What Little Crow began as a desperate gambit against Americans in August, had now, by the end of May 1863, become a game of wary diplomacy with the British. Shunned by every tribe and leader he’d encountered in the Dakota Territory, Little Crow moved his camp to the Hudson Bay Company post near Pembina, the old trading town where the Red River of the North flowed across the national boundary. Here, even as the snows began to melt, his welcome grew colder: the métis told him, falsely, that Sibley’s spring offensive had already commenced, while the northernmost Ojibwe, who just wanted him to go away, sent one of their leaders to council draped in the American flag. Little Crow now played his last card, adopting the Union Jack as his tribal ensign and continuing on into Canadian territory with the intention of asking British officials to grant the fleeing Dakota a new and permanent homeland beyond the reach of American rifles.
On May 27, Little Crow and a few dozen loyal Mdewakanton warriors and women paraded through the gates of Fort Garry in high style. The garrison, built by the Hudson Bay Company in 1822, was as formidable as Fort Snelling and situated in similar fashion at the confluence of two major trade routes, the Red and the Assiniboine rivers. Little Crow dressed in his finest for the occasion, bedecked in “a black coat with velvet collar, a breechcloth of blue broadcloth, and deerskin leggings,” while the women in his party sported parasols and wore dresses taken from their former captives. Despite the show of buoyancy, Little Crow also seemed to observers to be bearing a great weight, worn down by the “heavy price on his head,” his “thin and cadaverous” features betraying the anxiety brought on by his failure to form a new Indian confederacy.
Over three days Little Crow worked to bring his powers of persuasion to bear on yet another man who wanted nothing to do with him. Governor Alexander Grant Dallas oversaw Rupert’s Land, a position that ostensibly made him master of more than a million and a half square miles of Hudson Bay Company holdings in Canada; but the truth was that Dallas commanded few soldiers, administered few established communities, held sway with few of the indigenous tribes, and found his hands tied in any event by brutal weather from October to April of each year. Given a force of sufficient size, Dallas would surely have chased the Dakota back across the border, but as it was, he listened respectfully to Little Crow’s entreaties. Seeing that his proposal for a tribal homeland in Canada had little chance of success, Little Crow swore everlasting enmity to the Americans and offered peace and friendship to Dallas, referring to the old agreements between his grandfather and the British government during the War of 1812 and making a formal display of tokens from that alliance. He also repeated words passed down through his father, a British pledge that “the folds of the red flag of the north would wrap around them and preserve them from their enemies.”
For an Indian chief, such a promise bore considerable weight. The Dakota understanding of time often presented whites with a confounding lack of linearity; for Governor Dallas, fifty years was a long, long time, but in Little Crow’s mind, any pact made by his grandfather was as present as the early-summer sun now thawing the Red River. The picture he painted for Dallas was one of the American government defaulting on its claims and hunting the Dakota like animals. Bringing all of his oratorical skill to bear, he asked for provisions and permission to hunt for game along the Red River north of the American border. As he spoke, Little Crow skipped past the unfortunate truth that the British had treated the Dakota no better at the end of the War of 1812 than the Americans were treating them now. In 1816, after British commanders had deserted their Indian allies, offering only blankets and knives as thanks for their spilled blood, Little Crow’s grandfather had traveled more than a thousand miles to Lake Huron so that he might stand in council to deliver a stinging censure of his erstwhile allies.
After we have fought for you, endured many hardships, lost some of our people and awakened the vengeance of our powerful neighbors, you make a peace for yourself and leave us to obtain such terms as we can! You no longer need our services, and offer us these goods to pay for having deserted us. But no! We will not take them; we hold them and yourselves in equal contempt.
“Such terms” as the Mdewakanton obtained in the wake of the British withdrawal had included the first American stronghold in the region, Fort Snelling, which began to take shape in 1819, heralding the treaty era that would begin to end with Little Crow’s early-morning council forty-three years later.
Governor Dallas and other Canadian officials responded to Little Crow’s requests by making clear their desire that the Dakota warriors exit the country, and so in a second interview Little Crow said that should he be forced to return to the United States, he would fight to the last man in the “war of extermination” that whites were planning, with the implication that it was within the power and to the advantage of Canadian authorities to broker a peace with General Sibley. This proposal seemed to give Dallas the out he needed and allowed him to punctuate the talks with vague assurances that he would “endeavor to bring their grievances to the notice of the American government, with a view of establishing a better understanding in the future.”
For Little Crow, this was only the toothless language typical of treaties, and he left his last council with Governor Dallas on May 29 knowing that it was also his last day of leadership among the Dakota people. Taking advantage of the scarcity of white settlements and the open spaces of Rupert’s Land, most of the Dakota in the region, numbering as many as a thousand Mdewakantons, Wahpekutes, Sissetons, and Wahpetons, remained north of the border, and there many would live out the rest of their lives, creating villages and communities that still exist today. Little Crow returned to the United States at the beginning of June 1863 with only eighteen men, including his son, aware that he had become, in the end, no one’s spokesman or chief. Blamed in advance by whites and many Indians for whatever disasters might follow the Dakota uprising, he now moved with a core of very few warriors able to travel at great speeds, surely bringing to mind his earliest elk and buffalo hunts in the West and his once-frequent excursions against the Ojibwe over disputed hunting grounds in the Minnesota Territory.
In early June he managed to plant a message in the Saint Paul newspapers telling Pope and Sibley to “look for him” at the old Lower Agency site along the Minnesota River. Little Crow’s plans excited great curiosity and wide conjecture, a fire he stoked by telling traders, agents, reporters, and mixed-bloods in the Dakota Territory that he planned to steal enough horses to seat an army, that he planned to kill whites until he was killed, that he was on his way to retrieve a cache of buried treasure and then ride for the Black Hills. By this time, he was fully aware that General Sibley was preparing an army to hunt him down, and the statements read like a smoke screen and a provocation. But whatever the reason—whether to die, or to kill, or simply to once more dip his hand into familiar waters—Little Crow was indeed heading home.
Sarah Wakefield’s plea to Abraham Lincoln seems to have been the final step she took through official channels to remedy the mistake made in executing Chaska. Sarah’s daughter, Nellie, would eventually burn Sarah’s letters, meaning that only a few highly charged documents serve to record the aftermath of her captivity. As Little Crow made plans to visit Fort Garry for his final parley, Sarah was at work on three pieces of writing that, all together, provide an extraordinary picture of a soul in turmoil. The first was the book-length narrative called Six Weeks in the Sioux Tepees, in which she would provide a chronological account of her captivity and a fierce defense of Chaska’s conduct. The second and third documents were a pair of letters written to the missionary Stephen R. Riggs, expressing sentiments startling for the nakedness of their heartache, desperation, and anger.
This second round of communications with Riggs began on April 9, 1863, with a bolt from the blue. “I have determined if I can procure a situation of some kind to accompany the Indians,” she wrote. “I care not for any remuneration all I wish is to make myself useful: I need employment so I will not have as much time to think as I now have: if I could get interested in some way I would be much happier now I am alone without Friends or Relatives.” Sarah was surely talking about the plans to ship the captive families at Fort Snelling off to a reservation in Nebraska or the Dakota Territory, but what “situation” she imagined herself occupying is not clear. What she did make clear was the fact that John Wakefield, her husband, concurred in the plan and had been the one to suggest that she write to Riggs to sound out the possibilities.
In the end, Sarah did not go with the exiled Dakota. She would live in Minnesota another thirty-three years, but now, in April 1863, she saw no future for herself in her old community. “I could willingly devote the few remaining years of an unhappy life to the Indians for what they done for me while with them,” she confided, adding that “I have not one friend to consult with or go to now I am in trouble.” She mourned her late father, whose death had robbed her of a place “that would seem like home,” and confessed her permanent estrangement from her mother. Both of her parents have so far escaped the historical record, as has the nature of Sarah’s post–Dakota War separation from her husband, the second such schism of their married life. John Wakefield was a drinker, and there is reason to believe he sometimes abused her, but that is only informed conjecture. What is not conjecture is her declaration to Riggs that life with the Dakota was preferable to life anywhere else.
Her next letter to Riggs, written sixteen days later, addressed the subject of God. Her opening query was, to say the least, uncharacteristic of most letters written to clergy in the mid-nineteenth century: “Did Jesus Christ come into this world to save sinners?” she began. Her despair was helping to drive an anxious investigation into her proper relationship to the divine, an impulse that seems to have flowered during her time among the Dakota. Sarah was no theologian—she was simply a woman living within an intensely religious society, trying to make all of the pieces fit—but still she was able to issue a series of pointed challenges to Christian orthodoxy. Again she made an oblique reference to “the trouble I had few years since in Shakopee,” trouble that she said caused the “Gods church” there to refuse her children baptism. Whatever the “trouble” was, it had been enough to damage her reputation but not enough to permanently end her marriage or drive her out of the town for good. Now she was readjusting her relationships to everything and everyone, and God was no exception.
I always attended church and never forgot that there was a God and have tried to go to Him in my many hours of afflictions of different kind. I have had sorrows and troubles enough before this last to drive a woman wild but I have asked God to help me bear them in secret for rather than have them known, I would have suffered death first: When I was taken by the Indians I thought my cup was at last filled to overflowing, and I thought that all my prayers and tears were thrown away that God had forsaken me.
Sarah’s temporary move to Red Wing after the war seems to have been designed in part to have her children baptized in the Episcopal church there. At the same time, her effort to be baptized herself at Christ Episcopal Church in Saint Paul, the largest congregation in Bishop Whipple’s diocese, was rebuffed, much to her dismay. “This course of conduct by God’s ministers serves to harden my heart against all mankind,” Sarah told Riggs, “[and] I often wish I was in a wilderness away from all human creatures.”
The next portion of the letter alternately praised and rebuked her husband, who, she wrote, “blames me very much for my talking so much at Camp Release and does not have the pity for me that he would have otherwise. He says I have brought my trouble upon myself and now I must bear it.” Another wedge had been driven into her marriage and her life in society by her friendship with Chaska, whose execution had delivered the final blow to her reputation by seeming to place her in sympathy, if not in league, with one of the few Dakota Abraham Lincoln deemed foul enough to die for his crimes against the white world. Her husband, she wrote, hurrying her thoughts along, “cannot realize how a woman could try to save an Indian who had her a captive he thinks he would have killed himself before he would remained there in a tipi, but he little knows a mother’s feelings that Indian saved my children and what mother could forget it and not only my children lives were spared but I was saved from dishonor, but my anxiety to save him just cursed me and killed the man.”
This letter shows Sarah working to tie together two warring halves of herself: her faith in a personal, forgiving God and her anger at the injustice of her treatment at the hands of whites after her captivity was over, all in the shadow of a husband who seemed to be ashamed of her. The letter went a step further, surely startling Riggs whether it aimed to or not: “If I could have done it I would have released every one of them: I never shall feel as if the Indians were the guilty party. I know they done wrong but white men in the same situation as they were last summer would have done much worse.” She closed by drawing a poignant connection between herself and another aggrieved woman before considering the question that lay at the heart of her letter.
I wish when you see Chaska’s mother that you would explain to her how her son was executed I can see her sorrowful face in my dreams as I saw her last sitting on the bank of the Yellow Medicine River all alone such a moan as escaped from her was heart rending I hear it now and it seems to be continually sounding in my ears: for she blamed me as I do myself for not letting him go with Little Crow. I over persuaded him to remain and I feel as if I was his murderer. I hope you will pray for me that I may be able at last to reach heaven.
One April day in 1863, a small group of the Dakota families held at Fort Snelling was fishing along the riverbank when they spotted a steamer more than a mile upriver and moving slowly in their direction, working its way through the final channel of the Minnesota before breaking into the deeper waters of the Mississippi. Even from this distance, the Dakota could see that the deck of the Favorite was crowded with men draped in a shade of red particular to their history, the berry dye used for their winter blankets. In an instant they knew that these were the reprieved prisoners from Mankato: friends, fathers, brothers, husbands, and sons they had not seen for seven months.
It was a simple matter to spread the news via a chain of shouts and fluttered blankets, and before long well over a thousand Dakotas rushed to the water’s edge, frantic with anticipation and fear. Would the steamer stop beside the encampment for an exchange of greetings? A visit? Were these men, hope against hope, being brought to join them? Or were they on their way to meet the same fate as their thirty-eight brethren? Whatever the case, something had finally been set in motion. Under other circumstances, that something would surely have bred only fear and suspicion in the camp, but such thoughts were now set aside. A line of soldiers, nearly one hundred in all, stood between them and the water. Behind the soldiers the steamboat was close enough that they could see their men, still wearing their paired shackles, still prisoners.
After the boat’s ramp was lowered, many Dakota men walked onto the shore, but not nearly enough. These were the 48 acquitted men who had been brought along to Mankato, now joyfully reunited with their closest kin, while more than 260 others, the men who had been spared hanging, remained rooted to the steamer deck. Soon the ramp was raised again and the steamer made to move out into the center of the current. All of the Dakota families had learned that freedom and innocence were relative terms, but this was a new pain: if the rest of the men were not to stay at Fort Snelling—which was, after all, only another kind of imprisonment—they must be marked for something even worse. And the only thing worse, they believed, was to be hanged after all. A writer for the Davenport Democrat reported the reaction of the distraught families in purple, patronizing prose that nonetheless managed to catch the scene’s essential awfulness.
As the boat moved off with all their wild hearts held dear, snatching them again from the arms already outstretched in joyful welcome, to take them to a horrible death, the whole vast crowd of savage forms writhed in the agony of disappointment, and a wail of grief went up from hundreds of shrill, wild voices which it was heart-rending to hear. The poor creatures flung themselves on the ground, and pulled their hair, and beat their breasts with the anguish of the sudden revulsion from hope to despair. If they might only speak to their beloved ones! But no; sternly and exorably as Fate, the boat moved on and their last hope fades away as it disappears in the distance.
The colonel in command of the Fort Snelling encampment, William Crooks, another member of Sibley’s trial commission, hurried to hold council with the Dakota families and explain that their men were not to be hanged but rather brought down the Mississippi to an enclosure not unlike their own near the Iowa border. “This assurance calmed them somewhat,” reported the Davenport Democrat, “but the air was still filled with their lamentations as if they mourned the dead.”
Just a few days later, the Dakota at Fort Snelling learned from Colonel Crooks that it would soon be their turn to board a boat and enter into a mysterious future of their own. The restrictions on movement in and out of camp that had been relaxed after the first few weeks of their imprisonment were now reinstated; no one was to leave the enclosure, and the nightly guard was stepped up. Not all of the Dakota would be going downriver. Most of the leaders of the peace party and their families were already stationed up on the prairie, preparing to act as scouts for Sibley’s punitive expeditions into the Dakota Territory; whether this was for some reward or in response to some coercion is unknown. The rest of the Dakota went about finishing the job of striking their lodges and packing their things inside the rolled tepees so that they could be strapped onto their backs.
On May 4, beneath threatening skies, 711 Dakotas, mostly women and children, were herded aboard the Davenport, a midsize steamer designed to comfortably carry half that number. A few whites rode along, including a company of soldiers and the missionaries John P. Williamson, a Presbyterian, and Samuel Hinman, Whipple’s unflagging protégé, who had made the choice to accompany the captives to their new home and set up an Episcopal mission there. Williamson and Hinman must have been told of the government’s plan for a new reservation, and so the captives may have learned that they would travel down the Mississippi past the boat’s namesake town, where the reprieved prisoners were now being held, then on to Saint Louis and up the Missouri River to a place called Crow Creek in southern Dakota Territory.
But before all of this could happen, the Davenport needed to stop just five miles downriver at Saint Paul to take on food, fuel, and other supplies during a half-hour layover. Approaching the city, crowded onto the boiler deck, the Dakota women and children watched as a crowd of citizens surged to the edge of the levee, gesturing and shouting. When the steamer pushed abreast of its dock—no thought seems to have been given to waiting until the situation could be defused—the crowd began to hurl large stones and other heavy objects up at the Indians, badly wounding several as they crowded away from the storm. A captain in command of forty soldiers from the Tenth Minnesota Regiment came to the railing and threatened to bring his men down the ramp with bayonets fixed, a warning that served to quell the riot. While the wounded Indians received whatever ministrations were available on board, their kin engaged in what one white observer called “prayer and singing.”
Two days later a second steamboat arrived at Fort Snelling to collect the rest of the waiting Dakotas. But before the Northerner could take them aboard, it needed to deposit another human cargo along the same flat that held the Dakota enclosure. Six hundred Dakotas now looked upon a hundred or so black men from the southern reaches of the Mississippi, contraband slaves who were now free under the terms of the Emancipation Proclamation, brought north to be used as mule drivers for General Sibley’s spring expedition to the Dakota Territory in search of Little Crow and the other escaped Dakotas. Captive Indians and free blacks exchanged stares and, according to one observer, entered into conversations that were not recorded by any reporter, diarist, or letter writer. Eventually the black men were brought up the steep incline to the fort to prepare for their spring work, after which the remaining Dakotas were loaded onto the steamboat for their journey out of Minnesota.
That same day, the Saint Paul Pioneer said a particularly rude good riddance to the final group of Dakota exiles: “The Northerner brought up a cargo of 125 niggers and 150 mules on Government account. It takes back some eight or nine hundred Indians. We doubt very much whether we benefit by the exchange. If we had our choice we would send both niggers and Indians to Massachusetts, and keep the mules here.”
The day that the Davenport had slipped away from the vengeful crowd on the Saint Paul docks would be the first of twenty-four the Dakotas would spend aboard the grossly overcrowded ship. By the time they arrived at Fort Randall on the Missouri River on May 28, the remaining six hundred refugees had disembarked from the Northerner at Hannibal, Missouri, and taken an overland shortcut by train to meet them, sixty people to a car, bringing the total on board the Davenport to 1,300 and creating conditions that led to the deaths of at least one woman and several children during the last portion of their journey. As John P. Williamson described the scene, the “Indians were crowded like slaves on the boiler and hurricane decks of a single boat, and fed on musty hardtack and briny pork, which they had not half a chance to cook.”
If any of the soldiers traveling aboard the Davenport knew enough about the Crow Creek reservation to describe it with any accuracy, the Dakotas’ apprehensions would have only grown. The proposals for the final disposition of the innocent Dakota had included such far-flung locales as Devils Lake, Isle Royale in Lake Superior, and even the Dry Tortugas off the coast of Florida, but in the end lame-duck interior secretary Caleb Smith, perhaps at the urging of Minnesota congressmen, had written a bill placing them near Fort Randall on the upper reaches of the Missouri River. That choice was made in December, but not until May, just a few days before the Dakota were scheduled to arrive, did Superintendent Clark W. Thompson visit the site, deciding on a spot hurriedly and hoping that it would be suitable. “It has good soil, good timber, and plenty of water,” he wrote. “The only drawback I fear is the dry weather.”
Thompson’s choice was not suitable, much to the Dakotas’ despair. Three years of extreme drought followed, and in a place where few crops would grow under good circumstances, food was impossible to produce. Isaac Heard, hardly one to profess sympathy for the Dakota, wrote that “it is a horrible region, filled with the petrified remains of the huge lizards and creeping things of the first days of time. The soil is miserable; rain rarely ever visits it. The game is scarce, and the alkaline waters of the streams and springs are almost certain death.” The Missouri ran as low as it had in decades, putting Crow Creek beyond the reach of many traders and suppliers. What provisions did get to them—mostly meat and flour—were put into a barrel, mixed together, and ladled out. As no doctor lived at Crow Creek and no medicines were readily available, hundreds of Dakotas died within months of their arrival. Henry Whipple, Samuel Hinman, and Thomas S. and John P. Williamson wrote letter after letter to military and civilian authorities asking that the exiles be moved to a different reservation, but little attention was paid. The rest of the country remained focused on bigger, bloodier battles, and most ordinary Minnesotans, who might have had some reason to wonder where so many Dakotas had gone, simply forgot about them.