Maja Beckstrom, Pioneer Press, St. Paul, Minn. –
The Minnesota Historical Society has been thinking long and hard about how to tell the story of one of the most divisive turning points in state history.
This summer marks the 150th anniversary of the U.S.-Dakota war, which left hundreds of settlers and Dakota dead and resulted in the hanging of 38 Dakota warriors in Mankato. In its wake, the Dakota were forced out of the state entirely, clearing the way for white settlement in southwestern Minnesota.
Historical society staff reached out in unprecedented ways to both Dakota people and the descendants of settlers to shape “U.S.-Dakota War of 1862: An Exhibit,” which opened at the Minnesota History Center on Saturday, June 30. It’s one of several historical society initiatives related to the anniversary and one of dozens planned throughout the rest of the year by other historical groups, southwestern Minnesota communities and tribes.
“I’d say it’s easily the most challenging topic we’ve taken on,” said exhibit developer Kate Roberts, who has worked for the Minnesota Historical Society for 20 years. “It’s an emotional story of war and loss. And there is a lot of interpretation of events that vary according to who you talk to.
“We viewed things from many different viewpoints,” she added. “We’re not trying to be the authoritative source; we’re trying to bring out the evidence and talk to as many people as we can.”
The result is an exhibit long on text and short on sweeping conclusions.
Over the past two
years, historical society staff visited reservations, not just in Minnesota but also for the first time in South Dakota and even Canada, where descendants of Minnesota Mdewakanton Dakota had scattered.
“We asked that they keep the exiled Dakota in mind, and they listened,” said Franky Jackson, cultural resource consultant for the Flandreau Santee Sioux Tribe in South Dakota. “We feel like we’ve had full inclusion.”
There were purifying sage smudging ceremonies in the history center basement
as staff gave tours of the collection. There were tense roundtable discussions about everything from the exhibit title to what documents and objects to include and how to portray the role of the state’s founding fathers like Henry Sibley — fur trader, governor, Indian hunter and one-time president of the Minnesota Historical Society.
“They said, ‘It’s time for truth telling,’ and we said, ‘OK, then let’s really do that.’ It’s been about 150 years of one-sided views here, in terms of the written history,” said Sheldon Wolfchild, a member of the Lower Sioux Indian Community near Redwood Falls, Minn. “Our children suffer because our truth has not been put in the history books. Our Dakota children, they have learned lies — that they’re
savages, and that they started the war, that they’re murderers and rapists.”
Wolfchild and others wanted the exhibit to focus on the causes of the war, the treaties and corruption that stripped the Dakota of their land and culture.
‘TRAGEDY UNFOLDING’
Here then, is some of the story: Before the mid-19th century, Dakota people coexisted during the fur trade era with relatively few white people, traders who often married Indian women and whose livelihood depended on good relations with the tribes. After the collapse of the fur trade, everything changed. New fortunes were going to be made in land, not fur, and the Dakota were in the way.
In 1851, under pressure from the U.S. government, the Dakota signed a treaty selling
their territory in southern Minnesota, South Dakota and Iowa. A third of the government money went to pay debts claimed by Sibley and other white traders, debts many Dakota believe were inflated. The Dakota were left with a strip of land straddling 10 miles on either side of the Minnesota River from New Ulm northwest to South Dakota.
In 1850, there were about 7,000 settlers in Minnesota. During the next decade, a flood of immigrants crossed the Mississippi River and started homesteading in the Dakota’s former hunting grounds. By 1858, the number had swelled to 150,000.
The reservation was too small for the Dakota to sustain their traditional semi-nomadic life of hunting, gathering and small-scale farming. They became more dependent
on government cash and food payments.
“The traders and agents were getting by with stealing annuity money from the Dakota people each summer, the money the Dakota got from the treaties,” said Wolfchild, who is creating a documentary for the anniversary from a Dakota perspective. He steered historical society staff toward letters from missionaries and other observers detailing corruption and warning the federal government and then-Minnesota Gov. Alexander Ramsey that the Dakota were growing desperate.
A second treaty in 1858 shrunk the reservation more. Tensions grew between Dakota who tried to assimilate and those who wanted to continue the traditional life.
“What you have is an internal crumbling of the social order within the tribe as well as the pressure from outside,” said historian Mary Wingerd, whose landmark 2010 book “North Country: The Making of Minnesota” helped shape the exhibit. “When you look at it from 150 years in hindsight, you can just see this tragedy unfolding bit by bit.”
Everything came to a head in 1862. Crops failed, federal payments were delayed and the Dakota started to starve. Indian agent Thomas Galbraith, a stickler for rules, decided to keep what food he had locked in a storehouse. Trader Andrew Myrick famously said that the Dakota could “eat grass” or their own dung.
For some Dakota, this was the breaking point. On Aug. 17, 1862, four hunters killed five white settlers in Acton in Meeker County. Mdewakanton Dakota Chief Taoyateduta, known as Little Crow, reluctantly agreed to lead a faction of young warriors calling for war.
“See! — the white men are like the locusts when they fly so thick that the whole sky is a snowstorm,” he is quoted as saying in the exhibit. “You may kill one — two — ten; yes, as many as the leaves in the forest yonder, and their brothers will not miss them. Kill one — two — ten, and ten times ten will come to kill you. Count your fingers all day long and white men with guns in their hands will come faster than you can count.”
In the days that followed, Dakota groups attacked the storehouse at Lower Sioux Agency and farms and towns throughout the Minnesota River Valley, killing government employees and settler families, and taking women, children and mixed-race people hostage.
Ramsey told the Minnesota Legislature, “The Dakota must be forever banished from the state.” He asked his friend and former governor Sibley to go after them with a militia of volunteer soldiers.
New Ulm, a town of 600 German immigrants, was inundated by refugees from surrounding farms. On Aug. 23, the town was attacked by hundreds of Dakota, resulting in the largest battle over a U.S. town since the Revolutionary War, according to the exhibit. Residents and refugees left the town in ashes and fled to Mankato.
‘VICTIMS IN THE MIDDLE’
But who were these settlers?
“I thought that it was important that the human stories be told, not as a way of minimizing what happened to the Dakota, at all, but only to tell a full story,” said Mary McConnell, a settler descendant in the Twin Cities whose family’s experience is one of many highlighted in the exhibit.
“These people were sort of innocent victims in the middle,” she said. “The government had solicited people to come by saying there is land. The state wanted the settlers here for economic development. They were giving incentives for people to come. Most of the people who came had no idea that there were these tensions brewing or about the government policies that were creating difficulties for the Dakota people. They were just trying to find a better life for themselves and their families.”
McConnell’s father had told her that his great-aunt had been held captive. At first, she dismissed the story as lore. But after genealogical research, she discovered that a great-great-uncle, David McConnell, had immigrated from Scotland along with siblings and their 70-year-old mother, Ellen McConnell, to homestead in 1858 at Birch Coulee, just across the Minnesota River from the Lower Sioux Agency.
McConnell pieced together what happened through letters, local histories, old newspaper articles and lost property claims filed after the war. On the afternoon of Aug. 18, while David McConnell and other men were haying in the fields, a group of Dakota warriors came to the farm and forced his sister Martha McConnell Clasen, her two children and neighbor women into a wagon. Before they drove off, Martha saw her husband, Fred Clasen, shot and killed.
The elderly Ellen McConnell was spared, perhaps because she had previously been kind to one of the Dakota. A 13-year-old grandson was killed. The next day, Ellen McConnell walked 12 miles with her son David to find refuge with more than 200 other settlers at Fort Ridgely.
“She never came back to live at Birch Coulee,” said McConnell. “They said her ‘mind was forever shattered.’ ”
HUNTED DOWN AND HANGED
By late September, the war was over. More than 600 settlers had been killed, according to the exhibit, as well as hundreds of Dakota. Martha McConnell Clasen and nearly 300 hundred other captives were released, their safety negotiated by Dakota who did not participate in the fighting. Many Dakota actively opposed the killing and helped white neighbors escape.
But peaceful Dakota were hunted down or rounded up along with the fighters, guilty by association. The state placed a bounty on Dakota men. On display in the exhibit is the $500 check paid to the man who killed Little Crow.
Some Dakota fled west or to Canada, including Wolfchild’s ancestor Medicine Bottle, who was later captured by a trader and brought back to Minnesota.
“They had no eyewitnesses that he had killed anyone,” Wolfchild said. “But they hung him anyway.”
More than 1,000 women, children, elders and mixed-race people were marched to a fenced enclosure at Fort Snelling, where hundreds died of illness and exposure. Men were separated and 303 were condemned to death in trials overseen by Sibley that sometimes lasted a few minutes. President Abraham Lincoln commuted most sentences. The remaining 38 Dakota were hanged publicly on Dec. 26, 1862, in Mankato.
The following year, Congress passed a law expelling all Dakota from Minnesota. The Fort Snelling group was taken by steamboat and trains to a semi-arid reservation at Crow Creek, S.D., where many more died of starvation and illness.
‘THE LASTING VALUE’
“What 1862 did was legitimize the effort to eradicate the Dakota from Minnesota,” Wingerd said. “What it did was legitimize this unbridled hatred for Indians. Because there was so much hostility and so much fear.”
It’s an episode in history that has been suppressed, Wingerd said, initially because Minnesota boosters didn’t want to scare off immigrants and later because “there was an awareness of the injustice that was perpetrated against the Indians with the treaties, and there is no desire to look back on that.”
“I didn’t know that much about it at all,” said historical society collections assistant Ben Gessner, reflecting a general sentiment. “But I came to believe it’s one of the most important events in state history. These events displaced an aboriginal people from Minnesota. And we’re talking 150 years ago. That’s a blink of an eye.”
In the process of seeking feedback on the exhibit, the museum also opened its collections to the Dakota, a move that created goodwill and also resulted in a strange — for a museum at least — lack of actual objects on display that relate to Dakota culture or Dakota side of the war. The exhibit includes settler guns and a skirt with bullet holes worn by a settler survivor.
Some Dakota did not want anything displayed until the museum works in partnership to create a comprehensive policy and procedures for its Dakota collection. Is it appropriate to display a warrior’s hide shirt, for example, picked up as a battlefield souvenir, stolen from the dead? One item everyone agreed should not be displayed: a noose used to hang one of the Dakota.
“There was such obvious pain when we showed it to a few Dakota advisers,” Roberts said. “It produced such grief, and to me, that’s not what I want this exhibit to do.”
Roberts is pleased with how the exhibit turned out. And she’s just as pleased with the process.
“The exhibit will come and go,” she said. “But maybe we’ve repositioned the historical society a little differently in the minds of Dakota people. We’re poised and ready to listen. That’s the lasting value.”
IF YOU GO
What: “U.S.-Dakota War of 1862: The Exhibit”
When: Through June 30, 2013
Where: Minnesota History Center, 345 W. Kellogg Blvd., St. Paul
Info: 651-259-3000 or mnhs.org
Cost: $11 adults; $9 seniors/college students; $6 children 6-17 (free Tues. 5 to 8 p.m.)
More: The Minnesota Historical Society has created a website devoted to the 150th anniversary of the U.S.-Dakota War at usdakotawar.org. It contains timelines, historical background, a list of events related to the anniversary and transcripts of more than 50 oral histories conducted with Dakota and settler descendants during the past two years.
