Fort Snelling was temporarily decommissioned in 1858, the same year Minnesota became a state. The Civil War started in 1861, four years after the Dred Scott decision, and the government brought Fort Snelling back into service that same year to train newly recruited soldiers for the Union. In 1862 war broke out in Minnesota. Known as the U.S.-Dakota War, the four-month conflict was, in short, the result of treaty violations by the federal government and the negligence of Indian agents. We tend to think of the Indian Wars as something confined to the American West, but the U.S.-Dakota War highlights the mid-1800s contestations over lands and resources. The Dakota, like other Native nations across the country, had been interacting with Europeans and Euro-Americans for centuries. They had tried different strategies of cooperation, negotiation, and outright resistance to government interference, military operations, religious imposition, and growing settlement. When that didn’t work, some argued that they should go to war.
It’s important to recognize that what happened in Minnesota did not just occur spontaneously. Decades of ever-increasing settlement by Europeans and Euro-Americans led to continued conflicts with Native people in the state. The Ojibwe and the Dakota were forced to sign treaties (most notably in 1837 and 1851) that ceded hundreds of thousands of acres of their lands. Missionaries and the federal government also worked to assimilate American Indians. They wanted Native nations to give up their languages, their cultures, their religions, their political systems, and their ways of life in order to become what non-Natives considered “civilized.” The push for assimilation also divided Native communities: some believed that assimilation was the best thing to do, others wanted to continue living their traditional ways, and still more Dakota tried to incorporate some new practices into their traditional systems.
The treaties the federal government signed with Native nations like the Dakota promised payments, goods, and resources (usually called annuities) in exchange for their lands. In the midst of the Civil War, though, keeping their treaty obligations wasn’t high on the government’s list of priorities. Treaties between the federal government and the Dakota had outlined how the government would provide food and goods for the Dakota in order to stop the Dakota from continuing their traditional hunting and gathering practices. When the government stopped providing these resources, it meant that many Dakota were hungry. They couldn’t hunt or harvest like before, and there weren’t enough resources to go around. If they were able to get any provisions, the food was often spoiled or unfit for consumption. By the summer of 1862, with no annuities in sight and traders unwilling to extend credit, the Dakota had nowhere to go and no one to turn to. Trader Andrew Myrick told the Dakota that, if they were hungry, they could “eat grass.” In August 1862, a group of young Dakota men skirmished with some settlers near Acton, killing five of them. The Dakota leader, Taoyateduta (also known as Little Crow), reluctantly agreed with the faction of the Dakota who argued for continuing the attacks in hopes of driving out the settlers. “We have waited a long time,” Taoyateduta told Indian agent Thomas J. Galbraith. “The money is ours, but we cannot get it. We have no food, but here are these stores, filled with food. …When men are hungry they help themselves.”