Williamson, Jane Smith (1803–1895)

Jane Williamson was a schoolteacher and anti-slavery activist in Ohio before she came to the Presbyterian Dakota Mission at Lac qui Parle in 1843. She spent the remaining fifty-two years of her life working with Dakota people.

Jane began teaching school in Manchester and West Union, Ohio, in the 1820s, when she was a teenager. Slavery was against the law in Ohio at that time. Directly across the Ohio River in Kentucky, however, it was legal. Many enslaved people risked their lives crossing the river to reach the Ohio side, where they could be free.

The Williamson family had been involved in the Underground Railroad since 1805, helping fugitives escape from slavery. Jane welcomed the children of former enslaved people to her classroom, even when men from Kentucky tried to recapture them at every opportunity. At times, armed guards from Jane's family and her father's church had to surround the school to protect her and the children.

When Jane was eleven years old, her mother died. She lived with her father and stepmother until her father passed away in 1839. Four years later, she left behind her school and family in Ohio at the age of forty. Her brother, Rev. Dr. Thomas Williamson, worked at the Dakota mission at Lac qui Parle with his wife, Margaret. Jane joined them there in 1843, intending to help with their growing family.

After moving to the mission, Jane learned the Dakota language and taught at the mission school. Her students called her Dowan Duta Win, or Red Song Woman, because her favored method of teaching was to translate English hymns into Dakota and instruct the students by singing the words. Called “Aunt Jane” by her fellow missionaries, she was less than five feet tall. She was known for her habit of giving cakes and nuts to her students from her apron pockets.

In 1846, the Williamsons moved their ministry to the Dakota village of Kaposia on the Mississippi River in what is now South St. Paul. In 1851, the Dakota sold their land on the west side of the Mississippi River to the US government and moved to a reservation. The Williamsons accompanied the Sisseton and Wahpeton bands to their new location along the Minnesota River in western Minnesota Territory. There, they established a new mission the Williamsons called Pajutazee (after the Dakota place name Pejuhutazizi Kapi: the place where they dig for yellow medicine).

On August 18, 1862, a faction of the Dakota attacked the Lower Sioux Agency. It was the first organized incident of the US–Dakota War of 1862. Thomas and Margaret sent their children and grandchildren away with others attempting to escape, then followed two days later with Jane. They all made it safely to St. Peter thanks to the assistance of several Dakota men who were members of the mission church: Simon Anawangmani, Robert Hopkins Caskedan, Lorenzo Lawrence, Paul Mazekutemani, and Peter Tapetatanka.

After the war ended in September, a US military commission sentenced 303 Dakota men to death. They were imprisoned in Mankato, where Jane and Thomas ministered to them. Jane received permission to bring the men pencils and paper so they could write to their families. She wrote letters to President Abraham Lincoln on behalf of Robert Hopkins Caskedan and Peter Tapetatanka that helped bring about the stay of their death sentences. Lincoln later pardoned both men.

On December 26, 1862, thirty-eight of the men were executed at Mankato. In the spring, the remaining prisoners were moved to Davenport, Iowa. Thomas followed and continued to serve them. Back in St. Peter, Jane welcomed several of her Dakota former students into her home while they attended school in the area.

By the mid-1880s, Thomas and Margaret had passed away. Jane began having trouble with her eyesight, and it became difficult for her to live alone. John Williamson, Thomas and Margaret’s oldest son, was in charge of the Dakota Mission on the Yankton Reservation in Greenwood, South Dakota. He brought Jane to live with him and his family. It was there that she spent the final years of her life among the Dakota people to whom she remained devoted.

Jane Williamson died on March 24, 1895. She is buried in the cemetery at Greenwood, South Dakota. A Daughters of the American Revolution emblem, awarded to her in honor of her father’s participation in the Revolutionary War, adorns her tombstone.