Impeach him!

Winter never departed March of 1857, the temperatures as low as temperatures can dip here, deep snow sharply crusted to make walking any distance almost impossible.

For the Gardner family, a band of Indians coming to their door was not rare. Neither was talk. When the Wahpekutes showed up, Abigail’s father picked up his rifle. Her mother, Abbie remembers, told him to put it down. “If we have to die,” she told him, “let us now die innocent of shedding blood.” Thus, the Gardners allowed Inkpaduta’s men into their cabin and cooked up pancakes for breakfast.

Later, when the visitors returned, they demanded flour. When Abbie’s father turned to get what little they had, one of them shot him through the heart. Her mother attempted to push a rifle barrel away and was clubbed, then dragged outside and killed “in the most cruel and shocking manner,” Abbie says. Abbie was little more than a child. In a few moments, both her parents lay dead.

That left her alone with three children. Two were her brothers, the other belonged to an older married sister who happened to be away. The Wahpakutes grabbed the children, dragged them outside, and clubbed all three to death. 

What happened at the Gardner cabin was the first act of a string of atrocities along the lakeshore, a string that, a day later, extended into the town we know today as Jackson, Minnesota. 

In all, Inkpaduta’s band killed as many as 40 settlers in the three-day rampage and took four women captives, in what people here call "The Spirit Lake Massacre." They were never hunted down, never punished. Authorities charged those Native people who hadn't participated with hunting down Inkpaduta's band and bringing him to justice, a job that never got done. 

Five years later, hundreds of other justly disgruntled Dakotas began killing unsuspecting settlers along the Minnesota River in an orgy of blood-letting. Frontier Minnesota had little organization in 1862, so no one really knows how many homesteads were raided, how many white folks--men, women, and children--were killed; estimates vary between 400 and 800, in just a month.

Don't be misled. The Dakota had cause. They were starving. White people abandoned treaties they'd signed as if they had stood on the banks of the river and burned them. Native treachery had cause, but historians, even some Native people themselves, claim one of the reasons was that Inkpaduta's band of Wahpakute Dakotas went unpunished.

Whole library shelves of books have been written on the relationship between justice and mercy, endless titles, I'm sure, devoted to the relative efficacy of strict punishment for crimes done. Our culture's jury system puts much of that decision-making in the hands of judges who pass the judgments jurists ("a jury of their peers") make of the accused. Serving in the juror's box in an obligation of citizenship in a system like ours, but it's not easy and someone has to do it.

There are good reasons not to impeach Donald J. Trump. With just a few days left in the White House, if we do nothing at all, some Republicans say he'll simply disappear. What President-elect Biden doesn't need is even greater national anger as he takes over and attempts to heal a divided union. 

But those hundreds--and even thousands--of people, white people, white men, who tore up the Capital last week have to know that the treachery they perpetuated went beyond the limits of what we might call "dissent." They need to understand that a week ago five people died at their hands in "the people's house."

And Donald J. Trump needs to know that what he did and said right there in front of the crowd played a significant role in pushing that crowd into a mob. He needs to know his speech was not "appropriate." The only way that will happen is that he's punished. 

Not bringing the whole weight of the law down on him will only allow him to continue the tsunami of lies he's pushed throughout his term as President, including the one that has led to the horrors of last week: that some vast conspiracy of men and women from both political parties, literally hundreds of people, got together in secret to perpetuate an immense fraud and thereby declare Joe Biden as President in a national election he, Trump, had actually won in a landside. That story was and still is a damnable lie. He has to know it and own it, as do his fanatic followers. 

I say, impeach him.