Prairie Fires Read online

  In the 1830s, the painter George Catlin was among the first whites struck by the land’s wild beauty, calling it a paradise.8 Its most terrifying spectacle—fires sweeping through the grass like “red buffaloes”—was, for him, an ecstatic vision. “The prairies burning form some of the most beautiful scenes that are to be witnessed in this country,” he wrote.9 He bemoaned the region’s domestication by the “busy, talking, whistling, hopping, elated and exulting white man, with the first dip of the ploughshare, making sacrilegious trespass.”10

  The trespass had begun in 1803, when Thomas Jefferson bought the interior of North America from France, some 530 million acres between the Mississippi and the Rocky Mountains changing hands for fifteen million dollars. Over the following decades, a series of treaties were negotiated between the United States and the Dakota. Legally dubious, based on inaccurate translations of an oral language, the treaties steadily encroached on the Indians’ land, confining them within ever-shrinking boundaries. In 1851, some six thousand Dakota were consigned to a cruelly narrow reservation, a strip of land one hundred and forty miles long and ten miles wide along each bank of the Upper Minnesota River.11 There, they were expected to relinquish the immemorial pattern of their lives, give up hunting, settle down to farm, and become Christians. Few, however, chose to do so, the majority continuing to “live by the hunt.”12

  For settlers, the treaties set off a land rush. In the first wave, between 1854 and 1857, more than five million acres of public land were sold in Minnesota Territory, much of it for the rock-bottom price of $1.25 an acre.13 Farmers raced to stake claims on land already broken for cultivation: the Indians’ corn fields. Saw mills were set up, trees felled, and roads cut through the wilderness. In the 1840s, a few hundred whites were living among twenty-five to thirty thousand Indians of various tribes; by 1858, the year Minnesota became an American state, there were 150,000 whites.14 By that time, squatters were encroaching on Dakota land north of the Minnesota River, finding a willing collaborator in the federal government. Less than a decade after creating the Upper and Lower Sioux Reservations, the government took back half the Dakota’s land, the strip along the northern bank of the Minnesota, after negotiations that were little more than veiled threats. Promised $1.25 an acre, the Indians were paid thirty cents, a swindle that would end up costing both sides dearly.15

  For whites, free land was the original American dream. Inspired by massive taxpayer-funded acquisitions such as the Louisiana Purchase, the schemes to distribute such land were bitterly contested by well-heeled congressional foes, especially those from the South.16 Western territories were a particular focus of the Free Soil movement of the 1840s and ’50s, which joined farmers eager to colonize new lands with abolitionists intent on keeping new states free from slavery. Their rallying cry was, “Why not vote yourself a farm?,” a goad to politicians who abhorred giving land to the poor, arguing that such charity was “demeaning.”17

  In the presidential campaign of 1860, Abraham Lincoln harnessed and refined the Free Soiler argument, insisting that slavery was a stain on the land, “a moral, a social, and a political wrong” that could not be allowed to spread.18 If elected, he promised “free land” for all Americans. And he was as good as his word. When his inaugural train passed through Cincinnati on the way to the capital, he stepped out to speak to a committee of industrialists. “I have to say that in so far as the Government lands can be disposed of,” he remarked, “I am in favor of cutting up the wild lands into parcels, so that every poor man may have a home.”19

  The Homestead Act that Lincoln signed into law in May 1862 promised 160 acres—a quarter of a square mile of land, or a “quarter section”—to every citizen over twenty-one who wanted to stand up and claim them. The offer was open to anyone who had never taken up arms against the United States, including single women, immigrants, and freed slaves. For a ten-dollar filing fee, potential homesteaders could claim their acreage, and then had five years to “prove up” by cultivating the land and building a structure on it. If these conditions were met, and claimants could prove that they had lived at least six months of every year on the property, they received a deed, or “patent,” to the land. There were also shortcuts: after six months in residence, those with enough money could buy the land outright for $1.25 an acre. Altogether, a billion acres would be opened to homesteading when the Act went into effect the following year. Yet settlers were not content to wait: tens of thousands more began pouring into Minnesota when news of free land broke.20

  Lincoln doubtless realized the consequences that the Homestead Act would have on the Union, and he had been warned about the Dakota’s plight.21 But he had never set foot in Minnesota. Distracted by the Civil War, he failed to foresee the havoc that a second wave of settlement would unleash among tribes still living on the lands America coveted.

  * * *

  IN Minnesota, tensions were already running high long before Lincoln made free land a centerpiece of his campaign.

  In 1853, a decade before the Homestead Act, a group calling itself the German Land Company placed an advertisement in a Chicago-based German-language newspaper, the Illinois Staats-Zeitung. It called for immigrants from Bohemia and Germany to stake their claims to riverfront acreage in Minnesota. Within a few years, the company had signed up eight hundred, at a few dollars a head. In a sentimental allusion to a city on the Danube, the seekers named their future home New Ulm. The town was to be built at the confluence of the Minnesota and Cottonwood Rivers, on land adjacent to the Dakota reservation. For immigrants’ purposes, it was ideal: productive, naturally terraced bottomland, with steamboats running to the U.S. Army’s Fort Snelling.

  The first settlers arrived during the winter months of 1855, while the Indians were away, hunting. They moved into bark houses belonging to the Dakota. When the original inhabitants returned, the squatters refused to budge even as the natives continued to haunt the nascent town, arguing for their rights. Soon, smallpox broke out among the Indians.

  The Germans and Bohemians who founded New Ulm preferred to live in ethnic enclaves where they could speak their own language and do business with their own kind. This was a common practice in Minnesota settlements. At New Ulm, the whites’ encounters with Indians were made all the more thorny by the settlers’ lack of interest in the history, culture, and language of the people they were displacing. Mutual incomprehension was compounded by the fact that the Dakota were disgusted by the newcomers, whom they called “bad talkers” (for their guttural, unfamiliar speech) or “Dutchmen,” and whom they blamed for driving away game.

  Among those incensed by New Ulm was a leader of the Mdewakanton band, a legendary chief named Little Crow. Renowned for his physical courage and spiritual acumen, he had been dealing with the whites for years. He had traveled twice by train to negotiations in Washington, D.C. He had signed treaties, only to watch white traders siphon away the money and white farmers continue to encroach on Indian land. He was particularly aggrieved about the land on which New Ulm sat: he’d believed he had negotiated its return in earlier talks, only to learn he had been outmaneuvered.

  After their bark houses were seized by the New Ulm settlers, the Dakota began going from house to house, begging. Like many native groups, they held to a collective view of possessions, cherishing reciprocal hospitality. Those with more were expected to give to those with less. The Germans did not share that view. An 1859 article in the New Ulm Pioneer reported that laws had been enacted requiring the Dakota to present a pass before entering “the lands, claims, or settlement of the white inhabitants.”22

  Two years later, in 1861, Henry David Thoreau arrived in the Big Woods. Forty-three years old, suffering from the tuberculosis that would soon kill him, he recorded in his journal a brief but penetrating account. He started up the Minnesota River on the steamboat Franklin Steele, entranced by the tangle of wild grasses and roses along the banks. He saw “many large turtle-tracks on shore” and lagoons “fringed with willows.”23 At five o’cl
ock in the morning, he wrote of his excitement at seeing “the big woods; the wood all alive with pigeons, and they flying across our course.”24 They were passenger pigeons, then common.

  After the Steele docked at the Lower Sioux Agency, a compound housing the bureaucracy and trading posts at the south end of the reservation, Thoreau found himself listening to the Dakota, who had come on their ponies for a council with administrators.25 The speechifying of white officials left him cold, but he was impressed by the Indians, who had “the advantage in point of truth and earnestness, and therefore of eloquence.”26

  Thoreau undertook the journey to Minnesota in a last bid to restore his health. But he had yearned all his life to escape tame New England. It had been “mutilated” and “emasculated,” he wrote, left barren of “cougar, panther, lynx, wolverene, wolf, bear, moose, deer, the beaver, the turkey.”27 He had always wanted to see nature in its original profusion, a perfect whole.

  Instead, he found himself standing on the riverbank of another diminished wilderness, witnessing the prologue to a violent confrontation. “The most prominent chief was named Little Crow,” he wrote, and his people “were quite dissatisfied with the white man’s treatment of them, and probably have reason to be so.”28

  By the following summer, Thoreau was dead, and the discord he had seen on the riverbank was about to explode. Little Crow did wield the point of truth, and he was about to engage in some mutilating of his own.

  * * *

  TO the Dakota, the Homestead Act amounted to an act of war.

  It immediately inflamed feelings in Minnesota. Minnie Buce Carrigan, a child of German immigrants who moved from Wisconsin to Minnesota in 1860, remembered the Indians as friendly at first. But “in the spring of 1862,” she later recalled, “so many people came into the country that we did not know half of our neighbors.” After that, she said, the Indians became “disagreeable and ill-natured.”29

  It was in this atmosphere that, in June 1862, around a thousand Dakota began gathering at the Upper Agency, some thirty miles north of the Lower Agency. Game scarce, hunting poor, they had no choice but to wait for the annuity payments owed in payment for the land they had sold. Many had traveled hundreds of miles. Expecting a brief stay—the payments were usually distributed at the beginning of July—most carried enough dried meat to last a week or so. The lone military fort in the region, Fort Ridgely, had sent word that they were not to come until notified, because the payment had been delayed, but the instructions seem not have reached the far-flung Dakota.

  Their condition grew perilous as the weeks passed: the previous winter had been harsh, the corn harvest damaged by cutworm, and they were forced to eat unripe fruit and marsh grasses to survive. A white woman at the Upper Agency was pained by their desperation. “I remember distinctly … the agent giving them dry corn,” she wrote, “and these poor creatures were so near starvation that they ate it raw, like cattle. They could not wait to cook it, and it affected them in such a manner that they were obliged to remove their camp to a clean spot of earth.”30

  By August, the money had still not arrived. Normally, the gold barely reached the palms of the recipients before it was snatched away by traders, who would have advanced food and other goods against it. But that summer, the Dakota could not buy on credit. Government agencies were taking a hard line, outraged that some Dakota, furious about the delay, had tried to break into a federal warehouse packed with provisions.31

  The attempted break-in sparked a threatening exchange between Little Crow and Andrew Myrick, trader and storeowner at the Lower Agency. Typical of the notoriously corrupt cadre of Indian agents and traders, Myrick had a Dakota wife and had made tens of thousands of dollars off the treaties.32 Little Crow told the trader that he should extend credit to the Dakota: that they were waiting for money that had not arrived, that Myrick’s stores were full of food while people were starving. “When men are hungry they help themselves,” Little Crow said, a remark so incendiary that the interpreter refused to translate it.33

  When he found out what was said, Myrick blew up. He told Little Crow that if the Dakota were hungry, they could “eat grass or their own shit.”34 It was not the first time he had used such language. Translated for the crowd of Indians standing nearby, his taunt inspired angry cries.

  On August 16, 1862, the annuity payment finally arrived at St. Paul. It was only a hundred miles away, but to the starving Dakota it might as well have been on the moon.

  * * *

  THE following day, August 17, a Sunday afternoon, four young Dakota men were returning on foot from an unsuccessful hunt in the Big Woods. They were about forty miles from home and had found no game. They were hungry.

  At a farm near the town of Acton, fifty miles west of Minneapolis, they found a hen’s nest. They quarreled over taking the eggs. One warned against the theft, setting off a chorus of insults and dares. The exact sequence of events has crumbled into hearsay; the men may have been drunk, or simply past caring. What is clear is that the Indians went to the farmhouse, which also functioned as the town’s general store and post office, and shot dead five people, among them the farmer, his wife, and their fifteen-year-old adopted daughter.35

  The Dakota then fled on horses stolen from another farm, heading down a tributary of the Minnesota, gathering Mdewakanton elders as they went. In the middle of the night, they assembled at Little Crow’s tepee, near the Lower Agency. They called him out in the traditional manner, by rasping their knives against the tepee’s hides.36

  The young men were not sorry for what they’d done. They argued that the killings were justified by years of treaty violations and the gross aggravation of being despised and mistreated. They recounted tales of being cheated by government agents and of Dakota women raped by white men. They aired their hatred of “half-breeds” and “cut-hairs,” mixed-race Dakota who had chopped off their long hair, become farmers, and been rewarded for their treachery. The hunters noted that annuity payments had been delayed for months, and there were rumors that payments might arrive in the form of worthless paper. They had been pushed past the brink of endurance, they told Little Crow. They called for war.

  Some of the other bands rejected the idea. The Sisseton and the Wahpeton wanted nothing to do with it; a Wahpeton leader said a few days later that “no one who fights with the white people ever becomes rich, or remains two days in one place, but is always fleeing and starving.”37 But chiefs of Lower Agency villages who had suffered under Myrick were eager to do battle.

  Little Crow was reluctant but fatalistic. His Washington dealings had brought him benefits, including a frame house for the Minnesota winters. But they had cost him influence among his own people. Hearing their taunts—one of them called him a coward—stung him. And the American betrayals, disappointments, and humiliations stung too. He had seen millions of whites covering the country between the Mississippi and the east; he had seen their armaments fired in the nation’s capital, a display of irresistible force. Against it, he knew the Dakota could not prevail. But after the insult of New Ulm, he was ready to die.

  According to one account, Little Crow turned to the warrior who denounced him and delivered an eloquent, contemptuous speech. The men who committed the murders, he said, were full of the white man’s “devil-water,” snapping at their own shadows like “dogs in the Hot Moon.” He told them hard truths: that the murder of white women would call forth a terrible retribution, that they were outnumbered, that they did not stand a chance. Little Crow’s son later set down his father’s words:

  The white men are like the locusts when they fly so thick that the whole sky is a snowstorm. You may kill one—two—ten; yes, as many as the leaves in the forest yonder, and their brothers will not miss them … ten times ten will come to kill you. Count your fingers all day long and white men with guns in their hands will come faster than you can count.… Yes; they fight among themselves, but if you strike at them they will all turn on you and devour you and your women and little children
just as the locusts in their time fall on the trees and devour all the leaves in one day. You are fools. You cannot see the face of your chief; your eyes are full of smoke.… Braves, you are little children—you are fools. You will die like little rabbits when the hungry wolves hunt them in the Hard Moon.38

  Upon delivering these words, he is said to have blackened his face and “covered his head in sorrow.”39

  Then he and the Mdewakanton prepared to go to war.

  * * *

  THE morning of Monday, August 18, dawned hot. Rumors of the killings the night before had spread across the prairie, but no one knew what to believe. Just after first light, a hundred Dakota, walking in a silent line, massed at the trading center of the Lower Agency, led by Little Crow on a white horse.

  First, they went to Andrew Myrick’s house.

  They shot the man who answered the door, an unpopular trader known for taking sexual advantage of Indian women. Myrick himself was hiding on the second floor. After hearing the shot, he jumped out of a window, making an ignominious run for the woods near the river. His body was found later, peppered with bullet holes, pierced by arrows, slashed with a knife. His mouth was stuffed with grass.

  The Dakota attacked up and down the Minnesota River valley that day, taking settlers by surprise. Many were in the fields, beginning the harvest. Minnie Buce remembered every detail of “that dreadful Monday.”40 Seven years old, she was at the log cabin her father had built near Middle Creek, about fifty miles north of New Ulm, when her younger brother came in to say that he’d seen their neighbors “asleep” on the ground, with blood on their faces.41 She ran with him to hide in a cornfield, then watched as her father, panicking, carrying three-month-old Bertha, tried to walk away from the approaching Indians, across the open prairie. He offered everything he had in exchange for his family’s lives, but a Dakota warrior shot them both.