Massacre in Minnesota: The Dakota War of 1862, the Most Violent Ethnic Conflict in American History by Gary Clayton Anderson (review)

thanks to native american (and specifically Dakota) studies, the Dakota War of 1862 is no longer as eclipsed in America's popular historical imagination by the Civil War, during which it took place. But its historiography is a minefield for the intrepid historian, no matter how distinguished, and Gary Clayton Anderson is both. This is what he must contend with: The war's first three histories—Harriet McConkey's (1863), Isaac Heard's (1864), and Charles Bryant and Abel Murch's (1864)—defended the perfunctory trials that took place following the Dakota "massacres" of whites referred to in all the books' titles. Heard alone allowed that the Indians had been victimized by traders and defrauded of their land and, therefore, warranted better treatment than they received at the war's end. Return Holcombe's "Great Sioux Outbreak of 1862" (1908) was the first work to challenge the veracity of white eyewitnesses to Dakota atrocities and to benefit from Dakota accounts, such as Chief Big Eagle's, as well as from official U.S. military reports and correspondence.¹

"These accounts are often discordant in minor particulars and not infrequently in regard to matters of first importance," William W. Folwell wrote in A History of Minnesota (1924).² Or, as Kenneth Carley put it in The Sioux Uprising of 1862 (1976), "The literature of the Sioux Uprising and its aftermath is extensive and frequently contradictory."³ Between Folwell's 1924 book and the 150th anniversary of the war in 2012, twenty-five articles about the war appeared in the journal Minnesota History alone.

Anderson himself acknowledged the problem earlier in his career. "Since so many narratives of the destruction exist," he wrote in Kinsmen of Another Kind: Dakota-White Relations in the Upper Mississippi Valley 1650–1862 (1984), "there is little need to do more than briefly outline the fighting."⁴ Criticizing his own 1984 classic and his other highly regarded Little Crow: Spokesman of the Sioux (1986) and Through Dakota Eyes (1988), he reflects in the present volume: "At the time, I failed to comprehend … such a tragic event … when, for nearly two centuries, the Dakota people had been at peace with, first, Europeans who arrived after 1650, and then with Americans, who began coming to their lands in 1819…. A young historian at the time, I thought it was best to avoid the issue, to write about people caught up in the struggle, and to think hard what it all meant" (ix–x). After four and half decades of research, he concludes: "The time has arrived for this student of the affair to spell out what he thinks happened," to wit: Minnesota's founders stole hundreds of thousands of dollars from Dakota people (xii). "Some Christian Indians, others farmers, and a good many Sisseton and Wahpetons, who generally opposed the war … lost their reservation in Minnesota at its conclusion anyway" (xi). Deaths of settler families exceeded anything he or other historians have previously reported, thus justifying a return to the term "massacre" in the title of a book about the war, "even though I realize it is controversial today and know that some will object" (x–xi). (Anderson's obviously right that the word remains controversial.) Scare quotes surround the nineteenth-century euphemism "A Fate Worse Than Death" in the title of a chapter based on "careful reading of sources" regarding several dozen of more than one hundred white women and children taken prisoner. Of the trials of 392 Indians by a military commission, Anderson writes: "Some would argue that this form of military justice was perfectly legal and that the men who faced the gallows in Mankato were all guilty of rape and murder. Others claim innocence, and based on the evidence used to convict them, the guilt of many is questionable. Whatever the argument, most of these questions remain unsettled today and often lead...