Jackson, Minnesota: What Inkpaduta Left Behind

In the winter of eighteen fifty-six to eighteen fifty-seven, a Dakota leader named Inkpaduta and his band were struggling to survive. They had been cast out from their own community for refusing to comply with treaty demands, and the severe winter had brought starvation. When they begged for food from white settlers in northwestern Iowa, they were met with violence. A posse took their weapons.

In early March of eighteen fifty-seven, Inkpaduta's band attacked the settlements near Spirit Lake in northwestern Iowa and killed roughly thirty-eight men, women, and children. They took four women captive. Two of those women were subsequently killed; one was ransomed; one was eventually released.

From Spirit Lake, the band moved north into what would become Minnesota, pushing toward the small settlement at the Des Moines River that would eventually be named Jackson. On March twenty-sixth, the band attacked the Springfield settlement itself, killing three men, three children, and a woman, a toll of seven. A group of defenders there held out and survived.

United States Army troops from Fort Ridgely pursued Inkpaduta but never caught him. He remained at large for years. Other Dakota leaders pushed him out of Minnesota before the eighteen sixty-two war began, and he lived until eighteen eighty-one, dying in exile in Canada.

The Minnesota Legislature organized Jackson County in May of eighteen fifty-seven, two months after the attacks, naming it after a Saint Paul merchant. Settlement slowed dramatically and did not resume in earnest until the region was considered more secure.

The town that grew here knew from the beginning what it cost to be a settlement on the edge of a contested frontier.