Dakota march honors 1862 ancestors

March goes

from Lower Sioux

to Ft. Snelling

By FRITZ BUSCH

Journal Staff Writer

NEW ULM -- Several dozen Dakota people marched through New Ulm Monday during a 150-mile commemorative march through southern Minnesota.

The group, which included native Americans from Minnesota, North and South Dakota, California and several Canadian provinces, stopped at Turner Hall for an evening meal and to tell their stories and spend the night. On Tuesday morning, the group marched towards Mankato.

Angela Cavender Wilson, Dakota historian and professor at Arizona State University, said the purpose of the week-long march is to honor Dakota ancestors who were forcibly removed from the Lower Sioux Agency to camps at Mankato and Fort Snelling in November of 1862.

"We're here to tell the truth about what happened in 1862," Wilson said. "Dakota people fought for their land and suffered from forced removal and genocide. We're here to tell that side of the story."

Stakes with the names of Dakota who were force marched to Fort Snelling were placed in the ground at each mile. Prayers were said, and tobacco was dropped on the ground around each stick.

On Nov. 7, 1862, a four-mile long group of 1,700 Dakota, mostly women, children and elderly, were force-marched from the Lower Sioux Agency to Fort Snelling.

Two days later, after they were tried and convicted by a five-man military tribunal, more than 300 condemned men awaiting news of their planned execution, were shackled, placed in wagons and transported to a Mankato prison camp.

Both groups surrendered to the U.S. Army after the U.S.-Dakota War of 1862. At the tribunal, as many as 40 cases were tried in a single day, some lasting as little as five minutes.

Of the men, 307 were condemned to death at the trials. Sixteen men were given prison sentences.

As both Dakota groups were paraded through Minnesota towns enroute to the camps, residents lined the streets to taunt and assault them with rotten food, rocks, sticks and boiling water.

In addition to cold, hunger and sickness, an untold number of men, women and children died enroute from beatings and assaults by soldiers and residents and throughout the winter at the camps. What became of those who died on the way remains a mystery.

The largest mass hanging in U.S. history took place the day after Christmas in Mankato when 38 condemned Dakota were executed. President Abraham Lincoln pardoned the rest of the 307 men originally condemned.

Earlier that year, Minnesota Gov. Alexander Ramsey placed bounties on the scalps of the Dakota that eventually reached $200 each. Ramsey declared on Sept. 9, 1862, that the Sioux Indians of Minnesota must be exterminated or driven forever beyond the borders of the state.

Punitive expeditions were sent out to hunt down the Dakota who had not surrendered.

In May of 1863, the surviving, condemned Dakota men and surviving women and children were forcibly moved on boats from Mankato to Davenport, Iowa, where they were imprisoned for three years.

Fort Snelling surviving Dakota were shipped down the Mississippi River to St. Louis and then up the Missouri River to the Crow Creek Reservation in South Dakota.

Small numbers of Dakota began trickling back to Minnesota in the late 1880s.

A memorial to the Dakota taken to Crow Creek was dedicated in 2001.