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 happened in
Minnesota in 1862-from its complicated origins to the consequences
that reverberate to this day. A sweeping work of narrative history,
the result of forty years' research, Massacre in Minnesota provides
the most complete account of this dark moment in U.S. history.
Focusing on key figures caught up in the conflict-Indian, American,
and Franco- and Anglo-Dakota-Gary Clayton Anderson gives these
long-ago events a striking immediacy, capturing the fears of the
fleeing settlers, the animosity of newspaper editors and soldiers,
the violent dedication of Dakota warriors, and the terrible
struggles of seized women and children. Through rarely seen journal
entries, newspaper accounts, and military records, integrated with
biographical detail, Anderson documents the vast corruption within
the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the crisis that arose as pioneers
overran Indian lands, the failures of tribal leadership and
institutions, and the systemic strains caused by the Civil War.
Anderson also gives due attention to Indian cultural viewpoints,
offering insight into the relationship between Native warfare,
religion, and life after death-a nexus critical to understanding
the conflict. Ultimately, what emerges most clearly from Anderson's
account is the outsize suffering of innocents on both sides of the
Dakota War-and, identified unequivocally for the first time, the
role of white duplicity in bringing about this unprecedented and
needless calamity.
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