During the year 1862, the United States was in turmoil as the Civil War continued. Minnesota would start its own war in August with the Dakota Indians. From the Dakota's loss of lands, encroachments by whites, embezzlement and questionable annuity dealings, the clash of cultures, starvation, drought, and previous conflicts, the tensions reached a climax. All these factors brought on war. This uprising would take over 600 white lives and an unknown number of Dakota. Stearns County was spared the bulk of the massacres, which mostly centered around the Minnesota River Valley. However, its people were still affected by the events taking place a short distance away. This book tells of the people and places in Stearns County affected by the Dakota Uprising of 1862, information found in museums and historical societies and other sources.
As the United States fought the Civil War in the early 1860s, the country's western frontier was simultaneously the site of significant military campaigns that took the lives of both American and Sioux. The Dakota campaign, led by Commander Henry Hastings Sibley and Brigadier General Alfred Sully against the Sioux between 1863 and 1864 was greater in scope, intensity and bloodshed than almost all other Indian battles fought in the West but is often overlooked. The Minnesota War of 1862 and the Dakota War of 1863-1865 were among the most significant U.S. victories in the Indian wars, but did not temper the passions of the Sioux to preserve their people and land or the desires of the whites to settle the frontier. The wars only incited the Teton Sioux to enter into a long-term resistance that would end only at Wounded Knee in 1890.
First published in 1970, this volume from Mrs Harriet E. Bishop McConkey, a pioneer schoolteacher of St. Paul, Minnesota, was part of the first wave of contemporaneous accounts from Americans in 1863 documenting their perspective of the Sioux Uprising between the 17th of August and the 26th of September 1862. At least 450 settlers and soldiers were killed, depopulating large areas. Although not a direct eyewitness to events, Harriet McConkey was on the fringes of the action in St. Paul and gathered material firsthand from the participants themselves, enabling her to convey the settlers’ story with profound emotional involvement and intimacy, though with equally profound bitterness for the Native Americans. McConkey made little attempt to explore their motivations in the form of famine, late payment and poor treatment. Though imperfect, hers remains an important account documenting the settlers’ experience of the event which began a succession of wars over thirty years, ending at Wounded Knee, South Dakota in 1890.
This edition of A Thrilling Narrative of Indian Captivity rescues from obscurity a crucially important work about the bitterly contested U.S.-Dakota War of 1862. Written by Mary Butler Renville, an Anglo woman, with the assistance of her Dakota husband, John Baptiste Renville, A Thrilling Narrative was printed only once as a book in 1863 and has not been republished since. The work details the Renvilles’ experiences as “captives” among their Dakota kin in the Upper Camp and chronicles the story of the Dakota Peace Party. Their sympathetic portrayal of those who opposed the war in 1862 combats the stereotypical view that most Dakotas supported it and illumines the injustice of their exile from Dakota homelands. From the authors’ unique perspective as an interracial couple, they paint a complex picture of race, gender, and class relations on successive midwestern frontiers. As the state of Minnesota commemorates the 150th anniversary of the Dakota War, this narrative provides fresh insights into the most controversial event in the region’s history. This annotated edition includes groundbreaking historical and literary contexts for the text and a first-time collection of extant Dakota correspondence with authorities during the war.
This collection of thirty-six narratives presents the Dakota Indians' experiences during a conflict previously known chiefly from the viewpoints of non-Indians.
In 1862, four years after Minnesota was ratified as the thirty-second state in the Union, simmering tensions between indigenous Dakota and white settlers culminated in the violent, six-week-long U.S.-Dakota War. Hundreds of lives were lost on both sides, and the war ended with the execution of thirty-eight Dakotas on December 26, 1862, in Mankato, Minnesota--the largest mass execution in American history. The following April, after suffering a long internment at Fort Snelling, the Dakota and Winnebago peoples were forcefully removed to South Dakota, precipitating the near destruction of the area's native communities while simultaneously laying the foundation for what we know and recognize today as Minnesota. In North Country: The Making of Minnesota, Mary Lethert Wingerd unlocks the complex origins of the state--origins that have often been ignored in favor of legend and a far more benign narrative of immigration, settlement, and cultural exchange. Moving from the earliest years of contact between Europeans and the indigenous peoples of the western Great Lakes region to the era of French and British influence during the fur trade and beyond, Wingerd charts how for two centuries prior to official statehood Native people and Europeans in the region maintained a hesitant, largely cobeneficial relationship. Founded on intermarriage, kinship, and trade between the two parties, this racially hybridized society was a meeting point for cultural and economic exchange until the western expansion of American capitalism and violation of treaties by the U.S. government during the 1850s wore sharply at this tremulous bond, ultimately leading to what Wingerd calls Minnesota's Civil War. A cornerstone text in the chronicle of Minnesota's history, Wingerd's narrative is augmented by more than 170 illustrations chosen and described by Kirsten Delegard in comprehensive captions that depict the fascinating, often haunting representations of the region and its inhabitants over two and a half centuries. North Country is the unflinching account of how the land the Dakota named Mini Sota Makoce became the State of Minnesota and of the people who have called it, at one time or another, home.
