The Acton "Incident"

We stumbled on the place, literally. I knew we were in the area, but I didn't know where we'd have had to look to find the place where the Dakota boys, on what seems to have been a whim, put up a dare to each other--who among 'em would be scared to kill the white people who'd come along and determined to live on their land?

The game was as stupid as it was evil. The dare turned into murder: a man, a woman, another man, a boy, a girl. Five Little-House-on-the-Prairie types left behind in the dirt, random puddles of blood. The dead are named on the old monument set there more than a century ago. That panel was in a shadow when we stopped, but then I suppose the names are immaterial right now.

But the legacy of what happened here is anything but forgotten. When the boys, hungry from a long unsuccessful hunt, found some eggs in a nest in the grass; one of the kids said to eat them, another said no--they belonged to the white man. So the game of chicken got triggered.

Some historians consider what happened here to have been the very first act, maybe even a prelude to Great Sioux Wars that consumed the lives of thousands of Americans on both sides and wouldn't conclude until the massacre at Wounded Knee just about forty years later, wars that left this country, then a new nation, terribly scarred.

Today, "The Acton Incident" is remembered right here, in the backyard of a farm where dinner was being served when we stopped and harvest was going on--right there, the yard full of equipment, so close you can't help but feel you're trespassing.

The new historical marker is written in what you might call more "inclusive" language. It's an "incident." What happened here might be thought of as cold-blooded murder, but not today. Today, the boys were "returning to their hungry families," which was true. Today, what happened is an "incident."

Still, when the murderers returned to their bands, Shakopee's Dakota Band, council's were held. What would the people do?

They were hungry, and their way of life was vanishing, painfully, before their eyes. They felt imprisoned in a sliver of land afforded them by a treaty white people seemingly didn't honor--settlers kept moving in anyway. Finally, after much discussion, their leader, Little Crow, conceded to the fury of his warriors:

See!--the white men are like the locusts when they fly so thick that the whole sky is a snowstorm. You may kill one--two--ten; yes, as many as the leaves in the forest yonder, and their brothers will not miss them. Kill one--two--ten, and ten times ten will come to kill you. Count your fingers all day long and white men with guns in their hands will come faster than you can count. . . .Braves, you are little children--you are fools. You will die like the rabbits when the hungry wolves hunt them in the Hard Moon.

And thus it began, here, at this out-of-the-way spot, spitting distance from a farm house where yesterday, when we stopped, I'm guessing Sunday dinner was just then being served.

Hard to believe, really. But then, we'd all rather not remember.