The Dakota War of 1862 is an inexhaustible tale, with deep roots and many branches. 38 Nooses seeks to emphasize the small degrees of separation that existed between seemingly widely spaced actors: between Dakota Indians and whites, between individuals driving events and those swept up by events, between politicians in Washington, D.C., and settlers on the northwestern frontier, between battle-tested soldiers of the Civil War and civilian skirmishers in Minnesota. In my telling—as in any telling—certain moments and people are privileged and others are necessarily deemphasized or omitted. Those choices are not a judgment of value; rather, they are a by-product of the particular lenses I’ve used. Taken all together, the sources listed below are remarkable for their scope and detail, and those wishing to explore other parts of the story, or to revisit those narrated in 38 Nooses, will find much to reward their curiosity.
A long list of academic scholars, independent historians, and other researchers have devoted their attention to the themes, people, and events prominent in 38 Nooses. Many of these people are thanked individually in the acknowledgments. But gratitude is also due to the thousands of people who created and maintain the primary sources on which the story depends, some of which are now available in impressive digital collections. In writing 38 Nooses I made frequent use of the Cornell University Library’s Making of America Collection (ebooks.library.cornell.edu/m/moawar/index.html), especially its searchable copy of The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, as well as The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln at the University of Michigan (quod.lib.umich.edu/l/lincoln) and the Abraham Lincoln Papers at the Library of Congress (lcweb2.loc.gov/ammem/alhtml/malhome.html). I also took advantage of the many indispensable online research databases available through the library system at George Mason University, including JSTOR, ProQuest Historical Newspapers, and Infotrac’s 19th Century U.S. Newspapers. The two-volume compilation Minnesota in the Civil and Indian Wars, 1861–1865, recently reissued by the Minnesota Historical Society Press and available only in print, sometimes overlaps with The War of the Rebellion, but also includes many letters and other communications that are difficult to find elsewhere.
Offline, my most frequent destinations were the National Archives, the Newspaper and Current Periodical Reading Room at the Library of Congress, the libraries of the Washington Research Library Consortium, and the Manuscript and Newspaper Collections at the Minnesota Historical Society library. At these repositories I was able to access many important books, journals, personal papers, organizational records, and complete or nearly complete runs of the following newspapers, all of which are quoted in this book: from Minnesota, the Faribault Republican, Mankato Independent, Mankato Record, Minneapolis Tribune, St. Cloud Democrat, St. Paul Pioneer, St. Paul Press, St. Paul Union, and Stillwater Messenger; from New York, the New York Daily News, New York Times, and New York Tribune; from Washington, D.C., the Congressional Globe, Daily Morning Chronicle, and National Intelligencer.
Most of the white characters featured in 38 Nooses left ample records of their lives. In addition to the forty-plus boxes of material in the Whipple Papers at the Manuscript Collections of the Minnesota Historical Society, Henry Benjamin Whipple left behind a memoir, Lights and Shadows of a Long Episcopate, and a detailed record of his journey to the South as a young adult, Bishop Whipple’s Southern Diary. Sarah Wakefield’s life is far better documented than that of most middle-class women of her place and era (at least during the years covered by this narrative), in the form of two editions of her captivity narrative, Six Weeks in the Sioux Tepees, and a small but revealing set of letters scattered in various libraries. (Three of these letters have been unearthed and examined in great detail by Kathryn Zabelle Derounian-Stodola in an article in the journal Prospects: An Annual of American Cultural Studies; that article forms the basis of parts of chapters 17 and 19.) Primary documents by and connected to Henry Hastings Sibley are found in the voluminous Sibley Papers in the Manuscript Collections of the Minnesota Historical Society. Documentary source material related to other characters is listed in the notes and bibliography.
The Dakota experience of the war and its aftermath has survived in parallel to the written historical record for 150 years, largely through oral histories told generation after generation. Those thoughts and actions of Dakotas written down in the years covered by 38 Nooses were almost always recorded by white intermediaries in situations inviting a high degree of skepticism. I have privileged one text, Through Dakota Eyes, a collection of narratives from non-white perspectives carefully selected and accompanied by an excellent editorial apparatus by the preeminent Dakota War scholars Gary Clayton Anderson and Alan R. Woolworth. The many captivity narratives that emerged in the wake of the Dakota War may be unreliable taken one at a time, but they can be usefully used in concert. Isaac Heard’s History of the Sioux War stands out among the contemporaneous histories written by whites for its use of firsthand accounts and trial-related testimony, though considerable adjustment needs to be made for Heard’s own involvement in the events.
A superb collection of secondary sources forms the base of my interpretations of character. Most are listed here or in the bibliography, rather than chapter by chapter, as they suffuse every section of 38 Nooses. Though Little Crow left behind few writings of his own, his very public stature and his lifelong interactions with white authorities created an unusually wide and deep documentary record of his life. Gary Clayton Anderson’s Little Crow and Kinsmen of Another Kind, taken together, form a thorough panorama of the life and world of Little Crow. Mark Diedrich’s more recent biography of Little Crow presents an extraordinarily detailed chronology that is difficult to piece together otherwise. Sarah Wakefield has had three accomplished scholars on her trail for several years now: June Namias, whose book White Captives reintroduced Wakefield to a wide academic audience; Kathryn Zabelle Derounian-Stodola, whose recent work on Wakefield’s life and writings has masterfully placed them inside the frame of other captivity narratives from the Dakota War; and, again, Carrie Rebar Zeman, whose ongoing research promises a new perspective on Wakefield’s life, especially before and after her six weeks as a captive of the Dakota. Henry Benjamin Whipple’s life and work are ably laid out in Anne Beiser Allen, And the Wilderness Shall Blossom, and Andrew S. Brake, Man in the Middle.
The choices of secondary material related to Abraham Lincoln are nearly inexhaustible, and the degree of specialization impressive and greatly appreciated. Several such studies are listed in the bibliography. For my overall view of Lincoln’s life and character, I quickly came to rely on Michael Burlingame’s two-volume biography, Abraham Lincoln: A Life, published in 2008, when I was midway through my own project. No book brings the reader inside Lincoln’s inner circle as well as Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals. Lincoln and the Indians, by David A. Nichols, was the first book-length scholarly consideration of the subject and opened up a good number of intriguing lines of study and inquiry followed in 38 Nooses. And Shelby Foote’s three-volume The Civil War: A Narrative is still the most coherent and compulsively readable account of the war ever written.
If secondary sources related to Lincoln, his administration, and the Civil War have never been in short supply, a recent surge in scholarly attention to the history of Minnesota and the Dakota War couldn’t have appeared at a more fortuitous time. Since 1872 the Minnesota Historical Society has published its own journal; that publication, now called Minnesota History, was recently joined by the independently produced Minnesota’s Heritage, which focuses on the events and people of the Dakota War, often in great detail. In 2008 many of those responsible for Minnesota’s Heritage combined with other scholars to publish Trails of Tears: Minnesota’s Dakota Indian Exile Begins, a collection of studies and essays that examines the experiences of Dakotas brought to Mankato and Fort Snelling in the aftermath of the war. William Watts Folwell’s four-volume A History of Minnesota, since 1961 the standard history of the state, has now been supplemented by Mary Lethert Wingerd’s lively, readable, and lavishly illustrated North Country, which focuses on the history of the region up to the conclusion of the Dakota War.
In order to balance the need for careful documentation with space concerns, I have provided citations for all quoted material in the book. Secondary sources of special usefulness, when not listed above, have been listed under each chapter heading in the notes. I will list any postpublication emendations, additions, or reinterpretations at www.38nooses.com and www.scottwberg.com; I also welcome any queries or comments regarding source materials, which can be sent to scottwberg@scottwberg.com. Finally, where spellings or translations are in dispute, I have tried to make sensible and consistent choices. In some cases, punctuation or capitalization in quoted material has been very lightly edited.
ABBREVIATIONS USED
| AL | Abraham Lincoln |
| HBW | Henry Benjamin Whipple |
| HHS | Henry Hastings Sibley |
| HWH | Henry W. Halleck |
| LC | Little Crow |
| JN | John Nicolay |
| JP | John Pope |
| SW | Sarah Wakefield |
| ALPLC | Abraham Lincoln Papers at the Library of Congress |
| CW | The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln |
| MHS | Minnesota Historical Society |
| MICW | Minnesota in the Indian and Civil Wars, 1861–1865 |
| OR | The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies |