What do you think?
Rate this book
Dakota Dawn: The Decisive First Week of the Sioux Uprising, August 1862
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. To read about the fast paced and unpredictable flood of killing and destruction is to discover heartrending emotion, irony, tragedy, cowardice, and heroism from unexpected quarters. Previous attempts to sort out individual experiences and place the events in a coherent chronological and geographical order have enjoyed little success. Award-winning author Gregory F. Michno’s Dakota The Decisive First Week of the Sioux Uprising, August 17–24, 1862 offers an essential clarity and vivid portrait that readers will find refreshing and invigorating.
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. During those seven days at least 400 white settlers were killed, the great majority innocent victims slaughtered in the most shocking manner. Nowhere else in the Western United States was there a record of such sustained attacks against a fort (Ridgely) or upon a town (New Ulm). After soldiers put down the uprising, hundreds of Dakotas were captured and put before military tribunals with little or no opportunity to present a fair defense; 38 were hanged on one massive gallows on December 26, 1862.
Michno’s research includes select secondary studies and 2,000 pages of primary sources including recollections, original records, diaries, newspaper accounts, and other archival records. One seldom used resource is the Indian Depredation Claim files. After the uprising, settlers filed nearly 3,000 claims for damages in which they itemized losses and set forth their experiences. These priceless documents paint firsthand slices of the life of a frontier people, their cabins, tools, clothes, crops, animals, and cherished possessions. Many of these claims have never been incorporated into a book; Michno’s use of them allows him to more fully expound on various episodes and correct previous misconceptions.
Richly illustrated with 42 contemporary and modern photos and illustrations and accompanied by 19 original maps, Dakota Dawn now stands as the definitive account of one of the most important and previously misunderstood events in American history.
About the Award-winning author Gregory F. Michno is a Michigan native and the author of three dozen articles and ten books dealing with World War II and the American West, including Lakota Noon; Battle at Sand Creek; The Encyclopedia of Indian Wars; The Deadliest Indian War in the West; and Circle the Wagons. Greg helped edit and appeared in the DVD history The Great Indian 1540-1890. He lives in Colorado, with his wife Susan.
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. During those seven days at least 400 white settlers were killed, the great majority innocent victims slaughtered in the most shocking manner. Nowhere else in the Western United States was there a record of such sustained attacks against a fort (Ridgely) or upon a town (New Ulm). After soldiers put down the uprising, hundreds of Dakotas were captured and put before military tribunals with little or no opportunity to present a fair defense; 38 were hanged on one massive gallows on December 26, 1862.
Michno’s research includes select secondary studies and 2,000 pages of primary sources including recollections, original records, diaries, newspaper accounts, and other archival records. One seldom used resource is the Indian Depredation Claim files. After the uprising, settlers filed nearly 3,000 claims for damages in which they itemized losses and set forth their experiences. These priceless documents paint firsthand slices of the life of a frontier people, their cabins, tools, clothes, crops, animals, and cherished possessions. Many of these claims have never been incorporated into a book; Michno’s use of them allows him to more fully expound on various episodes and correct previous misconceptions.
Richly illustrated with 42 contemporary and modern photos and illustrations and accompanied by 19 original maps, Dakota Dawn now stands as the definitive account of one of the most important and previously misunderstood events in American history.
About the Award-winning author Gregory F. Michno is a Michigan native and the author of three dozen articles and ten books dealing with World War II and the American West, including Lakota Noon; Battle at Sand Creek; The Encyclopedia of Indian Wars; The Deadliest Indian War in the West; and Circle the Wagons. Greg helped edit and appeared in the DVD history The Great Indian 1540-1890. He lives in Colorado, with his wife Susan.
- GenresHistory
492 pages, Hardcover
First published July 1, 2011
3 people are currently reading
63 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
July 24, 2018
This is an ugly book on an ugly subject.
The subject is the Dakota Uprising of 1862 in which hundreds of Minnesota settlers were killed in their homes and fields, following which hundreds of Dakota Indians were exiled to Crow Creek Reservation, where upwards of 1,000 men, women and children died from starvation and exposure. Like I said: ugly. It was a nasty, brutal conflict that disregarded age and gender, that pitted culture against culture, and that turned mercy into weakness.
The subject’s ugliness is a historical reality.
The book’s ugliness has no excuse.
Gregory Michno’s Dakota Dawn is one of those post-revisionist revisionist histories that unapologetically retracts any apologies ever made to the Indians. (See also, S.C. Gwynne’s execrable Empire of the Summer Moon, which somehow got shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize). It seeks to reframe western history so that it more closely resembles the pre-Vietnam Era paradigm. To wit: white women are virtuous victims; white men are heroic conquerors; and the Indians are murderous “others,” savages who know only brutality and violence. Or, in Michno’s words:
After typing that out, I had to recheck something… Yep, this was published in 2011.
(It is tempting, at this point, to belie the crassness of Michno’s generalization, and the startling lack of imagination behind it. Instead, I will say two things. First, read Royal Hassrick’s The Sioux, which engages the Lakota and the Dakota as – you know – human beings. Second, when making such a generalization, Mr. Michno, never forget that you are an American, and therefore no stranger to “vengeance and retaliation.” Remember, we invented (and named!) that thing that uses atoms to turn people to dust. We’re not exactly hobbits.)
Part of my disgust with this book – and truly, I despise it – is that I have been a longtime fan of Greg Michno. This is by way of disclosure. I’m not objective. I’m scorned.
I’ve read the guy since his first book, The Mystery of E Troop, written back when Michno lived in Michigan and worked in the Department of Social Services. I loved the studiousness of that book. I loved its passionate amateurishness. I loved how he loved his subject, and took time off from work to pursue it. I loved his author’s photo, which looked like it caught him by surprise at an insurance convention in Cedar Rapids.
The Mystery of E Troop, and its follow-up, Lakota Noon, placed great emphasis on minutiae, in collecting and parsing every single primary source. Michno was never a great writer (his lack of confidence shows, if his self-conscious citation to Turabian’s A Manual for Writers is any indication), but his thoroughness was laudable. He always tried to place a framework of certainty over the uncertain, by utilizing time-distance analyses and chronologies. His starting point for such frameworks were always uncomfortably arbitrary, but by the time he finished presenting his case, you could certainly be lulled by his accomplishment: the creation of a believable narrative.
Then, for whatever reason, Michno began to change focus. He wrote an article (later a book) declaring that the Sand Creek massacre was no massacre at all. Then he co-authored a book with his wife called A Fate Worse than Death, detailing all the horrible things Indians did to white people. Because, as we all know, history has been so hard on white people.
Dakota Dawn is the capper to a strange crusade to remind us that during that pleasant interlude between Plymouth Rock and Wounded Knee, Indians killed white people and sometimes took their scalps.
Michno sets out to tell the story of the allegedly “decisive” first week of the Dakota Uprising. That should have been a warning. There was nothing “decisive” about the first week of the uprising for the simple reason (Michno does not dispute this) that the Dakota never had a chance of succeeding. Their goal was to push the white people off their land. This was an impossible task, and nothing that happened between August 17 and August 24 of 1862 would have changed that.
Rather, this time period – this first week – lets Michno dwell where he has become most comfortable: in atrocities. This is a swim in blood, a revel in slaughter. You might ask – as I did – why this book was written. Michno answers that in his preface (because Turabian requires a Preface!): “I wrote this book for selfish reasons – I wrote it for me.”
To be fair, Michno goes on to state his belief that previous accounts of the slaughter are insufficient. He is entitled to that belief. I am entitled to express my doubt. I have yet to read a book on the Dakota Uprising that has spared the reader any of the grotesqueries of the massacre, whether that book is Oscar Garrett Wall’s Recollections of the Sioux Massacre (referring to the Indians as a “crazed legion”), written in 1909, Duane Schultz’s Over the Earth I Come, published in 1992, or Scott Berg’s 38 Nooses which came out last year.
The difference between this book – and all those others – is that Dakota Dawn focuses almost exclusively on Indian outrages (and alleged Indian outrages). Thus, the real subtitle of Dakota Dawn should be History Without Context, But With Scalps.
To be sure, Michno does begin things with a short, insufficient chapter on the causes of the conflict. It’s in this chapter that he calls the Dakota children.
There is no denying the complexity of the Dakota conflict. Its causes are tangled and twisted up in human personalities, in human greed, in shortsighted and selfish men, both Indian and white. But with brevity and insinuation, Michno leaves you with the impression that all things were equal when the match met the tinder. That’s not true. One side was starving and being squeezed off the sliver of land that remained to them.
Ending his book after one week also allows Michno to ignore Minnesota’s vengeance. You won’t find anything in this book (beyond a lone paragraph) about Dakota women and children herded into a concentration camp at Fort Snelling; put in trains and steamboats and sent down to Crow Creek. You won’t read a word about how they died in the hundreds. Michno dwells longingly on the “innocent” white farmers slain in their fields; he has not a tear to shed for the equally innocent who starved in that barren waste.
Still, his book, his rules. He wants to write about this week, so be it.
But it’s not honest.
Throughout Dakota Dawn, Michno displays absolute credulity in the face of white accounts, while steadfastly ignoring Indian accounts or white accounts favorable to Indians. Time and again, he relates the horrifically barbaric stories of murder and rapine passed on by the settlers. Babies ripped from wombs. Babies nailed to walls. Babies with their heads dashed against tree trunks. Be warned: babies do not fare well in this book.
The problem with all these accounts are that there are uncorroborated and unverified and often lack basic foundation and come to us second and third and fourth and fifth hand. Oft times the story begins with a German or Dutch-speaking settler, long after the fact, telling his tale in a native tongue to a person who took it down (somehow, without a recorder) and then translated it.
Contemporary and near-contemporary researchers, including Marion Satterlee and Isaac Heard, found little evidence of the mutilations described by obviously-frightened and traumatized survivors. Moreover, the kangaroo-courts set up in the wake of the uprising convicted 200 warriors, but only managed to find 38 men who had killed (and only two who had raped). Michno mentions this only in passing, and only then to decry “politically correct” historians belittling the plight of white victims.
This is not to say that Michno hides faulty “eyewitness” accounts. Quite the opposite. He puts them on the page without remark. For instance, there is the lovely story of a young boy who has his heart torn out of his chest. The teller of this tale claims to have witnessed the deed with his own eyes. Unfortunately for his credibility, the boy’s mother also told her story: how her son was wounded and still alive when she found him. A thing quite impossible when one’s heart has been excised from its cavity. The heart-story, then, is a lie. Told for what reason? We can speculate. An exaggeration. A cry for attention. Hatred towards Indians. But in the end, a lie.
When it comes time to weigh accounts, Indian versus white, Michno invariably chooses the white version. There is, for example, Michno’s telling of the battle at Fort Ridgely and the question of Indian casualties. The whites claimed Indian casualties to be one-hundred or more. The Indians said their casualties were low. In the words of Big Eagle, they “did not have many” fatalities.
Oh contraire, Michno writes:
This blithe and bloodthirsty dismissal of Indian testimony bothers me on several levels. First, men in battle always overestimate the amount of damage they’ve done. It is rare to see someone cop to the reality of I was really scared during the battle and I only shot my gun once, and that was straight up in the air. Over-exaggeration was especially rampant in the Indian Wars, where whites often claimed to have slain phantom legions, though no bodies had been left behind. Fort Ridgely would not be the first, nor last time, that the American military has fudged body counts while fighting an indigenous insurgency (*cough* Vietnam *cough*).
Secondly, Michno’s supreme belief in the power of white observation above all shows a distinct lack of imagination. I’m not asking for empathy, per se, just the acknowledgment that the Dakota warriors in this battle were men. I’m not trying to put too fine a point on it, but these were humans, born of women to numbered days. They had wives and children and friends and loves; some were handsome, some were not; they had different talents and faults and personalities.
They had names.
And when the battle was over, the Dakota could count their own dead because they knew these men, their names, their wives and children left behind. They could count the dead because men who were their friends were no longer beside them. The white accounts convey a blusteringly fictional vision of red-painted waves scythed before Ridgely like summer wheat. The Indian accounts convey the reality of individuals who went into battle, and some who did not come out.
My negative response to Michno’s book is strong because I deeply respect his talents. However, I have come to question his priorities. Dakota Dawn does not present a new interpretation of this sad event. It presents a regressive analysis that could have been printed in a New Ulm newspaper in the weeks after the uprising.
Dakota Dawn is an obvious pushback against modern academic historians and their modern academic histories, along with all that that entails: inclusiveness; diversity of viewpoints; skepticism of traditional narratives; criticism of mainstream power structures; and the unraveling of cherished foundational myths.
Michno presents Dakota Dawn as somehow purer than today’s squishy, multi-cultural histories. He asserts that his in the unvarnished history, shorn of modern (see: liberal) encumbrances.
Of course, that’s all backwards. Modern histories – the ones where Indians (and blacks, and women, and every other minority) – are given the chance to tell their stories come far closer to reaching anything like the truth. They fill in the gaps that earlier generations of historians never bothered to fill.
This is an odd throwback to the ignorant old days.
But it does have some very insightful maps.
The subject is the Dakota Uprising of 1862 in which hundreds of Minnesota settlers were killed in their homes and fields, following which hundreds of Dakota Indians were exiled to Crow Creek Reservation, where upwards of 1,000 men, women and children died from starvation and exposure. Like I said: ugly. It was a nasty, brutal conflict that disregarded age and gender, that pitted culture against culture, and that turned mercy into weakness.
The subject’s ugliness is a historical reality.
The book’s ugliness has no excuse.
Gregory Michno’s Dakota Dawn is one of those post-revisionist revisionist histories that unapologetically retracts any apologies ever made to the Indians. (See also, S.C. Gwynne’s execrable Empire of the Summer Moon, which somehow got shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize). It seeks to reframe western history so that it more closely resembles the pre-Vietnam Era paradigm. To wit: white women are virtuous victims; white men are heroic conquerors; and the Indians are murderous “others,” savages who know only brutality and violence. Or, in Michno’s words:
Vengeance and retaliation were primary motivators in Sioux society. Not only in warfare involving entire tribes, but in day to day affairs, their responses often appeared to be that of a spoiled child.
After typing that out, I had to recheck something… Yep, this was published in 2011.
(It is tempting, at this point, to belie the crassness of Michno’s generalization, and the startling lack of imagination behind it. Instead, I will say two things. First, read Royal Hassrick’s The Sioux, which engages the Lakota and the Dakota as – you know – human beings. Second, when making such a generalization, Mr. Michno, never forget that you are an American, and therefore no stranger to “vengeance and retaliation.” Remember, we invented (and named!) that thing that uses atoms to turn people to dust. We’re not exactly hobbits.)
Part of my disgust with this book – and truly, I despise it – is that I have been a longtime fan of Greg Michno. This is by way of disclosure. I’m not objective. I’m scorned.
I’ve read the guy since his first book, The Mystery of E Troop, written back when Michno lived in Michigan and worked in the Department of Social Services. I loved the studiousness of that book. I loved its passionate amateurishness. I loved how he loved his subject, and took time off from work to pursue it. I loved his author’s photo, which looked like it caught him by surprise at an insurance convention in Cedar Rapids.
The Mystery of E Troop, and its follow-up, Lakota Noon, placed great emphasis on minutiae, in collecting and parsing every single primary source. Michno was never a great writer (his lack of confidence shows, if his self-conscious citation to Turabian’s A Manual for Writers is any indication), but his thoroughness was laudable. He always tried to place a framework of certainty over the uncertain, by utilizing time-distance analyses and chronologies. His starting point for such frameworks were always uncomfortably arbitrary, but by the time he finished presenting his case, you could certainly be lulled by his accomplishment: the creation of a believable narrative.
Then, for whatever reason, Michno began to change focus. He wrote an article (later a book) declaring that the Sand Creek massacre was no massacre at all. Then he co-authored a book with his wife called A Fate Worse than Death, detailing all the horrible things Indians did to white people. Because, as we all know, history has been so hard on white people.
Dakota Dawn is the capper to a strange crusade to remind us that during that pleasant interlude between Plymouth Rock and Wounded Knee, Indians killed white people and sometimes took their scalps.
Michno sets out to tell the story of the allegedly “decisive” first week of the Dakota Uprising. That should have been a warning. There was nothing “decisive” about the first week of the uprising for the simple reason (Michno does not dispute this) that the Dakota never had a chance of succeeding. Their goal was to push the white people off their land. This was an impossible task, and nothing that happened between August 17 and August 24 of 1862 would have changed that.
Rather, this time period – this first week – lets Michno dwell where he has become most comfortable: in atrocities. This is a swim in blood, a revel in slaughter. You might ask – as I did – why this book was written. Michno answers that in his preface (because Turabian requires a Preface!): “I wrote this book for selfish reasons – I wrote it for me.”
To be fair, Michno goes on to state his belief that previous accounts of the slaughter are insufficient. He is entitled to that belief. I am entitled to express my doubt. I have yet to read a book on the Dakota Uprising that has spared the reader any of the grotesqueries of the massacre, whether that book is Oscar Garrett Wall’s Recollections of the Sioux Massacre (referring to the Indians as a “crazed legion”), written in 1909, Duane Schultz’s Over the Earth I Come, published in 1992, or Scott Berg’s 38 Nooses which came out last year.
The difference between this book – and all those others – is that Dakota Dawn focuses almost exclusively on Indian outrages (and alleged Indian outrages). Thus, the real subtitle of Dakota Dawn should be History Without Context, But With Scalps.
To be sure, Michno does begin things with a short, insufficient chapter on the causes of the conflict. It’s in this chapter that he calls the Dakota children.
There is no denying the complexity of the Dakota conflict. Its causes are tangled and twisted up in human personalities, in human greed, in shortsighted and selfish men, both Indian and white. But with brevity and insinuation, Michno leaves you with the impression that all things were equal when the match met the tinder. That’s not true. One side was starving and being squeezed off the sliver of land that remained to them.
Ending his book after one week also allows Michno to ignore Minnesota’s vengeance. You won’t find anything in this book (beyond a lone paragraph) about Dakota women and children herded into a concentration camp at Fort Snelling; put in trains and steamboats and sent down to Crow Creek. You won’t read a word about how they died in the hundreds. Michno dwells longingly on the “innocent” white farmers slain in their fields; he has not a tear to shed for the equally innocent who starved in that barren waste.
Still, his book, his rules. He wants to write about this week, so be it.
But it’s not honest.
Throughout Dakota Dawn, Michno displays absolute credulity in the face of white accounts, while steadfastly ignoring Indian accounts or white accounts favorable to Indians. Time and again, he relates the horrifically barbaric stories of murder and rapine passed on by the settlers. Babies ripped from wombs. Babies nailed to walls. Babies with their heads dashed against tree trunks. Be warned: babies do not fare well in this book.
The problem with all these accounts are that there are uncorroborated and unverified and often lack basic foundation and come to us second and third and fourth and fifth hand. Oft times the story begins with a German or Dutch-speaking settler, long after the fact, telling his tale in a native tongue to a person who took it down (somehow, without a recorder) and then translated it.
Contemporary and near-contemporary researchers, including Marion Satterlee and Isaac Heard, found little evidence of the mutilations described by obviously-frightened and traumatized survivors. Moreover, the kangaroo-courts set up in the wake of the uprising convicted 200 warriors, but only managed to find 38 men who had killed (and only two who had raped). Michno mentions this only in passing, and only then to decry “politically correct” historians belittling the plight of white victims.
This is not to say that Michno hides faulty “eyewitness” accounts. Quite the opposite. He puts them on the page without remark. For instance, there is the lovely story of a young boy who has his heart torn out of his chest. The teller of this tale claims to have witnessed the deed with his own eyes. Unfortunately for his credibility, the boy’s mother also told her story: how her son was wounded and still alive when she found him. A thing quite impossible when one’s heart has been excised from its cavity. The heart-story, then, is a lie. Told for what reason? We can speculate. An exaggeration. A cry for attention. Hatred towards Indians. But in the end, a lie.
When it comes time to weigh accounts, Indian versus white, Michno invariably chooses the white version. There is, for example, Michno’s telling of the battle at Fort Ridgely and the question of Indian casualties. The whites claimed Indian casualties to be one-hundred or more. The Indians said their casualties were low. In the words of Big Eagle, they “did not have many” fatalities.
Oh contraire, Michno writes:
These low estimates of Indian losses are directly challenged by white eyewitnesses who shot them down, watched as the artillery pieces tore them apart at the barricade and on the way back to the ravine, and who counted bodies after the fighting stopped…
This blithe and bloodthirsty dismissal of Indian testimony bothers me on several levels. First, men in battle always overestimate the amount of damage they’ve done. It is rare to see someone cop to the reality of I was really scared during the battle and I only shot my gun once, and that was straight up in the air. Over-exaggeration was especially rampant in the Indian Wars, where whites often claimed to have slain phantom legions, though no bodies had been left behind. Fort Ridgely would not be the first, nor last time, that the American military has fudged body counts while fighting an indigenous insurgency (*cough* Vietnam *cough*).
Secondly, Michno’s supreme belief in the power of white observation above all shows a distinct lack of imagination. I’m not asking for empathy, per se, just the acknowledgment that the Dakota warriors in this battle were men. I’m not trying to put too fine a point on it, but these were humans, born of women to numbered days. They had wives and children and friends and loves; some were handsome, some were not; they had different talents and faults and personalities.
They had names.
And when the battle was over, the Dakota could count their own dead because they knew these men, their names, their wives and children left behind. They could count the dead because men who were their friends were no longer beside them. The white accounts convey a blusteringly fictional vision of red-painted waves scythed before Ridgely like summer wheat. The Indian accounts convey the reality of individuals who went into battle, and some who did not come out.
My negative response to Michno’s book is strong because I deeply respect his talents. However, I have come to question his priorities. Dakota Dawn does not present a new interpretation of this sad event. It presents a regressive analysis that could have been printed in a New Ulm newspaper in the weeks after the uprising.
Dakota Dawn is an obvious pushback against modern academic historians and their modern academic histories, along with all that that entails: inclusiveness; diversity of viewpoints; skepticism of traditional narratives; criticism of mainstream power structures; and the unraveling of cherished foundational myths.
Michno presents Dakota Dawn as somehow purer than today’s squishy, multi-cultural histories. He asserts that his in the unvarnished history, shorn of modern (see: liberal) encumbrances.
Of course, that’s all backwards. Modern histories – the ones where Indians (and blacks, and women, and every other minority) – are given the chance to tell their stories come far closer to reaching anything like the truth. They fill in the gaps that earlier generations of historians never bothered to fill.
This is an odd throwback to the ignorant old days.
But it does have some very insightful maps.
November 13, 2022
Dakota Dawn by Greg Michno is a book about the largest Indian uprising ever recorded in North America. It was a conflict that took place in 1862 during the Civil War, and the uprising was spread throughout an area of 200 miles by 120 miles inside the state of Minnesota. The book covers just the first week of it, in which hundreds of unsuspecting white settlers were killed by the Dakota Indians, and four major battles were fought, two at Fort Ridgely and two at the town of New Ulm. At the end of the fighting, the governor of Minnesota said that half the population of his state had fled for their lives and entire counties were depopulated. However, the Indian uprising has largely vanished from public consciousness despite its massive scale.
The Dakota Indians had originally lived near the Great Lakes, but they had been forced west into Minnesota by the Chippawa, and this did not improve the Dakotas' tempers. Efforts by the government to make the Dakota settle down and become farmers had split the tribe into two parts, with farmer Indians making a go of white ways, and blanket Indians who still clung to their old hunting and gathering lifestyle. The blanket Indians detested the farmer Indians and had been harassing them and destroying their crops in an attempt to force them back into the old ways.
The uprising highlights the major economic difference between the farming and hunting/gathering lifestyles. The farmers could accumulate enough food surpluses via their crop and livestock raising to feed themselves during difficult times, but the hunter/gatherers could not and starved. The blanket Indians often begged food from the white settlers and ran up debts to traders. These Indians were entirely dependent on regular government payouts for the use of their lands to survive. However, their trading debts were subtracted by the Indian Agent from the government payments, and this made the Dakotas surly, for they had short memories about the debts they owed to the traders, and they were resentful at not receiving their full payments.
For some time, the Dakota had been quietly discussing among themselves the benefits of forcing the whites out of Minnesota and taking the land for themselves, and then two perfect circumstances arrived. The Civil War was distracting the Federal Government in Washington, and the latest government payment, $71,000 in gold, arrived exactly six hours too late.
The Dakota first attacked and killed the hated traders and looted their storehouses, and then they attacked the white settlers. Michno recites a lengthy list of one unsuspecting farmer after another meeting Indians known to him, the Indians making signs of friendship, only to suddenly shoot the farmer. The Indians then invaded the farmhouse and murdered his wife and children, ransacked the place in an orgy of looting and smashing, burned the house, stole or shot livestock, and then burnt the crops.
This, unfortunately, is where the book has its greatest weakness. Michno covers so many victims that they begin to blur together. It would have been better if Michno either picked a representative sample of victims, or related their stories in greater detail to make them more memorable. The Indians went to great trouble to hunt down any whites who fled, searching around farms and throughout the countryside to flush out anyone in hiding. Most of the victims were killed, even the women and children, although some two hundred of them were taken captive according random whim.
The book really gets heated when Michno describes the battles at Fort Ridgely and New Ulm. Hundreds of Indians besieged each place for two days, and the defenders barely managed to hang on. Fort Ridgely, despite its name, had not been build for defense and was simply a collection of buildings placed on the prairie with no protective wall or fortification whatsoever.
Much of the slaughter occurred because the settlers were remarkably unarmed. Michno estimates that no more than one in three families owned a firearm. Many of these weapons were in disrepair and the settlers were short of ammunition. Most of the settlers in this region were Germans, and they did not come from a culture with a hunting tradition. The peasant farmers of Germany had been obtaining their meat via livestock raising for hundreds of years, and hunting animals was a privilege reserved for the aristocracy.
One observer noted sardonically that the German defenders had arrived in Minnesota because they had fled the violence of the German Revolution in 1848, and in 1862 they were yet again dodging having to fight in the Civil War. But now they were being forced to fight a foe they had no quarrel with. One officer bawled out the German men because during the battles significant numbers of them would slink off to hide with the women and children.
Michno makes note of one time in which the settlers at a farmhouse actually had a decent supply of guns, and they barricaded themselves inside the house and shot it out all day with the Indians, who finally became discouraged and left. But this was the only time in Michno's account in which the farmers were able to defend their homestead.
The situation at Fort Ridgely was bad enough since they had only a small number of defenders while they were besieged by hundreds of Indians, but New Ulm's fight was even wilder. The Indians decided to make their most determined push on the second fight at New Ulm, and nearly a thousand Indians attacked. Unlike at Fort Ridgely, New Ulm's defenders were not even soldiers, but only frightened and poorly armed settlers.
New Ulm was a typical prairie settlement consisting of small wooden structures. The Indians set fire to the houses, hoping to destroy the town and flush the whites out into the open where they could be shot down. However, the town's commander, Charles Flandrau, recognized the houses were blocking the field of fire for the defenders and provided cover for Indians so the latter could sneak closer, so he gave orders for more houses to be burned. Around 190 houses were destroyed this way, consisting of most of town, and witnesses said the second day of battle was a scene right out of Dante's Inferno.
New Ulm went up like a torch while Indians ran amok screaming their war cry and shooting whites. Horses and oxen panicked and stampeded along the streets, and frightened dogs ran about biting and attacking people, so much so that Flandrau gave orders to shoot the dogs. The defenders ran low on ammunition and had to use pieces of iron cut up by a blacksmith as bullets. The irregular shape of these makeshift bullets caused them to emit an eerie, shrieking whistle when fired, and this helped to unnerve the Indians. The defenders also put together a makeshift 'cannon' and displayed it, and 'fired' the weapon with an accompanying explosion of powder to fake a cannon shot. This further helped to discourage the attackers, and the Indians abandoned the fight. A smaller group attacked again half-heartedly on a third day, but gave up and left, and the defenders, lacking food and ammunition, evacuated the town and left for safety.
It seems plain to me that a very large number of Indians must have been involved in the uprising, simply by looking at it from the perspective of a time and motion study. Survivors reported that each house was attacked by a group of Indians, and the Indians travelled mostly on foot. You can't just wipe out a farm quickly. All the family had to be shot, knifed, or pummeled to death, and flushed out from their hiding places over many acres of farmland. Household articles would then be smashed or stolen, and the livestock killed or driven off back to Indian communities. Transportation of the booty alone meant some Indians had to detach themselves from the killing parties to remove the plunder and would not available for the next raid. Then the Indians would burn the settler's houses and crops. Again, setting fires over many acres of crops is not quick work.
It seems obvious that it would take at least two to three hours' work just to destroy one farm. Most of the farms were not close together, and many of the escapees mention have to flee distances like 6, 9, or 15 miles to the nearest farm house. The Indians had to travel this same distance, so they must have been unable to attack more than two to three farms in a day. Even those settlers who were able to escape in time still had their farms destroyed by the Indians. Fort Ridgely and New Ulm were attacked by many hundreds of Indians on four different days, days in which these Indians would not have been available to attack outlying farms. Since the range of depredation was 200 to 120 miles throughout Minnesota during this week, and settlers indicate a group of Indians attacked each farm, it's plain that the number of Indians involved in the uprising consisted of at least a few thousand.
President Lincoln approved orders to hang 30-odd Indians after the uprising, and about 300-odd were imprisoned as punishment. Around 500 settlers were killed, and 200-odd whites had to be recaptured from the Indians. The government then decided to move the Dakotas out of Minnesota and into the lands that now bear their name.
Michno's book is especially good on the drama of the battles at Fort Ridgely and New Ulm, despite its flaws when dealing with what happened to the settlers, and I highly recommend it. Lavinia Eastlick's personal account of what happened to her is a good supplement for giving you an idea of what happened to the settlers.
Michno's book is available on Hoopla here:
https://www.hoopladigital.com/title/1...
The Dakota Indians had originally lived near the Great Lakes, but they had been forced west into Minnesota by the Chippawa, and this did not improve the Dakotas' tempers. Efforts by the government to make the Dakota settle down and become farmers had split the tribe into two parts, with farmer Indians making a go of white ways, and blanket Indians who still clung to their old hunting and gathering lifestyle. The blanket Indians detested the farmer Indians and had been harassing them and destroying their crops in an attempt to force them back into the old ways.
The uprising highlights the major economic difference between the farming and hunting/gathering lifestyles. The farmers could accumulate enough food surpluses via their crop and livestock raising to feed themselves during difficult times, but the hunter/gatherers could not and starved. The blanket Indians often begged food from the white settlers and ran up debts to traders. These Indians were entirely dependent on regular government payouts for the use of their lands to survive. However, their trading debts were subtracted by the Indian Agent from the government payments, and this made the Dakotas surly, for they had short memories about the debts they owed to the traders, and they were resentful at not receiving their full payments.
For some time, the Dakota had been quietly discussing among themselves the benefits of forcing the whites out of Minnesota and taking the land for themselves, and then two perfect circumstances arrived. The Civil War was distracting the Federal Government in Washington, and the latest government payment, $71,000 in gold, arrived exactly six hours too late.
The Dakota first attacked and killed the hated traders and looted their storehouses, and then they attacked the white settlers. Michno recites a lengthy list of one unsuspecting farmer after another meeting Indians known to him, the Indians making signs of friendship, only to suddenly shoot the farmer. The Indians then invaded the farmhouse and murdered his wife and children, ransacked the place in an orgy of looting and smashing, burned the house, stole or shot livestock, and then burnt the crops.
This, unfortunately, is where the book has its greatest weakness. Michno covers so many victims that they begin to blur together. It would have been better if Michno either picked a representative sample of victims, or related their stories in greater detail to make them more memorable. The Indians went to great trouble to hunt down any whites who fled, searching around farms and throughout the countryside to flush out anyone in hiding. Most of the victims were killed, even the women and children, although some two hundred of them were taken captive according random whim.
The book really gets heated when Michno describes the battles at Fort Ridgely and New Ulm. Hundreds of Indians besieged each place for two days, and the defenders barely managed to hang on. Fort Ridgely, despite its name, had not been build for defense and was simply a collection of buildings placed on the prairie with no protective wall or fortification whatsoever.
Much of the slaughter occurred because the settlers were remarkably unarmed. Michno estimates that no more than one in three families owned a firearm. Many of these weapons were in disrepair and the settlers were short of ammunition. Most of the settlers in this region were Germans, and they did not come from a culture with a hunting tradition. The peasant farmers of Germany had been obtaining their meat via livestock raising for hundreds of years, and hunting animals was a privilege reserved for the aristocracy.
One observer noted sardonically that the German defenders had arrived in Minnesota because they had fled the violence of the German Revolution in 1848, and in 1862 they were yet again dodging having to fight in the Civil War. But now they were being forced to fight a foe they had no quarrel with. One officer bawled out the German men because during the battles significant numbers of them would slink off to hide with the women and children.
Michno makes note of one time in which the settlers at a farmhouse actually had a decent supply of guns, and they barricaded themselves inside the house and shot it out all day with the Indians, who finally became discouraged and left. But this was the only time in Michno's account in which the farmers were able to defend their homestead.
The situation at Fort Ridgely was bad enough since they had only a small number of defenders while they were besieged by hundreds of Indians, but New Ulm's fight was even wilder. The Indians decided to make their most determined push on the second fight at New Ulm, and nearly a thousand Indians attacked. Unlike at Fort Ridgely, New Ulm's defenders were not even soldiers, but only frightened and poorly armed settlers.
New Ulm was a typical prairie settlement consisting of small wooden structures. The Indians set fire to the houses, hoping to destroy the town and flush the whites out into the open where they could be shot down. However, the town's commander, Charles Flandrau, recognized the houses were blocking the field of fire for the defenders and provided cover for Indians so the latter could sneak closer, so he gave orders for more houses to be burned. Around 190 houses were destroyed this way, consisting of most of town, and witnesses said the second day of battle was a scene right out of Dante's Inferno.
New Ulm went up like a torch while Indians ran amok screaming their war cry and shooting whites. Horses and oxen panicked and stampeded along the streets, and frightened dogs ran about biting and attacking people, so much so that Flandrau gave orders to shoot the dogs. The defenders ran low on ammunition and had to use pieces of iron cut up by a blacksmith as bullets. The irregular shape of these makeshift bullets caused them to emit an eerie, shrieking whistle when fired, and this helped to unnerve the Indians. The defenders also put together a makeshift 'cannon' and displayed it, and 'fired' the weapon with an accompanying explosion of powder to fake a cannon shot. This further helped to discourage the attackers, and the Indians abandoned the fight. A smaller group attacked again half-heartedly on a third day, but gave up and left, and the defenders, lacking food and ammunition, evacuated the town and left for safety.
It seems plain to me that a very large number of Indians must have been involved in the uprising, simply by looking at it from the perspective of a time and motion study. Survivors reported that each house was attacked by a group of Indians, and the Indians travelled mostly on foot. You can't just wipe out a farm quickly. All the family had to be shot, knifed, or pummeled to death, and flushed out from their hiding places over many acres of farmland. Household articles would then be smashed or stolen, and the livestock killed or driven off back to Indian communities. Transportation of the booty alone meant some Indians had to detach themselves from the killing parties to remove the plunder and would not available for the next raid. Then the Indians would burn the settler's houses and crops. Again, setting fires over many acres of crops is not quick work.
It seems obvious that it would take at least two to three hours' work just to destroy one farm. Most of the farms were not close together, and many of the escapees mention have to flee distances like 6, 9, or 15 miles to the nearest farm house. The Indians had to travel this same distance, so they must have been unable to attack more than two to three farms in a day. Even those settlers who were able to escape in time still had their farms destroyed by the Indians. Fort Ridgely and New Ulm were attacked by many hundreds of Indians on four different days, days in which these Indians would not have been available to attack outlying farms. Since the range of depredation was 200 to 120 miles throughout Minnesota during this week, and settlers indicate a group of Indians attacked each farm, it's plain that the number of Indians involved in the uprising consisted of at least a few thousand.
President Lincoln approved orders to hang 30-odd Indians after the uprising, and about 300-odd were imprisoned as punishment. Around 500 settlers were killed, and 200-odd whites had to be recaptured from the Indians. The government then decided to move the Dakotas out of Minnesota and into the lands that now bear their name.
Michno's book is especially good on the drama of the battles at Fort Ridgely and New Ulm, despite its flaws when dealing with what happened to the settlers, and I highly recommend it. Lavinia Eastlick's personal account of what happened to her is a good supplement for giving you an idea of what happened to the settlers.
Michno's book is available on Hoopla here:
https://www.hoopladigital.com/title/1...
September 23, 2015
I enjoyed this well-researched, detailed book. I have read several works by Michno, and he does not disappoint. I sometimes had difficulty keeping track of what was happening where and to whom. I wish the dates would have been repeated more often throughout the text and that a map of modern day Minnesota had been included reflecting where and when the events took place. Hats off to the author for tackling a subject unknown to most.
April 21, 2024
This book, covers the Dakota uprising in Minnesota in 1862 in all it's brutality. This is the third of Michno's titles I have read and I always enjoy them. He has a very detailed and straight forward method of telling the story. Of course this is my opinion, but I like that he leaves it up to the reader to decide the veracity of one sides story against the other. His story telling may not be as good as some, but I feel it is good enough to get the information across.
A few things that stood out to me;
Politicians/Bureaucrats - Make promises they can't keep. We all know that, yet we keep voting the same ones in. That said the repercussions of their lack of faith are not so tragic now, as they were in the fall of 1862. Typical political nonsense, you have a guy making great inroads with the Dakota, integrating them into American society, at least some, then because of a change in the party in charge, you replace him with an idiotic political appointee. What can go wrong, right? Well, a few hundred farmers and theirs wives and children dead is the answer.
Myth of an armed populace - Very few of the farmers had firearms, surprisingly so. I was astounded by this fact. Even the towns had few weapons. The military had barely enough to outfit a portion of the farmers that streamed into Ft Ridgely for the pitched battles there. There were several factors that fed into this. The Dakota were generally friendly to the farmers, the farmers were mostly recent, or fairly recent immigrants from Scandinavia or Germany, and the fact the Civil War was raging and weapons were mostly funneled to the big armies doing the fighting. This led to easy pickins for the Dakota.
No one was immune from the depredations - People died that were on friendly terms with the Dakota, unarmed women, children, infants were killed, some mutilated (not all or many but there seems to have been a good number), there was no rhyme or reason to it. Some were randomly taken captive, some were helped by certain Dakota to safety. It would seem that the luck of the draw was the order of the day whether you lived or died.
The End Result - The Dakota were forced out of Minnesota and into the Dakota Territories. They were not a plains tribe, but a woodland one, so that required a shift in lifestyle. Many of the tribesmen were put on "trial" though no defense was given. A number were given prison time, over 300 were slated for execution. Abraham Lincoln had the final say and wisely commuted all but 39 of the sentences. Those 39 were executed in one mass hanging, which looks to have included one man that was most likely innocent. I don't see how this could have gone too differently, though a well documented trial would have been better, it is probably asking too much for people in that time or place.
Overall a great read, and one I would recommend.
A few things that stood out to me;
Politicians/Bureaucrats - Make promises they can't keep. We all know that, yet we keep voting the same ones in. That said the repercussions of their lack of faith are not so tragic now, as they were in the fall of 1862. Typical political nonsense, you have a guy making great inroads with the Dakota, integrating them into American society, at least some, then because of a change in the party in charge, you replace him with an idiotic political appointee. What can go wrong, right? Well, a few hundred farmers and theirs wives and children dead is the answer.
Myth of an armed populace - Very few of the farmers had firearms, surprisingly so. I was astounded by this fact. Even the towns had few weapons. The military had barely enough to outfit a portion of the farmers that streamed into Ft Ridgely for the pitched battles there. There were several factors that fed into this. The Dakota were generally friendly to the farmers, the farmers were mostly recent, or fairly recent immigrants from Scandinavia or Germany, and the fact the Civil War was raging and weapons were mostly funneled to the big armies doing the fighting. This led to easy pickins for the Dakota.
No one was immune from the depredations - People died that were on friendly terms with the Dakota, unarmed women, children, infants were killed, some mutilated (not all or many but there seems to have been a good number), there was no rhyme or reason to it. Some were randomly taken captive, some were helped by certain Dakota to safety. It would seem that the luck of the draw was the order of the day whether you lived or died.
The End Result - The Dakota were forced out of Minnesota and into the Dakota Territories. They were not a plains tribe, but a woodland one, so that required a shift in lifestyle. Many of the tribesmen were put on "trial" though no defense was given. A number were given prison time, over 300 were slated for execution. Abraham Lincoln had the final say and wisely commuted all but 39 of the sentences. Those 39 were executed in one mass hanging, which looks to have included one man that was most likely innocent. I don't see how this could have gone too differently, though a well documented trial would have been better, it is probably asking too much for people in that time or place.
Overall a great read, and one I would recommend.
June 29, 2021
Wow! I couldn't put this book down. What incredible history
January 24, 2023
Detailed & thought provoking
War is hell for combatants & civilians alike, and hell came to Minnesota in August of 1862. An excellent & detailed look at the Dakota uprising that kept sucking me in (it’s frankly one horror after another).
War is hell for combatants & civilians alike, and hell came to Minnesota in August of 1862. An excellent & detailed look at the Dakota uprising that kept sucking me in (it’s frankly one horror after another).
September 12, 2016
I have to say this was one of the best books about the Dakota War/Uprising that I’ve read. Mr. Michno chronicles the terrible events of August 17-24 (and a few years prior and after.) I found the book hard to put down as we learn how different farm families were attacked and whether they survived or not. It is pretty brutal to read, so not for the faint of heart. Having heard about this topic since I was a kid (my great great great Grandfather was killed in the 2nd Battle of New Ulm) this is the first time I understood how situation progressed down the Minnesota River Valley, plus the first time I read such a detailed description of the battles at Fort Ridgley and New Ulm. I also didn’t realize how wide-spread the fighting/killing was. Mr. Michno also includes the personal property lost by settlers (from their claims) so you get of sense of all that was lost in addition to people’s lives. Michno has found contradiction in many of the accounts (which is understandable considering the stress folks were under) so I’m feeling a little more inspired to revisit my family’s oral stories. Overall, Michno does a good job chronicling what was just a mess and devastation for all involved.
January 26, 2012
This book is challenging because it set's the American Indian wars in a history with Europe and European monarchy far before the government of the U.S. was ready to start treaty making. At the same time it demonstrates how ready the U.S. was ready to make treaties that neither could be fulfilled nor acted upon. The history of U.S. relations with tribes of Native Americans in the 19th century is little more than a series of lies. This book documents how that resulted in a violent episode that was repeated regardless of the consequence until the whole thing ended in domination. It leaves one wondering what might be next.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews