Medicine Bottle
Chief Waukan-ojan-jan founded a settlement of Dakota people at Pine Bend in 1838 and lived there until 1852, the year after the Treaty of Traverse des Sioux relocated Minnesota's Dakota populations to the western part of the state. Waukan-ojan-jan was commonly known as Medicine Bottle. His village at Pine Bend was captured in Henry Lewis's panorama, "Medicine Bottle's Village", a lithograph that depicted the life of Native Americans at Pine Bend with wooden houses and children running around. Medicine Bottle was the chief of the village and a healer with expansive knowledge of medicine.
Medicine Bottle died in 1862 by being impaled in the head by a metal hook after tripping accidentally according to the account of local historian John H. Case in his "Notes of Grey Cloud Island and its Vicinity."
After Chief Medicine Bottle’s death, Dr. Asa W. Daniels, a government physician at the Redwood agency, described him as being a civilized Indian and was “honest, truthful, and bore the duties of life faithfully.” This displays the perspective many white people had of Native Americans as uncivilized so when the Chief circumvents their biases and is knowledgeable and kind it is seen as civilized.
A plaque was put up in 1939 by the National Youth Administration commemorating the Pine Bend settlement of chief Medicine Bottle, but was moved to county storage in 2005 during a construction project. When the monument was reassembled and restored in 2019 for the Mississippi River Greenway, the plaque was omitted due to its language. As of June 2022, Dakota County plans to erect a monument to the Dakota settlement at a later date.