Compiled and written by David R. Schleper, 2020

David-Frederic Faribault, Sr. was born in 1816 at Prairie du Chien. He was the fourth of eight children of Jean-Baptiste Faribault and Elizabeth Pelagie Kinzie Haines.

David-Frederic lived with his mother at Prairie du Chien, on the island called Wita Tanka (Big Island), and at Mendota. David-Frederic and Oliver were sent to a Protestant boarding school at Michilimackinac in the 1820s. David-Frederic also lived at Inyan Ceyaka Otunwe, a summer planting village of the Mdewakanton Dakota. Pelagie likely reinforced the importance of Dakota ways with David-Frederic, her husband, and other children. She provided the family with social connections that paved the way for trade opportunities with her Dakota relatives. She was known to be kind and generous, and provided hospitality for friends and neighbors in their social networks. Her own Dakota relatives sometimes visited nearby for extended periods.

David-Frederic married Wowaka Wa-Pa-Let Winona Nancy McClure Faribault Huggans at Fort Snelling. It was a gala occasion. Governor Ramsey, the officials from Washington who had come to negotiate the Indian treaty of 1851, the army officers, and their wives, the head leaders, and the principal men of the great Dakota nation were all present. The bride, dressed in white, was married to David by Alexis Bailey, who was justice of the peace during the Traverse des Sioux Treaty on July 11, 1851. Nancy was 16 years old. Nancy noted “often wondering how so much champagne got so far out of the frontier.” “The affair even got into the papers,” Nancy wrote later.

Frank Mayer described David-Frederic Faribault as a young man when he wrote about Faribault’s marriage to Nancy McClure. David-Frederic was 19 years older than Nancy, had been married twice before (including Suzanne Wasukoyakewiŋ Weston, who had died in 1851) and had several children, including David Faribault, Jr., when he and Nancy wed.

David-Frederic moved to Tínṫa Otuŋwe after his brother, Oliver, died after contracting quinsy. David-Frederic had been manager of Henry Sibley’s store at Mendota, but when he married Nancy, they moved to Prairieville (Shakopee), where David-Frederic continued to trade with the Indians. Nancy later wrote that they lived in a house below Oliver’s and stayed in the area for about two years.

During this time, David-Frederic tried creating a settlement along the Faribault Springs that would rival the newly established town of Sha K’ Pay, Minnesota Territory. The attempt was described in The History of the Minnesota Valley, page 293:

“About the time of Mr. Holmes’s arrival David Faribault, a brother of Oliver, arrived, and when the excitement of town building began, he attempted a rival town, trying to divert the settlement to his location, which was the Indian village.… Though he succeeded in gathering a little colony of French half breeds about him, he was finally obliged to abandon his scheme as useless.” (Neil, p. 315.)

The small settlement disappeared, the Indian village of Tínṫa Otuŋwe was forced to move to a western reservation, and new settler-colonists claimed the land. Very little remains of the settlement along Faribault Springs.

David-Frederic and Nancy resided in Shakopee until their business failed. They then moved to LeSueur for a year and then to Faribault, where they remained for four years. Their daughter, Mary Jane, was born in Faribault on Aug. 16, 1855. They lived in various places in Minnesota where David-Frederic carried on his fur trading business. By 1862, David, Nancy, and Jane had moved to a new home about two miles from the Lower Sioux Agency on the east side of the river at Redwood. David and Nancy arrived at the site of the new Fort Ransom in June 1867. They then opened a “house of entertainment” about thirty miles away from Fort Ransom to provide room and board for travelers. Finally, they moved to Flandreau, South Dakota.

It looks like David-Frederic separated from Nancy, though it seems they never divorced (they both were Catholic). Nancy was living with Charles Huggans in 1871.

David-Frederic Faribault died Nov. 18, 1887.

While David Faribault, Sr. didn’t die until 1887, the 1880 Federal Census lists Nancy as aged 36, when she was really 44 and was identified as Nancy Huggans. She was living with Charles Huggans, aged thirty, in Flandreau.

The so-called romantic relations between Nancy and Charles did not last. In 1902, an Indian School Service report on Indians living at Flandreau records the following in Nancy’s entry: “62 years old, receives rations. She has a worthless white husband. She has no land and lives with John Eastman [her son-in-law].”