After the Civil War broke out in spring 1861, federal officials had neither the time nor resources to devote to Stockbridge-Munsee affairs. Francis Huebschman was to blame for not taking the first step in the allotment process, the survey of the two townships into 1,152 separate parcels of forty acres each. Instead, the Stockbridge-Munsees informally made preallotment selections of land parcels. Their minister, Jeremiah Slingerland, kept a record book of these selections, most of them in the easternmost of the two townships, T28N R14E. Most families lived around the church and school building at Red Springs. Few tribal members lived on their parcel selections. Some families, notably the Touseys and Gardners, made selections on land in the adjoining Menominee Reservation in T28N R15E. The Tousey and Gardner families lived on their selections in a neighborhood that was known as the Two-Mile Strip.
Daniel Marques “Dan” Tousey was born August 9, 1881, probably on the Stockbridge Reservation near Shawano. His Stockbridge-Munsee heritage could be traced back generations, with his family intertwined with other notable Stockbridge families, including the Chicks and Welch branches. Tousey was raised in Red Springs, which was then part of Shawano County.
1893-1894: Charles Painter, or “Professor Painter” as he was known because of his onetime position at Fisk University, volunteered to take a census at no charge to the tribe or to the United States. Painter proceeded to travel to Wisconsin, Canada, and New York in search of disfranchised Mohicans and Munsees who deserved to be on the Stockbridge-Munsee tribal roll. For six months Painter labored patiently to make sense of the genealogy of the Stockbridge and Munsee Indians. Tribal member John C. Adams proved indispensable; he helped Painter to navigate the history of marriages, births, deaths, and adoptions of the people, or what the professor called “the bitter factional strifes of twenty-three years, and fearfully mixed marriages, and great liberty of divorce.” It was Adams’s final service to his people before his death in early 1895.
The leaders of the Indian Party refused to participate in the census, calling the Act of 1893 the “most unjust, outrageous and unconstitutional legislation” ever passed by Congress in regard to the internal matters of an Indian tribe. In numerous letters and petitions to the secretary of the interior, Zacharias Miller and others in the Indian Party protested Painter’s census, calling it an “illegal enrollment of unauthorized persons and their descendants under Act of March 3, 1893 of mixed Races of whites & Negroes.” Miller also ignored Adams’s participation as an assistant to Professor Painter and complained to Secretary of the Interior Hoke Smith that the true guiding force behind the census was “one Simeon Gardner, a notorious negro bigamist and profligate.” Miller charged that Painter’s September l893 work took place in Gardner’s “private residence.” Whatever the circumstances of the enrollment location, Painter’s census carefully delineated individuals by membership in the Indian Party, the Old Citizens Party, New York Munsees, “Outsiders,” and a “special class,” the “Tousey Family.” (Source: Stockbridge Indians” (1894), Special Case 42, Box 5, Records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Record Group 75, National Archives.)
In 1897 Congress passed a statute prohibiting alcohol manufacture and sale throughout Indian Country, that is, on federally recognized American Indian reservations.The OIA enforced this aggressively. Each year, local agents and superintendents were required to file reports specifying the actions taken to stamp out liquor sale and use on their reservations. This change in federal Indian policy in the early 1900s coincided with the emergence of Morgan Siding as a center of alcohol sales and consumption. The result was an ongoing struggle between the United States and individual Stockbridge-Munsees over alcohol. The undisputed king of Morgan Siding was a Stockbridge-Munsee named Dan Tousey. He figured out sooner than any other proprietor that the allotment of the reservation in fee simple title made him a “Citizen Indian” outside the reach of the OIA and its agents. His career may be followed in the annual reports of the Keshena superintendent and in the court papers of state and federal jurisdictions.
In July 1913, there was a dance at Dan Tousey’s place at Morgan Siding. Jim Reed and Jones House got their hats exchanged and in trying to straighten out the hat jumble a quarrel ensued. Tousey told the men to stop their quarreling and when they began to fight, Tousey put Reed outside the door. They went outdoors and Reed promised not to have any further words with House. A young Stockbridge man named Thomas Hammer urged both men to fight, but Reed went upstairs and began to dance. Hammer then went upstairs also, and as Reed came near, Hammer knocked the young man down. As he was doing this, Dan Tousey, who runs the place, was coming up the stairs with an ax handle or club, and endeavored to hit Hammer. As soon as this was done Hammer’s relatives got into the fight: Rufus Hammer the father and Job Hammer a brother endeavored to take the club away from Tousey. There were several in the fight by this time and Albert Fowler (another Stockbridge) tried to take Rufus and Job Hammer off the struggling Tousey. Then it was that Tom Hammer stepped up to him from behind and stabbed Fowler with a knife four times. On adrenaline, Fowler turned around and knocked Hammer down. Fowler was then stabbed two more times from in front, which were very bad. The fight stopped about this time. There were a number in the hall and many witnessed the fight, and there are different versions of the disgraceful row.
O. F. Morgan went in his car to retrieve a doctor, but he could not get Dr. Sapper of Gresham, and Dr. Gordon was then called, and for some reason they could not get him by phone until about 8:00 the next morning. Fowler lost a great deal of blood before Dr. Gordon got there. He was brought to town Friday evening and taken to the Shawano hospital, where he passed away Sunday afternoon,
A post mortem was held Sunday evening so as to examine the nature of the wounds, and it was found that the two in front, one of which pierced his left lung, were both mortal. Fowler is said to have been a quiet man and leaves a wife and one child. He was not a drinking man and had not drank any that evening. The remains were taken to Morgan Siding.
Hammer was arrested Friday and placed in the county jail and his examination will be held after the coroner’s inquest, which will be held tomorrow at Coroner W.H. Garfield’s undertaking rooms. There have been a number of fights at Morgan Siding and the place has not a very good reputation. District Attorney Andrews has the case in charge and will endeavor to have the guilty one punished. It would be a good thing for Shawano County if there were no saloons at Morgan Siding.
Those at his bedside when death claimed him were his mother, wife and son, brother, sister, a friend Joseph Pleshek, and an uncle.
August 1915, indicted for reckless homicide for the accidental shooting of German immigrant Rheinhold Sidletz. Dan and a friend were target shooting at empty beer bottles set on a log outside the Tousey Tavern when a drunken patron, a German immigrant named Rheinhold “Whitey” Sidletz, woke up from his slumber on the far side of the log. Unfortunately for Sidletz, he stuck his head up right behind the next target. Dan’s bull’s-eye shattered both the bottle and Sidletz’s head. Charged with reckless homicide, Tousey hired the outside counsel for the tribe in Shawano County to represent him, and after a series of motions filed by his lawyer, the judge dismissed the indictment and set Dan free.
By 1915 Dan Tousey became a regular subject of complaint of the Keshena Indian agent to the U.S. Attorney in Milwaukee and the Commissioner of Indian Affairs in Washington, and for the next two decades the OIA struggled mightily to put him behind bars. The liquor laws regulating American Indians were strengthened in 1916 when the Supreme Court interpreted the Act of 1897 to cover Indians who had received their fee simple allotment patents and were otherwise not subject to OIA supervision.This made Tousey and other Stockbridge Munsee tavern keepers at Morgan Siding more vulnerable to prosecution. But what really made Tousey a figure of notoriety, at least among OIA personnel, was the advent of Prohibition.Tousey went from being a legitimate saloonkeeper to a bootlegger-speakeasy operator. So long as drinking was legal in Shawano County but not on the Menominee Reservation, the superintendent satisfied himself with trying to keep alcohol outside Menominee and putting up with illegal drinking by individual Indians at Morgan Siding. But after the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment, the Keshena agent made it a personal crusade to shut down Dan Tousey.
August 3, 1921: Oneida George Shomin had come to Morgan Siding from Crandon where he had been working as a painter. He was to have gone to work for Dan Tousey the next day. First, he bought some canned goods at the Morgan Siding store and went to the home of Charley Brown. He told Brown about some trouble he had had and which seemed to prey upon his mind, but he left the impression with Brown that the trouble had been settled. When Brown got up to go out from the house, he said “Well, good bye, I’ll see you later,” and Shomin replied, “When you see me again it will be all over with me.” Brown had gone but a few rods from the house when he heard the shot of a .44 revolver and rushed back to the house and saw the body in a pool of blood. The entire upper part of his head was blown off, and death was instant. W.H. Garfield was called to review the case, and upon investigation the nearest relative was found to be a sister who lived in Brooklyn. Shomin was a man about thirty years old and was unmarried. The burial took place at Morgan Siding.
All through the 1920s, the Keshena superintendent’s reports vilified Tousey as “the worse offender against law and decency.” Keshena Superintendent Edgar Allen wrote in 1923 that the village of Morgan Siding “is noted as the most iniquitous little community in the whole country round” and that while the “Stockbridge mixed b1ood” Tousey was the worst, other white men also ran speakeasies, “some of whom are quite prominent in local politics.”
In 1924 the OIA sent a special police agent from Duluth to raid Dan Tousey’s speakeasy. Tousey, described as a “mixed blood Stockbridge and Negro,” pleaded guilty and paid his $100 fine. The disgusted superintendent considered Tousey’s liquor selling “guilty under God’s law of murder” and despaired that the fine “doubtless was made back in a couple days of good business.” The next year, 1925, the Keshena superintendent complained: “On a good Saturday night enough can be made… to pay the amount of the fine imposed.” Tousey’s tavern was where “women and men congregate… and the most vicious and obscene practices are indulged in.” Superintendent Allen posted a notice at the Neopit sawmill: “Any man found in Morgan Siding under any pretense whatever will be discharged from our service.” By 1926 one senses a note of surrender in the superintendent’s annual report. He made his observations about conditions on the Stockbridge and Oneida reservations and found “situation as to law and order… much worse on the Stockbridge reservation in the vicinity of Morgan’s siding.” Then in an exasperated pronouncement, Superintendent Allen continued, “The Oneidas are very much superior to the Stockbridges and especially the larger portion of the Stockbridges who contain a considerable portion of Negro blood.”
Carl Miller, the chair of the Tribal Business Committee in the 1920s, despaired about the Tousey family. According to Miller, the Touseys were a mixed African-Indian family that was denied membership among the Stockbridges in the 1820s, then admitted by Superintendent Huebschman at the 1856 treaty, removed from the rolls by Commissioner Wells after the Act of 1871, readmitted by Painter in 1894, and, Miller lamented, “still with us today.”
By 1930 the superintendent had pretty much given up; the winner of the contest was Dan Tousey: “The State of Wisconsin has recently passed what is known as the Severson Act the purpose of which was in reality to renounce the National Prohibition Law. Since the passage of this act we can expect very little cooperation from State and County officials in enforcing the Eighteenth Amendment… It is impossible to improve law and order conditions on the reservation until this Stockbridge country can be thoroughly cleaned up of saloons and bootleggers.”
March 1930, Judge FA Geiger found 22 people guilty of Prohibition violations. Of those, Dan Tousey received the biggest penalty: a $250 fine and eight months in jail. He was identified as co-owner of the Black and White Wigwam in Gresham. The other owner, George Lavelle, was fined $100 and given six months in jail.
May 1938, Federal Judge Patrick Stone sentenced Tousey to two years in Leavenworth federal prison for selling liquor to Indians, and fined his bartender Ed Blashe $50. Stone said there needed to be better liquor control among the Indians, and said “there have been three murders at the reservation all attributable to liquor.” Stone felt it was too easy for 17- and 18-year old Indian boys to get liquor and “these Indian boys do not have as much opportunity as the white race and need protection against this traffic.” Tousey said he was caught through entrapment, but Judge Stone did not budge.
After his release,Tousey lived a quiet life, stayed out of trouble, and died on the reservation in 1950.
Led by members of the Tousey family, residents established the Old Stockbridge Orthodox Presbyterian Church in Morgan Siding. At first the group was without a building, so they met in the saloon of Dan’s brother, Mac Tousey; it also hosted services of the new Assembly of God church. The Pentecostal worshipers of the Assembly of God stayed in the Tousey tavern until 1940, when they built a church.
Dan Tousey died December 13, 1950 in Red Springs.
This wasn’t quite the end of his story, because his will would be contested for the next year. He had left his estate to his housekeeper on the condition that after her death, the remaining estate pass on to his heirs. Shawano Judge C.B. Dillett ruled the heirs in this case were two brothers, two sisters, and seven nieces and nephews. However, two illegitimate sons came forward to contest this decision, which made its way up to the Wisconsin Supreme Court. The court ruled that when Tousey left the estate to “heirs,” he was aware of his two sons and therefore knew they would be the legal heirs.