Abbie's Story -- vi

Flandreau, South Dakota, is a small town a half hour west of the greatly revered Catlinite quarries at Pipestone, Minnesota. A few white settlers were in the region when, in 1868, 11 years after the massacre, many Santee Sioux families, some Wahpeton and others Wahpakute, moved north and east from their reservation in Nebraska to claim farmland there, around a bend in the Big Sioux River.

Abbie Gardner begins her narration of the Flandreau story this way:

On Sunday, September 26, accompanied by C. H. Bennett and wife, and H. L. Moore and wife, a drive of some fifteen miles was made to Flandrau [sic], visiting on this occasion the Indian Episcopal and Presbyterian churches. It seemed as though a miracle had been wrought in this region and the day of realization was at hand. Here at Flandreau the red man and the white man are brought face to face in daily contact, living, as it were, next door neighbors, the Indians commanding the utmost respect of the white residents.

What she says she witnessed in Flandreau is a degree of shalom she had not seen or imagined on the frontier. Something that clearly thrilled her was going on in this small South Dakota town, something she found to be what she might well have called a miracle.

Understanding her incredulity at the “utmost respect” she witnessed there in Flandreau, once again, requires some historical background. 

Historians have claimed—as Ms. Gardner does in her memoir—that the Dakota Sioux of the Minnesota River reservation were emboldened by Inkpaduta’s crimes and his having escaped punishment. That he and his band roamed free after the slayings meant depredations against settlers exhibited the white man’s disregard for what the Wahpakutes had done: in short, Inkpaduta’s escaping punishment made subsequent attacks easier. After all, well-defined links exist between the blood shed on the shores of Spirit Lake in 1857 and Lake Chetek in 1862, as well as New Ulm and throughout the region in the Dakota War. The Wahpakutes and the Santees spoke a similar language; they were all Dakota Sioux people.

What Abbie Gardner doesn’t say in her description of the Flandreau visit is that there may have been a handful of Santees at Flandreau who, years earlier, were part of Inkpaduta’s bloody band. In that town, in two churches, she had to know not only that they were Native but that they were themselves related to her oppressors and her family’s killers.

But on Sunday, September 26, 1892, Abbie Gardner Sharp wasn’t the only soul in those churches who had suffered horrors; so were the Santees who were that day sitting in hand-cut pews. She doesn’t mention their suffering, but, again, it’s difficult to believe she didn’t know. It was the Santees, led by their headman Little Crow, who had raided the Lower Sioux Agency at Redwood Falls on August 18, 1862, the frontier town of New Ulm a day later, and Fort Ridgely on the 20th and the 21st.

Little Crow's tombstone at Flandreau

During the Dakota War, the total number of settlers murdered in a one solitary month of raids will never be known; historians estimate between 450 and 800, all of them murdered after the bloody fashion of Abbie’s own family and their neighbors.

During the Dakota War, hate boiled over into death throughout the Minnesota River valley. When it was over, mass trials, some no more than five minutes long, determined the fate of the more than 400 Dakota warriors accused of atrocities. When tallied, the military tribunal found 303 men guilty of rape and murder, and sentenced them to be hanged.

In December, 1862, the nation was preoccupied with the Civil War. The list of convicted warriors was sent to Washington, where President Lincoln surveyed names and stories’ charges, then narrowed the list of guilty to 39, one of whom was later exonerated.

Thus, on December 26, 1862, 38 Dakota men were hanged when a man whose wife and family had been killed at Lake Shetek massacre pulled a rope on the gallows erected in Mankato, Minnesota, for the public to witness.

Ft. Snelling captives

A thousand more Santees, mostly women and children, were interned on Pike Island, near Ft. Snelling, where hundreds died of infectious diseases that winter. The 275 convicted men who’d not been hanged were, early the next spring, shipped down the Mississippi to a fort near Davenport, Iowa, where they spent the next two years as prisoners.

Suffering at Crow Creek

The rest of the Dakotas interned on Pike Island were also sent down river, then up the Missouri to Crow Creek, South Dakota, where they suffered through drought and heat and long hard winters, before begging the government to let them go south to Missouri River land and a reservation in northeast Nebraska.

The Santee reservation at Running Water

Hundreds of women, children, and old men were moved once more to the place where some of their descendants live yet today, a small Santee reservation where the tribal museum includes photographs of some of those warriors, freedom fighters, who were hanged at Mankato. The museum’s prize possession is mounted in a window box on the south wall—the rifle of Little Crow himself, killer to some, hero to others.