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In August 1862 the worst massacre in U.S. history unfolded on the Minnesota prairie, launching what has come to be known as the Dakota War, the most violent ethnic conflict ever to roil the nation. When it was over, between six and seven hundred white settlers had been murdered in their homes, and thirty to forty thousand had fled the frontier of Minnesota. But the devastation was not all on one side. More than five hundred Indians, many of them women and children, perished in the aftermath of the conflict; and thirty-eight Dakota warriors were executed on one gallows, the largest mass execution ever in North America. The horror of such wholesale violence has long obscured what really happen...
Robert Hopkins was a man caught between two worlds. As a member of the Dakota Nation, he was unfairly imprisoned, accused of taking up arms against U.S. soldiers when war broke out with the Dakota in 1862. However, as a Christian convert who was also a preacher, Hopkins’s allegiance was often questioned by many of his fellow Dakota as well. Without a doubt, being a convert—and a favorite of the missionaries—had its privileges. Hopkins learned to read and write in an anglicized form of Dakota, and when facing legal allegations, he and several high-ranking missionaries wrote impassioned letters in his defense. Ultimately, he was among the 300-some Dakota spared from hanging by President ...
This edition of A Thrilling Narrative of Indian Captivity rescues from obscurity a crucially important work about the bitterly contested U.S.-Dakota War of 1862. Written by Mary Butler Renville, an Anglo woman, with the assistance of her Dakota husband, John Baptiste Renville, A Thrilling Narrative was printed only once as a book in 1863 and has not been republished since. The work details the Renvilles’ experiences as “captives” among their Dakota kin in the Upper Camp and chronicles the story of the Dakota Peace Party. Their sympathetic portrayal of those who opposed the war in 1862 combats the stereotypical view that most Dakotas supported it and illumines the injustice of their exi...
In August of 1862, hundreds of Dakota warriors opened without warning a murderous rampage against settlers and soldiers in southern Minnesota. The vortex of the Dakota Uprising along the Minnesota River encompassed thousands of people in what was perhaps the greatest massacre of whites by Indians in American history ... Dakota Dawn focuses in great detail on the first week of the killing spree, a great paroxysm of destruction when the Dakota succeeded, albeit fleetingly, in driving out the white man.--Publisher description.
In the days following the Battle of Birch Coulie, the decisive battle in the deadly Dakota War of 1862, one of President Lincoln’s private secretaries wrote: “There has hardly been an outbreak so treacherous, so sudden, so bitter, and so bloody, as that which filled the State of Minnesota with sorrow and lamentation.” Even today, at the 150th anniversary of the Dakota War, the battle still raises questions and stirs controversy. In Birch Coulie John Christgau recounts the dramatic events surrounding the battle. American history at its narrative best, his book is also a uniquely balanced and accurate chronicle of this little-understood conflict, one of the most important to roil the Ame...
A collection of personal accounts chronicling the experiences of the Native Americans and soldiers who fought in the Minnesota Indian War of 1862.
In 1862, four years after Minnesota was ratified as the thirty-second state in the Union, simmering tensions between indigenous Dakota and white settlers culminated in the violent, six-week-long U.S.-Dakota War. Hundreds of lives were lost on both sides, and the war ended with the execution of thirty-eight Dakotas on December 26, 1862, in Mankato, Minnesota--the largest mass execution in American history. The following April, after suffering a long internment at Fort Snelling, the Dakota and Winnebago peoples were forcefully removed to South Dakota, precipitating the near destruction of the area's native communities while simultaneously laying the foundation for what we know and recognize to...
First published in 1970, this volume from Mrs Harriet E. Bishop McConkey, a pioneer schoolteacher of St. Paul, Minnesota, was part of the first wave of contemporaneous accounts from Americans in 1863 documenting their perspective of the Sioux Uprising between the 17th of August and the 26th of September 1862. At least 450 settlers and soldiers were killed, depopulating large areas. Although not a direct eyewitness to events, Harriet McConkey was on the fringes of the action in St. Paul and gathered material firsthand from the participants themselves, enabling her to convey the settlers' story with profound emotional involvement and intimacy, though with equally profound bitterness for the Native Americans. McConkey made little attempt to explore their motivations in the form of famine, late payment and poor treatment. Though imperfect, hers remains an important account documenting the settlers' experience of the event which began a succession of wars over thirty years, ending at Wounded Knee, South Dakota in 1890.
As the United States fought the Civil War in the early 1860s, the country's western frontier was simultaneously the site of significant military campaigns that took the lives of both American and Sioux. The Dakota campaign, led by Commander Henry Hastings Sibley and Brigadier General Alfred Sully against the Sioux between 1863 and 1864 was greater in scope, intensity and bloodshed than almost all other Indian battles fought in the West but is often overlooked. The Minnesota War of 1862 and the Dakota War of 1863-1865 were among the most significant U.S. victories in the Indian wars, but did not temper the passions of the Sioux to preserve their people and land or the desires of the whites to settle the frontier. The wars only incited the Teton Sioux to enter into a long-term resistance that would end only at Wounded Knee in 1890.