Brown, Joseph Renshaw (1805–1870)

During his five decades in Minnesota, Joseph R. Brown was a significant figure in territorial and state politics. Although he never held high office, he exercised great influence on how the region developed. His ability to produce legislative results earned him the nickname “Jo the Juggler.”

Joseph Renshaw Brown was born on January 5, 1805, in York, Pennsylvania. At age fifteen, while a printer’s apprentice, he ran away to join the army. He was sent to Cantonment New Hope, a predecessor of Fort Snelling, on the edge of the American occupation of the continent. In 1828, aged twenty three, he was discharged from the army. For the next ten years he worked in the fur trade, often as far west as Lake Traverse. His three marriages (with two divorces) to mixed-race women produced invaluable ties to Dakota and Ojibwe communities.

When the Dakota ceded their country east of the Mississippi River to the U.S., Brown was one of the first to stake a claim. In 1838, he moved his family and several business partners to Grey Cloud Island, then part of Wisconsin Territory, where he built a store and farm. He plunged into Wisconsin politics as if he had been practicing for years. His experiences as a lobbyist and legislator in Madison and as a county official, justice of the peace, and election fixer prepared him well for an influential role in Minnesota.

When Wisconsin became a state in 1848, the territory west of the St. Croix River was left in a legal void. Brown organized and chaired the key Stillwater Convention, which sent Henry H. Sibley to Washington to persuade Congress to organize Minnesota Territory.

During Minnesota’s territorial days, Brown became a celebrity. He moved to St. Paul and was secretary and bill writer in the first Minnesota Territorial Council. He was then elected to both the Council and House and edited the influential Minnesota Pioneer. In 1851, he was instrumental in making the treaties with the Dakota that opened up southern Minnesota Territory to white immigration. At Traverse des Sioux, Brown had Dakota leaders sign a controversial document that acknowledged their debts and authorized direct payments to the traders.

Brown was a delegate to the 1857 constitutional convention and helped draft the Minnesota state constitution. As Sibley’s campaign manager, he worked to elect his old friend the state’s first governor. A life-long Democrat, he was rewarded for party service by being made Indian Agent to the Sioux (Dakota) in 1857. In this role, he engineered the 1858 treaty by which the Dakota ceded the northern part of their reservation. He also promoted a vigorous “civilization” program that pressured the Dakota to rely on farmed crops and livestock for food.

After Minnesota achieved statehood in 1858, Brown slipped quietly out of politics and into speculation. He ran a transportation business that centered on his Minnesota River town site of Henderson. He operated a steamboat and stage line connecting Henderson with St. Paul and contracted to haul freight to Fort Ridgely and the Dakota agencies. In 1860, he brought to town a “steam wagon” to pull freight wagon trains over the prairies in place of oxen. In 1862, he pioneered another steam-wagon route from Nebraska to the Colorado goldfields.

When the U.S.–Dakota War of 1862 began, Brown hurried to rescue his captive family. He joined Sibley, now the commander of an army against the combatant Dakota, as an aide. He commanded the scouting and burial detail that was attacked at Birch Coulee, and he was later superintendent of the Dakota prison at Mankato.

Brown participated in the 1863 and 1864 punitive expeditions against the Dakota as major in charge of the scouts. He was appointed a commissioner to conduct peace overtures with the Sisseton and Wahpeton Dakota who had not been involved in the war. His objective during the postwar period was to gain official recognition of those Dakotas’ non-combatant status, and to restore their prewar benefits.

Brown and Gabriel Renville worked together to bring about the Sisseton-Wahpeton Treaty of 1867. Afterward, Brown retired to a stock farm at Browns Valley and began work on another steam wagon venture. The third model was just being finished when he died in New York City in 1870 at age sixty-five.