Daniel Whitney and Daniel M. Whitney

[caption id="attachment_7594" align="aligncenter" width="423"] Daniel Whitney (1795-1862). Image credit: FC Pierce (Descendants of John Whitney (genealogy)) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons[/caption]Genealogists and historians of all stripes have found out the hard way that two people with the same name (or roughly the same name) can cause problems in their research. When you come upon a name in a document there is rarely any indication that the name belongs to more than one possible person. You might be reading about two different people and not realize it. So it has been with Daniel Whitney and his nephew Daniel M. Whitney. (And by the way, Daniel also had a son named Daniel, but the son is of no importance to us here.)

Both Daniel Whitney and Daniel M. Whitney were important actors in the lives of the Stockbridge Mohicans. The Daniel that was born in 1795 was, by anybody's standards, an ambitious, enterprising captain of industry. It probably would be no exaggeration to say that Daniel Whitney brought capitalism to present-day Wisconsin. What we now call Wisconsin and northeast Minnesota were part of the Michigan Territory in 1820, which was when Daniel Whitney started supplying Green Bay residents and small-time traders with the things they needed. Prior to that time, the so-called "factory system" was in place. In other words, there were "factors" at forts who represented the United States and supplied Indians and "frontiersmen" with goods at a regulated price. You might call it benign patriarchy; it was the federal government's way of protecting the Indians and frontiersmen from being cheated by unscrupulous traders.

Whitney (the uncle) started off his career by embarking on trade expeditions, including one trip from what is now Minneapolis to Detroit in which he hauled goods on a toboggan. The successful trade expeditions led to the establishment of general stores, one of them being at Statesburg, the first settlement of the Stockbridge Mohicans in present-day Wisconsin (the Stockbridges began settling at Statesburg in 1822, twenty-six years before Wisconsin became a state).

Daniel M. Whitney was born in New York State in 1815. He came west to Green Bay in 1833, and was employed by his uncle for many years, in a number of capacities, but most notably, Daniel M. ran the general store at Statesburg and moved with the Stockbridge Mohicans to their settlement on the eastern shores of Lake Winnebago (aka Stockbridge, Wisconsin).

When an 1843 act of Congress made the Stockbridges citizens, the land that had once belonged to the whole tribe was allotted into private parcels. And the Indians began selling their land. Daniel Whitney (the uncle) was the biggest buyer of Stockbridge land between February 1844 and February 1846. According to historian Alice E. Smith, he acquired "nearly 2,500 acres, mostly in 60-acre tracts"(Wisconsin Magazine of History, March, 1941, page 294).

The interaction between the Whitneys and the Stockbridges, I suspect, is a complicated one. Within a politically correct mindset, it would be difficult to think of Daniel Whitney (the uncle) as a positive factor in the lives of the Stockbridge Indians. However, he is said to have employed a lot of them in his business ventures. Meanwhile, Daniel M. Whitney, the storekeeper, was said to be a great friend to the Indians - at least in his obituary where people always say good things about you.

Clearly the topic of the Whitneys and the Stockbridge Indians has great potential for more historical research.