Although this war was a minor conflict by comparison to the Sioux wars of the 1870’s, it had the effect of costing Minnesota’s Sioux most of their ancestral land, and it was punctuated by the largest mass execution in U.S. history.
On August 17, 1862, four Santee Sioux men who were returning from a fruitless search for food beyond the boundaries of their southern Minnesota reservation attacked and killed five white settlers near Acton, in Meeker County. Ordinarily, the culprits would have been surrendered to white authorities, but the incident did not occur in ordinary times. The Sioux of Minnesota were starving. Long-promised annuities were slow in coming, as usual, and doubts about the ability of a nation divided by civil war to fulfill its obligations to an isolated frontier community led traders at the Redwood Agency to refuse to open their warehouses to the Sioux until payment in gold arrived from Washington, D.C. Trader Andrew Myrick
On August 18, a large Sioux war party attacked and looted the Redwood Agency and wiped out most of a military unit sent from Fort Snelling. Among the first to die, Myrick was found with his mouth symbolically stuffed with grass. As politicians argued over payment of annuities in paper money or in gold, the Great Sioux War was beginning.
Although the outbreak of hostilities appeared to be local, its causes must be viewed in a national context. The Fort Snelling reserve, established in 1819 near present-day St. Paul, was, until 1851, the only land in Minnesota Territory that did not belong to Native Americans. Nevertheless, thousands of white settlers, in the familiar pattern of national expansion, occupied most of southern Minnesota. In 1851, the Minnesota Sioux negotiated away most of their best hunting grounds in the treaties of Traverse de Sioux and Mendota, and were tricked into signing away most of the promised compensation to pay debts, real and imagined, to traders there.
The remaining annuities that were due were slow in coming and insufficient to support the Sioux, and there was no promise of permanent occupancy of the Minnesota reservation. Furthermore, there was no consistent policy regarding American Indians in the United States during the period. Native Americans had no legal recourse against white depredations. Indian appeals for protection from soldiers and civilians alike fell on deaf ears. Moreover, the quality and abilities of American Indian agents declined as the nation moved toward the outbreak of the Civil War (1861-1865)
Santee Sioux war chief Little Crow.
Despite the influx of settlers, the Minnesota frontier had been generally peaceful up to that time. The occasional murder of a settler by an Indian usually resulted in the miscreant’s being turned over to white authorities for punishment. In 1857, however, a group of renegade blanket Sioux slaughtered thirty settlers in northern Iowa
Chief Little Six
The white men are like the locusts when they fly so thick the sky is like a snowstorm. Yes, they fight among themselves, but if you strike one of them, they all will turn upon you and devour your women and little children . . . you will die like the rabbits when the hungry wolves hunt them in the hard moon.
Despite his understanding of the hopelessness of taking on the whites, he led the Sioux, forlornly hoping to regain his prestige.
The Sioux were inefficient attackers and allowed most of the inhabitants of the Redwood Agency to escape to spread the alarm at Fort Ridgely. During the first week, far more whites were spared than were killed, and many of those taken prisoner by Little Crow were protected from harm in his camp. Attacks on New Ulm and settlers in Brown and Renville Counties convinced the Sioux that success was imminent. Little Crow knew that Fort Ridgley, which protected the Minnesota River Valley, would have to fall.
Meanwhile, panic spread across the Midwest, as politicians from Iowa, Wisconsin, Nebraska, and Dakota Territory petitioned the federal government for troops and leadership. Minnesota governor Alexander Ramsey
On August 20 and again on August 22, before Sibley reached Fort Ridgely with a motley crew of raw recruits, Little Crow and Chief Mankato
By the middle of September, Sibley had formed his sixteen hundred troops into a fighting unit and moved north. On September 23, his men defeated several hundred warriors under Chief Mankato, who was killed. As most of the combatants slipped away, Sibley
Although that mass execution may be said to have ended the war, white conflicts with the Sioux continued. Little Crow was murdered near Hutchinson in 1863, and Little Six
The Great Sioux War cost the lives of 413 white civilians, 77 soldiers, and 71 Indians, including the 38 prisoners hanged at Mankato
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Anderson, Gary Clayton. Little Crow: Spokesman for the Sioux. St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1986. Carefully researched and documented biography of the most important Native American war leader; sympathetic to both Little Crow and the Santee Sioux. Provides a detailed description of the war. -
Anderson, Gary Clayton, and Alan R. Woolworth, eds. Through Dakota Eyes: Narrative Accounts of the Minnesota Indian War of 1862. St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Press, 1988. Carefully edited, readable first-person accounts of the war, some sympathetic to the blanket Sioux, some to the farmer Sioux who opposed the war. -
Blegen, Theodore C. Minnesota: A History of the State. St. Paul: University of Minnesota Press, 1975. This standard history of Minnesota has a chapter on the Sioux War that is both solid and balanced. -
Carley, Kenneth. The Dakota War of 1862: Minnesota’s Other Civil War. 2d ed. St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2001. Brief account of the Sioux conflict by a specialist in Minnesota history. -
Ellis, Richard N. General Pope and U.S. Indian Policy. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1970. Ellis’s detailed account provides insight into the policy of punishment and containment that grew out of the war. -
Lass, William E. Minnesota: A History. New York: W. W. Norton, 1977. Chapter 5 is a concise but insightful discussion of the war’s effect on Minnesota. -
Nix, Jacob. The Sioux Uprising in Minnesota, 1862: Jacob Nix’s Eyewitness History. Translated by Gretchen Steinhauser, Don Heinrich Tolzmann, and Eberhard Reichmann. Edited by Don Heinrich Tolzmann. Indianapolis: Max Kade German-American Center, Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis and Indiana German Heritage Society, 1994. Translated from the narrative of a German-speaking settler, this little book provides a first-person account of the Sioux attack on New Ulm by a participant in the fighting. Nix’s passionate disdain for the Indians provides a colorful example of nineteenth century prejudices. -
Utley, Robert M. The Indian Frontier of the American West, 1846-1890. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1984. Although the description of the war is brief and simplistic, it places the war in the context of western policy toward the American Indians.
Apache Wars
Red Cloud’s War
Fetterman Massacre
Washita River Massacre
Red River War
Sioux War
Battle of the Little Bighorn
Nez Perce War
Wounded Knee Massacre
Crazy Horse; Red Cloud; Sitting Bull.