Thirty miles to the northwest and seven hours later, a white woman named Sarah Wakefield moved from room to room in her two-story brick home at the center of the Upper Agency, the northernmost of the two administrative centers run by the United States on Dakota land. Outside, her house was spare and unadorned, a match for the warehouse, agent’s quarters, employee barracks, and jail spread along a windswept bluff along the government road, high above the junction of the Minnesota and Yellow Medicine rivers. Inside, the house was more city than frontier, probably the best furnished and most expensively appointed on the south side of the river. Today, every room held particular meaning as she stepped away from carpeted parlors full of black walnut and mahogany furniture, left behind wardrobes full of silk damask dresses, and abandoned hundreds of books and bound volumes of the latest magazines from the East.
Sarah’s husband, John, the Upper Agency physician, appeared and asked gruffly what she was doing. “Taking a final look,” she wanted to say, but, worried that she’d sound melodramatic, she made a lighthearted comment and finished stuffing a few of her and her children’s things into a trunk before she went outside for a hurried and dangerous trek across the prairie.
In August 1862, Sarah Wakefield was thirty-two, with little more than a year’s experience of the frontier. Gregarious to strangers, prone to anxiety, and fiercely protective of her two young children, she was plain-looking and stout enough that the Dakota called her Tanka-Winohinca Waste, meaning “large good woman.” The move to an Indian reservation had been her husband’s choice, not hers, and she had spent the past fourteen months rattled by night noises and unsettled by the prairie’s vastness while she worked gamely to achieve something resembling normality in her day-to-day affairs.
Sarah was born and raised in Rhode Island, but little is known of her time in the East other than the fact that her move to Minnesota in 1854, when she was twenty-four, occurred under some kind of dark personal cloud and coincided with the end of her speaking relationship with her mother. Within two years she had married a fellow New England transplant, a Yale-educated doctor from Connecticut named John Luman Wakefield, who had settled in southern Minnesota after five years of practice in the California goldfields, probably to be near his brother James, who was already a prominent frontier lawyer. In 1857, Sarah gave birth to a son, James; a daughter, named Lucy but called Nellie, followed in 1860, one year before their move to the Minnesota River.
The Wakefields had expected to spend one and perhaps two presidential terms at the Upper Agency, but now, in August 1862, it seemed that Sarah’s time on the “Indian frontier,” as whites called it, might end as abruptly as it had begun. As the sun had climbed through the morning and burned the dew off the tall bluestem grasses, reports of an Indian uprising filtered in from the villages downriver, all of them confusing, uncertain, and hard to credit. How much of this talk reached Sarah is uncertain, but she had known something unusual was afoot shortly after lunch when her husband asked George Gleason, a visiting Lower Agency clerk, to escort her away. As a pair Sarah Wakefield and Gleason were mismatched, one full of premonitions of doom and the other full of jest and bluster. “Indian scares” were a phenomenon agency employees like Gleason felt they understood and could shrug off. Indeed, they’d been through a summer of crises, all more immediate and tangible than this one, without violence from the Dakota.
None of the whites or mixed-bloods entering the Upper Agency grounds and talking of attacks against whites along the river below seemed to have reliable, concrete information. And in that absence, many at the agency took comfort in more typical and less cataclysmic possibilities. Perhaps they were only hearing the first rumblings of an Ojibwe raid near the reservation; perhaps the Yankton and Yanktonais living along the James and Missouri rivers had come to steal horses; perhaps the Upper Agency Dakota were only making noise in an attempt to hurry the late annuity payments; or perhaps, even, agents of the seceded states were in the area to stir up trouble. None of these were new threats, and today, with the community on edge and people beginning to depart in all directions, they sounded positively reassuring.
All morning Gleason told passersby that he was heading down to the Lower Agency and then eastward for a vacation, adding that the doctor’s wife would be making a visit to relatives a hundred miles downriver. Sarah heard a different story. Gleason told her that their destination was actually Fort Ridgely, a small garrison of artillery and mostly untested American soldiers beyond the Lower Agency and across the river, forty miles away. This information was enough to put her into a growing state of panic. Shortly after three o’clock in the afternoon, Sarah’s children were hoisted into the back seat of an open wagon, James next to her and Nellie in her lap. As Gleason climbed into the driver’s seat, Sarah asked him if he carried a pistol. He told her not to worry and gave the call to start the horses moving.
Sarah Wakefield had first arrived on Dakota lands the previous summer, in 1861, as one passenger in a seven-wagon train that carried two important items destined for the Upper Agency: the medical expertise of her husband and a portion of the annuity payment for the Dakota, $75,000 in gold coins stipulated in the four treaties negotiated over the past quarter century. The distance from Shakopee, Sarah’s previous home, to the Upper Minnesota River Valley was about 90 miles as the crow flies, but she had traveled for three days over 150 twisting miles on the steamboat Jeanette Roberts before disembarking at the Lower Agency, near the mouth of the Redwood River.
“As I landed from the steamboat, I could not help exclaiming, ‘Is it here where I am to live?’ ” she wrote later, “for all I saw was one log hut and about six hundred filthy, nasty, greasy Indians” gathering at the Lower Agency to wait for their portion of the 1861 annuity. Soon she understood that the ferry landing along the river bottom was only a way station for her, one that gave way to high, sweeping vistas of grass and more grass as she and her party continued by wagon another thirty miles to the Upper Agency. As she headed northwest toward her new home, she worried about a bushwhack aimed at stealing the gold and remarked on the emptiness of her surroundings. “A more beautiful sight than that prairie, I have never seen,” she wrote. “It seemed like a vast lake—not a tree or shrub to be seen.”
Sarah and John Wakefield had not been lonely travelers headed for empty lands. A few weeks behind her own boat, the Franklin Steele had carried the new governor and the new Indian agent, along with an assortment of soldiers, attorneys, newspaper editors, gamblers, clergymen, and tourists from Milwaukee, Chicago, and even England. The journey was labeled a “Grand Pleasure Excursion” and promised the opportunity to see the Dakota assemble for a day of performance and ceremony. For years, traders, frontiersmen, and new settlers had come to watch the dances, singing, and speeches that highlighted a summer kinship gathering for the Dakota; beginning in the early 1850s, the annuity payment had simply been attached to those events, providing a convenient way for white authorities to bring the Dakota together for their payment and creating, at the same time, a festive occasion for adventurers and frontier aristocrats from all over.
No more illustrious visitor had ridden on the Franklin Steele in the summer of 1861 than an ailing Henry David Thoreau, who had traveled fifteen hundred miles from Massachusetts with his friend Horace Mann, Jr., on what would be Thoreau’s final trip away from home before his death from tuberculosis the following spring. Thoreau, who had nurtured a distant fascination with Indians all of his life, wrote fancifully that “the buffalo were said to be feeding within twenty-five or thirty miles” of the Lower Agency as a series of ceremonial councils between white authorities and Indians began on the morning of June 26, 1861. He singled out Little Crow among the Dakota speakers for his forcefulness and charisma, but all of the chiefs, he added, “were quite dissatisfied with the white man’s treatment of them” and, in Thoreau’s view, had “the advantage in point of truth and earnestness, and therefore of eloquence.” Little Crow’s dissatisfaction, though, had not dampened the festivities, which included the presentation of two beef oxen to the Dakota, the firing of cannon salutes, songs by a German band, and a ceremonial monkey dance created and performed by the Dakota at the governor’s formal request. All of this action, which would be repeated by other whites and other Indians in front of Sarah at the Upper Agency a few days later, excited and gratified the outsiders, who could now write home with tales of their time among the savages.
Little Crow’s complaints may have been easily set aside in the bustle surrounding the payment, but they were deeply felt and long in the making. All of the week’s pomp and merriment served to paper over a pile of long-standing disputes regarding the annuity gold. The treaties of 1837, 1851, and 1858 had reserved set sums for the Dakota in the form of annual disbursements from the United States Treasury, which were paid out of a dedicated fund and only after congressional approval in the form of an annual appropriations bill. That yearly bill, debated and signed by men who knew little of the treaty details, less of the treaty negotiations, and nothing of the Dakota, began the process not of disbursing the money to Indians but of reserving much of it for whites.
By the time the wagons arrived at the agencies, a portion of the money had vanished, along with all clarity as to the rightful execution of treaty provisions. Commissioner, superintendent, and Indian agent had the authority to reroute annuity money to pay for administrative services, construction projects, employee wages, restitution for individual depredations, or other, more creative expenditures. Any of these men could approve the repayment of Indian debts to white agency employees and contractors out of the annuities, who often tallied the monies due them under a system of blank vouchers—essentially signed checks with no dollar amount written in—that allowed its designees to name their price for goods and services. Unregulated and barely monitored, the validity of these set-asides and appropriations was left to the integrity of individuals who, in many cases, had taken their jobs in part because of the possibilities for financial gain.
When John Wakefield arrived at the Upper Agency in the spring of 1861 with his wife, he represented the tail end of a chain of patronage stretching up to Abraham Lincoln, whose inauguration had changed everything for the Dakota in Minnesota and the whites who surrounded them. Sarah Wakefield owed her presence on the reservation to a series of decisions triggered when Lincoln had sent “blank appointments” to the congressional delegations of the northwestern states and territories so that they might name agents to the various tribes on or adjacent to their land. Democrats had run the executive branch for the previous eight years, through the terms of Franklin Pierce and James Buchanan, but in reality the Dakota had been involved with a familiar set of agents and traders—most of them interrelated with the Indians by marriage and fatherhood—for decades. Now, with the white population booming and the Northwest gaining fast in political importance, almost everything had changed.
In one frenzied week of political dealing at the 1860 Republican convention in Chicago, lawyer and former U.S. representative Caleb Smith had received a promise of the post of secretary of the interior, while Illinois merchant William P. Dole was given a similar guarantee of the position of commissioner of Indian affairs, both in exchange for their crucial support of Lincoln’s nomination. Lincoln’s handlers had brokered these promises themselves, leaving Lincoln free to focus on speechifying and handshaking. Once elected and in office, Lincoln had made good on those commitments and dozens of others, discovering along the way just how much he despised the work of patronage, calling the torrent of office-seekers “a curse to this country” and taking advantage of all possible ways to shift lower-level decisions onto state governments or his cabinet appointees. The Minnesota slate was chosen by the state’s congressional delegation for reasons as unconnected to the real business of Indian affairs and the real needs of Indians as Lincoln’s choices of Smith and Dole had been.
The Indian superintendency of the Northern Department (encompassing Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Kansas, Nebraska, and the Dakota Territory) had gone to ambitious, hard-drinking Clark W. Thompson, a railroad speculator and close friend of Republican senator Morton Wilkinson. One level below Thompson, new Indian agents were named, and the Minnesota River post had gone to Thomas Galbraith, a lawyer, staunch Unionist, active Freemason, and loyal Republican functionary from the Wakefields’ hometown of Shakopee. The superintendent and agent were entitled to enlist a new group of agency professionals that included clerks, teachers, and a physician, all “in the employ” of the agent, who became a political boss with as much control over the lives of the Dakota as the governor or Indian commissioner had over his own life.
For the Dakota, this change had created profound upheaval, as almost every tie they had to the white power structure was suddenly severed and made anew. For generations whites had grown more numerous around them and yet more distant from them. A class of men who had not so long ago come into their world as solitary entrepreneurs, demonstrating remarkable adaptability and taking great personal risks, was now too often made up of strangers lining up at a trough. What these new men shared was not knowledge of the Dakota people or Dakota customs but rather the knowledge that Indian superintendents and agents controlled a large pot of federal money. The spillover from that pot, they reasoned, might as well land in their own laps. In this era of Lincoln, a Republican who could frame an Indian’s house—or teach an Indian’s children, or shoe an Indian’s horses—was in a far better position than a Democrat who could do the same thing.
Only the old group of traders held on at the Dakota agencies, men named Myrick, Forbes, and Roberts, among others, sole proprietors eking out a living under a system that required them to squeeze their Dakota customers ever more tightly to stay afloat. At the turn of the nineteenth century, to be a trader had meant a solitary life in a West that seemed wide open. Independent operators at first, later the employees of powerful fur companies, they were sometimes honest, sometimes designing and avaricious, but always intrepid and adventurous. Those who found the greatest success in accumulating valuable beaver furs and buffalo hides in exchange for cash or barter were those who most fully assimilated into Dakota life, living in Dakota villages, wearing Dakota clothes, learning the Dakota language, marrying into Dakota bands, and embracing Dakota traditions of reciprocal gift exchange. But those times were now long past. The good furs were in ever shorter supply, replaced by muskrat pelts that sold for pennies, and a relationship that had been symbiotic, at least at its best, was now broken.
Every member of the current crop of traders among the Dakota had been appointed by a Whig or a Democrat, and all were beholden to state and federal leaders whose influence had now vanished. Most understood that their time in the field was growing shorter, well aware of the scuttlebutt that Galbraith, the new agent, would not renew their licenses for the following year. In its previous incarnation as a sparsely populated territory, Minnesota had been solidly Democratic, but the influx of new citizens, more than a hundred thousand in the previous decade, had consisted mostly of Republicans opposed to the extension of slavery into their new home and suspicious of the Democrats’ anti-immigrant leanings. To the Dakota, questions of slavery and immigration and political parties were foreign concerns, but the traders’ tenuous hold on their jobs brought new pressures to bear on everyone connected to the Indian agencies.
Bearing their certifications from the Office of Indian Affairs, the traders working the agency grounds had become professional creditors working to keep a system of perpetual debt in place. Their shelves laden with flour, sugar, household items, farm implements, blankets, clothing, and firearms, they offered terms that shops in Saint Paul or the other Minnesota River towns would not or could not. Managing this liberal credit was the key to their success: push too hard, and their stream of income would flow in another direction; push too little, and it would slow to a trickle. Each year, as the annuity gold was disbursed, the traders and their employees formed a ring around the newly paid Dakota, demanding money and interest due them according to figures the Dakota were often asked to take on faith. Should a Dakota refuse to pay what he was told he owed, no more credit would be extended. Should a Dakota find himself and his kin cleaned out by his previous year’s obligations, he was simply granted more credit, payable out of the next year’s annuities. Nothing about the process was illegal, but the perpetual spiral of debt was galling. And now, facing the possible elimination of their franchises, most of the traders would be foreclosing on all debt and demanding as much gold as they could get.
The exact mechanism of John Wakefield’s appointment as Upper Agency physician at a salary of $1,000 a year remains unclear, but a trail is easy to pick out. He and Galbraith had lived in Shakopee and belonged to the same Masonic lodge. Perhaps they were good friends, or perhaps they simply moved together in the same political or professional circles; perhaps John Wakefield sought the position for a promise of ease, or perhaps he nursed a hankering for the frontier; perhaps, even, given persistent hints of marital discord before and after their time at the Indian agency, he and Sarah had gained a quiet notoriety around town as a troubled couple and needed to get away. But one thing is sure: the Wakefields were not roughing it on the reservation. Their house included a fully outfitted kitchen and storeroom full of beef, pork, codfish, mackerel, cheese and crackers, rice, butter, and eggs. At a time when Upper Agency Dakotas were hungry and demanding action from the Indian agent, the Wakefields’ prosperity must have made them conspicuous.
In Shakopee, Sarah had been a doctor’s wife, sister-in-law to a prominent and well-liked lawyer, but here, out on the prairie? For all her fears and racial assumptions, Sarah was inclined to be friendly and generous with the Dakota, but she still looked eastward for her cultural and material needs; she remained connected to New England through books, magazines, and expensive mail-order fashions. Not even the small group of missionaries’ wives around the agencies provided Sarah with real companionship. She had never been baptized, and though she believed in God she did not find comfort in church services or churchmen. In many ways she seems to have been something of an outsider, even a wayward one. The tenor of her marriage is difficult to decipher, but all of the available evidence shows that her relationship with John up to 1862 was full of tension, including an apparent period of separation, his unilateral decision to head to the prairie, and incidents of rough, impatient treatment that may well have descended into physical abuse. Sarah was a loyal wife, but the Wakefields were not a happy couple.
When the Wakefields settled in Minnesota in the 1850s, their new hometown of Shakopee was no longer Dakota land, but it was still part of the Dakota world, a natural stop along the Minnesota River for Dakotas traveling to Saint Paul, abroad on hunting expeditions to the Big Woods, or heading out for battle against the Ojibwe. In winter, the Dakota often camped around Shakopee, which had been built on the site of a Mdewakanton village. “Not a day passed but some of the Indians were at my house,” Sarah wrote, “and I had always pitied them, and given them food.” In 1858, a clash between Dakota and Ojibwe warriors near the town brought several wounded Mdewakantons up to John Wakefield’s door, and Sarah maintained that “they often said he saved many of their lives,” creating an indebtedness she later believed saved her own life in return.
Despite her previous encounters with Dakota families, Sarah’s perceptions of Indians were sometimes as reductive and bigoted as those held by her most xenophobic neighbors; her language could be insulting and ignorant, and she rarely questioned the presumed superiority of white intelligence and culture. But at other times her eyes and heart were open. She noted with anger the ongoing debasement and growing resentment among the Dakota as traders claimed tribal monies through unaccountable tallies of Indian debt. On her first Independence Day at the Upper Agency, shortly after her arrival in 1861, a stray rumor had circulated that Dakotas were coming after traders and clerks with violence in mind. The white men of the agency and their wives and children had spent the day hiding out in the jail, and the situation was eventually defused when Sarah and others performed an impromptu dance for the Dakota, took them into their homes, and served them ice cream, one of the frontier’s most exotic foodstuffs.
Over the past year Sarah had seen provisions and annuity payments distributed more liberally to “farmer Indians” who agreed to cultivate the earth, dress like white people, and cut their hair, all according to the terms of the 1858 treaty, which many Dakotas had bitterly opposed. She hired Dakota wives to sew for her and wrote fondly of stopping in Dakota villages to share a pipe and join the women as they sat cooking, talking, and laughing. During Sarah’s first winter on the reservation, two feet of snow fell in January and more in February, leaving few pockets of protection on the prairie and little to hunt or forage, forcing the Dakota to slaughter and share their few cattle and hogs and to travel long distances to find food and blankets, both of which were growing scarce. The hard winter had made the spring hunt a meager one, and in the summer of 1862 the Dakota, especially those of the Upper Agency bands, had turned to forage as they waited for their corn and potatoes to ripen, digging turnips, pulling tall grasses, and shooting pigeons and whatever muskrats and ducks they could find.
From her vantage point in a comfortable, well-provisioned home, Sarah had watched over the hot summer as the Dakota became more and more desperate. In early June the Sisseton and Wahpeton Dakota, the Upper Agency bands, had begun to gather, so that by July 1862 the agency grounds were crowded with more than a thousand agitated Indians. Gossip filtered in from the Indian agent and many others that the annuity gold would be arriving any day; but she also heard the unfounded though believable rumors suggesting that the money would be issued as paper currency, if it came at all. The traders, ears perked, were refusing to extend credit until they received solid assurances that the Dakota would soon have their funds. Compounding the Dakotas’ anger, the brick warehouse at the Upper Agency, which occupied half of the building that also contained John Wakefield’s office, was well stocked with flour, sugar, cured meats, and other provisions for the agency employees. Without a reliable assurance of payment, they had narrowed their focus to getting at that food.
On August 4, 1862, two weeks before the fateful meeting in front of Little Crow’s tepee, Sarah watched hundreds of armed young Dakotas come “driving down the hill toward the Agency, dressed out very finely, and as we thought, for a dance; but we were soon convinced they meant mischief, as they surrounded the soldiers while part of them rushed up to the warehouse.” Galbraith refused to open the doors. Such demonstrations had been staged before. He didn’t believe the stories of starvation, and he was, besides, a man who held standard procedure in high esteem, preferring to enroll the Dakotas—counting them and verifying their identities—before issuing any goods. After Galbraith disappeared inside his office, the Dakotas came to the Wakefields’ house and “rapped violently” on the door. Convinced they had come to kill her, Sarah picked up a pistol, met them in her front hall, and “inquired as calmly as I could what they wanted.”
They did not want to kill her. They wanted an axe, which Sarah supplied, and soon the men began to hack at the warehouse door. The moment was thick with the threat of armed violence: a crowd of soldiers and Dakotas face-to-face, guns raised, the Indian agent out of sight and, some said, getting drunk. Galbraith’s inaction meant that the task of defusing the crisis had been left to a young army lieutenant, Timothy Sheehan, who held his own quick council with Upper Agency Dakota leaders and, whether out of pragmatism, magnanimity, or a desire to play hero, opened the warehouse doors.
The confrontation had already gone well beyond the usual haranguing between Dakotas and agency employees, and Sarah and several other white women left the next morning for the Lower Agency to get out of harm’s way and bring news of possible unrest to the white population there. Little Crow, meanwhile, had departed the same day from the Lower Agency in the other direction; runners and riders had brought him news of the altercation overnight. He arrived at the Upper Agency in time to find a new soldier taking command of the white forces. This was John Marsh, a veteran of the First Battle of Bull Run, who finished the job of distributing the warehouse provisions and began to talk to the Dakotas at the same time as he was placing guards around the agency. For the next two weeks, a running series of unusually charged councils and discussions took place, convened in several locations along the river valley and featuring a shifting cast, including Marsh, Sheehan, Galbraith, Little Crow, and various missionaries and traders. All of these talks centered on the growing unrest of the Dakotas who had been denied credit and were still waiting on their annuities.
Galbraith would later describe the reservation as quiet during this short period following the confrontation at the warehouse, and perhaps it was, outwardly. But the situation was full of clashing agendas, and ominous potentialities lay just beneath the surface. As a village chief and erstwhile tribal spokesman, Little Crow was speaking only for the Lower Agency Mdewakantons and their need for provisions. Marsh and Sheehan were concerned with tamping down the rising possibility of violence. Galbraith seemed to have been knocked to the sidelines; given that he was still recruiting a company of white and mixed-blood soldiers for the Union army and still talking about becoming its captain, he may have been eyeing the end of his tenure as Indian agent and hoping that no fire lay behind all of the summer’s smoke. In any case, confident that the annuity gold would soon arrive, Galbraith preferred that the traders do what they had always done and simply open one small, additional line of credit to cover the gap. The traders wanted none of Galbraith’s plan. Most didn’t trust the agent to renew their licenses, and their need for cash, should their remaining tenure prove short, inclined them to heed the rumor that the gold wasn’t coming at all. Any interruption in the flow of annuities would mean that their last chance to profit from the Dakotas in debt to them might simply float away.
As the August heat settled in, the face-offs turned ugly. And the talk was never any uglier than when the trader Andrew Myrick was involved. Myrick and his brother Nathan had arrived on the Minnesota River a dozen years earlier and were veterans, so they thought, of the yearly routine: the Dakotas would agitate against the traders’ claims on most of the annuity money, but in the end do nothing about it. Still young men, the Myricks owned stores at both agencies and employed several clerks. Their haul from the treaties and the yearly distributions had already run into the tens of thousands of dollars, and they seemed to occupy a primary position in negotiations, not least because Andrew was prone to confrontation.
At some point between August 4, when the Upper Agency Dakota attempted to break into the commodities warehouse, and August 18, when four young men told their story of killing whites near the Big Woods, Little Crow and Andrew Myrick stood face-to-face in the most heated exchange of the month. The exact location and date are difficult to pinpoint, probably on or near the Lower Agency grounds after Little Crow’s return from his trip upriver. But the substance of their conversation is clear. As Thomas Galbraith, Captain Marsh, and Lieutenant Sheehan looked on, Little Crow argued that since goods had been distributed at the Upper Agency, the same thing should be done for his people to the south. His tone and words were apparently threatening enough that the mixed-blood interpreter refused to translate them, leaving the task to John P. Williamson, son of the Presbyterian missionary Thomas S. Williamson.
We have waited a long time. The money is ours, but we cannot get it. We have no food, but here are these stores filled with food. We ask that you, the agent, make some arrangement by which we can get food from the stores, or else we may take our own way to keep ourselves from starving. When men are hungry they help themselves.
Myrick responded as he often had to such sentiments: as far as he was concerned, the Indians could eat grass or their own shit. He had said so in various ways more than once in the past month, but now, following weeks of mounting unrest, the situation was far more volatile. After his words were translated, a cry went up among the Dakotas. Refused an extension of credit or provisions from the warehouse at the Lower Agency—and with the annuity gold still who knew where—the Mdewakanton Dakota, Little Crow’s people, now focused on words. Myrick’s statement was not one to start a war; that was far beyond the power of one white trader. But as a rallying cry, it was tailor-made. And when violence did come, there was little question as to who would become one of its first targets.
As George Gleason drove Sarah and her children south under an intense afternoon sun on the long afternoon of August 18, the government road was strangely empty of travelers. Stopping at one of the traders’ stores on the way out of the Upper Agency, they had heard that Dakota warriors were killing settlers as far north as the Big Woods and as far south as the Iowa border, that Indian camps all over the Dakota reservations and in the Dakota Territory were holding councils of war, and that the Upper Agency Dakota, “her” Indians, the Wahpeton and Sisseton bands, were meeting to decide whether to join the conflict or to flee out west. Sarah had asked Gleason to turn around and go back to her house and husband, but, she wrote later, he only “made great sport of me.” If the Upper Agency Dakota were agitating, he said, he would take her to the Lower Agency and recruit several hundred of the Mdewakanton and Wahpekute Dakota there, “his” Indians, to go north and fight alongside the whites.
Gleason’s route, at John Wakefield’s instruction, would take Sarah past Little Crow’s village and into the Lower Agency, across the Minnesota River via ferry, and then eleven more miles to Fort Ridgely, the only place within eighty miles where settlers might find artillery and white soldiers. As they rode for mile after mile along the bluff, the river wound in curlicues to their left while to the right a sea of high grass filled the horizon. For long stretches their view was uninterrupted by a single tree, hill, or built structure. The third week of August was the height of the prairie’s summer display, an immense quilt pattern created by pasqueflowers, golden alexander, bearded tongue, and goldenrod budding in color-rich waves. The expanse was beautiful but also so spacious as to be frightening. Sarah begged Gleason to hurry and to keep an eye out for ambush, but, she wrote later, “he would laugh, sing, shout, and when I would chide him and tell him how I felt, he would say I was nervous, and told me he would never take me anywhere again.” Reaching a rise in the road they saw a “great body of smoke” rising ahead of them in the direction of the river, where the Lower Agency was situated. When Sarah asked Gleason one more time to turn back, he laughed and said, “Oh, no, it is the saw mill or the prairie on fire.”
A few miles later, nearing six o’clock, their wagon approached the two-story house of Joseph and Valencia Reynolds. Here two Dakotas approached casually on foot. Sarah asked Gleason to take out his pistol, to which he answered that “they are only boys going hunting,” and reined in the horses. As the two men passed by Wakefield’s wagon, a shot sounded. Struck in the shoulder, Gleason twisted in his seat and fell back against Sarah, pressing one-year-old Nellie between them. Another shot, this one to his intestines, struck with enough force that Gleason was catapulted off the wagon. The Dakota who had not fired took hold of the panicked horses and spoke urgently to Sarah.
In this moment, with Gleason’s blood in the wagon, on her, and on her children, Sarah was seized by terror and hope. For she recognized him. And he recognized her.
His name was Chaska, a farmer Dakota of the Mdewakanton band with cut hair and a collared shirt, who spoke broken English and who had been a familiar face among those who had camped near Sarah’s hometown of Shakopee before the Wakefields’ departure for the Upper Agency. Chaska hastily told her that his companion, Hapa, was a “bad man” who had been drinking and that she should not talk too much. Sprawled on the ground, Gleason called out, “O, my God, Mrs. Wakefield!” Chaska walked over to the mortally wounded man, aimed at his head, and pulled the trigger, but the hammer only snapped. Six weeks later Sarah would offer her own testimony in front of a military commission about what happened next. Hapa brushed his companion aside and shot Gleason a third and final time, then turned to level the gun at her head. It was, Sarah believed, her last moment, but Chaska knocked the firearm away from Hapa and barked out a reprimand.
The two Dakota men then argued over her fate for close to an hour while smoke continued to rise nearby, clearly the sign of something worse than a prairie fire. Chaska finally won out. Gleason’s body was left to lie in the sun while Mrs. Wakefield and her children were driven back upriver, in the direction of Little Crow’s village. Her captivity had begun.
