Inkpaduta

For most of the 19th century, at least the second half, Inkpaduta was Siouxland's most famous, most notorious, most hated, most feared citizen, even though he'd likely left the region long before. He was headman of a band of Santee Sioux called the Wahpakutes (Waa-pa-koot’-ee), a ragtag bunch who lived--who hunted and trapped--along the Little Sioux River, just east and south of here in O'Brien and Woodbury Counties.

How bad was this bunch? Opinions vary. Before the massacre at Spirit Lake, they were at least well-known. Whether they were feared is a good question, still disputed among those who know the story. What we do know is that they were here when the very first white pioneers spearheaded western migration, many of them (although few in number) around what we know today as the Iowa Great Lakes. They watched, warily, as illegal aliens came in and stayed, like some foreign pestilence.

It must have been an incredibly difficult time for those persistent pioneers, whose struggle to survive was mammoth. They'd come in 1856, too late to plant and gather any crops for a winter that, when historians describe it, sounds unlike any winter I can remember in my forty years here. Three feet of snow covered even the flatland, drifts big as boxcars filled in whatever spaces the wind cared to choke. By March, just enough warm temps created a snow crust so hard it could hold up an ox, except when it didn't, which made travel impossible.

Inkpaduta and his band were old-time Iowans, more accustomed to endless blizzards, more capable of a way of life in the wilderness. But their hunger that winter was just as real as that of the newcomers. Hunting was difficult, if not impossible, so the Wahpakutes would stop at homesteads and ask for food. There were many more of them than there were of white folks since immigration had only just begun.

In a reign of blood-letting that ran for four days, Inkpaduta and his warriors slaughtered the white folks--men, women, and children--slaughtered them like animals. Abbie Gardner, a 13-year-old girl watched them kill every last one of her family members before taking her hostage. Much later in her life, she wrote a memoir and described herself at that moment:

After ransacking the house, and taking whatever they thought might be serviceable, such as provisions, bedding, arms and ammunition; and after the bloody scalping knife had done its terrible work; I was dragged from the never-to-be-forgotten scene. No language can ever suggest, much less adequately portray, my feelings as I passed that door.

Why? As I said, opinions vary. Retaliation for the similarly viscous slaughter of one of their tribe sometime earlier? Hunger? Hatred for treaty obligations others had signed? Was violence simply a way of life for them, institutionalized? Was what happened there on the shores of the lake what would have happened if the white folks had been Ojibwe too, their enemies?

Worse, perhaps, was that horror simply whimsical? Did they kill for blood sport? Were Inkpaduta and his band simply unsullied evil?

A dozen reasons have been forwarded, but none of them bring any relief--then or now--to the anxious acceptance of that significant question--why?

Paul N. Beck's Inkpaduta (2008) doesn't really try to mount a defense. What it does attempt is to handle the reputation of Inkpaduta in a way that contextualizes him, his people, and his time, not as if to exonerate him from blood guilt, but to explain him, his personal history, and the roles he played throughout the Great Sioux Wars which were to follow.

Inkpaduta became legendary--that's a cliche, but that it is doesn't mean the characterization is wrong. Inkpaduta became far, far bigger than life for white people who invested in him all the terror First Nations people could incite with their naked midnight dances, their shrieking, their drums and singing--and their drinking.

No white man ever punished Inkpaduta for what he did. His legend not only didn't die, it grew exponentially, both as the epitome of horror for pioneering families throughout the upper Midwest, and the epitome of devoted resistance to those Native people whose lives were altered beyond anything they could have imagined when hoards of whites moved in. It wasn't just their freedom that was lost, they lost everything in the torrential flood of western movement, America's insistent Manifest Destiny.

To the white man, the name Inkpaduta struck fear; he was incarnate evil. To the red man, he was the spirited embodiment of the ancestors staying alive.

For years, people have believed that Inkpaduta was at Little Big Horn. For years, many believed that he was the one who himself finally did in Custer himself. Was he? Yes, mythologically for sure. He was there for both sides--the killer and the redeemer.

Beck's biography makes a game attempt to beg a second look at a mean and bloody killer. He tries, hard. Am I convinced? Not really.

What he does establish that in the character of a single Santee headman, just about every soul in the territory invested either their greatest fears or their most-beloved hopes.

We all have our Inkpadutas, I suppose.