Spirit Lake Massacre Monument

This tall granite shaft marks one of the bloodiest episodes on the Iowa frontier. In March of eighteen fifty-seven, during a brutal winter, a renegade Wahpekute Dakota band led by a chief called Inkpaduta, or Scarlet Point, struck the scattered settler cabins around Spirit Lake and the Okoboji lakes near the Minnesota line. Pushed by starvation and years of broken treaties, the band killed roughly thirty-five to forty settlers over several days and carried off four young women.

One of them, a teenager named Abbie Gardner, survived months of captivity before she was ransomed. She spent the rest of her life telling the story and pressing for a memorial. The state finally answered, raising this monument, more than fifty feet tall, dedicated in eighteen ninety-five.

Nearby stands the original Gardner cabin, kept as a reminder of the families who died in the snow.