Nurse Eliza Müller, Hero

By today's standards, she wasn't a nurse. She lacked the formal training young men and women take these days before they get to the hospital floor. We have to be able to trust them because we are what they do. Even though Eliza Muller--be sure to get that umlaut above the u--never underwent the requisite training a nursing degree requires today, have no doubt about the testimonies her patients gave once the war was over: Eliza Müller--with an umlaut--was a nurse. "You betcha'" as they say in Minnesota. She was a nurse for the ages--and a hero in a fleeting, bloody moment of time at which  there were very, very few.

Truth be told, we know very little about her childhood, her family, even where she was born and reared. We can trust that her parents' circle of friends were well-established in the 1830s, when she was born. Her community--far out east--was German-American; but unlike those who were moving into central Minnesota in the mid-19th century, her family, like that of her husband, Dr. Alfred Müller who was, officially, the appointed surgeon at Minnesota's Ft. Ridgely. 

If you've never heard of Ft. Ridgely, you're not alone. It's greatly overshadowed by its much bigger and more ballyhooed big brother, Fort Snelling, which stands amid Minnesota's Twin Cities right there on the Mississippi River. What remains is not much more than a skeleton at Ft. Ridgely, which is not a reason not to visit.

So Dr. Müller and his capable wife, our hero, fell into treachery in the summer of 1862, when hundreds of marauding Dakota warriors determined their lives would be worth living if and when they killed everyone in the neighborhood--man, woman, and child. So they tried.

And they did bloody well. Most authoritative sources forward a death toll of 350 or so dead settlers, even though historically the toll has ranged to as many as twice that number, all in a matter of less than a month. 

You're saying  you never heard of such a thing, and it wasn't that far away? You're not alone. This nation is 250 years old this year. They'll be no end of fireworks, but don't expect to hear much at all about the 1862 Dakota War. It ain't pretty and it really doesn't have heroes. 

Save Eliza Müller--with an umlaut. Tell you what, let's just call her Nurse Eliza Müller because she tended the wounded graciously, assisted her husband's surgeries, and with him did the triage so necessary when little skeletal Ft. Ridgely suffered not just one but two separate assaults from the angry Dakota warriors that vastly outnumbered those trying to stay alive behind the fort's stone walls.

This Ft. Ridgely wasn't constructed to hold off a military siege--there were no walls, no palisades, no watchtowers for sharpshooting guards. It was--still is--wide open. Everything's exposed. When bullets and arrows flew, there was no shelter, so when people say that Eliza Müller showed divine grace under fire, they weren't making things up. 

Only an idiot would say that the 1862 Dakota War had no heroes. There were dozens, I'm sure. But the darkness that swept over the Minnesota River Valley for several months in 1862 leaves just about all the selflessness deep in shadow. 

And that, or so it seems to me, is reason enough to remember Eliza Müller, with an umlaut. When you finish at the Fort, go east for a block or so to the oldest section of the cemetery. Won't be long and you'll find a memorial, from the state, to Nurse Müller's memory. Take off your hat. Maybe leave a flower. 

She's a nurse. She's a hero.

**“In memory of

Mrs. Eliza Müller,

wife of Assistant Surgeon A. Müller, U.S.A.

Her valor and her devotion to the care of the sick and wounded soldiers and refugees during and after the Sioux Indian outbreak of 1862

will forever be cherished

in the hearts of a grateful people.”**