SIOUX INDIAN LAND HISTORY

The Sioux treaties of the 1850s stand as monuments to the greedy United States policy toward Indian lands, and the insensitive attitude toward the Indian way of life. No tactics of bullying, cheating, or lying were neglected. When the whirlwind was reaped a decade later the immediate victims were the comparatively innocent white settlers near the reservations, not the businessmen and politicians who were ultimately responsible.

Discontent had been growing among the Dakota, who were confined by treaties to reservations along the Minnesota River. In the summer of 1862 the Dakota faced starvation when their government annuities were delayed by bureaucratic ignorance and indecision concerning the Indian's desperate situation. The Upper Sioux Agency was one of the points where the United States distributed food, supplies and annual payments to the Dakota. The agency was also an educational center where Indians learned farming, carpentry, and other skills valued by the white settlers.

On August 17, 1862, four young Dakota shot and killed five settlers in Acton Township in west central Meeker County. Thus began the Sioux Uprising. Chief Little Crow declared war on the whites the next day. The Dakota attacked the Upper Sioux Agency and burned it to the ground. The Indians also attacked settlements in the Minnesota River Valley and prepared to overrun the garrison at Fort Ridgely. Chief Big Eagle later said, "We thought the fort was the door to the valley as far as to St. Paul, and that if we got through the door, nothing could stop us this side of the Mississippi."

On September 2, 1862, settlers near Forest City, hearing that the Dakota warriors had defeated a company of soldiers about 20 miles north of the village, hastily built a stockade within 24 hours. Twenty Dakota horsemen attacked Forest City the next day. Thwarted by the stockade and 40 armed settlers, they soon gave up their attack. The Battle of Wood Lake was the last major skirmish of the Sioux Uprising, and led to the release of 269 prisoners in September 1862. The site of the Dakota camp near Montevideo where Col. Henry H. Sibley took custody of the captives was later called Camp Release and is now a state monument.

In the end those who suffered most were the Indians. After the uprising all treaty rights of the Santee Sioux were canceled. Those who had not fled to Canada or the western plains were imprisoned or deported to a bleak resettlement camp on the Missouri River, where hundreds starved. In Minnesota, meanwhile, Indians were hunted down with bloodhounds and a bounty was paid for their scalps.

A military tribunal had originally sentenced more than 300 Indians to die for participating in the uprising, but President Abraham Lincoln ordered the execution of 39 Indians. On December 26, 1862, thirty-eight Indians were publicly hanged in Mankato - the largest mass execution in United States history.

MONTEVIDEO

Population 5,441; altitude 924 feet; Chicago, 554 miles; Seattle, 1,635 miles. Here is a crossing of the Yellowstone Trail highway which parallels the Milwaukee Railroad most of the way from the Twin Cities to Seattle.

Montevideo is exactly half way between Plymouth Rock, Mass., and Puget Sound. The Camp Release Monument, standing in a state park about a mile to the south, commemorates the surrender of 269 white captives of Chief Little Crow to General Sibley in 1862.