Fort Snelling and the Dakota Winter

After the executions at Mankato in December eighteen sixty-two, the United States government moved the surviving Dakota population to a makeshift camp below the walls of Fort Snelling, on the bluffs above the confluence of the Minnesota and Mississippi rivers. Approximately sixteen hundred people, mostly women, children, and elders, were held there through the winter. Estimates of those who died in the camp, from disease, exposure, and despair, range between one hundred and three hundred. The ground they died on is now a historic site and a state park.

The following spring, an act of Congress expelled the Dakota people from Minnesota entirely, canceled their treaty rights, and placed a bounty on Dakota people who remained in the state. Approximately thirteen hundred Dakota survivors were loaded onto steamboats and transported to a reservation at Crow Creek on the Missouri River in present-day South Dakota, land that could not support them. Hundreds more died in the first year from hunger and disease.

The Dakota people who remained in Minnesota in subsequent generations did so without legal standing in their own homeland. Some sheltered in remote corners of the state. Some passed as members of other communities. It took decades and a series of Indian Reorganization Act processes in the nineteen thirties and forties before small Dakota communities in Minnesota, including the Prairie Island Indian Community and the Lower Sioux Indian Community, could establish formal land bases.

The Stone Arch Bridge visible from the mill district downstream, the Capitol dome visible to the northeast, the light rail that crosses the Minnesota River below the fort: all of it built on territory the Dakota people were expelled from by an act of Congress signed in the same year that the northern armies were fighting to end slavery in the South. The coincidence is not coincidental. It is American history operating at full speed in both directions at once.