Compiled and written by David R. Schleper, 2020
Wowaka Wa-Pa-Let, meaning Hat in Dakota, was born in the Village of Mendota in 1836. She was also known as Winona Nancy McClure Faribault Huggan.
Wowaka Wa-Pa-Let’s mother was Winona, who was born in about 1818 in Redwood Falls, Minnesota. Wowaka Wa Pa-Let’s great-great-grandfather was Ta-temannee or Walking Wind. Her great grandfather was Ma-ga-iyah-he, or Alighting Goose. Her mother’s father was Manza-ku-te-niannee or Walking Shooting Iron.
Winona entered a relationship with James McClure, a white soldier at Fort Snelling, in 1835, and Nancy was the only child of that partnership.
Nancy lived with her mother’s people at Mendota. James, her father, remained in contact with Winona and Nancy until he was transferred to Florida and died there in 1838. The next year, Nancy’s mother, Winona, married Antoine Renville. Winona and Antoine Renville had three other children who were Nancy’s half-siblings: Sophia, Isaac and William Renville.
Nancy grew up at Lac qui Parle after 1839 and attended school at the Dakota mission there. She was baptized into the Christian faith by Dr. Thomas Williamson on November 8, 1840. Nancy’s mother was often not well, and Nancy lived with the Williamsons until they left for Kaposia in 1846, at which time she became part of the Fanny and Jonas Pettijohn family at the Lac qui Parle mission.
In 1851 Nancy went to live with her grandparents at Traverse des Sioux near her uncle Rdayamani (Rattling Walker)’s village. She lived with the Robert and Agnes Hopkins family and attended the mission school there.
Nancy was at Traverse des Sioux in 1851 for a treaty signing. Frank Blackwell Mayer, a writer and artist, drew Nancy’s portrait and described meeting her in his journal: She was “the most beautiful of the Indian women I have yet seen. Her eyes are dark and deep; a sweet smile of innocence plays on her ruby lips and silky hair of glassy blackness falls to her dropping shoulders.”
While at the treaty signing, Nancy, who was 16 years old, married David Faribault, who was almost 35. Frank Meyer described David as a young man when he wrote about Faribault’s marriage to Nancy McClure. David was 19 years older than Nancy, had been married twice before and had several children when he and Nancy wed. In Frank Meyer’s diary, he wrote “She has been courted for a year past in person and by proxy by David Faribault, a young Indian trader of half-breed descent and the ceremony of marriage was yesterday at our camp. Two horses were given for the bride.”
After their marriage, and after Oliver Faribault died, Nancy and David moved to the newly established town of Sha K’ Pay, Minnesota Territory where David continued to trade with the Dakota Indians. They lived in a house below Oliver Faribault and Wakan Yaŋke Wiŋ’s log cabin in the eastern part of what is later Shakopee. They stayed for two years.
During this time, David tried to create a settlement along the Faribault Springs that would rival the newly established town of Shakopee. “Though he succeeded in gathering a little colony of French half breeds about him, he was finally obliged to abandon his scheme as useless,” said Neill.
David Faribault, Sr. didn’t die until November 18, 1887, but in the 1880 Federal Census, Nancy is identified as Nancy Huggan, and is living with Charles Huggan in Flandreau, South Dakota.
It appears, however, that the so-called romantic marriage between Nancy and Charles did not last, according to Lois Glewwe. 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].”
Wowaka Wa-Pa-Let Winona Nancy McClure Faribault Huggan passed away on August 6, 1927, at Flandreau at the age of ninety-one years.
According to Lois Glewwe, “Her life had spanned the earliest days of the Dakota mission in the 1830s, through the U.S. Dakota War of 1862, the arrival of the railroad, the advent of the airplane and the dramatic events of World War I. Throughout the span of her long life she had also dealt with the reality of her birth and learned how to live within both Dakota culture and white Christian culture, always trying to find the best path.”