D.D. Mitchell

          Indian Superintendent for the West, and the treaty commissioner at the 1851 Treaty Council at Horse Creek in the Nebraska Territory.

         Congress appointed D.D. Mitchell to the post of Superintendent of Indian Affair  - a successor to Captain William Clark - in 1847, following his successful career as a fur trader with John Jacob Astor's American Fur Company.

          Mitchell was the first to alert Congress that trouble was brewing in the West on the new Oregon Trail.  After meeting with his friend and fellow Indian Agent, Thomas Fitzpatrick, in St. Louis in 1849, Mitchell wrote Congress a stern warning and asked that they fund a new peace council with the western tribes: "It is only by some measure of this kind that we can ever establish friendly relations with these Indians; and the bones of American citizens that now whiten the plains from the borders of the western states to the Rocky Mountains all admonish of the necessity for peace.  We can never whip them into friendship; the prowess of our troops and the vast resources of the government would be wasted in long and toilsome marches over the plains in the pursuit of anignis fatuus; they'd never see an enemy." Click here for more on D.D. MItchell

          Congress agreed to fund a peace council with the tribes in order to promote peace and friendship.  That council, which met for a month at the confluence of the North Platte and Horse Creek, in the Nebraska Territory,  in September of 1851, ended by formally recognizing the great western tribes as being the titled owners of 1.1 million square miles of the west - an area larger than the entire Louisiana Purchase.