This style of coat was popular with the Métis of the Red River Valley. This particular coat belonged to Alexander Ramsey and may have been brought back by him from an 1851 treaty signing. The coat is possibly Cree, Métis, or Ojibwe in origin.
Members of the Dakota treaty delegation in Washington, 1858. Included in the delegation are members of the Métis community: Antoine (Joseph) Campbell (standing second from left), Thomas A Robertson (standing second from left), and Nathaniel Brown (standing at right).
In the Minnesota region during the eighteenth to mid-nineteenth centuries, métis, or mixed-ancestry, people often acted as bridges between white and Native American communities. The Métis cultural community of Pembina formed out of fur trade dynamics and influenced Minnesota during its territorial birth.
Ojibwe oral tradition identifies Little Round Hill, a small elevation on the banks of the Crow Wing River, as the location of a late-1700s French fur trading fort and a skirmish between Ojibwe hunter-traders and Dakota warriors. Located in Old Wadena County Park at the confluence of the Partridge and Crow Wing Rivers, it was the site of the first intensive archaeological excavation within Wadena County.