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  • Dark Day on the Prairie
  • Robert Lacy (bio)

Mankato, Minnesota, is an attractive riverfront town in the south central part of the state. It boasts a university campus and a sprinkling of light industry. The National Football League’s Minnesota Vikings used to gather there each summer to train for the coming season. Carol Kennicott, the heroine of Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street, was from there; and it’s where Pa was usually headed when he hitched up the wagon on tv’s “Little House on the Prairie.”

Today it is a prosperous and growing little metropolis. Despite the national economic downturn, optimism abounds. You can feel it as you walk the streets. But it wasn’t always that way. One hundred and forty years ago Mankato was a raw outpost on the American frontier. It was one of those tenuous, perhaps temporary places that a newly arrived immigrant from Germany or Sweden might find himself in after heeding the call to “go West.” It was also, on December 26, 1862, the scene of an event unique in the history of the United States. Unique in its magnitude. Unique in its awfulness. That was the day, just one day past Christmas, when the federalized militia of the State of Minnesota, acting on orders from President Abraham Lincoln, hanged thirty-eight Sioux Indians. Hanged them all together, all at once.

It is by a factor of more than six the largest mass execution ever to take place on American soil. Nothing else comes close. The U.S. government electrocuted six captured Nazi saboteurs in Washington, D.C., in the early days of American involvement in World War ii, and in terms of numbers that ranks second to the Mankato killings. Also, during the Mexican War, the U.S. Army hanged “about thirty” (nobody seems to have kept count) Irish-immigrant deserters immediately following the Battle of Chapultepec. That does come close, but it happened in faraway Mexico City, not here in the United States. And, as for the Sacco-Vanzetti and Rosenberg executions, while they may loom larger in the nation’s historical consciousness, they were just small potatoes [End Page 236] compared to the great slaughter that occurred that long-ago day in Mankato.

The hangings were initially scheduled for December 19, 1862, but they had to be postponed for a week after the man in charge, Colonel Stephen Miller of the Seventh Minnesota Volunteers, determined that he didn’t have the right kind of rope. Presumably something sturdier was called for. Lincoln was forced to issue a revised order moving the date back a week. Picture the perturbation all around—just the kind of irritating inconvenience one had to put up with out on the prairie in those days.

The Indians to be hanged were renegade Sioux who had gone off their reservations along the Minnesota River in August and, during the course of a five-week rampage, killed many white settlers: estimates range from a low of three hundred and fifty to a high of more than a thousand. Lincoln himself, according to one of his biographers, thought the correct number might be about eight hundred. At any rate many settlers were killed.

The reasons for the uprising were the usual ones: clash of cultures, simmering resentment on one side, indifference and favoritism on the other, lack of strong leadership among Indian elders who knew such an effort was doomed from the start, lack of understanding on the part of the whites that things had gotten as bad as they had, possibly even the heat—August that year was said to be sweltering. But the fact that these were “annuity” Indians (so-called “cut hairs”), who had accepted the federal government’s coin to give up their old warring ways and then reneged on that pledge, seems to have made the white desire for revenge, when the time came, much stronger than it otherwise might have been.

The original list of culprits, as drawn up in the field by a drumhead court, numbered three hundred and three. And, left to their own devices, the white Minnesotans might have hanged every one of them. But Lincoln, mindful of...

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