Editor’s Note: This article first appeared in a June 2016 subscriber-exclusive magazine titled “Historic Fort Snelling,” about the site’s history and changes to its programming being developed by the Minnesota Historical Society. Full copies of the magazine are available for $3 apiece. For information, call 651-228-5280 during business hours.
A four-mile-long caravan of Dakota — mostly women, children and elderly men — arrived at the Minnesota village of Henderson on Nov. 11, 1862.
Despite its military escort, the wagon train was attacked by an angry mob of white settlers. Some threw rocks at the Dakota; others poured boiling water on them.
“I saw an enraged white woman rush up to one of the wagons and snatch a nursing babe from its mother’s breast and dash it violently upon the ground,” one onlooker recalled. The child later died.
The U.S.-Dakota War raged along the Minnesota frontier for six weeks that summer, leaving hundreds of settlers dead. Some in Henderson that day likely knew families who were killed by Dakota warriors.
But the Dakota they brutalized had taken no part in the fighting. They were cleared of any wrongdoing by a U.S. military tribunal.
Still, they were marched as prisoners to Fort Snelling, where they would spend the winter confined within a wooden stockade. As many as 300 of them would die there. Those who survived would be exiled to the Crow Creek Reservation in what is now South Dakota.
“They were brought here to await expulsion. Effectively, this was the removal of the Dakota from Minnesota,” said Matt Cassady, program development specialist at Fort Snelling. “It’s a really dark moment in the history of the state and of this place.”
That moment is still very much alive for the descendants of those Dakota. Ramona Kitto Stately’s great-great-grandmother had given birth to her fourth child the night before she and the other Dakota began their 150-mile forced march to Fort Snelling.
“For the Dakota, this is not something that happened a long time ago,” Stately said. “The wounds are very fresh.”
U.S.-DAKOTA WAR
By 1862, a series of treaties with the U.S. government had pushed the Dakota onto a sliver of land along the Minnesota River. These treaties, designed by the government to make room for white settlers flooding into the state, promised the Dakota annual payments in gold.
Unable to pursue their traditional subsistence pattern of moving throughout the year among seasonal villages to exploit different food sources, the Dakota became increasingly dependent on government annuities.
Crop failures in fall 1861 left them with little to eat during the coming winter. By summer, they were beginning to starve. Their annuity payment, which was due at the end of June, did not arrive.
On Aug. 17, 1862, four young Dakota men killed five white settlers near Acton while stealing eggs from their farm.
Dakota leaders gathered that night to discuss how to handle this transgression. Some factions viewed it as an opportunity to wage a long overdue war against the U.S. government and its people.
“We have no choice,” a chief named Red Middle Voice told the group. “Our hands are already bloody.”
Hundreds of settlers would die in the six weeks of violence that followed — estimates range from 400 to 1,000, according to Minnesota historian Mary Lethert Wingerd. Only 50 or so were armed. More than 70 U.S. soldiers were killed.
The death toll on the Dakota side was 75 to 100 warriors. It’s likely that fewer than 1,000 of the state’s 7,000 Dakota participated in the violence, Wingerd writes.
Little Crow, the reluctant leader of the Dakota forces, fled west and avoided capture with about 200 of his men. Others scattered.
Some 2,000 Dakota surrendered near what is now Montevideo to Col. Henry Sibley, who led U.S. forces against Little Crow. There Sibley convened a military tribunal to parse which of the Dakota in his custody took part in the killing.
“Reading the records today buttresses the impression that the trials were a travesty of justice,” writes Kenneth Carley in his 1961 book “The Dakota War of 1862.”
None of the accused Dakota was represented by a lawyer. Many were declared guilty in less than five minutes.
Of the nearly 400 men tried, 303 were convicted and sentenced to die. Most of their sentences would later be commuted by President Abraham Lincoln, but 38 were hanged at Mankato.
The remainder of the surrendered Dakota — many of them the families of those convicted — were absolved of any wrongdoing. Some were even known to have aided white settlers attacked during the war.
But they would not be allowed to return to their reservation. During a special session of the Minnesota Legislature called to address the crisis, Gov. Alexander Ramsey advocated genocide.
“The Sioux Indians of Minnesota must be exterminated or driven forever beyond the borders of the state,” Ramsey said.
The innocent Dakota would be held at Fort Snelling until the federal government decided their fate.
CONCENTRATION CAMP
On Nov. 7, 1,658 Dakota began the march to Fort Snelling under the protection of about 300 soldiers led by Lt. Col. William Marshall.
Anticipating trouble from angry whites along the way, Marshall issued a warning to settlers through the press.
“I would risk my life for the protection of these helpless beings,” he told a reporter. “I want the settlers in the valley, on the route we pass, to know that they are not the guilty Indians … but friendly Indians, women and children.”
Despite his plea, the caravan was attacked several times before it reached the fort on Nov. 13.
It is unknown how many Dakota were killed during the journey, but by the time the first census of the captives was taken on Dec. 2, only 1,601 remained.
Fort Snelling proved no less dangerous, writes historian Corinne Monjeau-Marz. Less than a week after their arrival, the Dakota had established a camp in the river bottom below the fort. One evening, a Dakota woman who was out gathering firewood alone was attacked and raped by a group of soldiers, St. Paul newspapers reported.
Military leaders ordered a wooden stockade built in the river bottom, with the intention of protecting the prisoners from white antagonists as much as it was to confine them, according to Monjeau-Marz.
Armed guards patrolled the stockade day and night, and no one was allowed in without a pass.
The 3-acre enclosure encompassed between 200 and 250 tipis behind its 14-foot walls, according to Monjeau-Marz’s research.
The Dakota did have a few friends among Minnesota’s white population. Local clergy made frequent visits to the stockade.
Episcopalian Bishop Henry Whipple became an advocate for the prisoners, raising money for their care and arranging for the release of several. The Rev. John Williamson, who had lived among the Dakota his entire life, would join them at the concentration camp and remain with them for the rest of their ordeal.
Local photographers turned out to capture images of life in the camp.
“The enclosure also had its share of gawkers, taunters, and those who came simply relieved to see the Dakota confined,” Monjeau-Marz writes.
Among them was pioneer educator Harriet Bishop, who was disgusted to learn that the government was spending $1 a day per prisoner to maintain the camp, rather than putting those funds toward the care of white settlers victimized during the war.
“The streets were receptacles of all the offal of the lodges, where barefooted women and children splashed around in the filthy snow slush,” Bishop wrote of the camp after her visit.
These conditions left the Dakota vulnerable to diseases like measles.
Gabriel Renville, a half-Dakota man imprisoned at the camp, later recalled in a memoir that “we were so crowded and confined that an epidemic broke out among us and children were dying day and night.”
“Amid all this sickness and these great tribulations, it seemed doubtful at night whether a person would be alive in the morning,” Renville added.
The total number of deaths is likely between 100 and 300, Monjeau-Marz estimates.
After the bodies of several dead Dakota were exhumed and mutilated by whites, the captives began burying the bodies of loved ones in the floors of their tipis, The Rev. Stephen Riggs later wrote.
When spring came, it became necessary to move the camp to higher ground as the rising rivers flooded the stockade. The Dakota would spend the last two months of their captivity at this new camp, about one mile southwest of Fort Snelling.
In March 1863, the U.S. Senate voted to expel the Dakota from Minnesota. The annuities due them from previous treaties would be paid to the white victims of the U.S.-Dakota War, Wingerd writes.
EXPULSION AND AFTERMATH
In early May 1863, the Army loaded the 1,318 captives who remained at the concentration camp onto a pair of riverboats to be exiled to the Dakota Territory. As they steamed past the levee at St. Paul, a crowd gathered along the river and pelted them with rocks, Wingerd writes.
At St. Joseph, the Dakota were loaded onto a single overcrowded steamer for the final leg of their journey up the Missouri River. Many more would die before they reached their destination.
A month after departing Fort Snelling, the survivors disembarked at the Crow Creek Reservation, a “drought-stricken wasteland,” Wingerd writes.
They were soon joined by the Ho-Chunk (or Winnebago) of southern Minnesota, who were also exiled to Crow Creek despite having no part in the conflict between the whites and the Dakota. Cassady characterizes this as a naked land-grab by the state and federal governments.
But the stockade at Fort Snelling would not remain empty for long.
As the hundreds of Dakota who fled to the plains after the war were captured or surrendered between summer 1863 and spring 1864, the fort became a waypoint on their journey to Crow Creek. Included among them was the family of Little Crow, who remained at large until he was killed near Hutchinson for a $500 bounty offered by the state of Minnesota.
Also brought to the Fort Snelling during this time were Shakopee and Medicine Bottle, two Dakota leaders who had been kidnapped in Canada and sentenced to death for their participation in the war.
They were hanged just outside the walls of the fort on Nov. 11, 1865. As they awaited execution, the whistle of a steamboat coming upriver was heard in the distance.
“As the white man comes in, the Indian goes out,” Shakopee said.
STILL A SOURCE OF SORROW
The painful legacy of the concentration camp at Fort Snelling is still apparent today in Dakota communities. Many see the fort as a symbol of genocide and call for it to be torn down.
Every two years, a group of Dakota recreates the forced march to the site of the concentration camp.
Each mile, the marchers stop and place a wooden stake into the ground. Tied to the stakes are two strips of leather, each bearing the name of a female head of household who was imprisoned at the camp.
At the river bottom, they arrange the remaining stakes in a circle where the camp is believed to have been located.
Kitto Stately said she would like to see a permanent exhibit at Fort Snelling to educate visitors about her ancestors’ captivity, akin to the museum at Auschwitz-Birkenau.
“I would like people to know exactly what happened there,” Kitto Stately said. “I think Minnesota has hidden its history.”
