uprising

When Dakota Sioux Indians began killing settlers in August 1862, the uprising came as a surprise to most white Minnesotans. Many regarded it as a stab in the back to a state that was gearing up to send as many men as possible to fight the Confederacy.

For the white man, Minnesota in 1862 had become a land of promise - a place to start a new life, to build a new fortune.

For the Sioux, it had become a place of sorrow.

In essence, it was a conflict over widely differing ways of life. The Sioux wanted to roam the land. The white man wanted to own it - even in the pitifully small, by Sioux standards, tracts given out under the Homestead Act of 1862.

Treaties signed in the 1850s had shrunk the Sioux land to a narrow strip of the Minnesota River Valley from about New Ulm to the Dakota border. When their crops were meager - as they were in 1862 - the Sioux were forced to live on annuities the government sent to them in return for their land.

The annuities were small enough at the outset, but were made even smaller by a system of credit that primarily benefited white traders. Before the Indians received a penny of the annuities, the traders got whatever they claimed they were owed in credit for food or goods.

At first, the Indians did not keep accounts of their credit. But the white man's accounts always seemed higher than the Indians remembered, so some started to keep accounts themselves.

One example of the use of annuities by traders and agents involved two Minnesota governors. Henry H. Sibley, the first governor elected after statehood in 1857, claimed the Sioux owed him $145,000 for overpayments from his American Fur Company. The Indians thought they'd been underpaid and took their complaint to their agent, Alexander Ramsey, a friend of Sibley who was governor at the time of the uprising.

Ramsey, not surprisingly, ruled in Sibley's favor. The Sioux dubbed him the Long Trader.

The immediate cause of the uprising was another hassle over annuities. The Sioux gathered near the Lower Agency near Redwood Falls in July 1862 to receive their money. By mid-August, it still had not arrived, and many of the Sioux were hungry.

But the Sioux had reason to be optimistic. A confrontation between soldiers and braves at the Upper Agency at Yellow Medicine in early August had led to a decision to distribute provisions on credit to avoid violence.

At the Lower Agency at Redwood, however, the whites took a harder line. At an August 15 meeting attended by Sioux representatives, Indian Agent Thomas Galbraith, and representatives of the traders, the traders resisted pleas to distribute provisions held in agency warehouses to starving Dakota until the annuity payments finally arrived.

Unbeknownst to those gathered at the Lower Agency, the long delayed 1862 annuity payments were already on their way to the Minnesota frontier. On August 16, a keg with $71,000 worth of gold coins reached St. Paul. The next day the keg was sent to Fort Ridgely for distribution to the Dakota.

Before the money arrived, the chiefs and Galbraith held their climactic August 15 meeting, where Little Crow, the chief of the Mdewakantons, spoke for the rest. "We have waited a long time," he said. "The money is ours, but we cannot get it. We have no food, but here are these stores filled with food. We ask that you, the agent, make some arrangement by which we can get food from the stores, or else we may take our own way to keep ourselves from starving. "

"When men are hungry, they help themselves."

Galbraith didn't answer, but asked trader Andrew Myrick what he would do.

"So far as I'm concerned," Myrick replied, "if they are hungry, let them eat grass or their own dung."

The room was silent for a moment while Myrick's statement was translated for the chiefs.

When the sense of his remarks became known, the Indians started shouting and then stomped out.

But Little Crow, whose Indian name was Ta-oya-te-duta, still did not want to fight the whites. He had been east to see President Buchanan, and he knew that his Sioux warriors, however brave, were completely overmatched by the white man's power. Little Crow had adapted to the white man's ways, farming and joining the Episcopal church.

By this time, however, he was becoming disillusioned with the white man. He had signed the two treaties giving away much of his people's land, had suffered with them because of it, and had lost prestige in the tribe. Incensed by Myrick's remark and a comment by another trader that the Sioux were not men, Little Crow was edging toward war, but wasn't quite there yet.

The flash point would come somewhere else.

On August 17, 1862 four young Wahpetons went deer hunting in the big woods near Acton in Meeker County. Their names were Killing Ghost, Breaking Up, Runs Against Something when Crawling, and Brown Wing.

On the way back they came upon some eggs. One of them picked one up and was going to eat it, but another cautioned that he shouldn't do that because the eggs belonged to a white man. An argument ensued, and grew hotter and hotter. When a white man's ox walked past one of the Indians shot it, apparently to prove his mettle..

Walking on, the Indians arrived at the farm of Robinson Jones, who also was postmaster and a storekeeper. They asked for liquor, but Jones refused to provide any because one of the Indians had borrowed a gun from him the previous winter and had not returned it. Jones asked the Indians to leave his house, and began walking toward the house of a neighbor, Howard Baker. The Indians followed.

At the Baker place the Indians asked the whites to take part in a round of target practice. The Indians fired and reloaded. The whites fired, but didn't reload. Then the Indians turned on the whites, shooting down Baker, Jones, his wife, and a man named Webster. Then they went to the house and killed Mr. Jones's adopted daughter, who was 15 years old..

During the shootings, Mrs. Baker and Mrs. Webster and some other children fell into the cellar. The Indians left without killing them.

Having killed five whites, the Indians walked to their village on the Minnesota River near the mouth of the Redwood, where they told their story to the leader of their Sioux band, the Red Middle Voice.

When Little Crow learned of the attack, he continued to urge caution.

"You are fools," he told some of the young Indians who were calling for war. "Braves, you are little children. You are fools. You will die like rabbits when the hungry wolves hunt them in the hard moon of January.

But others pressed for war, arguing that whites would avenge the first killings and take away the annuities promised by the treaties. With so many northern white men away at war against the South, the militants argued, the Sioux could clear the entire Minnesota River Valley of settlers.

Their argument was persuasive. The uprising had started.

The next morning, Sioux attacked the Lower Agency at Redwood, achieving the first of only a handful of victories in the uprising. Myrick was found slain with grass stuffed in his mouth. "Myrick is eating grass himself," one Indian joked

Events moved quickly. Forty-four whites were killed and another ten captured in the first full day of fighting in and around the agency. Nearly two hundred additional whites died over the next few days as Indians massacred farm families and attacked Fort Ridgely and the village of New Ulm.

Panicking settlers fled eastward from twenty-three counties, leaving the southwestern Minnesota frontier largely depopulated except for the barricaded fortifications at Fort Ridgely and New Ulm. On August 23, a second Dakota attack on New Ulm left most of the town burned to the ground, and 2,000 refugees, mostly women, children, and wounded men, set off in wagons and on foot for Mankato, 30 miles away.

On August 23, Gov. Alexander Ramsey appointed Colonel Henry Sibley, the former governor, to command the forces assigned to put down the uprising, Three days later, Sibley advanced from the east with 1,400 soldiers toward Fort Ridgely. The next day, Sibley and his men forced the Sioux to lift their siege at Fort Ridgely. Then the second phase of the conflict - an organized military campaign to defeat and punish the Sioux - began.

The Sioux offensive continued to achieve some success through early September. At dawn on September 2 at Birch Coulee Creek, Sioux warriors attacked a 170-man party of soldiers sent to bury the bodies of settlers, killing 20 soldiers and 90 horses. Other Sioux attacks took place at Acton, Hutchinson, and Fort Abercrombie.

But the war itself was short-lived and, except for a success or two in ambushes, went as Little Crow had predicted:

By Sept. 26, the conflict was over, the Sioux's white prisoners freed and as many as 2,000 Sioux in captivity.

The Sioux had been unable to take even New Ulm, which was defended mostly by civilians.

Of the approximately 500 whites killed in the uprising, more than 360 were civilians. About 140 of the deaths took place in Brown County.

In one respect, the uprising was remarkably successful. The random killings and scalpings fed one of the psychic fears of the frontier - the fear of stealthy red men coming in the night to lonely homesteads for killing and rape. The flight of white settlers was such that Ramsey wrote to President Lincoln that whole counties in southeastern Minnesota had been emptied.

Sibley held impromptu trials for the Indians he had taken prisoner. When he was finished, he had more than 300 sentenced to hang. Because of the large number, President Lincoln assumed final responsibility for the coming executions..

When Lincoln cut the number to be executed to 39, the governor, the newspapers and, ultimately, the people of Minnesota cried foul. One St. Paul newspaper warned that, unless more were executed, the people of Minnesota would exact their "private vengeance."

That did, in fact, happen. In New Ulm, furious whites killed some Indians as they walked through the burned village, under guard, en route to prison camps near Mankato. As Sibley marched his remaining prisoners - about 1, 700 - to Fort Snelling, angry bystanders wrenched a child from a Sioux mother's arms and beat the child to death.

On Dec. 26, 38 Sioux were hanged near Mankato, all but one dropping to their deaths at once when the control rope was chopped. One Indian survived for a few more minutes because his rope broke.

One white called it "America's greatest mass execution."

Nine years later, it was revealed that two of those hanged were not on Lincoln's list. It was described as a regretable mistake.

The year after the hangings, most of the remaining Sioux were relocated outside of Minnesota, mostly in South Dakota and Nebraska.

By 1863 there were few Indians left in the state, and Minnesota was more open than ever for the white man's way of life. With the Homestead Act in place since 1862, the banishment of the unruly Sioux in 1863, and the end of the Civil War in 1865, the state was now ready for a surge of immigration from Europe - a surge that was not far off.

Little Crow left the state before his tribe's surrender, joining his brothers in Dakota territory. But in Dakota, he needed horses, so he returned to Minnesota to steal some.

On July 3, a farmer spotted Little Crow and his son picking berries near Hutchinson, and, without knowing who he was, shot him to death. When his identity was revealed, the farmer received a $500 reward from the state.

The Sioux Wars went on for many years. A military expedition carried the fighting into the Dakota Territory in 1863 and 1864. As the frontier moved westward, new fighting erupted. Finally, in 1890 at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, the generation of warfare that had begun at Acton in August of 1862 came to an end.