Mankato, Minnesota

Mankato sits at the confluence of the Minnesota and Blue Earth Rivers, and its very name is a Dakota word. Mahkato, meaning greenish-blue earth, for the distinctive clay found in the river bluffs here. For the Dakota people, this was a significant place long before European-American settlers arrived.

In eighteen fifty-two, Parsons K. Johnson and Henry Jackson staked claims along the riverbank and platted the town. Growth was rapid. By eighteen eighty, Mankato was the fourth-largest city in Minnesota, connected by rail to the wider world and drawing immigrants from across Europe. It seemed like a straightforward success story of the American frontier.

But the event that placed Mankato permanently in the history books occurred on December twenty-sixth, eighteen sixty-two, and it is not a straightforward story at all. Following the Dakota War of eighteen sixty-two, a military commission conducted rushed trials of Dakota men, some lasting only minutes, with no attorneys and no meaningful translation across the language barrier, and sentenced three hundred three to death. President Abraham Lincoln reviewed the trial records personally and provided a list of thirty-nine men to be executed. One received a last-minute reprieve.

On that December morning, in front of an estimated four thousand spectators, thirty-eight Dakota men were hanged simultaneously on a specially constructed mass scaffold in downtown Mankato. It remains the largest mass execution in United States history. The condemned men had cut their hair, painted their faces, and sang together as the platform dropped.

The causes of the war were rooted in a decade of broken treaty promises, land confiscation, delayed annuity payments, and starvation on the reservation. Many of the thirty-eight had not committed the crimes for which they were convicted. In eighteen ninety-seven, a reconciliation monument was erected at the site. In nineteen ninety-seven, the Dakota Memorial at Reconciliation Park was dedicated near the execution grounds, and every year since, Dakota riders have completed a three-hundred-thirty-mile winter horse journey from the Lower Sioux Agency to Mankato to honor the thirty-eight.