be induced to return, but in later years always upbraided my father for not giving him a sound thrashing and sending him back." Although he avoided speaking English, Gabriel Renville became known as a skilled orator in Dakota. Sam Brown, who served as his interpreter during multiple trips to Washington, D.C., wrote that in his opinion, "Gabriel Renville had no superior –– no equal, even –– as to the use of the Sioux language. He knew the use of it so well and so completely that every word was a sledgehammer, always clear, homely but strong, and to the point." Decline of the fur trade In 1841, Joseph R. Brown brought Gabriel Renville in to serve as a clerk in his fur trading business based in the Coteau des Prairies. After Brown sold his business to Henry Hastings Sibley in 1846, Renville worked briefly for Sibley's business partner Martin McLeod. By 1849, Renville had moved back to Lac qui Parle. The collapse of the fur trade wrought economic hardship in the newly formed Minnesota Territory. In 1850, Brown summoned Renville to Saint Paul, where he was meeting with a group of traders including Sibley to help to facilitate the signing of a treaty between the U.S. government and Dakota leaders, which would also pay traders for any outstanding debts owed to them. Historian Gary Clayton Anderson writes, "Renville quickly became part of the inner circle that worked for the treaty...Given the circumstances, Renville, in working with Brown, obviously assumed that he was helping his people out of what had become an increasingly unsustainable lifestyle." In 1851, Gabriel Renville was present at the signing of the Treaty of Traverse des Sioux as part of the delegation of Wahpetons. Anderson writes, "When Renville, as a mixed-blood, did not sign, his stepfather, Akipa, gave his mark." Entry into farming As news of the 1851 treaty spread, there was a large influx of white settler-colonists attempting to claim indigenous lands in Minnesota Territory, including 320,000 acres of land that had been set aside for "mixed-blood" descendants of European American fur trappers and settlers and certain Dakota tribes in the Fourth Treaty of Prairie du Chien. To compensate for their loss, the U.S. government authorized a swap, offering "land scrip" to eligible mixed-race applicants in exchange for giving up their claim to the "half-breed tracts." Gabriel Renville filed for land scrip in 1856, claiming lands