A Thrilling Narrative of Indian Captivity: Dispatches from the Dakota War

Historical Perspectives on A Thrilling Narrative of Indian Captivity

1 HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES ON A THRILLING NARRATIVE OF INDIAN CAPTIVITY Carrie Reber Zeman In 1863, when A Thrilling Narrative of Indian Captivity first appeared in print, its authors, Mary and John Renville, were too poor (they had lost everything in the U.S.-Dakota War of 1862) and too disenfranchised (as an interracial couple) to afford to do more than publish their story as an inexpensive pamphlet printed at the local newspaper’s job office. The yellow paper cover, unadorned by illustration, was also devoid of John’s name, and therefore his Dakota identity. But the cover of the small book was dressed up nonetheless: with a sensational title, A Thrilling Narrative of Indian Captivity, that both literally and figuratively covered the story’s original designation, “The Indian Captives: Leaves from a Journal.” However, the cover ploys failed to secure notoriety for the book because the story had a more fundamental problem: its sympathetic humanization of the Dakotas who opposed the Dakota War of 1862 was unwelcomed in postwar Minnesota. Marginalized by multiple circumstances, A Thrilling Narrative fell into obscurity, virtually unknown even among scholars for almost 150 years. When the booklet first came to my attention in the form of the reserve copy owned by the Minnesota Historical Society, I dismissed it as a primary source on the Dakota War, returning it to the librarian after only a few minutes’ reading, as put off by the melodrama in the opening paragraph as I was by the title. But years later, when I discovered that John B. Renville, the youngest son of Joseph and Mary Tokanne Renville of Lac qui Parle, was rumored to have married his English teacher, a white woman named 2 hiSToriCAl inTroduCTion Mary Butler, I was intrigued. In that sensational little booklet with Mary Butler Renville’s name on the cover, had she not claimed that “we”—that both of them—had come from Illinois to teach Indian children on the Minnesota frontier? How could John Renville come to the frontier? Was that place not his home and were the students he came to teach not his people? Those questions led me back to the reserve copy of A Thrilling Narrative . But this time I read beyond the first page and became lost in the story of the formation and intrigues of the Dakota resistance movement I had known only vaguely as the “Peace Party,” whose opposition to the war, marginalized by attribution to a handful of Christians, garnered mere sentences of space in most histories of the 1862 war. Even more remarkable , Mary Butler Renville managed to tell the whole story without ever letting on that her husband was Dakota. Was he not? Who was she to turn her back on her own white privilege to marry an Indigenous man? This historical introduction is my attempt to answer those questions and dozens of others raised by the Renvilles’ story, contextualizing A Thrilling Narrative of Indian Captivity for a modern audience. I approach the seven-decade sweep of the authors’ lives in three parts. Part 1, “Borderlands ,” is set on the multiple geographical and social frontiers that shaped John Baptiste Renville and Mary Adeline Butler into the married couple we meet in the opening pages of the story reprinted in this volume. For part 2 I have borrowed the story’s original title, “The Indian Captives,” because it both captures and interrogates the complicated truths at the heart of A Thrilling Narrative: that in 1862 Dakota people simultaneously took captives, were held as captives, and were rebelling against cultural captivity imposed by outsiders and by their own kin. Part 3, “Afterwords,” explores how A Thrilling Narrative came into being in the form reproduced in this volume, privileging the period words written by John and Mary and written about them by others to discover what became of their elusive “we” during the decades when their little yellow book plummeted into obscurity. “No one’s story,” one of my former college professors, Daniel Taylor, 3 hiSToriCAl inTroduCTion reminds us, “exists alone. Each is tangled up in countless others. Pull a thread in my story and feel the tremor half a world and two millennia away.”1 In the case of A Thrilling Narrative, tug on the snag of Mary Butler Renville’s “we” and unravel a story that begins in a place called Mde Ia Udan on what was then mapped by whites as the St...