Wabanquot (Chippewa chief)


Wabanquot, Wabonaquod, Wah-bon-ah-quot, Wau-bon-a-quat or Wa-bon-o-quot was an Ojibwa chief.

Biography

Wabanquot was born at Gull Lake, Minnesota, around 1830. He succeeded to the office of chief of the Ojibwa at the death of his father, Waubojeeg, one of the principal chiefs for the Gull Lake Band of Mississippi Chippewa. After the Dakota War of 1862, the Gull Lake Band was removed to the Leech Lake area. There, Wabanquot was considered by many to be the principal chief of the removed Mississippi bands of Chippewa. He was a signatory to the Treaty of Washington , in which on June 14, 1868, he led his band to the White Earth Indian Reservation, where he lived until his death 30 years later. Upon his supposed conversion to Christianity sometime in the 1870s, he adopted the name D.G. Wright after an Episcopalian benefactor, but he rarely used his English name; however, sometime in the 1890s before his death, he converted to Roman Catholicism.

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