Legal Avulsions: River Rights on the Upper Mississippi in the 1830s

Northern Environmental History Network

NEHN February: Karl Nycklemoe  will speak on Legal Avulsions: River Rights on the Upper Mississippi in the 1830s

In the 1830s the United States initiated a new wave of treaties with Indigenous peoples to seize Indigenous territory in the Upper Mississippi River watershed. In particular, the Menominee (in 1836), Ho-Chunk, Ojibwe, and Dakota (in 1837) lost significant portions of territory that became significant portions of the settler states of Wisconsin and Minnesota. In US historiography, this dispossession is increasingly framed as part of rapacious settler land hunger that seized, parceled, and privatized Indigenous homeland. This paper adds to this historiography by arguing that the United States did not simply seize land, but also seized and transformed waterways in open-access commercial highways. Before the mid-1830s, Indigenous leaders leased tracts of their rivers beyond US purview to lumber millers, allowing the millers to construct millworks and harvest pine. After the dispossessive treaties, these same (and some new) lumber millers quickly pivoted to the US riverine legal regime. Millers on ‘non-navigable’ rivers dammed and milled based purely on riparian landownership, fulfilling US common law assumptions about waterways as unowned, but commercially exploitable, energy. Rather than entreat with local communities for mill rights, these millers now purchased and sold mills, equipment, and water rights in fee-simple transactions. A decade later, Wisconsin and Minnesota then assumed the legal authority to legislate commercial arteries of waters to guarantee both navigable commerce and commercial mill development. Over this long process, settler-colonial state governments rendered Indigenous-regulated waterways into open-access resources. Rivers in the United States are not inherently ‘open,’ but were made publicly accessible through 19th-century settler colonization. By emphasizing waterways in US history, this paper points to how water law creates and organizes human-river relationships, and points to how the US colonized water in entwined, but unique ways, compared to land. The US needed to actively colonize, and was often challenged by, water bodies long governed by Indigenous peoples.~Karl Nycklemoe is a Ph.D. candidate in History at Stony Brook University. Their current dissertation research investigates how the Upper Mississippi River, which was an Indigenous-governed watershed in the wake of the US War of Independence, became a US-regulated, engineered watershed only by the 1870s. Drawing from the fields of environmental history, history of science, environmental humanities, borderlands, and legal studies, they are fascinated by how fluid, sometimes-intangible beings (such as sound, water, and atomic energy) shaped and exceed the way humans interact with and perceive the world. [Presenter's photo: Gouverneur K. Warren, Mouth of Chippewa, 1866, pencil on paper, Box 17, folder 5, Gouverneur Kemble Warren papers, New York State Library, Albany, NY]

Our {communityGuidelinesLink} describe the sort of content we prohibit on Eventbrite. If you suspect an event may be in violation, you can report it to us so we can investigate.

To report other categories of prohibited or illegal content, submit {link}

Legal Avulsions: River Rights on the Upper Mississippi in the 1830s

More events from Northern Environmental History Network

Discover more events from Northern Environmental History Network, from Community to other experiences you might love.

Still looking for the right event?

Explore all online events to browse and filter by date, category, and more.

Legal Avulsions: River Rights on the Upper Mississippi in the 1830s

More events from Northern Environmental History Network

Discover more events from Northern Environmental History Network, from Community to other experiences you might love.

You might also like...

Browse more events with different dates, prices, and formats to find your next great experience.

Still looking for the right event?

Explore all online events to browse and filter by date, category, and more.