Birch Coulie: The Epic Battle of the Dakota War

2. Red Iron

No one in the mid -nineteenth century was sure where these strange Indian people had come from. At the time some argued that their origins were as mysterious as the dawn of life itself. Others insisted that the Indians had come in an ancient migration from Asia before the land bridge to North America had been swamped by the rising waters of the Bering Sea. In North American the Indians wandered and scattered. The Sioux, of whom the Dakotas were part, were thought to have settled first in the Carolinas. Then the encroachment of the white man pushed them east to the Ohio Valley, finally to the wilderness of the upper Midwest. From there some of them had fled still farther west. Explorers who encountered the Sioux who remained in the upper Midwest described them as wretched and diseased. Their tribes were ravaged by smallpox, brought to them and other tribes by the white man. Indeed, by the 1830s what had been millions of Indians in North America had been reduced to just two million 2. Red Iron red iron . . 15 souls who tried to imitate the white man while swallowing his alcohol poison. Indian orators spoke with an uncharacteristic fatalism. “We know,” they said, “that the white men are like a great cloud that rises in the East and will cover the whole country.” Meanwhile, white writers wrote poignantly, “so the aborigines pass away, and the few survivors in our land may chant in sorrow.” Doomed or not, the Indians were the objects of curiosity. Explorers and scholars and artists came into the wilderness by steamboat and canoe to study their “manners and customs and conditions.” These observers described Indians, the Sioux among them, as profoundly religious, although some white men dismissed belief in a Great Spirit as mere superstition. All objects, many Indians believed, were sacred and had a spiritual existence. Some even prayed to stones. Many Indians believed that at death, if the mortal had been good, his or her soul left the body and traveled to a region of eternal happiness. If the individual had been bad, the soul drowned. It was a faith whose promises also were at the core of Christianity. Yet there were those in the nineteenth century who felt the Indian needed to be converted from his savage existence to the white man’s faith. But Indian medicine men were more influential than priests, and efforts to teach the Indians about Christianity brought few converts. The first white pioneers in the new land described the Indian as a “merry creature.” In the eyes of these pioneers, he was agile and playful and walked in moccasins with the nonchalance of a child and the dignity of a man. He laughed at the white man, who he said walked like a dandy in clodhoppers and entered a teepee like a frog. The white man, he said, was a sad creature because he had lost his agility in his effort to acquire power. Meanwhile, nineteenth-century observers claimed that Indians loved games and could romp half-naked with “serpentine ease and deerlike swiftness” from sunup to sundown across an endless sward, using a 16 . . red iron long stick with a webbed pocket to hurl a tiny ball through a makeshift goal. Indians were tribal, with many living in villages close to water. “We cannot dig wells like the white man,” they explained. “We must have our home by the flowing rivers.” Many believed that polygamy was authorized by the Great Spirit, and they did not understand the white man’s habit of taking only one wife. Indians often fought with courage and bravery in short-lived feuds, the purpose of which was as much to touch the enemy as to kill him. No people were more attached to the land of their birth. They believed that the land and the rocks were made of Indian flesh, and if the white man seized it in his never-ending desire for earthly possessions, it left a hole in Indian flesh, and “the blood would never stop running.” It was the white man’s everlasting desire to possess the earth and its creatures that brought the first explorers and a few settlers to the upper Mississippi. The area was described as “paradise,” and despite being fired upon by Indians, settlers came by wagon and steamboat to work the soil, persuaded in part by Thomas Jefferson’s...