negotiations to Washington, D.C. On August 18, Taliaferro managed to leave the St. Peter's Indian Agency with twenty-six Mdewakanton chiefs and headmen on a steamboat without tipping off the traders and without telling the chiefs the real reason for the trip. Soon after their departure, however, Taliaferro's covert operation was discovered, and nearly a dozen traders, including Henry Sibley and Joseph R. Brown, arrived in Washington close behind them. It was Sibley's first time in Washington. In early September, Hercules Dousman wrote to Sibley, instructing him "leave no stone unturned to get something handsome for us" when the U.S. government was negotiating with the Dakota. However, Taliaferro prevented most of the American Fur Company traders from entering the room where discussions took place between Secretary of War Joel Roberts Poinsett, Commissioner Carey A. Harris, and the Mdewakanton chiefs, starting September 21. Only "mixed-blood" American Fur employee Alexander Faribault and former AFC trader Alexis Bailly were allowed in the meetings as staff assistants who could also serve as interpreters. On September 29, 1837, twenty-one Mdewakanton leaders and representatives of the U.S. government signed the "Treaty with the Sioux." The Mdewakanton gave up "all their land, east of the Mississippi river, and all their islands in the said river" to the United States for $16,000 in cash and goods up front, plus an annual distribution worth up to $40,000 per year. Meanwhile, mixed-blood "relatives and friends" would receive $110,000 up front (because they were ineligible for annuities), and $90,000 would be paid to the traders to settle Mdewakanton debts – a little more than one-third of the debts they had claimed. Sibley wrote to Ramsay Crooks that the whole treaty was "but one series of iniquity and wrong," which had left Faribault and Bailly "so exasperated, that they seriously considered traveling home without the delegation... This is the boasted paternal regard for the poor Indian. 'O Shame where is thy blush!" Historian Gary Clayton Anderson writes that "Self-interest on their part underlay this opposition: the traders wanted the government to spend more money." Sibley was also irritated that the treaty named Taliaferro's interpreter, Scott Campbell, as an annuity recipient with title to part of the land then occupied by Sibley's trading establishment — a personal concession which was later struck out by the United States Congress. On November 1, 1837, Henry Sibley was a signatory to the Treaty with the Winnebago, also