The Dakota War: in the middle of Civil War, a battle between Native Americans and white militias in Minnesota led to the largest mass execution in the nation's history.

• Author: Elder, Robert K.
• Position: TIMES PAST: 1862

Blood had been spilled in the new state of Minnesota. And the 100 Dakota tribesmen who visited the teepee of Chief Little Crow one August morning in 1862 argued for more. They wanted war. The white settlers had broken promises, pushed them onto smaller and smaller reservations, disrespected their religion, and nearly starved their families. Tensions boiled over, and that morning, a small hunting party of Dakota men had killed five white men near Acton Township (see map).

Little Crow did not want war, convinced his tribe was out-gunned. But he relented. "You will die like the rabbits when the hungry wolves hunt them in the Hard Moon," he said. "[Little Crow] is not a coward.... He will die with you."

That set the stage for a six-week conflict that would claim the lives of at least 490 white settlers and an unknown number of Dakota warriors, ending with the execution of 38 Dakota men--the largest mass execution in U.S. history. It would also spark the bloodiest period of the Plains Indians Wars--a series of conflicts between Western tribes and the federal government--leading to national policies dealing with Native Americans that echo to the present day.

"The legacy of that war has been passed down through generations," says Diane Wilson, author of Beloved Child: A Dakota Way of Life, whose great-great-grandmother survived the Dakota conflict.

Outside Minnesota, the bloodshed was overshadowed by the massive carnage of the Civil War. In September 1862, more than 1,000 miles from Minnesota, Union and Confederate armies clashed in Maryland at Antietam--the bloodiest single-day battle of the Civil War, with casualties totaling 23,000. The year 1862 was a particularly grim one for President Abraham Lincoln, who lost his 11-year-old son to typhoid fever as he quarreled with his generals, and Union armies suffered loss after loss.

Clash of Civilizations

The Civil War also played a part in aggravating the situation in Minnesota. But tensions between white settlers and Dakota Indians--historically called the Sioux by their enemies-were part of a much longer history of conflict between whites and Native Americans.

When they first encountered European settlers, Native Americans in North America numbered somewhere between 2 million and 15 million (see Timeline, p. 18). Diseases brought over from Europe, like measles and smallpox, devastated native populations. The two cultures clashed, created alliances, fought, and sometimes negotiated fragile peace treaties. But by President Andrew Jackson's administration (1829-37), many of the Eastern tribes had been forcibly removed from their homelands as the United States expanded west.

In the mid-1800s, about 7,000 Dakota called the region around present-day Minnesota home. But they were soon overwhelmed by the 70,000plus settlers lured to the area by government land incentives and a thriving fur trade, according to Dale Weston, a Dakota member who teaches at Augsburg College in Minneapolis.

"Tribes relied on natural resources, and the fur-trade boom started to affect the economy," Weston says. "It started to deplete animals the tribes relied on for food and clothing." Minnesota, which was admitted as a state in 1858, actually took its name from the Dakota word for "sky-tinted water," according to the Minnesota Historical Society. Chief Little Crow had negotiated and signed treaties with the U.S. government--he even traveled to...