History Mystery: HERE WERE HANGED 38 SIOUX INDIANS
A mystery popped up last week, one that serves as a metaphor for the difficulty Minnesota faces — in this 150th anniversary year — in acknowledging the Dakota War of 1862 and its aftermath of racism, retribution and white triumphalism.
A large monument that noted the spot along the Minnesota River where 38 Dakota warriors were hanged on the day after Christmas in 1862 — the largest mass execution in American history — has gone missing. One man says he knows where it is — but he ain’t saying.
The 6-foot-tall granite marker, weighing more than four tons, was erected a century ago, in 1912, on or near the spot where the warrior’s bodies are believed to have been hastily buried in shallow, sandy graves — graves that proved easy to rob as frontier doctors, including the father of the famous Mayo Brothers, spent the night pulling out the dead Indians and taking them away to their surgeries so that they might be flayed and dissected and displayed like so many animals.
As Mankato State University Prof. Melodie Andrews noted in a lecture last week, the resemblance of the monument to a somber gravestone was deeply ironic:
The “grave” was empty.
Eventually, the racial boast that seemed to trumpet the triumph of the white race started seeming hollow, too. In the 1920s, Andrews says, Clarence Darrow was horrified by the sight of the marker, saying, “I would never believe that the people of a civilized community would want to commemorate such an atrocious crime.”
One hundred and fifty years after the war that scarred and shaped the new state of Minnesota, we don’t know exactly how to discuss the causes and the effects of 1862, but we know enough to be embarrassed by the way these things used to be portrayed. The Mankato Marker made us uneasy, and brought old pains to the surface.
It had to go. But where? Nobody knows.
By the 1970s, after being moved three or four times, the marker was quietly removed from public display and stored in a city works garage. But it vanished from its storage site sometime in the mid-1990s, and has never been seen again. Like the Dakota Conflict itself, it has been out of sight, but hardly out of mind. Efforts to locate the marker, or to determine its fate, have been made, uncovering various rumors but no actual sign of the marker.
A couple of days after Prof. Andrews’ lecture, however, The Free Press ran an interview with former Mankato Mayor Stan Christ, who now lives in Missouri. Christ, whose heritage includes Dakota Indian ancestry, told the newspaper’s Brian Ojanpa that he knew where the marker is, and for a very simple reason:
“I got rid of it,” he declared flatly.
But he refused to say where, whether he dumped it in the Minnesota, or disposed of it on the Lower Sioux Indian Reservation near Morton, Minn., as some people believe, or whether the stone was ground up into gravel and now lines someone’s garden path.
“There’s only three people in the world who know, and two of them may be dead,” said Christ, who is 72.
There is a modern plaque that marks the hanging site, and a large sculpture of a buffalo that was installed there in 1987, on the 125th anniversary of what should be known not only as the country’s largest mass execution, but also as the place on which one of the country’s greatest miscarriages of justice was carried out. And a plan is under consideration for a new monument that would list the names of the 38, instead of just lumping them together as nameless, dead Indians.
But the case of Mankato’s Missing Marker highlights the difficulty that Minnesota still has of coming to terms with the genocidal policies and racism that drove the Dakota to the brink of destruction, sparked a desperate short-lived war for survival and led to more than a century — 150 years, really — of denial and forgetfulness on the part of the state that was built upon the bones of its original inhabitants. Here Were Hanged 38 Indians? Why? What happened after that? What led up to it?
That marker had to go: It didn’t represent the truth, an explanation or the end of the story. It — and its unceremonious disappearance — represented the end of the old way of telling it. We are still trying to figure out how to begin telling the real story.
HERE WERE HANGED THE 38. And here is where the story starts.
–30–
If this “monument” were still on public display, I’m sure it would be sporting some pro-George Zimmerman graffiti.
Puke. You are probably right. Speaking of which, do you think Zimmerman will ask for a change of venue… perhaps Willmar, MN? It seems people there don’t watch the news I hear. I’ve heard the 911 screams are the kid’s (voice analysis) instead of being those of the 250 lb George.
Take care
It’s interesting to me that someone with Lakota heritage “got rid of it” instead of someone whose lineage includes ancestors that hung the Indians. I forget to look with historical eyes and see a stone erected in triumph and instead see it for what it would be today… a black smudge on Minnesota’s good name.
I’ve read that one of the hanged Indians was actually someone else (converted to Christianity and wasn’t involved in the killings?)… so they even hanged an innocent man.
And to end it all? A death march to the internment/ concentration camp… Fort Snelling.
Holly: More on Chaska, the Dakota who was hanged by accident, or maybe by murderous intent, from a column I wrote in December, 2010:
Nick Coleman: Harm done in the making of Minnesota
By NICK COLEMAN, Star Tribune
December 19, 2010
December is a time for reflection and for taking care of unfinished business, so it is fitting, perhaps, that the end of the year in Minnesota always comes with a painful reminder of a deeply troubled past that remains difficult to resolve.
Next Sunday, Dec. 26, will mark the 148th anniversary of America’s largest mass execution, the hanging of 38 Dakota Indians in Mankato in a proceeding attended by thousands and done under the color of law but which nonetheless was flawed in how it was carried out and how those marked for death were chosen.
Justice had little to do with the event. Vengeance was what it was all about.
Swindled out of their land, cheated of the paltry payments they were supposed to receive, pushed to the point of starvation, confined to tiny reservations and facing the collapse of their traditional culture, the Dakota exploded in rage and fear and tried to wipe the Minnesota River Valley clear of the expanding white population.
If the original sin of Minnesota was the injustice perpetrated against its original inhabitants, the violence of 1862 and the retribution that followed was the flood that destroyed the old and gave the new state a new start.
But in the view of historian Gary Clayton Anderson, a Moorhead native and an expert on frontier Indian and white cultures, the war and its aftermath were the defining events that made Minnesota.
Born in blood and fire, the state had a rocky start that is still being debated.
Last week, the New York Times reported on a proposal to “pardon” one of the Dakota hanged at Mankato, a man named Chaska, a common name given to first-born sons.
There were several “Chaskas” among the 303 condemned prisoners sentenced to death by military trials — trials that were brief kangaroo courts and that dispatched death sentences by the score, including to many Indians whose “crimes” amounted to nothing more than fighting in battles with soldiers.
Chaska was among the majority of the prisoners spared from the gallows by President Abraham Lincoln, who was aware, unlike the authorities in Minnesota, that executing 300 Indians would not look good to the world.
Chaska was supposed to be reprieved, but was hanged anyway. He may have been confused with another prisoner with the same name.
But some believe it is very possible Chaska was hanged because he had taken a white woman under his protection and because rumors of a sexual relationship between Chaska and the woman had outraged whites.
The story makes quite a potboiler (I have written extensively about it in the past), but it is important for what it reveals about the lynch-law justice of 1862, and for what it says about our efforts to cope with that history. U.S. Sen. Al Franken, according to the Times, may introduce a bill issuing a posthumous “pardon” to Chaska.
It is a well-intentioned effort, but raises more questions than it answers.
Was Chaska the only Indian not to deserve his fate? Hardly.
Others among the hanged, not to mention among the hundreds of men, women and children who died in prison, in exile, of starvation or, in some cases, who were shot and killed for a state-sponsored “bounty,” were equally innocent.
In 1987 — “The Year of Reconciliation” that didn’t reconcile anything — I spent a year writing about war of 1862 for the Pioneer Press, and the St. Paul newspaper editorialized in favor of a proposal, which had the support of Gov. Rudy Perpich, to extend posthumous pardons to all of the executed.
The idea fizzled after many Indians objected, quite reasonably, on the grounds that pardons imply guilt. The executed and imprisoned were only guilty, they argued, of being Indians.
Anderson, the Oklahoma University historian and biographer of Little Crow, the Dakota leader, says the 1862 prosecutions suffered from the same problems affecting modern-day efforts to prosecute Al-Qaida suspects: Prisoners from a different culture, language, religion and ethnicity, and trouble separating them.
More than one Muslim Chaska has been imprisoned and punished extrajudicially — and even tortured — in cases of mistaken identity. In the end, how such prisoners are treated and punished may say more about “us” than it does about “them.”
So we are left — two years from the 150th anniversary of 1862′s bloodshed — wondering what to do with this history.
If pardons aren’t the answer, what about apologies to the Dakota tribes and their descendants?
The Legislature has called on Congress to apologize for the government order that exiled the Dakota Sioux from Minnesota after the war — a neat plan that ignores the state’s role in the “banishment or extermination” of the Dakota.
That idea seems to have little chance of passing.
The war and its repercussions defined our state, says Anderson.
Maybe the only fitting way to remember and reflect on the events of 1862 is a moment of silence.
Nick Coleman is at nickcolemanmn@gmail.com.
© 2012 Star Tribune. All rights reserved.
As usual, an awesome read. I’m left wondering which is worse, hanging by mistake, or hanging because someone felt like there should be a hanging. Hopefully we never lose faith in our modern court system.
I wonder if we are witnessing a change in the way things work (which could lead to a loss of faith)… Is it good to assume the courts protect the minority because laws are made by the majority? Perhaps Scalia and others have now decided that is not the role of the courts at all. Is there now a feeling we need to protect the majority from what is immoral?
of course, people taking the law into their own hands (whether they feel scared or not) hasn’t traditionally been a part of a civilized society.
Back to the Dakota Conflict. I’ve always felt uneasy about Lincoln’s orders as they are presented in a “oh, what about 10%” kind of way (in textbooks it might feel that way). What should make us feel uneasy, of course, is that it was the Executive branch moving on this…
Thanks for your thoughtful responses/questions… Lincoln was under tremendous pressure to hang as many as he could…Ramsey and the MN delegation in Washington basically told him that id he didn’t hang enough Indians, the citizens would finish the job.
Though I oppose the Death penalty for anyone, including those who were hanged in 1862… One has to remember that the LaKota declared war on the United States government at a time that the nation was involved in a Civil War. My Great, great grandfather August Reopke was a settler on land that the LaKota had given up by treaty in 1858. He was killed defending New Ulm as a 45 year old man protecting his family from those who intended to KILL them. As we remember the great injustice that was done to all indian peoples as we settled this country, we must also remember that the settlers came here from Germany with the promise of free land, believed that they would be protected by the US government, and in this case many were killed by a tribe that had declared war on the US.
Chuck: Your ancestors were used as guinea pigs by wealthy white politicians and schemers who wanted to see how much pressure could be brought to bear on the Dakota without actually putting the lives of English-speakers at risk. Mission accomplished. I might also point out that that so-called “death penalty” meted out to the Indians came without real trials. The hanging wasn’t justice. It was a miscarriage of same.
One last thought as to the hangings… don’t you think that it was as much as an effort to send a message to any other tribes that were also not getting their payments from the Federal Government because ever scrap of food was being sent to the troops that the Government would be swift and brutal towards any tribe supporting the Confederate Government? This is the middle of the Civil War and the Union is being attacked behind the lines… the fear that this would break out all over had to weigh heavily on Lincoln and the Department of War also…
Feds were, as you say, a bit distracted. Mostly, Minnesota authorities saw a few hundred dead Germans as a good excuse to grab the last of the Dakota land, to banish the Indians and finish tying up their fortunes.
[...] Here Were Hanged 38 Sioux Indians – Nick Coleman, The State I’m In [...]
I am a teacher, and whenever this topic or the Duluth lynchings are brought up, the kids are always shocked. They have apparently been led to believe these kinds of things happen somewhere else, but not in Minnesota.
I’m a 5th generation Mankatoan who grew up in Mankato, having ancestors who were amongst the first Mankato settlers to start the town. they were also at the execution in a 1912 they were there to dedicate the marker that marked the site of the execution. beer trees in other commemorative items came out to commemorate the event but it was always firmly stated by the early settlers that the marker was merely a marker, carved in st. cloud granite to mark the site of the event, not to celebrate it. unfortunately a lot of businesses took the opportunity to commemorate the event by putting out beer trays and eben larger tin wall hangings, showing soldiers drinking beer while the execution occurred. such distortions of the truth were grossly inaccurate and unfortunate, of course. like the pendulum on a clock, times change, attitudes change. Clarence Darrow’s comments about the marker in the 1920s was followed later by the mankato jaycees of the 1960s wanting to turn the marker around and carve friendship and happiness on the back of it. I wrote a letter to the editor of the Mankato free press at the time that this was akin to de-stalinizing Russia, by removing all of Stalin’s monuments in Russia. it was about this same time that mayor stan Chris made the marker disappear, as an excuse that it was in the way of urban renewal. the marker was an effort to mark the site 50 years after the event and 150 years after the event, we now have a buffalo commemorating the site and remembering those who were executed. few educated people would argue that the Indians were given a raw deal, cheated, and unjustly taken from their land. does that mean we should pardon and or make Saints of those who murdered defenseless helpless settlers. i don’t think so. it is time for us to accept what happened and to live with it and not to try and rationalize a politically correct solution. it is what it is, it was what it was. we need to leave it at that and move forward.
I was wondering if you could tell me where I could find out; or if you know the names of the 38 Dakota men hung in Mankato?
The names are readily available online. They also are printed on the new monument that was dedicated in Mankato on Dec. 26, 2012. If you check my post on that occasion, you can see a photo of the monument, which is made to resemble a large, buffalo hide scroll:
http://www.nickcolemanmn.com/?p=3996