1862 U.S.-Dakota War

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Guns of the Big Bend ' nnwdidhe obtain it?These are Indians u,:.i ilftt.ii,*l l: f. t , 't construct the warrior's lifeway While ethnohistorical documentation and rock art *..r. '. . and, by extension, the lifeways While ethnohistorical documentation and rock art *..r. '. . .. and, by extension, the lifeways reveal that historic Indians in the Big Bend carried '-'tz ; of his culture. It is details, ofweapons such as guns, bows and arrows, knives, t ,, ten laboriously obtained, that hatchets, and lances, what do we really know '; 1 n.d. Notes Concerning a Northwest Indian Trade Gun and Other Metal Artfacts from Terlingua Ranch, Brewster County, Texas. Center for Big Bend Studies file document, March zo15"

The revised results of this live-fire experiment with colonial, Revolutionary War, and American Civil War firearms add to the investigation of late pre-modern gun use and enhance our previous work on colonial-era firearms (Scott et al. revised 2024). To determine what happens when large-caliber lead balls, shot, and conical bullets were used in combat or hunting we observed impacts of experimentally fired projectiles into ballistic gelatin, an accepted tissue simulant with end coverings to simulate clothing of the era, and into a sand backstop. Projectile deformation associated with varied ranges were catalogued. The results of these experiments will permit archaeologists to better interpret recovered projectiles.

This report details and revises the results of live fire study of American Revolution era shoulder fired weapons. The shooting recovered the fired bullets, and the effects of impact are documented and discussed. The study also used ballistic gelatin tissue simulant and the results of bullets entering and passing through the gelatin are discussed in detail.

In the case of a bullet fired at a precisely vertical angle, it immediately begins to slow down because of the effects of gravity and air drag on the bullet. The bullet deceleration continues until at some point the bullet momentarily stops and then it begins to fall back toward earth. The bullet speed will increase during its free fall until it reaches its terminal velocity i.e. the bullet weight and air drag is balanced. Once this velocity is achieved the bullet will fall no faster and such a bullet would tumble, lose its spin, and fall at a much slower speed due to terminal velocity and therefore it may be less than lethal on impact. A man and his friend were on their way to nearby village to take dinner in a religious program. Suddenly the man was hit by a bullet on the top of his shoulder and he died. A case was registered U/S 302IPC. Careful scientific investigation reveals that it is the bullet fired by someone in air which on return journey towards earth hit the man.

The public's attention was recently focused on Civil War history, which has manifested in various ways. One is the market for Civil War artifacts, particularly bullets presumably bitten by soldiers who underwent amputations as a result of warfare. This paper will address a study that analyzed a local museum's ''bitten bullets'' to determine the authenticity of the claim that the marks were human induced, as well as cover previous studies that focused on this same subject matter. The results of this and previous studies demonstrate that bitten bullets are largely the result of animal chewing and that there remains little to no evidence of humans biting bullets during amputation surgeries.

The Dakota people are the original people of Minnesota. We come from the area where the Mississippi and the Minnesota Rivers meet at what we call Bdote. The Dakota language is currently on life support in Minnesota. Due to the effects of colonization, our number of speakers has continuously dwindled since the United States invaded our lands. The trauma caused by genocide, forced removal, decades of human rights violations all by the United States, its Euro-American citizenry and the church have had an effect on Dakota language loss. We need a safe place to teach and learn Dakota while at the same time being medicine to each other in ways that will empower our people.
What follows are my reflections on twenty-five years of teaching and learning the Daḳota language myself, observing teaching and learning in a variety of environments, and visiting with other teachers and learners. Colonization has had a profound effect on the Daḳota people (and other Indigenous people) so it has had an effect on our relationship with each other through the Daḳota language. The personal observations and reflections as a Daḳota person and as an academic have given me insight into ways that the teaching and learning of the Daḳota language is a powerful a tool for decolonization. By creating a safe place to speak, learn and teach Daḳota through traditional values as well as using best methods for Indigenous language learning (revitalization), we get a larger picture of how to be medicine to each other when we are speaking/learning/teaching Daḳota.
This thesis should be accessible to all Daḳota people and other Indigenous language learners and teachers. It is not intended for an academic audience only. In an ongoing effort to decolonize the academy or at least create places of decolonization within the academy, this is necessary to facilitate open discussion on creating and maintaining a safe place to teach and learn our languages.

In the two hundred years since his birth, the Rev. Dr. David Livingstone has been viewed as a Victorian-era missionary explorer associated with ‘humanitarian imperialism’; an image vigorously promoted by imperialists after his death, which survives in the popular mind, e.g. Jeremy Paxman’s 2012 BBC Empire series. Kenneth Kaunda’s description of Livingstone a few years ago as “Africa’s first freedom fighter” has not been generally embraced. Yet the Livingstone who lived among Batswana  from 1841-1853 was a far more radical figure than commonly portrayed. He was as scathing of British as Boer subjugation of the ‘aboriginal nations’ of South Africa Writing of the British Quarterly in 1851 he thus compared the renewed conflict between the Sandile’s Xhosa and British, to the independence struggle of Kossuth’s Hungarians against Austrian tyranny:
“But while England had been sympathizing with the struggles for freedom which she herself knows so very well how to enjoy, she has been struggling to crush a nation fighting as bravely for nationality as ever the Magyar did...We are no advocates of war but we would prefer perpetual war to perpetual slavery. No nation ever secured its freedom without fighting for it. And every nation on earth worthy of freedom is ready to shed blood in its defence.” 

The following slides converted from PPT to PDF were used in my November 11, 2013, Botswana Society presentation on Livingstone's radical legacy coinciding with the year's bicentennial of his birth.

After every battle the battlefield was covered with all signs of the battle that had raged. This paper highlights two topics related to the Aspern-Essling battlefield in May and June 1809. Burriyng could be a dangerous task and not liked by the ones chosen. After all a battlefirld was a hugh ressource that was emptied, speaking about canon-balls and weapons. The paper covers reports of the Artillery department what was recovered.

This conflict archaeology study shows how Indigenous identities, particularly of Dakota and Métis people, affected strategic choices made on the Wood Lake battlefield, and the larger Dakota- U.S. War of 1862. Before the war, people with Dakota ancestry were able to transcend rigid racial categorizations, situationally adjusting their identities to navigate changing social and political settings. As conflict with whites intensified, Dakota and Métis people were forced to materialize and project clear wartime allegiances, concealing aspects of their multi–faceted identities to align with white interests or Dakota resistance. Artifact and intervisibility analysis of the battlefield has improved our understanding the conflict, showing how Dakota people and their relations deployed invisibility, visibility, and complex group identities within asymmetrical warfare.  The resulting narratives use new archaeological data and ethnographic sources to challenge simplistic dominant racialized narratives of the war that represent the Dakota as disorganized and divided by dichotomized oppositions.

Using RadioDoc Review's suggested criteria for evaluating a radio documentary, John Biewen delivers an autocritique of his own program, Little War on the Prairie. It tells the story of the U.S.-Dakota War, a bloody Plains Indian war that broke out in the summer of 1862 in southern Minnesota. That six-week conflict took the lives of hundreds of people, perhaps a thousand, a larger death toll than in the better-known bloodlettings at Little Big Horn or Wounded Knee. Most of the dead were white settlers, though the U.S. government's reprisals in the aftermath of the war killed up to several thousand Dakota Indians. A grim highlight of that payback was the simultaneous hanging of thirty-eight Dakota warriors, the largest mass execution in U.S. history, on the day after Christmas, 1862, in Mankato, Minnesota. Which happens to be Biewen's hometown. Yet the story was not well known there -and Biewen seeks to find out why. Little War on the Prairie aired on This American Life (2012), whose host, Ira Glass, was also its primary editor. Download full article with audio link embedded.

The goal of this thesis is twofold. The first step was to perform archaeological test excavations on the Fort Fair Haven site in order to confirm that we had, in fact, located the 1862 historical site of Fort Fair Haven. Once we successfully determined that it was indeed the fort, then the second step was to analyze these findings and use them in conjunction with archival research in order to better understand what kind of actual defensive function it could have provided. A specific way of doing this is to compare the civilian fort’s design with those of military fortifications of the period. The data recovered strongly suggests that we did indeed successfully locate Fort Fair Haven. Because of the somewhat haphazard placement of the posts and their overall lack of uniformity, however, the so-called fort may have better been considered a makeshift barricade. With this in mind, the structure contrasts greatly with contemporary military fortifications, though it does share some simila...

In this article, we examine the role of partnerships as they relate to the destruction and reconstruction of Wakaŋ Tipi and Indian Mounds Park as a Dakota sacred feminine, origin, birth site through a theoretical lens of critical Indigenous pedagogy of place (Trinidad, 2016) and partnership studies (Eisler, 2005). We discuss the deep historical, social, psychological, and cultural relationship the Dakota have to this sacred site and the challenge of partnering with non-Dakota entities to restore Wakaŋ Tipi/Indian Mounds Park from a toxic waste dump to a spiritual sanctuary.

The battle of Little Bighorn in 1876 marked the beginning of the end of conflict between the U.S. and its military against the various Native American tribes west of the Mississippi River. Historians have given us various ideas of why Lieutenant Colonel Custer met with defeat. But none have noted, in connection with the November 3rd "secret meeting" between Grant and his generals, a movement of troops away from the Black Hills even before decisions were supposedly made to no longer keep miners out of that sacred land. When we study attitude and orders in conjunction with what we know about these events, the idea emerges that the government knew that they couldn't get the Indians to break the Fort Laramie Treaty unless they were attacked. Here, then, is a presentation of the possibility of deliberate defeat by the U.S. government and its military in order to take the Black Hills.

During the 19th century, the U.S. government took ownership of Dakota homelands in Minnesota and the Dakota Territory, leading to increasingly violent conflicts and decades of war. Military and militia forts were built at the physical boundaries of contested space to push “hostiles” west and to protect European American settlers. Fort Wadsworth, constructed in South Dakota during the 1864 Dakota Campaign, and Fort Juelson, built in 1876 by Norwegian immigrants during an “Indian scare” in Minnesota, were both knowingly constructed on top of burial mounds, appropriating and reshaping sacred Native American landscapes into protective enclosures for the dominating, yet fearful, colonizers. Aerial laser scanning, geophysical survey, and historical research explore the archaeological expression and significance of these interlocked landscapes at geo-
graphic and cognitive frontiers.

In the early 1860s, far from the American Civil War’s traditional Eastern and even “Western” theaters, New Mexico Territory quickly became an American, Confederate, Diné, and Apache battleground for control of the region. Despite its strategic value to all parties and the blood spilt to win it, the Southwest has remained a geographically and intellectually distant frontier in most historians’ conceptions of the war. Pushing back against the region’s neglected status in her latest book, The Three-Cornered War: The Union, The Confederacy, and the Native Peoples in the Fight for the West, Megan Kate Nelson effectively brings the Far West front and center to the ambitions, military objectives and engagements, and long term consequences of the Civil War.

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The Walnut Creek massacre occurred July 18, 1865. Ten teamsters, eight white and two African Americans, were killed by a party of Kiowa warriors near Fort Zarah, Kansas. The remains were uncovered during a storm in 1973. The report summarizes the history and physical evidence surrounding the burials. Eighteen buttons and thirteen iron projectile points are described and illustrated.

This article reexamines a highly public dispute between a powerful and well-connected Episcopal bishop and his missionary priest, men both central to the gov-ernment's campaign of war and assimilation against Indigenous Peoples in the Northern Great Plains of the nineteenth-century United States. The bishop claimed that the priest had engaged in sexual intercourse with a Dakota woman named "Scarlet House," and used this allegation to remove the priest from his post. No historian ever challenged this claim and asked who Scarlet House was. Employing Dakota-resourced evidence, government and church records, linguistics , and onomastics, this study reveals that in actuality there was no such person as Scarlet House. Furthermore, at the time of the incident, the person in question was not a woman but a child. The church created a fictional personage to cover up what was taking place at the agency: sexual violence against children. After "naming" this violence, this article makes four key historical contributions about the history of US settler colonialism: It documents Dakota Peoples' agency, by demonstrating how they adapted their social structures to the harrowing conditions of the US mission and agency system. It situates the experiences of two Dakota families within the larger context of settler-colonial conquest in North America, revealing the generational quality of settler-colonial violence. It shows how US governmental policies actually enabled sexual predation against children and women. And, it argues that "naming violence" means both rendering a historical account of the sexual violence experienced by children and families in the care of the US government and its agents, as well as acknowledging how this violence has rippled out through communities and across generations.

The Wood Lake Battlefield is the location of the last armed conflict between the Oceti Sakowin and the U.S. Military in 1862. Investigation of the material patterns of asymmetric warfare on the battlefield combined with oral history and documentary sources provide new ways of understanding the complexity of the conflict. Dakota traditional warfare was adapted to fight against the U.S. Military, which was technologically better armed with a numerically greater force. An examination of artifacts recovered through sub-surface geophysical survey and metal detection, and a GIS analysis of artillery shows that the U.S. was relatively ineffective when using shoulder arms and gained their advantage through the use of  anti-personnel weapons fired by artillery.

William Back, in his 1981 article, " Hydromythology and Ethnohydrology in the New World, " wrote " If used with caution, mythology can sometimes extend historical and archeological interpretation further back in time. " This principle was applied to Minnesota cave history. According to early missionaries, the indigenous Dakota people believed that the junction of the Minnesota and Mississippi rivers was the center of the Earth, positioned directly under the center of the heavens. Nearby was the dwelling place of Unktahe, Dakota god of waters and of the underworld, who was often depicted as a serpent. Mary Eastman, in her 1849 book, Dahcotah, or Life and Legends of the Sioux around Fort Snelling, wrote that " Unktahe, the god of the waters, is much reverenced by the Dahcotahs. Morgan's Bluff, near Fort Snelling, is called 'God's House' by the Dahcotahs; they say it is the residence of Unktahe, and under the hill is a subterranean passage, thro...

The US-Dakota War stands among the most overlooked conflicts in American History. Contemporary with the American Civil War, the US-Dakota War, featured significant fighting, tactical brilliance, and strategic savvy set in the open plains of Minnesota and North Dakota.

Karl Jakob Skarstein's "The War with the Sioux" tells the story of Norwegian immigrants, American soldiers, and Dakota and Lakota Indians as they fought to protect their families, communities, and way of life.

Translated from Norwegian and supplemented with a preface and new introductions by Danielle Mead Skjelver, Richard Rothaus, Melissa Gjellstad, and Dakota Goodhouse, this work draws on the diaries, letters, and newspapers of Norwegian immigrants for a new perspective on the Northern Plains during these tumultuous years. Skarstein's work makes an important contribution to the growing body of scholarship on this conflict and offers an accessible and surprisingly intimate view of the conflict through the eyes of the Norwegian settlers in the region. 

All of the introductions are Open Access, and the full text, including the English translation by Melissa Gjellstad and Danielle Skjelver is available here. https://mediterraneanworld.wordpress.com/2015/09/03/the-war-with-the-sioux-the-book/

Despite being known by Minnesotans as a “second civil war,” and as a campaign of ethnic cleansing by Dakota, the 1862 U.S.-Dakota War remains an understudied event in the history of U.S. imperialism. Through readings of Dakota prisoners’ letters, this essay examines how Dakota experienced and resisted state power in the concentration camps that were created following the war. By focusing on the slippages between English and Dakota languages, languages which of course mediated the mass conversions of Dakota prisoners, I argue that we may see more clearly what I call the “transgressive adoptions” of White culture by imprisoned Dakota. Transgression appears under the guise of compliance or “assimilation” (converting to Christianity, learning to write and read, practicing vocational trades), where the adoption of forms of Whiteness did not mean relinquishing Dakota values, but instead merely afforded some of Whiteness’s privileges. These transgressions importantly cleared space for forms of solidarity and resistance that were unintelligible to non-Dakota, but were latent in norms and practices of the tiyospaye, or Dakota/Lakota extended family.  Writing letters to family imprisoned elsewhere, some Dakota prisoners were able to maintain, and even extended the reach of, kinship relationalities and so reclaimed an important basis for remembering, decolonizing, and remaking a wounded Dakota peoplehood.

In September 2012, USUAS conducted a second year of investigations that again focused on the Island Area, but also expanded their investigations east of the river onto the Olson property. This year’s work was an expansion of the 2011 investigations that focused on excavation, or ground-truthing, of identified geophysical anomalies, as well as additional metal detection and geophysical prospecting. The results of the work were quite fruitful and produced additional buried evidence of Emigrant Era artifacts that included a range of fire arm munitions (e.g., bullets, percussion caps, melted lead), plus domestic items (.e.g., tent stake and hog scraper candlestick holder). Additional geophysical surveys using ground penetrating radar and a fluxgate gradiometer identified a number of linear features and, based upon our previous work, buried hearth features. Hand excavation, in concert with chronometric dating techniques, will be necessary to understand the context and origin of these ano...