Sioux Uprising

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Image:ChiefLittleCrow.jpg The Sioux Uprising, also known as the Dakota Conflict or the U.S.-Dakota War of 1862, was an armed conflict between the United States and several eastern bands of the Dakota people (often referred to as the Santee Sioux) that began on August 17, 1862 along the Minnesota River in southwest Minnesota. Skirmishes in the following weeks claimed hundreds of lives. The number of Native American dead is unknown, while estimates of settlers who died range between 300 and 800—one of the largest tolls on American civilians to ever occur. The conflict also resulted in the largest mass execution in U.S. history, when 38 Dakota men convicted of murder and rape were hanged in Mankato, Minnesota. This was the first major armed engagement between the U.S. and Dakota, though it would not be the last.

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Background

In 1851, the U.S. and Dakota negotiated the Treaty of Traverse des Sioux and Treaty of Mendota, ceding vast amounts of land in Minnesota Territory. In exchange for money and goods, the Dakota agreed to live on a twenty mile (32 km) wide reservation centered on a 150 mile (240 km) stretch of the upper Minnesota River. The deal immediately began to turn sour as the United States Senate deleted Article 3 of each treaty during the ratification process. Much of the promised compensation never arrived, lost or effectively stolen due to corruption in the Bureau of Indian Affairs and wrongful conduct by traders.

As Minnesota became a state in 1858, representatives of several Dakota bands led by Chief Taoyateduta (commonly known as Chief Little Crow) traveled to Washington, D.C. to make further negotiations. Again, events did not transpire in the Indians' favor. The northern half of the reservation along the Minnesota River was lost, and rights to the quarry at Pipestone, Minnesota were also ceded. This was a major blow to the standing of Little Crow in the Dakota community.

In the meantime, the ceded land was quickly being divided up into townships and individual plots for settlement. The forest, prairie, and other wild lands used in the traditional Dakota yearly cycle of farming, hunting, fishing, and gathering wild rice was unalterably interrupted as timber was stripped to make way for new farms plowed by white settlers. In addition, wild game like bison, elk, whitetail deer, and bear had been hunted so intensively that populations were tiny compared to the populations before Euro-American settlement. The Dakota people of southern and western Minnesota relied on the sale of valuable furs to American traders to earn cash needed to buy necessities.

Payments guaranteed by the treaties were not made due to federal preoccupation with the American Civil War. Most land in the river valley was not arable and hunting could no longer support the Dakota community. Losing land to new white settlers, non-payment, past broken treaties, plus food shortages and famine following crop failure led to great discontent among the Dakota people. Tension increased through the summer of 1862.

On August 4, representatives of the northern Sisseton and Wahpeton bands met at the Upper Sioux Agency in the northwestern part of the reservation. They successfully negotiated to obtain food. However, when the southern Mdewakanton and Wahpekute Dakota turned to the Lower Sioux Agency for supplies on August 15, they were rejected. Indian Agent (and Minnesota State Senator) Thomas Galbraith managed the area and would not distribute food without payment. At a meeting arranged between the Indians, the government, and local traders, the Dakota asked lead trader Andrew Myrick to support their cause. His response was blunt. "So far as I'm concerned, if they are hungry, let them eat grass or their own dung."

The dehumanizing comment first brought a hush over the group, but they soon began yelling at him. Soon after, with the Civil War keeping the U.S. occupied, some Dakota warriors saw an opportunity. The delayed money for the tribes arrived in St. Paul to the east on August 16, arriving at Fort Ridgely the next day. However, it came too late to prevent violence from erupting.

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Uprising

While a fight had broken out in Spirit Lake, Iowa in 1857, most histories trace the beginning of the conflict to the killing of five whites by four young Dakota men on August 17, 1862. The Dakota men had been hunting but ended up stealing food from the settlement of Acton in Meeker County. This event caused an uproar among the Santee Sioux living on the reservation, and some warriors convinced a reluctant Chief Little Crow to lead further attacks. An account of the outbreak of the Uprising is told in Terry Tales 2 by Terry R. Shaw:

"On Sunday, August 17, 1862 in nearby Acton Township, which is by Grove City, four Sioux from Rice Creek were out hunting for food. They stopped near Robinson Jones’ cabin, which doubled as a store, and saw some eggs in a hen’s nest by Jones’ fence. One of the Indians bent over and picked up one egg. “No,” said another brave, “Don’t take that. It belongs to the white man.” “I don’t care. I’m hungry,” replied the Indian with the egg. “Put it down, quickly.” The other Indian threw it onto the ground, breaking it. “There,” he said, “Now no one eats it. You are a coward. You are starving and you are afraid to take one egg from the white man because you fear him.” “I do not fear the white man,” spat back the Indian. “Come with me. I will show you. I will kill the white man.” With that, he climbed over the fence and marched towards the cabin, followed by the other three. When they got to the cabin, they asked for liquor. Jones, the local postmaster, had a barrel of whiskey on hand but he refused the young Indians. After all, it was Sunday and besides he didn’t think it was a good idea to give alcohol to some young armed Indian braves. Words were exchanged but Robinson held his ground, the Indians turned and left, and nothing came of the incident. “Why didn’t you kill the white man?” the young brave was asked by his companions. “I have a plan…” came back the answer. Meanwhile, Jones and his wife, the widow Ann Baker, left their adopted daughter Clara Davis Wilson, who was also their niece, to watch her little baby brother while they went to Ann’s son Howard Baker’s cabin, which was less than half a mile away on the same piece of land. It was their normal Sunday afternoon visit.

On the way to Baker’s cabin, Ann and Robinson noticed the Indians, who had demanded the liquor, following them. But they seemed friendly enough. In fact, when they all reached Baker’s place, the entire group entered into a discussion about hunting and marksmanship. Another neighbor named Viranus Webster joined the group along with his wife and two children. It was decided to have a contest to prove who could shoot better, the whites or the Indians. A large white oak tree was selected as the target. The Indians shot first and then reloaded their rifles as the white men were shooting.

Suddenly, as if the whole thing had been planned, the Indians turned on the settlers, who now had empty rifles, killing Baker, Webster, and Robinson Jones and his wife Ann. In fact, a story was told that previous to the whole event, the young Indian men had been arguing about who was the bravest and they had decided to do the shooting to show each other their daring. No doubt they had wanted the liquor to bolster their bravery. Howard’s wife, Mrs. Webster and the children ran and hid. The Indians didn’t pursue them. Instead they retraced their steps to the Jones’ cabin where they saw Clara standing at the window. She was wondering what all the shooting was all about. The Indians shot Clara but not her baby brother, who they didn’t see inside the cabin.

Mrs. Webster and Ann Baker ran to the Nels Olson home and told of the shooting. Then they continued on to Forest City. Olson alerted his neighbor Nels Danielson who was four miles to the west of the Baker place. Danielson got some other settlers, they armed themselves, and they went to investigate. At the Baker farm, eighteen-year-old Hans Evenson was the first to discover the bodies. The men buried the dead in one grave at the Ness Lutheran Church cemetery and then they went to get their families to go to Forest City for protection.

While at his house, Nels heard shots being fired at his neighbor Anders or Andreas Olson’s place. It was just fifty rods away. Sensing what was taking place and that the Indians were close by, Nels gathered his family and grabbed a few possessions including a single feather mattress with ticking, which was a luxury in the days of straw beds. He rolled the mattress up, strapped it to his back and he and his family took off into the woods, heading for Forest City. They ran and ran for their lives, never really seeing Indians but knowing they were close by. When they stopped to rest, Nels took the mattress off his back and only then discovered that there was an arrow sticking out of it. The mattress had saved his life. It was later discovered that Olson and his family had been killed at their farm.

Swedish immigrant Peter J. Lund, who had recently been inducted into the Union Army, was walking with a couple of other men when they came across a small group of Indians. The Indians weren’t hostile but were acting quite nervous. They were armed but said that they were hunting deer. The two groups parted company with no incident.

Lund had also been friendly with the Indians. He had even bought an Indian pony from them. The pony didn’t like the Indians because they had been cruel to it. So, the horse was always running away. The Indians decided to sell or trade him and they approached Lund about the horse. Peter didn’t have any problems with the horse, so he bought it.

Upon arrival in Acton, Lund’s group heard of the massacre and wondered if they hadn’t come across the Indians involved and narrowly escaped with their lives. Lund decided to take his family to Forest City where the stockade was near completion.

The same day as the attack at Acton, a meeting of some of the settlers was being held in the morning at Nels Elofson's house. The purpose of the meeting was to find three men to go off into service in the Union Army. Swede Grove Township was required to fill the draft quota made on it by the government. Nels Elofson was the second white man in Meeker County. At about ten o'clock in the morning, Nel’s neighbor’s children came to the house and informed their father, Mr. Monson, and the other settlers there that Indians were about in the area. They were frightened and wanted to stay. Monson and Swan Nelson went to see what the trouble was. Along the way, they met some Indians on horseback. One of the Indians reached down from his horse and grabbed Nelson by the whiskers. Then he pointed to the east. Swan didn’t understand what the Indian was trying to tell him. They parted company peacefully.

The Indians stopped at Elofson's, who knew several of them. They told Nels that they were on their way to the “Big Woods” for the purpose of killing some Chippewas who, they said, had been killing the whites. They then rode off. Before long news of the murders of the Jones and Baker families got to Nels and in the evening he and Nels Hanson went to the scene of the murders where others had gathered before their arrival. There they learned the details of the attack and were told to come back the next morning to help bury the dead, which they did. While they were there, nine Indians came in sight and several shots were exchanged, but no one was hurt. Elofson returned to his home and helped to start his own and all neighboring families for Ripley (now Litchfield).

When the settlers returned to their homes later, they found that the Sioux had burned down most of the houses, except for a couple. They were the homes of men who had been friendly with the Indians and even had bothered to learn their language. Their homes had been “protected” by a yellow feather on a stake in the ground out front. The Sioux had placed it there meaning “friend to Indian, leave alone.”

The four young Indians, who had done the shooting, stole four horses and went south to their village forty miles away in the Lower Agency on the Minnesota River. They told their chief what they had done. The crowd, which had gathered around them, insisted on going to Chief Little Crow’s village and asking him to lead them into war against the whites. When Chief Little Crow heard what they had done, he told them “No!” “Then we will fight anyway, even if you are afraid to,” Little Crow was told. “You are fools,” Little Crow told them. “You will be hunted down like rabbits in the winter.” Finally, he decided that it was “kill or be killed”. “You are fools, but I am not a coward. I will die with you.” With those words, the Sioux Uprising of 1862 officially started. Little Crow gathered all the chiefs together and they decided the time was right to rid their land of the invading white men.

Peter Lund and his family arrived at Forest City with the Indian pony and corralled it with the other horses just outside the stockade in a fenced area. There were now two hundred and forty settlers assembled inside the stockade. They knew they needed more help and they decided someone should ride to the State Capitol in St. Paul with a letter to the Governor asking for help.

The Capitol was about a hundred miles or more on horseback through Indian country. Fifty-nine year old Jesse Branham, Sr. was the only person to volunteer to go. Looking like an Amish Santa Claus, Branham, Sr. didn’t look the part of a “pony express” rider or hero. But his stern face showed that he wasn’t one to be messed with. At 6am on Wednesday, August 20th, 1862, he took off on his famous ride.

Nils Axel Viren had a homestead near Eagle Lake in Kandiyohi County. His last name was really Werin, but he changed it to Viren when he came to America from Sweden in 1855. He was on his way to Forest City with his wife Hedvig and children, which included young Frank, baby Josephine, and Nils’ widowed mother-in-law Stina Greta Sandstrom and her children. They were all packed onto a cart pulled by two oxen. They had forty slow miles to cover and no roads to follow, only Indian trails.

When the group arrived at a crossing over the Crow River, a lone Indian approached them and demanded an ox. He said he would kill it and take it anyway if they attempted to cross the Crow River. Nils didn’t want to give up the ox and he wanted to get his family to the safety of Forest City, so he crossed the river anyway, thinking the brave wouldn’t do anything as he was outnumbered, even if it was mostly women and children.

The Indian, true to his word, shot and killed one of the oxen. When some of his comrades arrived, they started butchering the ox. Nils and his family were surprisingly allowed to continue on. A little further on they came upon a neighbor lying wounded outside of his burned cabin. They loaded him on their cart and continued on.

Nils had gotten along with the Indians previously. Many times they had come to his cabin hungry and he had allowed them to help themselves to his food. They didn’t like his salt pork, however, and threw it on his dirt floor, thinking it had gone bad. The Indian women were fascinated with baby Josephine. On two occasions, they took her away to show her off at their village and then returned her to Hedvig unharmed."

On August 18, Chief Little Crow led a group that attacked numerous white settlers at the Lower Sioux Agency. Trader Andrew Myrick was among the first that was killed. He was discovered trying to escape through a second-floor window. Days later, Myrick's body was found—with grass stuffed into his mouth. The stores were taken and several buildings at the site were torched, though this provided enough delay for many people to escape across the river at Redwood Ferry. An initial Minnesota militia force that was sent to suppress the uprising only resulted in a massacre of Minnesota troops in the Battle of Redwood Ferry. At least 44 deaths occurred that day.

Confident with their initial success, the Sioux would continue on their rampage attacking the white settlement of New Ulm on August 19. Dakota warriors decided not to attack the heavily-defended Fort Ridgely along the river, instead turning toward the town and killing many white settlers along the way. By the time New Ulm was attacked, residents had organized defenses in the town center and kept the Dakota at bay.

The military compound Fort Ridgely was later attacked on August 22 (See Battle of Fort Ridgely). White settlers sustained fairly heavy casualties in both cases. Farther north, the Sioux launched several attacks on Fort Abercrombie which were also repelled by the white defenders. There were also raids on farms and small settlements, plus attacks by settlers against the Indians. However, further counterattacks by Minnesota troops resulted in another massacre of white soldiers at Birch Coulee on September 2.

The Battle of Birch Coulee began when a large group of Dakota attacked a detachment of 150 U.S. soldiers at Birch Coulee, 16 miles from Fort Ridgely. The detachment had been sent out to find survivors, bury the dead, and report on the location of Dakota fighters. A three-hour firefight began with an early morning assault. Twenty soldiers were killed and 60 wounded. There are no accounts of Dakota casualties. A column of 240 soldiers from Fort Ridgely relieved the detachment at Birch Coulee that afternoon.

Due to the Civil War, repeated appeals for help were required before President Abraham Lincoln appointed General John Pope to assemble troops from the Third and Fourth Minnesota Regiments to quell the violence. Minnesota Governor Alexander Ramsey also instructed Colonel Henry Sibley (formerly the state's first governor) to aid in the effort. Although the expedition got off to a slow start, the Sioux were finally met and defeated at the Wood Lake on September 23, 1862.

The fighting lasted for six weeks. The final large-scale fighting took place in the Battle of Wood Lake. Most Dakota fighters surrendered at Camp Release on September 26. Records conclusively show that more than 150 soldiers and settlers died in the conflict, though many more may are believed to have died in small raids or after being captured. Estimates for U.S. losses range up to 800, though there is no accurate accounting of Dakota deaths.

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Trials and mass execution

Image:MankatoMN38.JPG Initially, 303 Sioux prisoners were convicted of murder and rape by local courts and sentenced to death six weeks later. However, President Lincoln commuted the death sentences of all but 38, largely due to the pleas from Bishop Henry Whipple for clemency. The 38, for whom the evidence seemed strongest, were executed by hanging in a single day on December 26, 1862 in Mankato.

The mass execution was performed for all to see from a single scaffold platform. It was and still is the largest execution in the history of the United States. Chief Cut Nose was convicted of being involved in the attack on New Ulm, Minnesota and he was one of the thirty-eight hanged.

The bodies of the Indians were pronounced dead by the regimental surgeons and then they were buried in a long trench, which was dug in the sand of the riverbank. Before they were buried, however, a “Dr. Sheardown” supposedly removed some of the Indians’ skin. Little boxes containing the skin were sold in Mankato after the hangings. Over the years, many “souvenir” pieces of skin have continued to be sold, some on ebay. Of course, most are hoaxes and are just hunks of pigskin.

At that time, bodies used for dissection by medical men were hard to come by, so some of the many medical men attending the hanging asked for the bodies. That’s why they had come to the public hanging in the first place. One of those men was Doctor William Worrall Mayo. The mass grave was re-opened and the bodies were removed and distributed. As fate would have it, Dr. Mayo received Cut Nose, the brave he had encountered earlier in their lives, and stood up to. Dr. Mayo brought Cut Nose’s body back to Le Sueur. There, Mayo dissected it in the presence of some medical colleagues. Afterwards, the skeleton was cleaned, dried and varnished so other students could benefit from it.

The remaining convicted Indians stayed in prison that winter. The following spring, they were transferred to Rock Island, Illinois (near Davenport, Iowa) where they were held in a prison for almost four years. By the time of their release, one third of the Indians had died of disease. The survivors were sent with their families to Nebraska. Almost five hundred white men, women and children were killed in the uprising in Minnesota. Some figures go as high as nine hundred."

The 38 men who were hanged are remembered each year at two separate pow-wows in the state. The Mankato pow-wow, held each year in September, commemorates the lives of the condemned men, but also seeks to reconcile the white and Indian communities. The Birch Coulee pow-wow, held on Labor Day weekend, honors the lives of those who were hanged in the largest mass execution in United States history. There are also several stone statues at the site, in downtown Mankato, where the execution took place.

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Aftermath

As result of the war, the U.S. government abolished the reservation and attempted to expel the Dakota people from Minnesota. 1,300 to 1,700 Dakota people were rounded up and held in a concentration camp below Fort Snelling in the winter of 1862–1863. In the spring, the camp was moved southwest toward the current site of the Mall of America, prior to the mass removal of these people to Nebraska and South Dakota including the Crow Creek Indian Reservation on the Missouri River on May 4, 1863. More than 130 Dakota died in the camp and subsequent removal.

The Minnesota Sioux War of 1862 was the first violent engagment between the Sioux Indians and the United States. It would not be the last, however. The battle of Killdeer Mountain occurred in 1864, Red Cloud's War followed in 1866–1868, and the Battle of Little Big Horn in 1876 and Battle of Wounded Knee in 1890 also involved the two parties.


Image:GoodThunderandSnana.jpg Taoyateduta was forced to flee from the fighting about a month after the conflict began. He briefly stayed in Canada, but soon returned to the area. He was killed on July 3, 1863 while gathering berries with his son. The pair had wandered onto the land of a white settler who shot at them.

By the 1880s, a number of Dakota had come back to Minnesota River valley, notably the Goodthunder, Wabasha, Bluestone, and Lawrence families. They were joined by several families from the Wahpekute Dakota who had been living under the protection of Bishop Whipple and the trader Alexander Faribault. The small Lower Sioux Indian Reservation was reestablished at the site of the Lower Sioux Agency near Morton and in the 1930s, an even smaller Upper Sioux Reservation was established near Granite Falls.

Many Dakota did not join in the attacks, choosing to aid and protect settlers and to serve with the Minnesota soldiers who responded to the attacks. The Yankton Sioux chief Struck by the Ree deployed his warriors for this purpose. Monuments to their actions were erected in the 1890s on the river bluff opposite the Lower Sioux Agency.

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External links

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References


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