By David Schleper

Witch-e-ain was around 15 years old in early 1840s. Witch-e-ain’s father was another chief named Mock-ah-pe-ah-ket-ah-pah. (Although some people said that Witch-e-ain’s father was Wah-pa-sha).

The name of Witch-e-ain is closest to the Dakota word wićíte, “the human face,” although like some of LaFayette Houghton Bunnell’s other names, it is highly corrupted. The name “Face” could allude to her beauty and seductiveness. The name may also be a corrupted front formation from Wićítokapa, “the eldest born,” although this posits such a degree of corruption as to defy probability.

In the early 1840s, a special celebration was happening in Wah-pa-sha’s band. They assembled, and after elaborate preparation and sanctification of the ground by invocations and incense, the chief speaker came forward, and in a sonorous address lauded the virtues of chastity and warned against the sin of bearing false witness.

Wah-kon-de-o-tah, the great war-chief of the band, addressed his warriors in a quiet and affectionate manner, and told his braves to maintain the truth as sacred, and not offend the spirits of their ancestors. Wah-pa-sha then called for the virgins and matrons to come forth, and for some time there was the silence of expectation.

Again the call was made for any virgin to come forward and receive her reward. Two maidens came partly forward, but, upon reaching the line of denunciation, faltered and turned back, probably from modesty. We-no-nah, the wife of the speaker, and eldest sister (or cousin) of Wah-pa-sha, motioned to her youngest daughter, Witch-e-ain to come forward.

After repeated calls by the crier of the assembly, Witch-e-ain came modestly forward and was crowned goddess of the feast that immediately followed. Her head was encircled with braids of rich garniture and scented grass, and presents of colored cloths, calicoes, yarns, beads and ribbons were lavished upon her as the tribe’s representative of purity.

Wah-pa-sha said that Witch-e-ain could pick either LaFayette Houghton Bunnell or Thomas A. Holmes, as both allowed royal alliance for the family. Witch-e-aim said she did not like the trader, and preferred LaFayette. When Bunnell declined her offer, Witch-e-ain’s withering, silent contempt was clear.

During the feast, Thomas was so enchanted that he decided at once to make Witch-e-ain his wife.

Witch-e-ain was allowed to marry European American traders, like Thomas A. Holmes, in the fashion of the country. This means that these marriages were not recognized by law or religion. The French speaking traders of Canada term for this is “a la faḉon du pays.” Some people would call them “country wives.” While many marriages brought loving couples together for the rest of their lives, other marriages were very short-lived or violent. Many traders married native women, but also had other wives back home. Sometimes when the men retired from the fur trade, they returned to their legitimate, or legally married wives.

These marriages came with the expectation that trade between the woman’s relations and the trader would be secured, and that aid would be mutually provided in times of need. It was also the hope of the woman’s family that the trader’s generosity would increase after the marriage took place. The marriages between these two groups would lead to the creation of the Métis people, who would be considered the offspring of the fur trade.

So Thomas gave Wah-pa-sha an offer that he accepted. Based on this, Witch-e-ain then picked Thomas A. Holmes. This was in the early 1840s.

Thomas then married Witch-e-ain a la faḉon du pays. They were married in the fashion of the country, and lived together. But Witch-e-ain did not like living with Thomas. Like a caged bird, she soon pined for her Dakota prairie home. By the spring, while flowers bloomed, Witch-e-ain died of consumption.

(Some information from Lafayette Houghton Bunnell, Winona (We-No-Nah) and Its Environs on Mississippi in Ancient and Modern Days, Winona, MN: Jones & Kroeger, 1897; History of Wabasha County: Together with Biographical Matter, Statistics, Etc. Gathered from Matter Furnished by Interviews with Old Settlers, County, Township and Other Records, and Extracts from Files of Papers, Pamphlets, and Such Other Sources as Have Been Available. Also a History of Winona County, H.H. Hill & Company, 1884.)

Compiled and written by David R. Schleper, 2020

Dr. Frederick H. Buck was born Oct. 30, 1882, and grew up in Norwood, Ontario, Canada. His parents were farmers, and after graduating from high school he spent seven years working on the farm and “hated every minute of it!” While his father opposed him becoming a doctor, his mother encouraged him, and by age 24 he entered the University of Toronto to become a doctor.

He heard that Shakopee, which had about 1,500 people, needed a doctor, and in 1911, he moved here. He made most of his calls on foot or in a buggy.

After a year, he went back to Norwood and married his sweetheart, a nurse, Ida Gjerdrum Buck, and returned to Shakopee.

Dr. Buck’s office was at 127 ½ East First Avenue, which was above the old Shakopee movie theatre. He had the first microscope in Shakopee, and people reportedly came from miles around to see it! Dr. Buck and Ida lived at 421 East Third Avenue in Shakopee. After a few years, he bought a Model T.

Most of the time, Dr. Buck took a horse to farmhouses near Shakopee.

As he walked into one farmhouse, Dr. Buck saw a man lying on the bed, bright with fever. He knew it was pneumonia. The homemade remedies such as mustard plaster, goose grease, and turpentine all had been tried before the doctor arrived. The man on the bed was racked with coughing and spitting blood. His temperature was 104.

There was no way to check the diagnosis. There was no hospital in Shakopee. No laboratories, X-rays, and tests to confirm the decision. There was no phone. Dr. Buck was alone in that isolated farmhouse. Because pneumonia usually lasted seven days, the doctor returned in a few days, crossing the threshold and holding his breath. The man on the bed was bathed in sweat. His temperature had broken, and his breathing came easier. “The most wonderful sight in the world,” said Dr. Buck.

According to Dr. Buck, the railroad had been his ambulance line once. If you had an emergency—appendicitis, maybe—you got word to the station agent. You’d carry the patient on the back of a wagon to the depot. The next train would stop and you’d load the patient into a baggage car and climb in yourself, and ride with him to St. Paul, where an ambulance took both of you to either St. Joseph’s or St. John’s hospital. You always stopped in St. Paul because the train went there first before going on to Minneapolis.

When he first started, the doctor got $10 for each baby delivered. Over the many years that he was a doctor, Dr. Buck delivered 1,200 babies. He also made many hours in calls, including the Dakota at the tipi tanka and tipi along the Minnesota River.

When the scarlet fever epidemic happened in February 1918, Jane Cloud, a Dakota aunt of Minnie Josephine Otherday Weldon and a descendent of Dakota leader Ṡakpe II, sat on the curb in front of Dr. Buck’s office. She was crying her heart out because she was afraid the fever would kill Dr. Buck. Luckily, Dr. Buck survived.

On Dec. 5, 1914, Ida and Frederick had a child, Marion Bell Betty Buck (1914–2007) in Shakopee.

A few years after Marion was born, Ida became blind.

Ida went to Faribault School for the Blind to learned Braille. She received a seeing eye dog to roam around downtown Shakopee.

Ida died on Oct. 9, 1957. She is buried at Valley Cemetery in Shakopee.

Dr. Frederick Buck sold his general practice in 1946, but he continued as a physician for the masonic home until 1959, and for the women’s reformatory for 18 years, and continued to work with the children with disabilities at the reformatory until that was closed.

At age 95, Dr. Buck died. He had served the people in and around Shakopee for many, many years.

According to Vern Lang, “His death is the passing of another era.”

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By David Schleper

A contingent of peasant farmers from Germany left for the New World, including the Lenz and Gerdesmeier families around 1848. When they arrived in America, the authorities asked their name and occupation, and decided to combine their name (Lenz) with their occupation (dairy farmer) to become Lenzmeier. At some time, either in Germany or in East St. Louis, Illinois, Elizabeth Gerdesmeier Lenzmeier married Francis Lenzmeier.

Two sons were born and died in infancy, and then Henry was born in St. Louis. In 1860, Elizabeth and Stephan came by steamboat to St. Paul, where they traveled to Scott County and to Marystown. Twenty-five year old Elizabeth, who was either pregnant or carrying a newborn infant along the trip, arrived and they registered their homestead in Shakopee. The family, like others in Marystown, spoke German.

Stephan settled the homestead and brought in crops and did fairly well, with Elizabeth every inch the heroic pioneer woman, keeping people fed and clothed while rearing a big family, including eight boys, and finally a baby daughter, Mary, in 1878.

Stephan went out to South Dakota under General George Custer to look for gold in the Black Hills. Stephan was 53 years old, while Elizabeth was 38, and stuck at home with the children. Stephan was hoping to get rich quick, but he didn’t succeed. He reportedly fell ill away from home and had difficulty getting back. He did return, but his health was broken, and he died at 57 of heart failure.

It was said that his widow, Elizabeth, was very bitter about his death, blaming him for bringing on his own demise and leaving her to raise their large brood and run the farm, even with an infant at her breast. She reportedly held up the child before his open casket and cried something to the effect of “Here, take her with you, why don’t you! How can you leave me here alone with all this responsibility and this little one, too?”

Now Elizabeth surveyed her situation. She was a widow at age 43 with assets of a good farm, eight sons, and an infant daughter. Life must go on. Elizabeth learned of a good family in Shakopee who was growing a very of marriageable daughters. She made an inevitable logical decision. One Sunday morning, she hitched up a team to the buggy and drove the five miles to the Hubert Roehl farm just west of the town of Shakopee, along the road leading to Jordan.

Hubert Roehl was an immigrant from Luxembourg, and owned a long piece of land parallel to the Minnesota River. He also owned an overabundance of daughters!

Elizabeth told Hubert about her big, handsome boys, and suggested that they had a basis for an arrangement. Elizabeth was one smart woman!

And so it was arranged that her sons would marry Roehl girls. And four of them did! The four brothers who married Roehl sisters received pieces of good land from their father-in-law’s original claim along the Minnesota River.

And Elizabeth? She was happy. And one smart woman!

(Some information from First Reunion of the Lenzmeier Families, Shakopee, Minnesota, June 19, 1983.)

By David Schleper

Granddaughter of Oliver Faribault and Wakanyankewin

Grace Manaige, daughter of Charles A. Manaige and Pelagie Eliza Faribault Manaige, and granddaughter of Oliver Faribault and Wakanyankewin, was planning to marry. But she went to South Dakota to be with her sister, Isabelle, during the birth of a child.

It was a difficult delivery, as the baby came breech and couldn’t be turned. In order to save Isabelle, the doctor cut off an extremity of the baby, and the baby died.

When Grace returned home, she broke off the engagement with the man she was to marry. She said she would not go through that for a man!

By David Schleper

According to Mary Cavanaugh DuBois, “Everyone in the community knew ‘Indian Minnie,’ who made beautiful beaded articles. The purses mother had her make were not leather, but made from rubber inner tubes. They had beaded handles and rubber streamers decorated with beads. The price was $1.00 each.”

Minnie Josephine Otherday was born in a tipi on July 24, 1877 on the north side of the Minnesota River in Tiŋta-otoŋwe. Her parents were Jim and Lucy Otherday. Her grandmother was the sister of Chief Ŝakpe II, whom the city of Shakopee was named.

According to Diane Sexton, “My grandma had a pair of baby booties and a pillow made by Minnie, they always fascinated me as a young girl. She later donated them to the historical society.” Marcia Wagner remembered, “When I was a girl Indian Minnie lived on the Indian Road, on the Eden Prairie side. I used to take a walk and visit her. She was a very nice lady. Went to school with her granddaughter Darlene. I grew up in Eden Prairie on Spring Road, so Indian Road was just like a hop and a skip away.”

In the 1980 McDevitt family history book, there is mention of Minnie:

“Because the homestead only consisted of fifty acres, his father rented land at a number of places and also purchased some land at two different sites adjoining the city of Shakopee. These tracts of land that his father had purchased are now a part of the city of Shakopee and many homes have already been built on this land…To get to one of the rented fields, they had to drive across the old bridge at Shakopee onto the Indian Road, where they would see Indian Minnie sewing under a shade tree and the young Indian boys running and hiding behind trees, aiming and shooting their Fourth of July guns.”

(Some information from online discussion on If You Grew Up In Shakopee…)

Compiled and written by David R. Schleper, 2020

Bror Folke Persson (Pearson) was born on a farm in southern Sweden July 30, 1906. Bror Folke, meaning “brother of the people,” was a particularly apt name for a man who devoted his life to his family, parents, and communities. He was kind and had a good sense of humor.

Dr. Pearson immigrated to America in 1919, and became a doctor for 42 years in Shakopee, starting in 1934. Dr. Pearson used to come directly to homes any time of the day or night, whenever called. He delivered more than 2,500 babies in Shakopee.

Gwen Johnson Humphrey remembered when Dr. Pearson “brought [me] into the world, then in the next few years brought four of my six brothers also. He was always at our house it seemed tending to either one or all seven and never left without giving someone a shot, Through measles, German measles, chickenpox, [tonsillectomies], stitches and owies he was always there.”

In 1939, Dr. Pearson, a local priest, and the editor of the local paper visited the convent of Franciscan nursing nuns and asked them to take over the decrepit county poor house and run it as a hospital and a home for the elderly.

By 1952, the little hospital was no longer big enough, and Dr. Pearson led the effort to build a new hospital with 120 beds, an emergency room, and a full services laboratory.

Dr. Pearson married Elizabeth Stephens in 1935, and after 40 years, Beth died in 1976. They had three daughters and a son. Pearson retired from his Shakopee practice in 1976, the same year Beth passed away.

Dr. Pearson received the 18th annual Franciscan International Award. The honor goes to someone whose humanitarian efforts and singular devotion to others live up to the ideals of St. Francis. Other recipients have included Dr. Billy Graham, Dr. Charles Mayo of the Mayo Clinic, and Harry Reasoner, nationally known ABC Television news anchorman. In 1976, it went to a little-known doctor from a small Minnesota town.

In 1980, he wed Dr. Dora Zaeske, and they were together for 22 years, traveling the world and working as humanitarians.

Dr. Pearson worked as a physician in locations in South America, the West Indies, and Taiwan, and a Navajo Reservation in Ganado, Arizona. He also led an effort to sponsor a leprosarium in Zambia, Africa.

In 1970, a new elementary school in Shakopee, B.F. Pearson Elementary School, was named after him. It is located at 917 Dakota Street South.

In 1995, Central became the fifth- and sixth-grade building, with Sweeney and Pearson elementaries serving grades kindergarten through fourth. As the number of students grew, the five other elementary schools in Shakopee continued, while in 2011, the school was converted to Shakopee’s Pearson Sixth Grade Center, which opened in 2012.

Pearson Sixth Grade Center served all public school sixth graders in Shakopee which included about 650 students. About 43% of the students were people of color.

In 2018, the school was closed for budget reasons. The sixth graders were moved to the two middle schools with other seventh and eighth graders.

In 2020, Pearson Sixth Grade Center became the Pearson Early Learning Center.

After a brief illness, Dr. Bror Folke Pearson passed away Aug. 24, 2004, at Sunrise of Mercer Island, Washington, at age 98.

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Compiled and written by David R. Schleper, 2020

Dan Eddings was born enslaved, probably in Kentucky around 1852.

So how did Dan Eddings move?

Elnathan Judson Pond married Wilhelmine Minnie Catharina Elisabeth Markus in Shakopee on June 24, 1879. Minnie was born Oct. 21, 1862, daughter of William (1823-1895) and. Wilhelmina (1832-1908) Markus. Elnathan and Minnie had six children. Elnathan’s younger brother, Samuel William Pond, Jr. married Irene Goodrich Boyden. The two couples started housekeeping at the mission farm. Later, Elnathan and Minnie moved across the road to a 170-acre farm. This farm is now part of The Landing in Shakopee, according to Pond Grist Mill Is Start of Something Big by Ginger Timmons, Scott County Historical Society, Shakopee Valley News, Aug. 30, 1972.

Elnathan and Samuel, Jr., sons of Rev. Samuel Pond, Sr. and Cordelia Eggleston Pond, built the Pond Grist Mill in 1875. The mill was built for supplementary income. Elnathan and Wilhelmine’s seven-room, two-story frame house, complete with summer kitchen and woodshed, stood about a block east of the mill. The families moved the big barn from the

The Shakopee Tribunealso discusses “our sole citizen of color.” According to the article, Dan was “quite harmless, although possessing only indistinct ideas of the philosophy of meum and tuum, especially when in the vicinity of a hen roost.” Meum et tuum means mine and thine and is used to express rights of property. In other words, he was a lady’s man. “In earlier days, before race prejudice had spread through the north, Dan often was present at social functions, and there may be those still living who have stepped off a quadrille with him.”

William Weiser, meanwhile, was back with his wife until she died, and then he married Kate Love McCallum. They have nine children before Kate died in 1901. William was a school teacher and brick mason, and died in Everett, Washington in 1919.

Dan spent his post-slave life living and working in Shakopee. In the Aug. 29, 1919 Scott County Argus, Dan “had spent his entire life here, and was well known among the farming community, having worked on many of the farms hereabouts.” He often worked at Lawrence Stemmer’s farm in east Shakopee. (“Threshers in Shakopee ca. 1910” by Shakopee Heritage Society)

J.A. Reitz, a Shakopee photographer, took a picture of Dan in 1915. It was a studio portrait, where Eddings was sitting on a wicker chair covered with a fur pelt. He was wearing a button-down shirt, vest, jacket, and trousers. On the back of the photograph is written “Ni**er—Dan Eddings 1915.” Dan Eddings continued working at various farms until 1919, when he became sick with cancer. He was taken to the county poor house five weeks before he died. The Aug. 29, 1919 Shakopee Tribunenoted, “Dan Eddings, better known to Shakopee as ‘Ni**er Dan,’ died at the county poorhouse Wednesday morning, and was buried that evening.” The Scott County Argusadded, “Dan Eddings, the only local negro resident in this community, died Wednesday morning at 9:45 o’clock at the county poor house where he was taken about five weeks ago. The cause of death was cancer of the stomach.”

Dan Eddings was buried at Valley Cemetery in Shakopee. Valley Cemetery was a public cemetery with no church affiliation. Many of the early families are buried there. The area where he was buried is directly across from pine trees. Valley Cemetery made a note in the remarks: “Known as Ni**er Dan.”

Dan, who was enslaved, worked for years at various farms in Shakopee, and died of cancer, was buried in the potter’s section, a place for the burial of unknown or indigent people. The term is of Biblical origin, referring to a ground where clay was dug for pottery, later bought by the high priests of Jerusalem for the burial of strangers, criminals and the poor.

Dan Eddings does not have a tombstone.

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