Spirit Lake Massacre

In the winter of eighteen fifty-six to eighteen fifty-seven, the lakes of northwestern Iowa sat at the remote edge of American settlement. The nearest United States Army post was Fort Dodge, more than a hundred miles to the southeast. The settlers who had come here were living on land that the Wahpekute Dakota had not ceded and did not consider available.

Inkpaduta was a Wahpekute leader who had accumulated a record of grievances against white encroachment. In eighteen fifty-four a whiskey trader named Henry Lott murdered Inkpaduta's blood brother and the brother's wife and five children, then fled. When Inkpaduta sought justice from white authorities, the prosecuting attorney reportedly nailed the murdered man's skull above a doorway as a grim joke. No one was prosecuted.

On the eighth of March, eighteen fifty-seven, Inkpaduta led his band into the Spirit Lake settlements. Over the following days, somewhere between thirty five and forty men, women, and children were killed. Four women were taken captive. Two of them were later killed; the other two were eventually ransomed and freed.

Fourteen-year-old Abbie Gardner was among the captives. She survived three months of captivity before being ransomed through negotiation by a party of Sisseton Dakota intermediaries. She was delivered to the Minnesota governor on June twenty-third.

Decades later Abbie Gardner returned to Spirit Lake, bought back her family's cabin, and spent the rest of her life telling her story to visitors, selling postcards and Native American items from the doorway. She turned the site of her family's destruction into one of Iowa's earliest roadside historical attractions.

Inkpaduta was never captured. He fought on for years and was present at the Battle of Little Bighorn in eighteen seventy-six. He remains a figure of fierce resistance in Dakota memory.