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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