For sale is a VINTAGE WHITE CLOUD SOAP LAUNDRY CANVAS SACK. This heavy duty canvas sack makes for a stylish laundry sack. The graphic design with read and black text on a cream aged canvas is incredible such this item would also display wall as a wall hanging or work well as a a table cloth top for a side table. The sack has the same design on both sides. The sack measures 32 inches wide by 23 inches tall.
The graphic design may be a tribute to a historic American Ioway Indian called White Cloud. He was born sometime around 1784 along the Des Moines River where the present states of Iowa and Missouri meet. In 1808, when White Cloud was in his mid-twenties, he was arrested for murder. White Cloud and one other Ioway man, known by the French name Mira Natutais, were trying to cross the Missouri River. While they were on the riverbank, they exchanged gunfire with some traders who were on the river in boats. As a result two traders, Joseph Tibeau and Joseph Marechal died. The two Ioways were taken to St. Louis where they were convicted of murder and sentenced to death. However, Judge John B.C. Lucas granted the two a new trial because the crime had taken place on land that was still owned by the Native Americans. While they were in jail waiting for their new trial, both White Cloud and Mira Natutais escaped.
By the early 1830s Missouri was growing in population and settlers were eager for more land. Soon, European Americans were settling illegally in the Platte country. Some moved so close to the Ioway Agency that their cattle destroyed the Ioways’ cornfields. The Ioways were too few in number to defend the land by themselves and White Cloud asked for help from the U. S. government. But even armed soldiers could not keep these illegal settlers, called squatters, off of the tribe’s land.
In June 1831, a group of Omahas travelling along the Missouri River attacked a band of Ioways beliving them to be bandits. The son of an Ioway leader named Péchan or “Crane,” died in the battle. After the attack, Ioway warriors asked White Cloud for permission to avenge the man’s death by raising a war party to raid the Omaha. White Cloud said no, demanding instead that the United States government settle the matter. The government was slow to act and two years later twelve frustrated Ioway men took matters into their own hands. They killed six Omahas in a raid and took a woman and a boy hostage. White Cloud helped the U.S. government arrest eight of the Ioways who were responsible for the raid. While in prison in Fort Leavenworth, one of the Ioway men vowed to kill White Cloud for helping to arrest him. A year later, in 1834, the man escaped and killed White Cloud in a hunting camp in southwest Iowa. White Cloud was about fifty years old at the time of his murder.
