“The Dakota became a people poised on a knife’s edge between war and peace, lacking only a dramatic incident to upset the balance.”

By John Danielski

FOUR HEN’S eggs started the bloodiest American Indian uprising of the 19th century.

A quartet of young Dakota tribesmen, returning from an unsuccessful hunting expedition, stopped at the residence of Robinson Jones in Meeker County Minnesota on August 17, 1862. It was a gathering place that was a combination farm, store and post office, located 85 miles west of the state capital of St. Paul. The group was known to the Jones family and so they were allowed to roam freely on the farmstead. One brave discovered and confiscated a nest containing four chicken eggs, while his companion jested that he was too cowardly to keep them because of his fear of the white man’s wrath. The first brave bristled at this dare and not only vowed to keep the eggs but promised he would demand liquor from Mr. Jones.

The four marched up to the Jones home but the demand for liquor was refused. Jones left after the exchange and headed for the Baker Farm nearby, where his wife was visiting children from her first marriage. The braves followed and challenged Jones, Howard Baker, and Varinus Webster to a shooting match. The two groups fired at a mark on a tree, but after the first shots the whites thought the match was done and did not bother to reload. The Indians reloaded quickly, then turned their guns on the whites, killing Webster, Baker, and Jones, after which they proceeded to murder Mrs. Jones. 

The actions of the irresponsible young bucks exploded the uneasy peace that the Dakota people had built with whites and forced every Dakota family in Minnesota to hastily choose sides.

Precipitate youthful actions were part of a pattern common in America’s Indian Wars, where the wiser counsels of tribal elders were sometimes overthrown by impulsive braves eager to make names for themselves. Often, the instigators of these conflicts came to a bad end. Two of the four “egg killers” died the next year at the hands of their fellow Dakota.

The underlying causes of the Dakota Uprising featured the usual suspects. The Dakota had ceded most of Minnesota for a pittance in several treaties that they only imperfectly understood. The chief beneficiaries were white traders, real estate speculators and settlers. Though the Dakota were fed from the public purse, the food was often poor and did not always arrive on time. A promised $71,000 annual subsidy of gold had failed to materialize in 1862, causing considerable hardship; the funds had been held up by Congressional dithering about whether the annuity should be diverted to the war effort. The gold finally arrived in late August, but by then it was too late to put the war genie back in his bottle.

In a classic case of wanting to put square pegs into round holes, misguided Washington bureaucrats had decided to “civilize” the semi-nomadic Dakota by placing them on reservations and force-feeding them American culture and agricultural methods. These efforts succeeded only in dividing the Dakota into two factions: the “blankets,” who formed the majority that wanted to follow the old ways, and the “breeches,” a much smaller minority, who were willing to pursue the white man’s teachings. The Dakota became a people poised on a knife’s edge between war and peace, lacking only a dramatic incident to upset the balance. The four young hotheads supplied it, and their actions reminded the Dakota that the whites were particularly vulnerable now that the healthiest men had gone off to fight in the Civil War. The “breeches” counseled caution and adopted a wait and see attitude. 

The Dakota strategy was inchoate because it was hastily improvised: possessing no specific objectives beyond driving off as many whites as possible from what had been their land. Attacks were poorly coordinated, and the Dakota failed to devise a coherent command structure. Most attacks were carried out by war chiefs acting on their own initiative: more inspirational fighters than leaders equipped to govern. The closest thing the uprising had to a supremo was Chief Little Crow, who had gotten on well with whites and only reluctantly agreed to fight. The chief survived the uprising but was shot to death by two farmers while attempting to steal horses on July 3, 1863.

The first major Dakota attack came on August 18 and was directed at the Lower Sioux Agency, a settlement of trader’s stores, shops and barns, as well as houses for the Indian agent and other government personnel. Thirteen whites were killed outright and seven more died as they attempted to flee. The raiding force plundered the buildings then set fire to them.

At the same time, small bands of warriors spontaneously descended upon individual farmsteads. Raiders were usually mounted and appeared without warning, armed with a hodgepodge of weapons, ranging from bows and arrows and antique shotguns to modern rifles and pistols. Operating in groups of five or 10, they ranged far and wide, looting, burning, raping and murdering — sometimes killing settlers who had been sympathetic to their plight. Their depredations eventually widened to a swath 250 miles long by 50 miles wide, mostly along the upper reaches of the Minnesota River, stretching from New Ulm to Fort Abercrombie on the border of the Dakota Territory. Thousands of settlers fled their homes for the safer eastern portions of Minnesota, while those who remained organized themselves into militia companies and began erecting stockades around villages and towns. Before the short-lived uprising was finished — it lasted only from late August to early December — roughly 1,000 settlers, soldiers, and Dakota were killed.

Dakota emissaries approached the Ojibway in northern Minnesota about joining in the uprising, but they showed no interest since the two nations had been traditional enemies since the 17th century.

A relief column of 54 soldiers marching from Fort Ridgely toward the Lower Sioux Agency was ambushed at Redwood Ferry and most of the men killed. The German American settlement of New Ulm, which had been on friendly terms with the Dakota, was attacked twice by a force estimated to be between 800 and 1,000. Both raids were beaten off by a ragtag force of 200 armed with obsolete weapons. Nearby Fort Ridgely, with a garrison of fewer than 100, was attacked twice as well by a similarly large force. Ridgely had become a center for refugees and was equipped with howitzers and cannons, weapons for which the Dakota had no match. The defeated Dakota retired to a safe distance and considered their options.

The Upper Sioux Agency was attacked after New Ulm and here some of the “blanket Dakota” intervened and made heroic efforts to get settlers to safety. Despite sensationalist newspaper editors demonizing the Dakota, acts of mercy were far from unknown.

Official reaction to the uprising was swift. On August 19, Governor Alexander Ramsey appointed the state’s first governor, Henry Sibley, as a colonel in the state militia and gave him command of a relief force of around 1,400. While Sibley had no military experience, he was familiar with Dakota culture from his first career as a fur trader and had an illegitimate half Dakota daughter that he openly acknowledged. His soldiers were all volunteers with thin training and second-rate equipment. Most of those who were mounted soon left the expedition, taking their horses with them and giving Sibley the difficult task of hunting down mobile warriors with foot sloggers. By the time his force arrived at Fort Ridgeley, it had dwindled to 940 men. A burial party sent out by Sibley under the command of Major Joseph Brown was nearly wiped out at the Battle of Birch Coulee.

In early September, Dakota warriors threatened Fort Abercrombie, one of three regular army posts in the uprising area. The fort lacked blockhouses and a stockade, but the Indians launched no all-out assaults and contented themselves with skirmishing and livestock raiding. A relief expedition was dispatched from St. Paul, but small clashes continued until the end of September.

Governor Ramsey’s requests for federal help were finally answered in early September, with the dispatch of Major General John Pope from Washington: a commander who had recently been beaten by Robert E. Lee and was sent to Minnesota to do penance. Pope brought with him a small force of experienced soldiers, as well as better weapons with which to equip Sibley’s men and experienced drillmasters to train them.

Sibley’s reinvigorated forces avoided an ambush of 1,200 warriors set by Little Crow on September 23 and fought what would become the decisive battle of the war at Wood Lake. The battle was decisive not in a military sense but in a political one: the defeat emboldened the Dakota warriors who wanted to seek peace. A substantial number of white prisoners were delivered to Sibley after the battle, accomplishing one of the principal objectives of his relief expedition.

By the time Federal forces relieved Sibley, he had taken over 1,200 Dakota prisoners. Under Federal control, that number almost doubled. Many Dakota braves surrendered because they were facing starvation — more proof that the spontaneous uprising had made no long-term preparations. The uprising did not so much end as sputter out; empty stomachs being stronger motivators than angry hearts.

With white prisoners being returned in increasing numbers and frontier violence tapering off, the Federals began trials at Camp Release on the upper Minnesota River in late September. Those trials focused on warriors who had been identified as ringleaders and rabble rousers, though most of the evidence against them sprang from hearsay rather than eyewitnesses. Trials were conducted by a five-man tribunal of army officers, assisted by a civilian lawyer from St. Paul. While sincere efforts were made to give the prisoners fair trials, the sheer number of them soon turned trials into assembly line affairs which dispensed justice that was rough at best. The unsophisticated Dakota found themselves ensnared in legal proceedings that they barely understood and were often enticed into making self-condemnatory statements because they lacked legal counsel. While many convicted were guilty of serious crimes, numerous innocents were condemned as well. Eventually 303 Dakota were found guilty of capital crimes, a number later reduced to 250.

President Lincoln was concerned over the large number of death penalty convictions and asked to review every capital case. With the help of two assistants, he did so, arguing that only those found guilty of murder and rape should be executed. He also wanted to be sure that the evidence against them was solid, rather than the hearsay used to convict so many others. Lincoln eventually reduced the number of condemned men to 38, and they were hanged in Mankato, Minnesota on December 26, 1862. It would become the largest mass-execution in United States history.

While this execution has been condemned by revisionist historians as an act of genocide, it should be remembered that America was in a terrible phase of the bloodiest war in its history, when unheard of casualty lists had caused even the best men to harden their hearts. In less turbulent times, the Dakota might have received fairer outcomes but in war where white Americans were visiting slaughter on each other, the average citizen cared little for what became of non-white troublemakers. There was no concerted government policy of AmerIndian genocide simply because U.S. policy toward Native Americans was a slapdash, ad hoc pastiche of regulations that changed from administration to administration. Government policy was frequently contradictory, counterproductive, and haphazard — more a product of incompetence than malice. While some historians have called the Dakota punishments a travesty of justice, it was still justice of a kind and in no way resembled a pogrom.

The bodies of those executed were buried in a mass grave but some were later exhumed to be used for dissection. Dr. William Mayo, founder of the famous clinic that was recently voted the world’s best hospital, said he learned osteology from working on several of those corpses.

The 1,600 Indian detainees were eventually sent to a camp in the river flats below Fort Snelling — a camp that activist historians have unfairly condemned as a concentration camp. It was in fact a refugee camp, a place where displaced persons could be more readily housed, fed, and supplied since the site was near a steamboat landing. Most of the 1,600 sent there were women and children, of whom 300 died. The death toll has been used as proof of genocide, but in fact it was evidence of poor sanitation, limited medical knowledge, and the lack of AmerIndian resistance to European diseases like measles and chicken pox. The percentage of refugees who died was 18 per cent; roughly the same percentage as Union prisoners who perished in Confederate prisoner-of-war camps.

The Dakota not convicted of any crimes were banished from Minnesota to remote reservations in the Dakota Territory. That number included many “breeches Indians” and several chiefs who had been against the uprising from the start. Washington wanted the Dakota problem to go away and was not particular about how it was done.

The Dakota War has been largely forgotten save in Minnesota and should be seen as a particularly bloody chapter in the saga of Native American efforts to resist the conquest of their lands. As with most of the other aboriginal resistance efforts, it left the Native Americans worse off than when they had started. The policy of putting semi- nomadic peoples on reservations and eradicating traditional ways would continue until the end of the 19th century, with bad outcomes whose side effects persist to the present day. While United States policy toward Native Americans was often racist, poorly conceived, and misguided, it was seldom deliberately cruel simply because very little about it was deliberate, much of it being made up on the go and administered in unpredictable ways. What happened to the First Nations was a tragedy of epic proportions, but it was not a carefully planned campaign of mass murder. The AmerIndian Wars should be considered as a series of confrontations between technologically inferior peoples and technologically superior ones; victory having nothing to do with any moral or ethical superiority but everything to do with the efficient use of advanced tools.