Democratic Sentinel, Volume 12, Number 20, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 8 June 1888 — Indian Wives of White Men. [ARTICLE]

Indian Wives of White Men.

A lady who some time ago became much interested in the statement, contradicted at the time, that Gen. Sibley’s first wife was a woman of the Chippewa Nation, speaks in the pleasantest terms of her recollections of the early days when many men who have since become prominent in the State’s history had homes presided over bywives in whose veins the Indian blood was uncrossed. “They were a pleasant and hospitable class of women,” she says, “rather taciturn sometimes, but women nevertheless, and good ones, too. Living always in the drudgery from which no Indian female ever escapes in the society of the savage ‘bucks,’ no wonder that squaws were only squaws at any period of development, but when placed among the more refining influences of white homes and white husbands these Indian women made wonderful progress, and made loving wives and mothers and kind neighbors. You must remember, too, that the men who married Indian women in those days up here were men in every sense of the word, not brutes and renegades like the ‘ squaw men’ of whom you read in the West to-day.”— Minneapolis Journal.