Ethnos

Dakota

The eastern Dakota people, in Minnesota, unlike their plains cousins, the Lakota, lived in agricultural communities. They accepted white settlements and seizure of their lands in exchange for annual payments guaranteed by treaty. In 1862, after a failed crop the year before and a winter starvation, the money was late to arrive. The local traders would not issue any more credit to the Dakota and the local federal agent told the Dakota that they were free to eat grass. As a result on August 17, 1862, a Dakota uprising began in Minnesota when Dakota attacked white settlements along the Minnesota River.

Dakota warriors decided on August 19 not to attack the heavily-defended Fort Ridgely, and instead turned to the settlement of New Ulm, killing many white settlers along the way. They also scalped the federal agent on that day, looted his warehouse, and rampaged through the area, killing perhaps a dozen whites.

Although this was in the middle of the American Civil War, enough troops were gathered to put down the "rebellion", and more than 300 Dakota were sentenced by local courts to die for the crimes of murder or rape six weeks later. President Abraham Lincoln commuted the death sentences of all but 38, for which the evidence seemed strongest, and they were dispatched in a single day on December 26, 1862. A photograph of the mass hanging was long a familiar icon to the white inhabitants of Minnesota. The 38 are remembered each year at two separate pow wows in Minnesota. The Mankato pow wow, held each year in September, commemorates the lives of the 38 but also seeks to reconcile the white and indian communities. The Birch Coulee pow wow, held on Labor Day weekend, honors the lives of the 38 who were hanged in the largest mass execution in United States history. ***