On the morning of August 20, 1862, in the tall prairie grass beside Lake Shetek in southwestern Minnesota, the settlement that would come to be known as Slaughter Slough dissolved into chaos. By the end of the afternoon, fifteen settlers were dead, eleven had been marched away as captives, and Lucinda Dooley, a homesteader’s wife, had lost three of her children. The attack on this small cluster of cabins was not the beginning of the horror that engulfed the Minnesota River Valley that summer. It was a single terrible afternoon in the middle of it, one outbreak among many in a war that would end four months later in the largest mass execution in American history.
The causes of that war are not difficult to trace, though its full weight is almost impossible to hold in a single story. The roots lay in broken promises. In 1851, Dakota leaders had signed away tens of millions of acres of Minnesota land in exchange for annuity payments, food, and supplies that were meant to arrive year after year. By 1862, the Dakota, confined to a narrow reservation strip along the Minnesota River, were starving.
The four bands of Santee Dakota, the Mdewakanton, Wahpekute, Sisseton, and Wahpeton, watched their hunting grounds disappear under settler fences, their game vanish, and their crops fail for a second straight season. The annuity payments were late again that summer, and the men who stood between the Dakota and what little was owed them were the traders. Andrew Myrick was one such trader, operating at the Lower Sioux Agency on the Minnesota River. In his storehouse were shelves stacked with flour, salt, pork, and molasses.
In front of his counter stood Dakota fathers asking for credit, their children hollow-eyed and dying in the villages along the river. The government warehouse beside his store was locked. When asked what starving Dakota families were supposed to do without credit, Myrick answered with nine words that would light the fuse of a war: “Let them eat grass or their own dung. ” Within six weeks, that sentence had traveled through the Dakota villages like a spark through dry grass, and some six hundred people would be dead.
On August 17, 1862, four young Dakota men argued with settlers near Acton Township over eggs and a shooting contest. The argument ended with five settlers dead. The young men returned to their village knowing the American response would come swiftly and knowing they had only hours to decide what to do. That night, at a council in a lodge at Rice Creek Village, the warriors looked to a man named Taoyateduta, remembered by history as Little Crow.
He was a Mdewakanton leader in his mid-forties, the son and grandson of chiefs, a man who had traveled to Washington, sat with senators, and spent his life betting that the Dakota could survive by adapting to the Americans. The younger warriors argued for war, pointing to the Civil War that had bled the United States army dry. Little Crow answered slowly. According to the accounts later carried out of that lodge, he told them they were like children who did not understand what they were doing.
He told them the white men were many and the Dakota few. But the war had already begun, and he agreed to lead it, knowing the Dakota could not win, because American retribution had already been chosen. The only question left was whether the Dakota would meet it standing. By first light on August 18, runners were moving to villages up and down the river.
Little Crow led the first strike at the Lower Sioux Agency, the very building where Myrick’s storehouse stood locked against Dakota families. The traders were the first targets, the men who had sat behind wooden counters saying no. Myrick saw the warriors coming, ran out the back door into the tall grass, and did not make it far. When soldiers arrived days later, they found his body face down, his mouth stuffed with handfuls of prairie grass, the same grass he had told the Dakota to eat.
The assault at the agency lasted through the morning. Indian agent Thomas Galbraith’s clerks, laborers, and families were killed; the ferry operator worked his rope across the river until he too was shot. By mid-morning, the agency was burning. Across the river valley, isolated homesteads were attacked in a pattern that must have felt to surviving settlers like the world ending in every direction at once.
Some bands killed indiscriminately; others took captives, mostly women and children. Some warriors deliberately protected settlers they knew, hiding neighbors and walking them out to safety in the night. That, too, is part of the record. On August 20, the settlement at Lake Shetek, fewer than three dozen people spread across a handful of log cabins and sod houses, saw riders appear on the horizon.
They were Sisseton warriors, perhaps thirty of them, led by a war leader named Lean Bear. Some accounts say they demanded the settlers leave; some say they demanded food. The situation held for a fragile hour until a single shot, from whom no one alive would ever agree, began the killing. Settlers fled toward the marsh beyond the lake, a low, brushy wetland thick with cattails and standing water.
Warriors on horseback surrounded it. Those who tried to move deeper sank to their knees. The killing in the slough was slow and specific, the ugliness of hunting people through wet reeds under an August sun. Fifteen settlers died at Lake Shetek that day.
Eleven were taken captive. Twenty-one escaped and spent days walking east across the prairie without food or water. Lucinda Dooley was among the captives. Three of her children were dead.
The war itself was fought between forces that barely qualified as armies. The Dakota warriors had no formal ranks, no supply chain, no artillery, only old trade muskets, hunting rifles, and knives, with ammunition scarce and bands operating semi-independently. What they had was intimate knowledge of the terrain and the ability to move fast across the prairie. The American side, meanwhile, was made up of farmers, blacksmiths, and German immigrants who spoke almost no English, backed by a single regular army post at Fort Ridgely and a handful of field pieces.
Governor Alexander Ramsey had authorized a mobilization under Colonel Henry Hastings Sibley, a fifty-one-year-old former fur trader who had spent decades profiting from the very Dakota he was now ordered to destroy. Sibley was not a soldier, but a businessman with epaulettes. The first major test came at Fort Ridgely between August 20 and 22. The fort, a cluster of wooden and stone buildings on a bluff above the river, was defended by roughly 180 men, plus refugees who had poured in from the burned farms downstream.
What the fort had that no other point on the frontier possessed were three small field pieces of artillery. The first Dakota assault came on the afternoon of August 20, warriors moving up through the ravines, expecting a quick storm like the Lower Agency. What broke them was the sound of exploding artillery shells landing among men on foot. Two more assaults over the next two days ended the same way.
East of the fort, the town of New Ulm, a German immigrant settlement, had turned itself into a fortress in less than a day, dragging wagons into streets and stacking furniture into barricades. The town burned on August 23, enough of it to reduce whole blocks to timber and ash, but the defenders fought street to street and held. When the smoke cleared, the town still stood, and the Dakota warriors, low on ammunition and unable to sustain assaults on fortified positions, pulled back westward. The uprising had killed hundreds of settlers in scattered farms, but it had not taken a single fort, and Little Crow understood what that meant.
In early September, Sibley finally arrived at Fort Ridgely with a column of volunteers and militia. He sent out burial detachments to find the dead. One of those parties, under Major Joseph Brown, camped on the night of September 1 at Birch Coulee, a shallow valley with wagons drawn into a loose ring. At dawn on September 2, Dakota warriors opened fire from the surrounding ridges.
The volley killed sleeping men in their bedrolls; horses tethered in the center of the camp reared and screamed. The surviving soldiers sheltered behind their dying animals, a living wall of horses that took hours to die. The siege lasted more than thirty hours. Ninety men were wounded; twenty-three died.
A relief column finally arrived on the morning of September 3, but Birch Coulee would be carried by the survivors as the worst night of the war. The war turned for good at the battle of Wood Lake on September 23. Dakota warriors planned an ambush along Sibley’s line of march, hiding in ravines and tall grass, intending to strike the supply train from three sides. The plan failed because a small group of soldiers foraging for potatoes early that morning accidentally rode across the concealed warriors and triggered the ambush hours too early.
The supply train was still far away and not vulnerable. The alerted soldiers formed up, brought their artillery into line, and for roughly two hours fought a running battle across open prairie. The Dakota, without the advantage of surprise, could not close with a formed infantry line supported by cannons. They held, then they broke.
American casualties were seven killed and three dozen wounded; Dakota losses were uncertain. Strategically, it was the end. By afternoon, the bands were dispersing. Little Crow began the long retreat westward with the warriors who wanted to keep fighting.
Behind him, the Peace Party, Dakota who had opposed the war from the start and who had spent six weeks protecting captives, prepared to hand the hostages back. On September 26, at a bend in the Minnesota River near what is now Montevideo, a place named Camp Release, 269 captives walked out of the Dakota lodges and into Sibley’s camp. Lucinda Dooley was among them, having survived thirty-seven days as a hostage. What awaited her was in some ways more terrible than what she had already endured, because now the trials would begin.
In the same five weeks, nearly four hundred Dakota men were brought before military tribunals at the Lower Sioux Agency. Panels of five officers heard most cases in less than an hour; some lasted under five minutes. Interpreters varied wildly in fluency. Defense representation was minimal or non-existent.
Of the nearly four hundred tried, about seventy were acquitted. Three hundred and three were sentenced to death. The number reached St. Paul, then Chicago, then Washington, landing on the desk of a president already managing a civil war that had cost more American lives than any war in the country’s history.
Abraham Lincoln did not accept the sentences as delivered. He asked to see the records themselves, to separate, he said, the more guilty from the less guilty, men who had committed murder from men who had simply participated in combat. Of the 303 condemned, he approved 39 executions. One man was later spared due to mistaken identity, leaving 38.
On the morning of December 26, 1862, in Mankato, Minnesota, a single wooden platform engineered to hold 38 men at once stood in a cold field. Several thousand spectators had gathered, breath visible in the air. The condemned were brought out, hands bound, white hoods over their heads, marched in single file onto the platform. Some sang death songs; some reached out to hold the hands of the men beside them; some called out their own names in the Dakota tradition of announcing oneself at the moment of death.
A single rope was cut, the platform dropped in less than three seconds, and 38 bodies fell. Not all died instantly; some ropes were miscalculated. The crowd was silent for a long moment, then a low cheer began. The bodies were left hanging for a time, then cut down and buried in a shallow trench near the Minnesota River.
That same night, some were dug up for medical study. One of those bodies, a man later identified as Mahpiya Okinajin, or Cut Nose, was kept, cataloged, and studied at a Minnesota medical institution for more than a hundred years. The remains of Little Crow, his scalp and skull, were taken by the state, displayed in a Minnesota Historical Society collection, and not returned to his descendants for burial until 1971. Little Crow himself had been shot and killed near Hutchinson in July 1863 while picking berries with his son, his body mutilated by a crowd and displayed for weeks.
The state paid a five hundred dollar bounty for his killing. In the winter of 1862 and into 1863, roughly 1,600 Dakota, many of them women, children, and the elderly who had not fought at all, were confined in a stockade below the walls of Fort Snelling. Disease, cold, and hunger killed hundreds, their names for the most part not preserved. In the spring of 1863, the surviving Dakota were exiled from Minnesota, loaded onto steamboats, and sent west to a reservation at Crow Creek in what is now South Dakota, where conditions were worse.
Minnesota formally revoked all treaties with the Dakota in 1863 and placed a bounty on any Dakota who returned to the state, a bounty not formally repealed until well into the twentieth century. Lucinda Dooley lived. She survived the war, the captivity, and the long aftermath. She was photographed years later in a high-necked dress, her hair parted and pulled back, books beside her.
Her face revealed nothing of what she had seen. The war that touched her life was never one massacre. It was a war of starvation and a war of retribution, and its bones sat in museum drawers within living memory. The horror was not what the textbooks flattened into a paragraph.
It was worse, and it was more human, and it belonged to everyone who lived it.