On December 26, 1862, in Mankato, Minnesota, 38 Dakota men were hanged simultaneously from a single wooden platform. It remains the largest mass execution in American history. The bodies were buried in a shallow trench and later dug up for medical study, with some skeletons kept in institutional collections for more than a century. The executions were the final act of a war that had begun four months earlier in the Minnesota River Valley, a conflict driven by starvation, broken treaties, and a single ruthless remark made by a trader.
In the summer of 1862, the Santee Dakota people were confined to a narrow reservation strip along the Minnesota River. Their hunting grounds had been fenced by settlers, game had vanished, and crops had failed for a second year. Treaty payments promised in exchange for tens of millions of acres of land were late, and the government warehouse was locked while Dakota children went hungry. The man standing between the Dakota and their money was a trader named Andrew Myrick.
When asked what starving Dakota families were supposed to do without credit, he replied: “Let them eat grass or their own dung. ”
Those nine words would help ignite a war. Within six weeks, hundreds of people were dead. On August 17, 1862, four young Dakota men killed five settlers near Acton Township.
Knowing the American response would be swift, they rode to their village and asked a council of leaders what to do next. Taoyateduta, known as Little Crow, a leader who had spent his life advocating adaptation and peace with the Americans, argued against war. Accounts of his speech vary, but his warning was clear: the white men were many and the Dakota few, but the killing had already begun. He agreed to lead nonetheless, believing American retribution was inevitable and that the Dakota should meet it standing.
At dawn on August 18, warriors attacked the Lower Sioux Agency. Andrew Myrick fled his trading post and ran into the tall grass. When soldiers found his body days later, his mouth had been stuffed with grass—the same grass he had told the Dakota to eat. The assault spread across the river valley.
Isolated homesteads were struck without warning. Some Dakota warriors killed indiscriminately, while others protected settlers they knew personally, hiding neighbors and walking them to safety. The uprising was not a single unified declaration of war but a series of desperate actions by separate bands. On August 20, a band of roughly 30 warriors led by Lean Bear approached the small settlement at Lake Shetek.
The settlers offered food and talk, but a gunshot—from which side, witnesses never agreed—ended the fragile peace. Families fled toward a marshy wetland thick with cattails, hoping the reeds would hide them. Warriors on horseback surrounded the marsh. The killing was slow and brutal, giving the place its name: Slaughter Slough.
Fifteen settlers died that day. Eleven were marched away as captives. Among them was Lucinda Duly, a mother who watched three of her children killed. Twenty-one settlers escaped on foot across the prairie without food or water.
Lucinda was one of nearly 300 captives held by Dakota bands over the following weeks, never knowing from one morning to the next if she would live. The uprising could not take fixed positions. Fort Ridgely, defended by a garrison of about 180 men and three small artillery pieces, repelled multiple assaults between August 20 and 22. The town of New Ulm, a German immigrant settlement, was fortified in a single day.
On August 23, much of it burned, but the defenders held and the warriors, low on ammunition, pulled back. In early September, Colonel Henry Hastings Sibley, a former fur trader, arrived with a column of volunteers. He sent burial parties into the countryside. One of those parties, under Major Joseph Brown, camped on the night of September 1 at Birch Coulee.
At dawn on September 2, roughly 200 Dakota warriors opened fire from the surrounding ridges. Soldiers sheltered behind their own horses, which were struck and died one by one. The siege lasted more than 30 hours. Twenty-three soldiers died and nearly 90 were wounded.
It was the worst American defeat of the war, but it changed nothing strategically. The Dakota could ambush, but they could not sustain a campaign. On September 23, at the Battle of Wood Lake, Sibley’s column triggered an ambush hours too early when a small group of soldiers foraging for potatoes stumbled across concealed warriors. The surprise lost, the Dakota could not close with an infantry line supported by artillery.
The battle lasted about two hours. The Dakota bands dispersed. Little Crow began withdrawing west with those who wanted to keep fighting, while the Peace Party prepared to release the captives. Three days later, at a place that would be named Camp Release, 269 captives—women, children, and people of mixed heritage—walked out of Dakota lodges and into American lines.
Lucinda Duly was among them. She had survived 37 days as a hostage. The shooting war was over, but the killing was not. Sibley established military tribunals at the Lower Sioux Agency.
Between late September and early November, nearly 400 Dakota men were tried. Most cases lasted less than an hour. Some lasted less than five minutes. Defense representation was minimal.
Seventy men were acquitted. Three hundred and three were sentenced to death. The sentences reached Washington. Abraham Lincoln, already managing a civil war that had killed more Americans than any conflict in the nation’s history, personally reviewed the trial records.
He asked to separate men who had committed murder from those who had merely fought in battle. Of the 303 condemned, he approved 39 executions. One man was later spared due to mistaken identity. The final number was 38.
Frontier newspapers called Lincoln weak. The execution was, by any measure, the largest in American history. On December 26, several thousand spectators gathered in Mankato. The gallows were engineered to drop all 38 men at once.
They were marched single file onto the platform, white hoods over their heads. Dakota death songs began. Some men called out their own names, a tradition of announcing oneself at the moment of death. A single rope was cut.
The platform dropped. Not all died instantly; some ropes were miscalculated. The crowd was silent, then a low cheer began. The bodies were buried in a shallow trench near the Minnesota River.
That same night, some were dug up for medical study. One skeleton, belonging to a man identified as Mahpiya Okinajin, or Cut Nose, was cataloged and studied at a Minnesota medical institution for more than a century. Little Crow’s own 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 had escaped west after Wood Lake.
In July 1863, he returned to Minnesota to gather horses and supplies. A settler named Nathan Lamson spotted him picking berries and shot him. The state paid Lamson a $500 bounty. A crowd mutilated Little Crow’s body and displayed it for weeks.
The war’s toll: 358 settlers killed, 36 volunteer militia and armed civilians killed. Dakota combat deaths are far less precisely documented, probably between 60 and 100. During the winter of 1862 and 1863, roughly 1,600 Dakota—many of them women, children, and elderly people who had not fought at all—were confined in a stockade below the walls of Fort Snelling. Disease spread through the overcrowded camp.
Hundreds died. Their names are mostly not preserved. In 1863, Minnesota formally revoked all treaties with the Dakota and placed a bounty on any Dakota who returned to the state. That bounty was not officially repealed until well into the 20th century.
The surviving Dakota were loaded onto steamboats and exiled to a reservation at Crow Creek in what is now South Dakota, where conditions were worse. More died on the trip and after arrival. Lucinda Duly lived. She was photographed years later in a high-necked dress, hair parted and pulled back, the memory of a marsh, a rope, and a platform that dropped 38 men in a heartbeat never showing on her face.
The Dakota War of 1862 was never a single massacre. It was a war of starvation, a war of retribution, and a war whose bones sat in museum drawers within living memory.