The Dakota War of 1862

Every morning in July 1862, a Dakota woman walked past the empty flour barrels behind the agency warehouse on the Minnesota River and turned her head to look, as though they might have filled overnight. They never did. The annuities the United States owed her people for the land they had ceded in 1851 had been due in June. They were not lost. The pork and flour sat crated in St. Paul and the money sat counted in a ledger, while the government poured everything it had into the Civil War.

In mid-August four young Dakota men killed five settlers at Acton, and within a day the war had begun. For six weeks it burned across the valley: the attack on the Lower Agency, two assaults on Fort Ridgely, the street fighting at New Ulm, Birch Coulee, Wood Lake. Hundreds of settlers were killed. By late September the Dakota who had fought under Taoyateduta, the leader the Americans called Little Crow, were beaten.

A military commission sentenced 303 men to death, some after trials that lasted minutes. Lincoln reduced the list to thirty-nine, one man was reprieved, and on December 26, 1862, thirty-eight Dakota men were hanged together at Mankato, the largest mass execution in American history. Little Crow was shot the next summer while picking berries, and most of the Dakota left in Minnesota were sent into exile at Crow Creek. And the annuity gold? It had reached Fort Ridgely on August 18, the day after the killings at Acton.