A Minnesota Frontier Fort -- The Site of Genocide?

The region at the convergence of the Minnesota and Mississippi Rivers has been home to many different cultures for at least nine thousand years.  Fort Snelling has occupied that area for two hundred of those nine thousand years.  Minnesota historian Waziyata Win, also known as Dr. Angela Wilson, believes that during those two hundred years, the fort became a site of genocide committed against the Dakota Indians.  Now she wants the fort, reconstructed from its ruins in the 1970s by the Minnesota Historical Society, to be torn down.  "It feels like a constant assault on our Dakota humanity," she states.  "I don't want the fort sitting on that site of genocide."  Many share her view, and on this last Memorial Day weekend there was a large protest at the fort. For its part, the Minnesota Historical Society is working to include the darker parts of the fort's past in its exhibits, but resentment is still strong amongst many in the Dakota community.

When I visited the fort, historian and program associate Matt Cassady explained the long history of the site.  Fort Snelling was built in 1821 to guard the newly-acquired territory of what is now Minnesota from British infiltration from Canada.  The fur trade was a large part of this; because it was such a lucrative business, and because much of that business occurred near the still ill-defined border between the of the United States and Canada, it was imperative that the United States maintained a stronger trading relationship with the Native Americans than the British in the Northwest Territory.  Indeed, America’s former colonial masters still had a strong influence in the region, as they were the dominant traders before the arrival of American settlers.  Part of the purpose of the fort was to extinguish that relationship while concurrently cultivating one for American interests.  This was done primarily by the presence of an Indian agent, a civilian assigned by the president who would act as an ambassador between the fort and the natives.  The agent's responsibility was to try and cultivate a positive relationship with the Native Americans in the area by mentoring disputes between Dakota and Ojibwa tribes, offering gifts and favors, and promoting new farming techniques, religion, and tools.  The ultimate goal was to maintain a good relationship while preparing the lands for settlement by whites.

The role of the fort reflected the greater role of the American government, which, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, was quite paternalistic in its relationship with Native Americans.  American Indian nations were considered sovereign, and the acquisition of their land could not be done without a signed treaty and the consent of the president.  But with the election of Andrew Jackson, this policy changed.  Andrew Jackson enacted the idea that lands could be taken through conquest and force.  Consecutive treaty violations and failure to follow through with proper payments by the American government made life for the Dakota people in Minnesota difficult, and hostility grew between natives and settlers.  In August of 1862, four Dakota men killed five American settlers, marking the beginning of the six-week Dakota War.

While no battle or attack ever occurred at Fort Snelling, soldiers stationed at the fort participated heavily in the Dakota War.  It was one of most destructive conflicts between Plains Indians and whites in U.S. history (and, in an interesting historical footnote, John Pope, the disgraced general defeated by Robert E. Lee at Second Bull Run, was dispatched by Lincoln to quell the uprising in Minnesota).  When it ended, a group of nearly sixteen hundred Dakota people were force-marched from southwestern Minnesota to the fort, through cities and towns that were overwhelmingly and often violently anti-Dakota.  The group was composed of those who did not participate in the fighting, mainly women and children.  Upon arriving at Fort Snelling, they were put into a wooden stockade, where they were kept from the winter of 1862 until the spring of 1863.  Between one hundred fifty and three hundred people died while at the internment camp, mostly from disease and malnutrition. In the spring of 1863, the survivors were transported to reservations west of Minnesota, in the Dakotas and Nebraska.

Those who had not escaped or been put in internment camps were executed by hanging. Thirty-eight Dakota prisoners were hanged on December 26, 1862, in Mankato.  They were all charged of murder and/or rape of civilians.  It remains the largest mass execution in American history.  Two leaders of the Dakota militant faction, Sakpedan ("Little Six") and Wakanozhanzhan ("Medicine Bottle"), who would have undoubtedly been hanged as well, managed to escape to Canada.  But once in Canada, British agents captured and delivered them back to the United States, where they were brought as prisoners to Fort Snelling.  In 1864 they were tried by a military tribunal and were sentenced to death by hanging.  They were executed just outside the fort's walls in November of 1865, and are the only known official executions of Native Americans that occurred on fort grounds.  After the war, the entire Dakota population of about six thousand was effectively removed from Minnesota by fleeing, forced removal, or death.

If you go to the fort now and climb to the top of the round tower, there is a sign that overlooks the location of the executions; it tells the story of Little Six and Medicine Bottle.  And on what is now Fort Snelling State Park grounds there is a public memorial built near where the wooden stockade was erected in honor of the Dakota prisoners.  There is also a private Dakota prayer circle near the same area.  The stockade memorials are tucked back down a path outside of the fort, and so are a little easy to miss if you don't know they're there.  However, the fort plays a short informational video regularly throughout the day that visitors can watch before exploring fort grounds. Among other things, it tells the story of the Dakota Indians held at the fort and shows the location of the memorials. Within the next few years, the Minnesota Historical Society hopes to include more information about what happened during the Dakota War; they hope to make the story of Dakota Indians a much larger part in their exhibits through informational signs.  

There is a general consensus among the staff at Fort Snelling that the site should be a means of educating people about the tragedy of the Dakota War and the lives it took.  "We're trying to interpret the broad history of the fort, in all its glory and all of its darkness," Matt Cassady states, "there is an ugly side to all of history, and we're not going to shy away from it."