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Through Dakota Eyes: Narrative Accounts of the Minnesota Indian War of 1862

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Historians discovered many years ago that oral history is a vibrant cornucopia of information. Even better, integrating oral history into traditional modes of inquiry opened up more chances for earning a Ph.D., or getting that career making book contract. In the case of "Through Dakota Eyes: Narrative Accounts of the Minnesota Indian War of 1862," oral history is the only game in town. Every selection in the book is an oral story from Indians or mixed-blood Indians about the disastrous uprising that killed hundreds of soldiers, settlers, and Indians. One of the editors of "Through Dakota Eyes" is none other than Gary Clayton Anderson, the premier scholar on Dakota history. As usual, Anderson goes above and beyond the call of duty in researching the narratives, providing background color on the people involved (and also providing information about what happened to these people after the uprising, something I greatly appreciated).

For nearly a century after the uprising, articles and books concerning the 1862 war only used white narratives as sources of information. There is definitely nothing wrong with relying on these narratives; they are invaluable sources of information on the uprising. The white narratives also reveal the tragic dimensions of the conflict, showing how innocent men, women, and children died (or persevered) in especially brutal ways. With the addition of these Indian narratives, however, historians can now go inside the camps and meeting places of the Dakotas intimately involved in the conflict.

The narratives are lumped into distinct categories dealing with different stages of the uprising. Each category then provides a succinct description of that particular phase of the war. With each narrative, the editors provide a small capsule of information on the person telling the story, allowing the reader to understand that person's place in the overall scheme of things. It is recommended to read the endnotes for each narrative, as they provide excellent information on each narrative. Excellent maps and pictures of many of the people involved also help the reader to understand the accounts.

Some of the narratives are more helpful than others. A few are difficult to understand due to poor grammar or contradictory information. Several of the narratives appeared in newspaper articles or as testimony in a case against the government in 1901, and there is a possibility that someone altered or changed them as they saw fit. That does not mean there are not any "WOW!" moments found here. In Cecelia Campbell Stay's account of the attack on the Redwood Agency (also known as the Lower Agency, where the killing began in earnest on August 18th), Cecelia describes seeing the sunlight flashing on the bayonets of Captain Marsh's patrol as they headed to their doom at the ferry crossing. Another narrative, now widely used in accounts of the uprising, comes from Wowinape, the son of Little Crow (the leader of the warring Dakota). Battle narratives allow the reader to feel as though they are at Fort Ridgely, New Ulm, or Birch Coulee as the cannons roar and the bullets fly.

As the editors point out, many of the mixed-blood Indian narratives identify a central tension of the conflict, namely the division between Indians who adopted white modes of civilization (the farmer Indians) and those who stayed true to traditional Indian values (the blanket Indians). Many of the mixed-blood Indians worked closely with whites; they feared the war parties of the traditionals just as much as whites did. As the war began to wind down, it was the mixed-bloods along with some full-blooded Indians who confronted the warring Indians, forcing these hostile forces to turn over their white captives in an effort to make peace with the military forces sweeping into the area.

This is an absolutely essential book for anyone interested in the Minnesota 1862 uprising. Actually, anyone writing a paper on this conflict without using this book as a source could find themselves in hot water. Since the editors graciously organized the narratives in chronological order, there is no reason someone unfamiliar with the conflict and its principal figures would have any difficulty understanding the book. Gary Anderson and Alan Woolworth have made an important contribution to Indian scholarship with this impressive tome.

A number of years ago, I was privileged to take an Internet class on the Dakota War of 1862 that was being taught by none other than Mr. Gary CLayton Anderson. After the course was over he took us to all the battle sites, trading posts, and places where treaties were signed. The good professor had a very great knack for evoking the visuals. That is a tendency that has carried over into his books. To write this book he has spent literally hundreds of hours combing through manuscripts, museum archives, and musty old books and newspapers in order to find first hand accounts of Minnesota's only Indian War. The results are absolutely stunning. The Dakota warriors and tribal chiefs who waged war on the whites come across not as peaceful children of nature or even as blood thirsty savages, but as men of flesh and blood. Although there are heroes and villains in this book, there are times when it is very difficult to tell them appart. At the same time as Chief Little Crow countenanced bloody massacres of women and children he secretly ordered his foster brother to save as many of them as he could. In addition, there were very few "hostile" Indians who didn't have some white people or Americanised Indians they desired to protect. Most of the people in this book seemed only interested in protecting their families and friends. One of the most sympathetic figures proves to be a Dakota "half breed" known as Joseph Coursolle or Hinhankaga, depending on which language you spoke. To Coursolle, after his daughters were taken prisoner by "hostiles," getting them back became his obsession, one understandable to any parent. The most fascinating thing about this book was that there were Indians who favored the whites and whites who favored the Indians. Coursolle, whose mother was Dakota, would go on to become a Corporal in the US Army, serving as a scout and a sniper against the men who had stolen his family. And among the "hostiles" hanged at Mankato was a white man who had been adopted into the Dakota Nation. In closing, this book reveals what happened in all it's complexities and brutal truth. History, no matter how hard one may try to change it to fit one's own politics, is so complex that even the characters you come to know intimately can still surprise you. No matter how hard some people may try, it cannot be pushed into a box. I am very much surpised that noone has tried optioning this book for TV or a movie. It would make a very powerful tale.

This book has some wonderful narratives from the very people who were caught up in the middle of the uprising in Minnesota in 1862. The author does a good job of explaining how the book is laid out. You definitely need to read the intro to understand this. While I was reading the book, I felt as though I was there in the middle of it with all those involved. I don't excuse what was done, but I have a better understanding of what horrors the indians went through that drove them to this place. I would definitely recommend this book.

This is an incredible book, and one that anyone interested in Minnesota, Western Frontier, or American Indian History should definitely read. For myself, I had embarked on a small project that involved a study of Civil War History and Minnesota's participation in it, when I stumbled on the topic of the Indian Wars of 1862, which played themselves out almost entirely in Minnesota, a state for only 4 years (1858) at the time, and the Dakota Territories to the west.

Because I live in Minnesota and have off and on since 3rd grade, and because I had taken a short course on Minnesota History in 4th or 5th grade, I thought I knew quite a little bit about it. Not so; or maybe just not as much as there was to be known. A quick check of the internet on the topic led to the discovery of the present book, Through Dakota Eyes, which is actually not so much a history as most of us understand it but a collection of memoirs by some of the Dakota participants.

As the editors of the book admit, some of the material in their collection was gathered by way of interpreters during a legal proceeding conducted in 1901 in which a portion of the Dakota people sued the government for their rights to the benefits granted by an earlier treaty--of which the failure of the US government to make good upon was partially, though not wholly, responsible for the war. Because some of the key witnesses were already quite elderly and most did not speak English, interpreters were provided. The authenticity of the testimony therefore relies heavily on the faithfulness with which these interpreters translated the words of the witnesses and especially upon their capacity to find English words that faithfully captured the meaning and intent of the Dakota speakers.

Some of the material was drawn from newspaper articles in Minnesotan and other newspapers which were written by participants who were usually younger, better educated, often of "mixed blood," and more Europeanized. These appear to have been written to exonerate family members of wrong doing or to bring to public attention the incredible courage that family members exhibited in protecting white settlers, especially captives, from harm at the hands of belligerents.

I found much that surprised me in the book. I was amazed, for instance, at the extent of the internal faction among the Native Americans themselves, especially the very varied reactions of people with both European and Indian ancestry and the reaction to them by full blooded belligerents, especially if the latter did not have mixed blood family themselves. Those who had family members of partially European descent were inclined to protect these family members at the very least and were more likely to protect white captives even in the camp of the war party under Little Crow. The tensions this created throughout the Indian communities must have been considerable and made the war against the white population even less winnable than it might have been with a greater sense of agreement. One is reminded of the factional Germanic tribes in Gaul or the much divided British tribes in England facing their own opponents, the Roman Legions, at a much earlier time in Europe. It certainly must have made the anxiety of those white and mixed prisoners held by the War camp exponentially higher, since their survival was always precarious and determined by the courage of their supporters and the degree to which these could control the volatility of their opponents.

Surprising too was the great courage some of the anti-war party exhibited in helping prisoners escape. The recitations of their flight made very exciting reading. It also made the later treatment of some of the anti-war party and their families by whites stand out sharply and not very favorably in history. That people were angry and lacking in good sense after being attacked and having lost family members is understandable but not necessarily excusable. Certainly white sentiments regarding these events still ran high even later in the century as is apparent from a story from my mother's family. According to this, when my grandfather was an infant (about 1880) people saw smoke coming from some high ground near Dundas, MN. Thinking that it was another uprising of the Sioux, the people in the neighborhood fled to the confines of the mill nearby because it was the only defensible stone building within miles. Here they remained in terror of their lives until one brave soul went out to check on the fires and discovered a farmer burning away the brush for a new field. Everyone returned home. It reveals how fearful settlers were even after 18 years.

Probably the figure who stood out most starkly in my mind after all was said and done was Little Crow himself. Underwhelmed by the arguments of the core group of belligerents for war, fully aware that the whole debacle and its likely outcome had arisen because a small group of immature braves (reputedly 4) had egged--literally--one another on to prove their courage by killing a white settler, aware too at his age and experience that they had no hope of actually winning, Little Crow acquiesced to becoming their leader when they accused him of cowardice. His response was impressive. In essence he told them the army of the white population was virtually unlimited despite the war going on in the South, that the war party was going to lose its own war because of this fact, that many if not all of the Indians would die because of their lack of wisdom in this regard, but that he was not a coward; he would die with them; one loyal and very gutsy guy. He reminds me a little of Robert E. Lee, who appears to have been aware of the unwinnableness of the war that his compatriots were starting, who understood the shortsightedness of its proponents, who had strong attachments to the United States in whose army he had long served and had family (especially a son) and friends who remained loyal to it, yet still felt his place was defending his native Virginia. In short, though he doubted its outcome, he gave the south its best shot despite the cost to himself. There also went Little Crow. From some of the commentary about him, it almost seemed as though his intention was to give the war party as good a leadership as he could in conducting the war, while leaving to other able statesmen the task of damage control when they lost. He certainly did not make any effort to eliminate or neutralize their activities in any way and seems to have harbored white and mixed blood prisoners in his own home. The fact that so many prisoners held in the war party encampment actually survived suggests that he was instrumental in their survival.

Impressive too is the fact that many of the anti-war party were aware that repercussions of the war would rebound on them as well as on their pro-war compatriots, yet they did what they could to help settlers anyway, often simply because it was the right thing to do. At one point when a woman whose life and those of her children had been saved by an Indian man offered her gold wedding band to him, he refused and asked only that later under other circumstances she remember his face, a clear indication that he knew that evil times might befall him after the events of the hostility and that he might not be given benefit of the doubt without someone to speak out in his behalf.

A very powerful book.

This book is filled with facts and is a great resource for any Indian project. This was one of my many reasorces for national history day (2011-2012).

Initially I purchased this book for a required reading in a college course. I must admit I was not expecting much from it, but it turned out to be very informative and interesting. I would recommend it to any one interested in Native American History.

This book is actually about my own family. I had been looking for it for years. My several Greats ancestor was Andrew Robertson. This book was told the stories I had heard my own Mother tell over her lifetime.