Grey Cloud Woman

Grey Cloud Woman (Dakota: , born c. 1793; died 1850) was the woman for whom Grey Cloud Island in Washington County, Minnesota was named. She was born around 1793 at the village of Prairie du Chien to a Dakota mother, also named Grey Cloud Woman, and a Scottish fur-trading father, James Aird. Grey Cloud lived through the final years when the fur trading economy was dominant in the region around the northern Mississippi River. She married her first husband, English-Canadian fur trader Thomas Gummersall Anderson, while just a young girl of 15. Together, they lived and traveled between several trading posts, including those at Patterson's Rapids and Pike Island. The couple had two children who survived infancy, Angus and Jane. Grey Cloud Woman was directly affected by the War of 1812, when her husband, who fought on behalf of the British, chose to return to Canada rather than live under American rule. Rather than follow him, Grey Cloud Woman separated from him and returned to her parents' home.

Grey Cloud later sent both her young children to live with their father in Canada. She remarried to another fur trader from New York, Hazen Mooers, in about 1825. Grey Cloud Woman's family connections facilitated trading relationships for both her husbands, and she and Mooers built a new trading post called Little Rock. During the negotiations for the Treaty of 1837, Grey Cloud was a signatory to a letter arguing on behalf of people of mixed Dakota ancestry and later was a beneficiary of the treaty settlement. The marriage produced three daughters, Mary, Jane Anne and Madeline. Later, she and her family lived approximately 15 miles south and east of modern-day St. Paul, Minnesota on the Mississippi River island that would come to bear her name from 1838 to 1846. She was one of the first people to farm wheat on the island, representing a larger shift away from dependence on the regional fur trade and greater economic power of farming. Grey Cloud died in 1850.

Name meaning Maḣpiya Ḣota in the Dakota language means "Grey Cloud". With the addition of "Wiŋ" (woman), the English translation of her name is Grey Cloud Woman. She also had an English name, Margaret Aird (sometimes spelled Ayrd). Grey Cloud Woman was named after her mother, also called Maḣpiya Ḣota Wiŋ, and thus she is sometimes referred to as Grey Cloud Woman II.

Parents Grey Cloud Woman was the daughter of James Aird and Grey Cloud Woman I, for whom she was named. Aird (born 1757) immigrated to Canada in 1783 from Ayrshire, Scotland. He was employed by the Hudson's Bay Company. Grey Cloud Woman I was the daughter of Wabasha I, a chief of the Mdewakanton band of the Dakota people. She was born in the mid- to late-1770s in the village of Wapaha Sa Prairie, near modern-day Winona, Minnesota. Most of the families in town supported themselves with a combination of farming and engagement in the fur trade. In 1811, a visitor to the village noted that the town produced a surplus of crops, including corn, wheat and vegetables. In the early 1810s, fruit trees were planted, producing plums and cherries, though these may not have been available during Grey Cloud's earlier childhood.

At the time, the houses were mostly made of logs plastered with mud, though a few frame houses were built by 1805. Grey Cloud likely grew up in relative comfort. Her father became successful in business and by 1810 he was the largest property owner in Prairie du Chien. At its height, he owned multiple farm lots, a grain mill and several lots in the village. Grey Cloud was an only child, but grew up surrounded by a large extended family. Four of her mother's sisters had also married White men and lived in the village with their families. Their immediate environs consisted of about 18 other households, and their next-door neighbors were Joseph Rolette and his wife Margaret and their children. Margaret Rolette was Grey Cloud's maternal aunt.

There was no school in the village and no record of what kind of education Grey Cloud Woman might have received. Grey Cloud Woman likely knew her future husband, Thomas Anderson, in passing as a child, as he came through the village multiple times each year from 1800 to 1808. Anderson described the villagers as "kind and hospitable, and prided themselves on their honesty and punctuality in paying their debts, and keeping their engagements." Grey Cloud was only about 15 years old when she married for the first time. View of the Mississippi River from Pike Island, where Grey Cloud Woman lived with her family between 1811 and 1814. When Grey Cloud Woman and Thomas Anderson married, she was about 15 years old and he was about 30. Her reasons for marrying Anderson are unknown. A native English speaker, he did not speak her first language, Dakota, and perhaps spoke little French either. Marriages between White fur traders and Dakota women were common in the village and were seen as mutually beneficial. Dakota women were generally not forced to marry and such marriages were not necessarily seen as permanent lifetime commitments. In a memoir written by Anderson in the late 1800s, he wrote of his marriage: "following the custom of the country, which I had hitherto resisted, I took to live with me a little half-breed." Anderson may have been motivated to marry Grey Cloud to forge business connections with both her father, Aird, and her mother's family among his Dakota trading partners. However, he served as a British agent during the war, encouraging Native people to fight on behalf of the British. In 1810, Anderson participated in blockade-running to move goods past an American installation at Fort Mackinac. In August 1814, a letter from a fur trader and friend of Aird and Anderson indicated the difficulties in continuing to conduct trade and travel freely, writing:"What greaves me the most is that I am prevented from Seeing you & my other friends Mr Aird & anderson & all those that I have ben so many years living in friendship with in that country. I Shall remain at york till late in the fall in hopes of being able to get in to Mackinac with my old friends if it does not fall and if in case that it unfortunately Should fall in the americans hands I shall be obliged much against my will to go Back to montreall."

In 1814, Anderson learned that Americans had built a fort directly next to Prairie du Chien, a strategic site in the control of the fur trade, while traveling to Mackinac on business. He received a commission while visiting the British commander at Mackinac and led a group of volunteer fur traders back to Prairie du Chien. He made efforts to persuade the Dakota to fight against the Americans and picked up additional native warriors along the way back. Anderson's volunteers were able to take the fort during the siege of Prairie du Chien and defended it successfully against subsequent attack. Anderson became commander of the fort, which was renamed Fort McKay, until May 1815, when he was ordered to surrender it following the British defeat.

By 1820, the combined population of the village and nearby fort was more than 500 people, with quantities of summer visitors. Visiting Native people would set up camp outside the village. There was no church nor permanent Christian minister in town until the 1830s, and newly arrived town resident Willard Keyes was shocked in 1817 at the lack of observance of the sabbath by the townspeople; he thought they spent too many of their leisure hours playing sports, eating and drinking. In 1818, Grey Cloud Woman sent her children to a local school whose builder and teacher were the same man, Keyes. Another part-time resident of Prairie du Chien during this period, John Shaw, decided to abandon the town due to "civil law not being very much in force" and the "petty tyrannies" of the current commander at the fort. The town's first jail was built between 1820 and 1821.

Death of James Aird Grey Cloud and her two children moved back in with her parents, James Aird and Grey Cloud Woman I following the war and separation from Anderson. Aird had continued working as a fur trader. He had a rough time and nearly starved in the winter of 1814-1815 while at a winter trading post and subsequently stayed mostly in town. He worked for American Fur from 1816 to 1819. Hazen Mooers, Aird's employee at American Fur and Grey Cloud's future husband, reported in a letter in December 1818 that Aird was in poor health. He died in the winter or early spring of 1819 in a tavern, supposedly after choking on a wild rice hull. Grey Cloud and her mother inherited Aird's estate, and began selling land almost immediately. Grey Cloud Woman and her mother sold their home lot in the village, but continued living in Prairie du Chien until 1825, perhaps as renters.

Departure of children Anderson resettled in 1815 on Drummond Island on what was believed at the time to be the Canadian side of Lake Huron, in another fur-trading community. Following the war, where Anderson attained the rank of Captain in the British army, he was appointed as storekeeper and clerk for the Indian Department of Upper Canada (then a part of the British army), a position he would keep for 43 years. Anderson remarried in 1820 to a woman named Elizabeth "Betsy" Hamilton, a member of a well-connected fur trading family with French, English and Ojibwe ancestry. Following the birth of their first child, Anderson, at the urging of his new wife, wrote to Grey Cloud in 1821 or 1822, inviting their children to live with his family indefinitely and receive an English education.

Grey Cloud sent both children to Anderson in the summer of 1823. Jane and Angus would have been about 13 and 15, respectively and Grey Cloud was about 30 years old. There is no extant account of Grey Cloud's reasons for taking such a step, but Jane Lamm Carroll, biographer of Jane Anderson, speculates that Grey Cloud was likely motivated by a desire to help her children receive a better education. She may also have been in financial hardship as it had been four years since Aird's death and the loss of his income. Carroll believes that Grey Cloud viewed the separation as a permanent one, noting that it was common practice at the time to name babies after older children who had died. Grey Cloud named another daughter, born in 1827, Jane Anne, perhaps indicating, according to Carroll, that she had no expectation of seeing her elder children alive again. He became an employee of American Fur in March 1818 after being hired in Montreal to serve as a clerk, and arrived in Prairie du Chien soon after. In 1840, Angus Anderson, who had recently gone into business with his step-father, died of fever while traveling to St. Louis on business. Jane Robertson bore a daughter, Marion, that fall, and a son, who she named Angus for her brother, in 1842. In 1841, James Wabasha Robertson, the first-born son of Jane and Andrew Robertson and Grey Cloud's first grandson, died at the age of three. Grey Cloud Woman I, Grey Cloud's mother, died in 1844 at Black Dog's Village. Shortly after, the young couple moved to Black Dog's village, close to the Bdote. Hazen and Grey Cloud moved off the island in 1846. They lived for a year in Shakopee's village, where Hazen built a house. A year later, they moved with their two younger daughters, Jane Anne and Madeline, near their daughter, Mary Brown. Hazen took work as a government farmer. in 1850.