Iron Face: The Adventures of Jack Frazer Frontier Warrior, Scout and Hunter

By Joseph Jack Frazer, Stanley Vestal and Henry Hastings Sibley

Written in the 1850’s by Henry Hastings Sibley, recorded first hand from Iron Face, a half-breed Sioux warrior and scout. Frazer, also was a half-breed born and raised in a Sioux village. Includes information on the Black Hawk War and the Minnesota Massacre. Vestal says, “We are lucky, I think, to have this story in any form. Its chief service is a tool to help us understand a kind of life now gone forever.” Stanley Vestal states that this volume presents a close-up picture of the Indians. Jack Frazer was a half-breed whose Sioux name was Iron Face. “There is no lace or perfume in theis book, no gilding of the aboriginal lily . . .”

With Introduction And Notes By Theodore C. Blegen And Sara A. Davidson.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Barakaldo Books
• Release date: May 19, 2020
• ISBN: 9781839745287

Book preview

© Barakaldo Books 2020, all rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means, electrical, mechanical or otherwise without the written permission of the copyright holder.

Publisher’s Note

Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.

We have also made every effort to include all maps and illustrations of the original edition the limitations of formatting do not allow of including larger maps, we will upload as many of these maps as possible.

IRON FACE — THE ADVENTURES OF JACK FRAZER

A NARRATIVE RECORDED

BY

WALKER-IN-THE-PINES (HENRY HASTINGS SIBLEY)

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 4

Foreword 5

By Way of Introduction 8

1—A Boy Goes on the Warpath 16

2—With War Paint and Eagle Feathers 22

3—Dakota Men and Chippewa Women 27

4—Dark and Bloody Ground 34

5—Bears, Wagers, and Brides 40

6—Winter Burial and a Rescue Errand 48

7—Driving Elk into Camp 55

8—Courting, Gambling, and Hunting 59

9—Primitive Mishaps and Pranks 67

10—Rattlesnakes and Religious Beliefs 74

11—Chief Wabashaw Surrenders a Murderer 82

12—Jack Keeps His Scalp Lock 90

13—The Black Hawk War 98

14—Jack Leaves the Indians 105

15—A Buffalo Hunt and the Sioux War of 1862 115

16—The Religion of the Dakotas 127

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 134

Foreword

MY PURPOSE here is to let the reader know what to expect and what he must not expect from this book.

Most of us suffer from an unsatisfied curiosity about the American Indian. Considering how long we have been in contact with the redskins and how much has been written about them, it is surprising that our thirst for understanding has never been slaked. But so it is. For most books about Indians deal only with important matters—treaties, wars, councils, ceremonies, tribal customs; they treat Indians as a tribe, as types, or as museum specimens. These books, having been written by white men, do not take us far into the mind and heart of our red brother. Too often we come away from the reading still feeling that he is something of a mystery, an uncertain quantity. The Indian himself was not a writer. His arts and rituals provided all the artistic expression he craved. And generally your Indian book of memoirs has been written by a ghost ignorant of the language and psychology of his informant and perhaps unconsciously misled by the inventiveness of his interpreter.

And so we may welcome the memoirs of Iron Face or Jack Frazer here recorded by General Sibley, a man who had known the Sioux firsthand for many years both in war and peace, and who was besides well acquainted with his informant.

We may imagine the old half-breed with his thinning gray hair and ill-fitting white man’s clothes sitting bolt upright and uncomfortable on a chair in Sibley’s quarters, talking now in the Dakota tongue and again in frontier English, and all the while corroborating his words with slight unconscious gestures of the sign language. It was an intimate association between men who understood each other.

True, the Black Hawk War and the Minnesota Massacre figure importantly in Jack’s story, but these events, like others in his narrative, are of interest chiefly because through them he takes us intimately into his confidence, into the inner life and motives of an Indian. He tells us what he thought and how and why. We learn to understand his attitudes, his values, his moral standards and qualities, his loyalties, fears, and hopes. Here we find bits of that most significant portion of a good man’s life which consists of his little nameless acts of kindness and of love. At the same time we learn much of Indian manners and of the driving forces which motivated his companions. He does not hesitate to tell us of his follies, blunders, and mistakes, even those which in his later years he could only regard as crimes. In youth, following the custom of his red relatives, Jack could be cruel and brutal; yet the overall picture is that of a man of humane feelings and great good nature with a lively sense of humor and considerable intelligence.

No very good shot, and not by his own rating especially robust or athletic, Iron Face was nonetheless a brave and even desperate fighter, and frequently sought opportunity to display his strength and courage. He declares that once, to win a race and a bet from a horseman, he willingly ran eighty miles cross country. To show his independence he boldly walked into the council lodge and shot down the chief’s dogs under his very nose. He would chase a bear all day, or track down his prey through a blizzard.

Impulsive, generous, competitive, restive under censure, but adept at saving his own face, he was also a prankster with an Indian love of practical jokes. Among the Sioux the relationship between uncle and nephew was very intimate and familiar, and the reader will find the jokes played upon each other by Jack and Wacouta thoroughly amusing.

Underlying the whole story is Jack’s gnawing problem—the half-breed’s tragedy. Brushed off by his white father’s people, for whose superior culture he yearns, Jack turns inevitably to his mother’s tribe, who accept him as one of their own kin, only to show their deep distrust of his white blood by trying to kill him in the Minnesota Massacre. Iron Face lived through that time when the advancing frontier was turning the Indian hunter’s paradise into the pioneer farmer’s hell. He grew up with the country, and we are made to realize the deep shame the old man felt at having killed women in his wild youth.

We have here, then, an interesting human document rare of its kind. True, the narrative does not take us so far into the heart of Iron Face as we could wish. The book is not always so explicit as we might desire. This may be because, in talking to an old friend like Sibley, Iron Face would leave some things unsaid, feeling sure that they would be taken for granted.

The reader, of course, must not expect qualities in this narrative which in the nature of things cannot be there. This is a period piece, and though clearly and directly written, is not a fine polished book in the modern sense. Inevitably it is sometimes repetitious. It exhibits some clumsiness, some lack of form. But all this seems proof of the honesty of the two men who composed it. Their restrained story has the ring of truth, when it might easily have been wrenched into a sensational yarn for the newspapers. I am not at all disturbed by the lack of perfect form and skilled technique here. We are lucky, I think, to have this story in any form.

Books may be toys, tools, treasures. For its rarity in its field this book may be considered something of a treasure; certainly it is amusing and readable enough to be called a toy, an enjoyable piece of entertainment for the intelligent reader; yet perhaps its chief service is as a tool to help us understand a kind of life now gone forever.

I would like to illustrate my feeling about Jack’s narrative by quoting some pertinent lines taken from The Earthly Paradise by William Morris.

Folk say, a wizard to a northern king

At Christmas-tide such wondrous things did show,

That through one window men beheld the spring,

And through another saw the summer glow,

And through a third the fruited vines a-row,

While still, unheard, but in its wonted way,

Piped the drear wind of that December day.

The praise of these memoirs is that they open just such a magic window. Here and there the glass is a little warped or clouded; the window frame cuts part of the picture out. But there is much to see and ponder. The vision will reward the effort.

STANLEY VESTAL

By Way of Introduction

THE STORY told in this book was written in the 1850’s by Henry Hastings Sibley, a powerful and engaging frontier figure of the Upper Midwest, but it is not his story. It is a narrative that he recorded at first hand from Iron Face, or Jack Frazer, a half-breed Sioux warrior, scout, and hunter. It has never been published before in book form, though Sibley had it printed serially in the 1860’s in the columns of a Minnesota newspaper.

The story has its setting in the Upper Mississippi Valley in what seems now, with the perspective of a century, to be the medieval history of that region. The scene is that of dark and bloody ground—murky feuds among red-skinned natives in a fair valley soon to be transformed into what an early explorer called a labyrinth of pleasure for millions of people.

It is no casual circumstance that Sibley, the son of Ohio pioneers and the grandson of Revolutionary officers, should have recorded for posterity the adventures of Iron Face. Sibley himself took part in many of them. Better than anybody else he knew Jack Frazer; he knew the region and period of Jack Frazer’s life; and alongside his career as fur trader, governor, general, and businessman, he happened to be a writer whose imagination was stirred by the changing scenes and picturesque characters of the western country to which he came, in 1834, as a youth of twenty-three.

The son of the eminent Judge Solomon Sibley of Detroit, Henry Hastings Sibley had studied law in that city, but he cared more for adventure than he did for law books; and so he sought his fortune as a trader for the American Fur Company on the Indian frontier, making Mendota, at the junction of the Mississippi and Minnesota rivers, the central station for his activities in the decades after 1834.

Precisely when Sibley first met Jack Frazer we do not know with certainty, but the meeting may have taken place in the autumn of 1834, when Sibley was making his way for the first time to the Minnesota frontier.

We know that one evening in November, five bedraggled horsemen stumbled through the peltings of a pitiless storm to knock at the door of a trader’s hut at the foot of Lake Pepin, on the Upper Mississippi. The door opened, and the only white man living on the three-hundred-mile stretch of river between Prairie du Chien and Fort Snelling—old Augustin Rocque—made the travelers bountifully welcome.{1}

The five horsemen were Sibley himself, coming out from Detroit, two Canadian voyageurs, an Indian half-breed boy, and a veteran fur trader, Alexis Bailly of Mendota. An Indian guide had deserted them somewhere in the wilderness west of the Mississippi above Prairie du Chien, and they had spent several days first in finding the river and then in following trails along its high and winding banks. Augustin Rocque’s cabin was a haven indeed. There they were fed on fresh venison and wild honey; there they slept in what they regarded as sheer luxury—comfortable beds.

A half century later, when Sibley wrote his autobiography, he recalled meeting Rocque’s pretty sixteen year old daughter. One wonders if he did not also meet a nephew of Rocque’s, some half dozen years older than Sibley, whom he doubtless would have taken for a full-blooded Sioux brave, since he had a strongly marked Indian face. His name was Joseph Jack Frazer—he was also known as E-tai-muzzah or, in English, Iron Face. Within a year or two Jack Frazer was to put on white man’s clothes and even accept baptism at Prairie du Chien, but when Sibley arrived on that wild fall night of 1834, Frazer probably was still in savage dress.{2} Anywhere else Jack might have been wearing his battle regalia, flaunting the eagle feathers his many enemy scalps entitled him to wear, but Rocque disapproved of his nephew’s fighting propensities, and it is not likely that the younger man appeared in war paint at the trader’s cabin.

Like Sibley, Jack Frazer came of fighting stock. Grandson on his mother’s side of a long line of Sioux chiefs and on the other a descendant of a Tory hero and the son of a Northwest adventurer, Frazer was already experienced as a warrior and hunter, and in fact was known as a desperate antagonist. Later his fame spread so far that he became a curiosity, sought out by travelers. In 1851 an editor visiting the Minnesota country felt it worth noting that he had actually seen the redoubtable Jack Frazer. The author of Mr. Midshipman Easy, Captain Frederick Marryat, talked with Jack through an interpreter in 1838. The British traveler counted twenty-eight notches on the handle of Jack’s tomahawk, each denoting a scalp taken, and described him as a fine intellectual-looking man.{3}

Between Frazer and Sibley a comradeship of interests and skills quickly developed. Sibley won a reputation in his own right as a resourceful antagonist, and even as a fighter—though not with tomahawk and arrow. Traditionally, there was but one man in the territory, a trader known as Bully Wells, who dared stand up against him. He also became an authority on hunting and fishing in the wilderness of the American West. And it was to Frazer, who could not follow his friend into other and more urbane fields of achievement, that Sibley owed much of his knowledge of wilderness life and wilderness ways.{4}

A third of a century later Sibley published in a newspaper the biography of this frontier fighter and guide. We should fail to appreciate the full quality and flavor of this biography if we did not recall that Sibley himself had accomplished much since that rainy night at Augustin Rocque’s cabin in 1834. He had been ruler of a vast fur empire and had seen that empire vanish with the game whose furs and pelts had been the first source of its wealth. He had been the first delegate of Minnesota Territory to Congress and was one of the architects of the state that emerged in 1858. He himself was its first governor. He had seen the Indians sell their land for a veritable mess of pottage and then rise in cruel retaliation, with himself as an American general in the ensuing war, one of the bloodiest in the long annals of Indian-white warfare. He had watched the wilderness turn into a cultivated land. He had viewed a tide of immigrants from the East and from Europe sweep in and make farms in the wilderness he and Jack Frazer hunted over in an earlier day. And he even saw Jack himself turn into a farmer.

A long panorama—this experience of Sibley in the new country! His life spanned two dynamic periods in the life of the Northwest—the era of frontier fur-trading and initial pioneering and the era of a transforming modern expansion and development. That story has been told and retold, but the story that he wrote on the basis of Jack Frazer’s reminiscences is less familiar. Jack’s life, like Sibley’s, spanned a long period of transition from early frontier times. Of full-length Indian biographies, relatively few antedate the time when the step from savagery to civilization was conventionally the step from reservation to Dartmouth. Few autobiographies describe Indian life in the primordial stage that is recorded in Frazer’s story. Many narratives deal with the later conflicts between whites and red men—these bloody collisions have been favorite themes of novelists and historians as well as of biographers—but few works describe as from the eyes of contemporaries the immemorial intertribal warfare of the earlier day.

Here is the biography of a man born and raised with the Sioux, who hunted for his food, who knew the hazard and wild thrill of the warpath. It tells its own story and needs little explanation. We could, it is true, wish at times that Sibley had followed more closely Jack Frazer’s own words. The English might indeed have been somewhat ungrammatical, perhaps at times obscure, but its atmosphere and tang might have gained in realism. If the literary style of Sibley’s day occasionally cloys on modern ears, there is no doubt that the story itself is authentic. Indeed, its authentic accent is unmistakable. William Joseph Snelling, a writer whose fame was eclipsed by Cooper but whose Indians were real and not cardboard Indians, noted that an Indian warrior never boasted of feats he had not achieved.{5} To this it may be added that enough of Frazer’s exploits are substantiated by contemporary sources to prove that his history, as here recorded, is essentially reliable. This is not to say that some errors may not have crept in, as is their wont in most autobiography and biography. Some chapters seem to be out of strict chronological order, but for the most part the seasons—an Indian’s calendar—follow in accurate succession with the events recounted. It is to be doubted that anyone, without dated events and contemporary records to steady and discipline his memory, could give a much more accurate account of his life.

According to his own introduction, Sibley put the history of Jack Frazer down in black and white during the winter of 1857-58. The tale of the three Sioux warriors, Dark and Bloody Ground, was printed, with a few minor variations, in Porter’s Spirit of the Times in January 1857. It was entitled The Three Dakotas and was said to have been drawn from an unfinished work called The Early Days of Minnesota. Sibley wrote under the pseudonym Hal—a Dacotah and was already well known, under that name, as a writer of sporting tales of the Northwest. The manuscript reminiscences of Samuel C. Staples in the possession of the Minnesota Historical Society explain that although Sibley wrote Frazer’s life at an earlier date, he was waiting, about the time the Civil War broke out, for more favorable terms for publishing it. Doubtless the outbreak of that war and the harrowing Sioux War that came on its heels prevented Sibley from publishing his tale earlier. In any event, he held it until both wars were memories and finally gave it for publication to the St. Paul Pioneer, in the columns of which it appeared in weekly instalments from December 2, 1866, through March 17, 1867. Certain additions, it seems obvious, were made at the time to bring the original manuscript up to date.

In reprinting Sibley’s account from the Pioneer the editors have made an attempt to correct only those errors in spelling or punctuation which appear to be purely typographical. Nothing has been changed that might be regarded as a peculiarity of speech or as characteristic of the period. It has been impossible to attain any regularity in the spelling of the Indian names. They have been left as they stood in the newspaper—even though the Indian names of the hero will be found spelled differently, and that of his uncle—Wacouta—occurs under several spellings. The chapter titles have been supplied by the present editors. Occasionally the original paragraphing has been modified as an aid to readability.

It has not been thought necessary by the editors to present the entire text of the Frazer narrative. Because of the somewhat tedious detailing of hunting stories, differing little in character and minutiae, four passages concerning hunting episodes have been omitted. In each instance where any portion of the text is omitted, a note gives a summary of its contents. A complete transcript is on file in the Minnesota Historical Society, and readers who for any reason wish to consult the omitted portions are invited to communicate with that society. Representative stories of bear and elk hunts have been retained in the book as here published.

Throughout the biography Sibley chose to use the word Dakota as designating the Sioux Indians. Only occasionally does he use the term Sioux. Jack belonged to the Mdewakanton subtribe of the Santee division of the Sioux Indians. The editors prefer the term Sioux—the usual one now employed for this tribe—and consequently, throughout the notes, the word Sioux is used.

In referring to Jack Frazer’s father, Sibley says that he was Alexander Frazer, but it has been reliably ascertained that this statement needs correction. No Alexander Frazer—there were more than one in the fur trade—seems to answer to the description of Jack’s father. Perhaps Jack knew only that his father’s name was Frazer and Sibley supplied the first name of a well-known Scotch trader. Actually Frazer’s father, in the light of more recent researches, must unquestionably have been James Fraser, a brother of that famous Simon Fraser who discovered Fraser River in British Columbia. Manuscripts in the possession of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin confirm beyond question Frazer’s paternity.{6}

James Fraser was born in Vermont about 1775, the son of Scottish Catholic immigrants who had come to America two years earlier. His father, Captain Simon Fraser, served under General Burgoyne, was captured at the battle of Bennington, and died in prison. His widow took her children to Canada. James Fraser went out to Prairie du Chien before 1800 and accompanied Lieutenant Zebulon Montgomery Pike part of the way on that expedition up the Mississippi in the autumn of 1805 which for the first time planted the American flag in the Minnesota region. He spent the following winter with the Indians and seems to have been well acquainted with the Sioux of both Chief Wabasha’s and Chief Red Wing’s villages. Pike commented that Fraser "although not possessing the advantages of a polished education, inherits that without which an education serves but to add to frivolity of character—candor, bravery, and that amor patria which distinguishes the good of every nation." By 1812 Frasers amor patria took a British turn, for he served with the British in the War of 1812 as a lieutenant in the Western Division of the Indian Department. He is mentioned several times as being in charge of or associated with Wabasha’s Indians in the conflict. Afterward Fraser received Prince Regent’s land in grant for services performed. He apparently never returned to the trading village of Prairie du Chien or the Indian camps of the Upper Mississippi.{7}

The Lieutenant’s small half-breed son had accompanied his father to Mackinac but was brought back to the Red Wing tribe after the British defeat at Fort Stephenson. Though the biography says that Jack believed his father to have been killed in the battle, there must have been some doubt in the boy’s mind. Both Captain Marryat and another traveler reported that although Jack had an assorted stock of