Cloud Man
| Cloud Man | |
|---|---|
| Maḣpiya Wic̣aṡṭa | |
| Mdewakanton Dakota chief | |
| Personal details | |
| Born |
c. 1780 Near Mendota, Minnesota |
| Died | 1862/1863 Pike Island, Minnesota |
Cloud Man (Dakota: Maḣpiya Wic̣aṡṭa;c. 1780 – 1862/1863) was a Dakota chief. The child of French and Mdewakanton parents, he founded the agricultural community Ḣeyate Otuŋwe on the shores of Bde Maka Ska in 1829 after being trapped in a snowstorm for three days. The village was seen by white settlers as a progressive step towards assimilation, yet members of the community maintained a distinctly Dakota way of life. The community was abandoned in 1839 and Cloud Man's band moved along the Minnesota River to join the Hazelwood Republic. During the U.S.–Dakota War of 1862, Cloud Man was interned at Pike Island where he died.
Cloud Man was born a member of the Mdewakanton Dakota around 1780 in a village eight miles (13 km) from Mendota, Minnesota, on the southern side of the Minnesota River. His father was French and his mother was Mdewakanton, reportedly the granddaughter of a Mdewakanton chief who met Louis Hennepin during his mission to explore New France in the late 1670s and early 1680s. Indian agent Lawrence Taliaferro at one point tried to convince him to begin a non-nomadic lifestyle at Bde Maka Ska.
During a hunting trip on the plains near the Missouri River, Cloud Man and his party were trapped by a snowstorm and were forced to wrap themselves in blankets and lie on the ground, waiting for the snow to pass. Members of the party were cut off from one another, buried separately beneath snowdrifts with some small quantities of dried buffalo meat on which to subsist. Cloud Man recounted to missionary Samuel W. Pond that he would periodically dig to the surface of the snow to try and find his fellow hunters, only to be greeted with more gales of snow. When the storm subsided after almost three days, he emerged from the snow and called for the other members of his party, finding both that every one had survived the storm and that they were not far from an Indian camp.
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