One of the most enjoyable parts of writing this novel was creating the personalities of the characters in my story. As I wrote, the characters grew in my mind and became very real to me, almost as the real as the flesh and blood people in my life. When I had to edit my work down, it was difficult to remove even minor characters. I had become so engaged with them that I hated to lose them. My hope was that my readers would become just as engaged with the characters in my story so that they were eager to see what happens to them next. Hopefully, if you are reading this blog post, then I have been successful in that endeavor.

Most of the characters in my book were real people, so I had some biographical data to work with as a starting point. Little Crow was a famous chief and several biographies have been written about him. Lorenzo Lawrence published a memoir, and John Otherday’s exploits were well known. Of the four, we know the least about Cut Nose. I tried to avoid stereotypical villains but came close to that with Cut Nose. I gave him a surly, antisocial nature, but in truth I do not really know much about his personal traits or his relationship with others. His brutal attacks on civilians were typical of many Dakota warriors and not at all outrageous in their eyes since the Dakota did not recognize noncombatants. What I found most interesting about his story was that he did not retreat to the west after the Battle of Wood Lake and made no excuses for his actions as so many others did. I am not really sure what this tells us about him. He boasted about his actions at his trial. Perhaps he was proud of what he had done or was just self-destructive. We will never know.

I portrayed John Otherday as a pragmatist who could see that the Dakota way of life was ending and was determined to make the best of it. Generally, his actions support this assessment. For example, although he was a very eligible bachelor, he married a white woman. He met her when the Dakota chiefs traveled to Washington D.C. to sign the treaty of 1858. There were rumors that he met his wife in a brothel, which may or may not be true. However, like the rest of the chiefs, he could not have helped being impressed by the power of the Americans, and perhaps he believed that marrying a white woman would be politically advantageous. In any case, that is what one would have gathered from my story. There is no question that the actions  he took to save the lives of the whites at the Upper Agency were heroic. Did he do it out of pure altruism or to curry favor with the whites? Perhaps it was a bit of both, and no doubt he wanted to protect his family as well. He was definitely highly rewarded for his actions.

I also portrayed Otherday as someone who liked to cultivate the impression that he was a man of mystery. This is totally my invention, not based on any historical information. However, there are some things about Otherday that remain a mystery to me, not the least of which was his choice of surname, for which I have never found any explanation. Also, I have always wondered why he failed as a farmer after the war when he was successful prior. Did he actually fail or did he simply miss his life as a Dakota? In any case, my assessment of Otherday, regardless of his motives, is that he was an intelligent, resourceful, and courageous man who saw the folly of war with the whites and acted accordingly.

Unlike Otherday and Cut Nose, Lorenzo Lawrence left a written record of his life, so I am fairly certain that my portrayal of his personality is reasonably accurate. He had a deep religious conviction and was devoted to the missionaries and their church.  His dedication to his religion left him no real choice when it came to war or peace with the Americans, and he seemed to see no conflict between loyalty to his people and peace with the white man. In many ways he was a truly admirable man, and I made no attempt to develop his character any other way.

For Little Crow I had a good deal of biographical information with which to work. However, unlike Lorenzo Lawrence, he left no personal record behind. I know nothing of his inner thoughts and had to rely on his actions and the perceptions of others to build his personality. Nonetheless, I think I understand him. Little Crow lived at a time of unprecedented changes for the Dakota, and for the most part he adapted successfully to those changes. Most whites considered him to be a “civilized” Indian. Most Dakota thought of him as a true leader, a warrior chief of the old school. He grudgingly accepted the former but craved the latter. I am convinced that had it been left up to him, there would have been no war. He had seen the power of the Americans and was no fool. Yet, when the choice of war or peace was forced upon him, against his own logic he chose the role of warrior chief. As events unfolded, he had his doubts, but when he realized that the die was cast, he did everything in his power to make something from a lost cause. He failed, but not for lack of trying. Little Crow saw himself as a leader, and that is what leaders do. He was both admirable and foolish, neither hero nor villain. As Grey Bird explained to Wowinape: in a flood of defeat, Little Crow was the largest log.

Developing Little Crow, Lorenzo Lawrence, John Otherday, and Cut NoseRead More

The first white people to reach Minnesota during the 1700s were fur traders, mostly French Canadians. These were not people seeking permanent residency but only intending to remain long enough to collect their furs. Yet this process took many months during which time they often took Native American wives and sired mixed-race children. Their relationships with the Indian tribes were generally positive because they provided goods such as firearms that the Indians could acquire in no other way.

The influx of real settlers, people who intended to stay, did not begin until the 1800s. These were Americans attracted by the rich farmlands produced by the tall grass prairie of southern Minnesota. Some Americans caught the tail end of the of the fur trading era and became rich like Henry Sibley. However, most migrants were farmers like Tom Barnes and his brother John. Soon many towns like Henderson and Mankato began springing up, and because of its location at the confluence of the Minnesota and Mississippi Rivers, the city of St. Paul prospered and attracted all sorts of entrepreneurs like Joseph Brown. The result was less and less open land for the wild game that supported the Indians’ lifestyle. The Sioux and Chippewa felt that they were being squeezed out. Conflict was inevitable.

At first there was no open hostility between the Americans and the Dakota, and contrary to the opinions of some people today, there was no policy of genocide toward the Indians, at least in Minnesota. However, most white settlers believed that the Indians were standing in way of progress, that the Dakota and other tribes were not using the land properly, and if they would only adopt the American way of life everyone would be much better off. The Dakota, on the other hand, had no concept of “progress” of this nature. Most could not conceive of a better life than they already had and resented the fact that their world was being changed. Treaties like the ones negotiated by Little Crow and others in 1858 ameliorated the conflict for a time, but every year there were more and more white migrants wanting more and more land. The Acton murders simply touched off an explosion that had been building for years.

While there were traders and government accomplices who knew full well what was happening to the Dakota, many of the white settlers in Minnesota in 1862 were unaware of the Indians’ resentment toward them. And although many settlers possessed firearms, they were not like the gun toting pioneers of the previous century, always on the alert for an Indian attack. In fact, the most recent immigrants to southern Minnesota were Germans who spoke little English and had no tradition of owning firearms. They settled along the Cottonwood River just south of the Lower Agency and became helpless victims for Dakota raiding parties like the ones that attacked Mary Schwandt and her companions on the first day of the war.

Of course, after the Americans’ victory at Wood Lake, some of these “helpless victims” were also capable of the savage attacks on Dakota prisoners as they marched through New Ulm, and even on the innocent women and children of the Dakota Peace Party at Henderson. Although I fictionalized the incident in which a baby was murdered, it happened very much like that in real life. One hideous assault does not justify another; however, traumatic events like the Sacred Heart Massacre, in which Justina Krieger and her family were attacked, were common during the summer of 1862, and experiences like these can cause great psychological damage, leading survivors to commit violent acts they would never think of committing in the normal course of their lives.

The number of deaths caused by the Dakota War in 1862 is estimated at over a thousand. Even if this number is 50% too high, it would still be a very large number of deaths considering the small population of Minnesota at the time. Southern Minnesota was severely depopulated after the war, both because of the settlers and Dakota who fled from the area, and the Dakota who were forced to relocate to reservations in other states. The depopulation also lasted longer than might have been expected, partly because of the on-going Civil War, but also because the remaining citizens of Minnesota publicly memorialized those who died for several years after it was over. Eventually, public officials began to realize that advertising the horrors of 1862 was discouraging re-settlement, and the memorials were toned down. Today few remember it even occurred.

Events such as the Dakota War in Minnesota have many lessons to teach us, one of which is that those who suffer the most in war are often the ones who had the least to do with starting it. As Leon Trotsky wrote, “You may not be interested in war, but war may be interested in you.”

The SettlersRead More

In August of 2000, my wife Karen and I drove to Minnesota from our home near Chicago to take part in a tour of the area where most of the fighting occurred in August of 1862. The tour was conducted by the Minnesota Historical Society to commemorate the anniversary of the Sioux Uprising.

We had learned about the tour quite by accident. Some years before, during a trip with her girlfriends to the Mall of America, Karen took a bus trip to the Jackpot Junction Casino about two hours west of the Twin Cities. Along the way she noticed signs with names that sounded familiar, such as Fort Ridgley State Park and Birch Coulee, and upon arrival discovered the casino was owned and operated by a Dakota tribe and located on what had once been the Lower Sioux Agency. When she returned home, she said, “I think I was where your great-grandfather fought the Indians.” The places she mentioned sounded right to me, so we got out Thomas Barnes’ memoir and, sure enough, realized that was where she had been.

At the time both of us were working full time as public school teachers, so we noted it as an interesting coincidence and went on with our lives. However, I filed the information in the back of my mind as a place I wanted to visit after we retired, which we both did in 1999. In the spring of 2000 my son, Michael, found an item on the internet concerning the guided tours of Birch Coulee, Fort Ridgely, and other historical sites in the area, so we decided it was time to make our pilgrimage into my family’s past.

I contacted the Lower Sioux Agency History Center and not only signed up for a tour but arranged to exchange copies of my great-grandfather’s memoirs in exchange for whatever information they could provide me about the war. The young people who ran the history center were more than generous and extremely helpful and gave an excellent tour. Without their help, my book never could have been written. In this way, I became acquainted with the country over which my great-grandfather fought so many years ago.

If Tom Barnes had been riding in the back seat of our Honda minivan on that hot August afternoon as we drove west on U.S. Highway 14 from Rochester, he would have been amazed by all the buildings and traffic, but he would also find that farming is still the main business for people living in the Minnesota River Valley. Though the tall grass prairie is mostly gone, the deep rich soil it produced is still there and is some of the most productive farmland in the world. Eventually our journey brought us to the Minnesota River, which we crossed at New Ulm. That town now not only occupies the bottomland near the river, but also the benches that rise to the south and west where the Dakota gathered by the hundreds before they made their second attack on Charles Flandreau’s poorly armed volunteer defenders.

We continued west on US 14, passing through Sleepy Eye, and from there followed highway 68 and then highway 67 northwest until turning due north on Route 2 at the little town of Morgan. In doing so we were retracing, in the opposite direction, the approximate route taken by Frances Patoile, Mattie Williams, Mary Schwandt and Mary Anderson as they attempted to escape to the relative safety of New Ulm on the first day of the uprising. Their intention at the time was to avoid the Lower Agency. However, when my wife and I turned north on Route 2, we were heading straight for it, or I should say what is left of it.

Only one original building still stands at the site of the former Lower Agency, a warehouse, but a walking trail with markers shows the former locations of various other buildings. In 2000 there was also a modern visitor’s center maintained and staffed by the Historical Society, but unfortunately that excellent facility has been closed due to lack of funds. The site is still maintained by the society but no longer open to the public on a regular basis, truly a loss for the people of Minnesota.

The community that resides there, the descendants of the Mdewakanton Dakota who once called it home, is still viable and numbers approximately three hundred people. The Dakota residents support themselves through farming and from the proceeds of their casino, Jackpot Junction, plus a motel and a gas station. We stayed at the casino, and by all appearances it is a profitable business which hopefully provides employment for many of the residents.

Our tour was scheduled to begin at the Fort Ridgely History Center in the Fort Ridgely State Park, a few miles south of the town of Fairfax. The fort’s commissary is still intact and maintained as a museum by the Historical Society. From there we retraced the route taken by the burial party under Captain Grant (or Major Brown, depending on whose version of the story that you believe) as they made their way first to the Redwood Ferry and then to Beaver Creek, and finally to their camp at Birch Coulee. It is no longer possible to follow the original trail to the ferry, and the land looks very different today, not due to the addition of buildings but to the proliferation of trees. In 1862 there were very few trees of any kind except for those growing along the river bottom. But the prairie fires that maintained the grassland have been suppressed, creating a good deal of wooded land between the farmers’ fields. Today, Dakota scouts like Lightning Blanket would probably not have been able to spot the burial party which included my great-grandfather crossing the high ground on the east bank of the river on their way to Birch Coulee.

The Birch Coulee Battle site has been preserved as open ground for the most part. The battlefield was much smaller than I had imagined, and I could understand why the Dakota, even with their relatively inaccurate guns, could have inflicted so much damage. A replica of what is called a “Sibley Tent,” though not invented by Henry Sibley, was set up in the area where the soldiers had made their camp, and from there it was easy to see why they had been unknowingly surrounded. A dirt path led to the small hump of ground where Big Eagle and his men had poured their deadly fire into the camp. No doubt had they had another day to complete their task, the Dakota victory would have been complete, though the outcome of the war would likely not have been any different.

Unfortunately, my wife and I did not go to the Wood Lake Battle site, Yellow Medicine or Camp Release, though I now wish I had. However, it is not difficult to imagine what that trip would be like.

In 1862 Sibley’s forces had to cross the Redwood River on their trek to Yellow Medicine and the Upper Agency. At that time, they would have passed Big Eagle’s village on the south side of the river and Shakopee’s village on the north side. The trail then paralleled the Minnesota River all the way to Yellow Medicine. This route no longer exists. The town of Redwood Falls now occupies the south bank of the river, and the main road, which is Route 19/67, heads due west from there rather than northwest as the old trail did. Route 9 does cross the Redwood near the point of the old trail, passing near the former site of the Rice Creek Village, home to the radical followers of Red Middle Voice, but then turns due west a few miles beyond Rice Creek.

Finding the Wood Lake Battle site is difficult for two reasons. First, the battle was actually fought near Lone Tree Lake. Wood Lake is much larger and at least five miles due west of the battle site. Why the names of the lakes became confused is not known. Second, there is nothing designating the location of the battle, which is where Route 67, after splitting off from Route 19, crosses the outlet creek from the lake. However, if you continue on 67, you will eventually arrive at the Yellow Medicine River and the Upper Sioux Agency.

What was once the Yellow Medicine (or Upper) Agency is now a one-thousand acre state park. The foundations of some of the old buildings have been excavated and one brick building has been restored. You can stay overnight in the park in a rented tepee or your own tent and enjoy the nature preserve, but nothing remains of the Hazelwood or Paiutazee Missions run by Thomas Williamson and Stephen Riggs. Gone also are the homes of their congregation members like Little Paul, Lorenzo Lawrence, Akipa, and Simon Anawangmani, most of which were destroyed in 1862. However, if you continue a mile or so north on Route 67, you will pass through the nine-hundred- acre Upper Sioux Indian reservation where, no doubt, some of the descendants of the Peace Party members still reside.

Three miles beyond the reservation, Route 67 enters the town of Granite Falls. It is the home of Andrew Volstead, author of the Volstead Act, which made prohibition the law of the land in the 1920s. To travel the path taken by the Dakota after their retreat from Yellow Medicine, you must take Route 212. This route will not take you directly to the former site of Red Iron’s Village or Camp Release, because it crosses the Minnesota River eight miles northwest of Granite Falls and continues on to the town of Montevideo on the Chippewa River, where it joins with the Minnesota. Route 212 then turns due west in the town, recrosses the Minnesota, and passes through the area where the Peace Party made their stand and met Sibley’s army to return the captives. A 51-foot monument was erected on the bluff overlooking the river valley in 1894 to commemorate Camp Release, so the sacrifices and struggles of 1862 have not been totally forgotten. 

Yet even though peace returned to the Minnesota River Valley over one hundred years ago, the problems that caused the war–the deceitful and unfair treaties upon which the state and nation were built, along with the clash of cultures between the European-Americans and Native-Americans, and racism in general–are still with us today, and they are problems that still need to be addressed.

The Minnesota River Valley TodayRead More

The Soldiers’ Weapons

Tom Barnes and his fellow soldiers were armed with muzzle-loading rifled muskets called Springfield Rifles. The Civil War was one of the last major wars in which these were used as standard weapons. The standard weapon for armies in the previous century and a half had been smooth bore muskets. The bullet that they fired was a round ball of lead that tended to curve like a baseball after leaving the barrel so that hitting what you were aiming at was very problematic beyond a few yards. However, they were simple to learn how to use and easy to maintain. Sharp shooters used rifled muskets. Spiral grooves were cut into the inside of the barrel, which imparted a spin to the ball when it was fired. This made rifles many times more accurate than smooth bore muskets, but they were expensive to manufacture, needed much more training to use, and were hard to keep clean. They were also slower to load.

The Springfield Rifle overcame some of the liabilities of the old rifled muskets. It fired what was called a Minie Ball, which was not round but conical in shape. The base of the bullet was indented, so that when it was rammed down the barrel it expanded into the grooves. This created a tighter fit, produced a tighter spin to the bullet when it was fired, and cleaned the grooves at the same time. It was also faster to load than the old rifles, but no faster than the smooth bores. Two shots a minute was about the maximum rate of fire. It was war in slow motion.

American soldiers used other types of weapons as well. The Renville Rangers had carbines, a shorter version of the rifled musket, because they were easier to load on horseback. Officers carried pistols, which could fire six shots in succession but were inaccurate and slow to reload. Also, for hand-to-hand fighting, the soldiers had bayonets, which turned their rifles into spears. But using the bayonet takes some training that most of Sibley’s soldiers did not have.

The soldiers also had artillery, which proved to be decisive in the battles to defend Fort Ridgley. Cannon had changed very little since the American Revolution. Essentially, they were enlarged smooth bore muskets that could fire several different types of ammunition, including solid shot that was just a large, solid iron ball, and hollowed out shells containing gunpowder and timed to explode through the use of a fuse. It appears that it was the shells that had the biggest deterrent effect on the Dakota, although they did not seem to have caused many casualties. Two other types of ordinance, grapeshot and canister, were used extensively in the Civil War. They were shells that fired lead balls which essentially turned the cannon into a gigantic shotgun. If they were used in the Dakota War, however, there is no record of it.

Dakota Weapons

Most of the Dakota had firearms which they had purchased or stolen from the traders’ stores. Most were double-barreled shotguns. These were smooth bore weapons with similar characteristics to smooth bore muskets. Their only advantage over the soldiers’ rifles was that they could fire two shots in succession. Bows and arrows were also used, and they could be shot more rapidly than rifles. However, their lethal range was shorter. How much they were used in the fighting is not really known.

For close fighting the Dakota used knives, tomahawks, and war clubs. By all accounts the warriors were quite skilled in the use of these weapons but few got close enough to the enemy to use them in any of the battles.

The Soldier’s Tactics

During the Civil War, the main infantry tactic on offense was to advance in massed formations. This required a lot of training and discipline, since the files of advancing soldiers would be under artillery fire from at least a half a mile away and very lethal rifle fire for at least a quarter of a mile. Such attacks produced huge casualty counts. It seems unlikely that General Sibley’s mostly untrained troops could have executed such an assault. Fortunately, they never had to do so, since in all of the battles they were on the defensive and could fire from behind cover. The only exception was the bayonet charge of the Third Regiment at Wood lake, and the Third was the only veteran unit in Sibley’s army.

The Dakota’s Tactics

Offensive war among the various Indian tribes of North America almost always took the form of hit and run raids. Ambushing an unsuspecting group of enemies was the main tactic. A battle would usually begin with a volley of arrows or bullets followed by a rush to close with the defenders. Seldom did a Dakota war party launch an attack against an equal or superior force, nor did the fights last very long. Once enough enemy warriors were killed, horses stolen, or captives taken, the Dakota would break off the attack. Mass assaults that involved hundreds of fighters almost never occurred. Had any Dakota warrior witnessed a Civil War battle, they would have been appalled by the carnage. The two attacks on Fort Ridgley started out as mass assaults, but quickly lost momentum. The Dakota warriors were as brave as any fighters anywhere, but they were not trained to keep advancing against massed fire power. The attack on New Ulm was similar, and though more successful for the Dakota it was still not a complete victory. Birch Coulee was more of an ambush, and might have been more successful had the soldiers not been reinforced from the fort. At Wood Lake, the ambush might have worked, but the trap was sprung to soon. Only at the Battle of the Redwood Ferry did the ambush tactic deliver a complete victory.

Weapons and TacticsRead More

The ways in which the Dakota and the Americans governed themselves at the time of the novel were profoundly different, leading to many misunderstandings between the two nations. One thing that they did agree upon, up to a point, was the importance of individual freedom. From its founding, the United States recognized that there were certain natural rights that the state could not overrule. To protect the citizens from the state, the founding fathers intentionally designed a weak central government. However, they soon found that the Articles of Confederation were inadequate for governing a large, diverse population and replaced it with a constitution that delineated the powers of the central government, which would hopefully protect individual rights. The Dakota, however, did not have to protect individuals from the government. They had no government.

How could the Dakota function without a government to enforce society’s rules? To answer that question, one must first realize that the Dakota population was very small compared to the United States in 1862. There were perhaps no more than 6,500 people who thought of themselves as Dakota. They lived in villages scattered throughout the southern half of Minnesota. The largest villages had no more than a few hundred people, most of whom were related in some way. Each village therefore was a large extended family, and politically independent from all other villages. Each village had a chief, and the title of chief was hereditary. However, the chief was not a sovereign and did not give orders. Little Crow, Mankato, and Big Eagle were all leaders, not commanders. Dakota society had rules that were enforced by consensus through the leadership of the chief, village elders, and head soldiers. Rules did not need to be codified because everyone knew them. Essentially everyone was the government.

In my novel I mention four Dakota bands: the Mdewakanton, Sisseton, Wahpeton, and Wahpekute. These were not legal entities like states or counties, but collections of villages. The Dakota moved freely among the bands and intermarriage was common. The bands were represented by their village chiefs in counsels, and often one of the chiefs was elected as a speaker for the band. The speaker was a spokesman with influence but no power to act on behalf of the band. The reader may recall the election of Traveling Hail to replace Little Crow. I could not find any information about how the election was conducted other than that it took place in a counsel of the Mdewakanton band. It seems that it was the only position of leadership determined by polling the whole band, or at least the male half of it. As in 19th Century America, politics was a male affair. In any case, the Dakota may have lacked a true system of government, but, as the reader may have gathered, there was plenty of politics going on in the Dakota nation. Politics pulled the people in different directions, making any successful effort for either peace or war impossible. In the end it could be argued that some positive outcome from the war could have been achieved by the Dakota if they had had political unity. Unity of purpose might have offset the Americans’ superiority in resources and manpower to some extent, especially since they were entangled in the Civil War. Unfortunately for the Dakota, however, General Sibley had something the Little Crow did not–command.

Dakota PoliticsRead More