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
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.
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.
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 hanged warriors, freedom fighters, 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.
During that deathly winter on Pike Island, something fierce happened to the Dakota people amid their suffering. It is not easy to talk about the phenomenon because historians do not propose eternal answers to spiritual questions. But what happened just before those who were hanged sang their death songs was what one might call a mass “conversion.” An immense spiritual about-face was somehow passed along from death row and into the internment camp, where their families were shivering and too often dying in a Minnesota winter. While fevers and disease raged, so did a full-blown religious awakening. Missionaries who stayed with the Santee people before and after incarceration, and were angrily reviled for visiting the savages, claimed the Holy Spirit came upon the people and created a mass conversion.
The Rev. Stephen R. Riggs, who spent his life as a missionary to the Dakota, explained what happened this way:
The circumstances were peculiar, the whole movement was marvelous, it was like a “nation born in a day.” The brethren desired to be divinely guided; and after many years of testing have elapsed, we all say that was a genuine work of the Holy Spirit.”[i]
While this reader may be less sure of what happened than was Rev. Riggs, my judgement of what happened spiritually in Mankato, and then on Pike Island, or even to Abbie Gardner, what forces ignited the fire or sustained it, is not my concern. Such “conversions” happen in a thousand ways. What interests me is the effects of a degree of spiritual enlightenment that changes hearts and minds of people who believe they have come into the presence of a living God. What is of importance to me is what happened in the lives of those people as a result of their “conversions.”
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| Ft. Snelling (top) and Pike Island, circa 1840 |
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