"Rivers of America - The Minnesota" (Chapter 16)
THE DAYBREAK WOMAN--JANE ROBERTSON
Among the books donated to the Joseph R. Brown Library by Larry Randen is a copy of The Minnesota: Forgotten River by Evan Jones. A shortened version of Chapter 16, the story of Daybreak Woman or Jane Robertson, is presented here as another in the series about people with whom Brown was associated.
"Jane Robertson was born in 1810 at the mouth of the Yellow Medicine. The sluggish Minnesota pulsed through her life as it did through no one else's story. It had carried her toward lower Canada, where she had spent her girlhood, and when she married, the river drew her irresistibly homeward. She was the river's daughter and her story reflected, as the river did, the change in the valley's destiny. . . . In her person this bois brule', called the Daybreak Woman by the Sioux, brought together the world of wilderness and civilization. . . .
Her grandfather, James Ayrd, . . . came into the Minnesota country as a Hudson's Bay Company trader toward the end of the eighteenth century. At Prairie du Chien he married Grey Cloud, a daughter of the great chief Wabasha, and as time would have it he had his own daughter Margaret, who was also called Grey Cloud by her Sioux relatives.
In 1805 . . . Grey Cloud married Thomas Anderson, a Scots-Canadian who worked for her father. Five years later Anderson and Grey Cloud headed up the Minnesota to take over a Hudson's Bay Company post on the shores of Lake Traverse. Their daughter Jane was born before they reached their destination. The family's respite in the valley was short; war broke out in 1812 and Tom Anderson turned down river again to enlist in the British army. With the defeat of the mother country he refused to become an American citizen as other fur traders did and Grey Cloud herself refused to leave the land of her Sioux relatives. She was persuaded to let Anderson take the Daybreak Woman and her brother to Canada where they might be better educated.
Grey Cloud did not turn her back on life. She met Hazen Mooers when he came west from New York, and in 1818 they traveled up the river, past the site of her daughter's birth, to trade with the Indians in the Lake Traverse region.
Eighteen years later, in Canada, the Daybreak Woman began an odyssey in search of Grey Cloud. In 1838, she left her father's Canadian household as the wife of Andrew Robertson, whose nuptial promise had been to help her find her mother. In May they sailed a Mackinaw boat across Lake Michigan, and in a bark canoe they paddled together up the Fox and down the Wisconsin to Prairie du Chien where they learned that Grey Cloud and Hazen Mooers were on the Minnesota. . . . The Place was called Little Rock. . . .
A generation had passed since the Daybreak Woman had been among her mother's people. There was a Scots burr to her English . . . but deep within lay a memory of the twisting stream and the quiet trees that screened the water from the high valley walls. . . . At long last, in the August sunlight, Grey Cloud and the Daybreak woman shyly approached each other.
The reunion was also the beginning of a lasting partnership between the Daybreak Woman's husband and Hazen Mooers. Robertson joined Mooers in trading at Little Rock Creek, and a couple of years later they abandoned the fur business together when they turned over their outpost to Joe LaFramboise. The two men took Grey Cloud and the Daybreak Woman downstream and began to farm on the Mississippi island that is still named for Mooers' wife.
The two families moved when Mooers and Robertson were hired to teach the Sioux how to farm, then moved again when together they were delegated to construct the buildings that would house the new Indian agencies after the signing of the Treaty of Traverse des Sioux. When Grey Cloud died, the Daybreak Woman started upriver for the last time with her stepfather, her husband and [son Thomas].
Jane Robertson, the Daybreak Woman, was at Andrew Robertson's side when Indian Agent Joe Brown named him the first superintendent of Indian education on the Sioux reservations. When a heart attack cut Robertson down in 1859, Joe Brown had no hesitation about his successor. The job went to Jane Robertson, who was back in the valley of her birth--and back among the people of her almost- obliterated Indian heritage."
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