Part 11: The condemned end up in Mankato

By John Biewen

Gwen Westerman and I return to Mankato, my hometown and where she teaches at the state university. It's a windy but otherwise nice autumn day.

We're in an old park, which is a favorite place of mine. It has big trees with bright yellow leaves, picnic tables. Alongside the park, the Blue Earth River that I canoed on as a kid flows into the Minnesota River.

It was right here on this sandy riverbank that my family used spend fall evenings building fires and roasting hot dogs and marshmallows.

This same spot is where the Dakota men ended up -- the ones who turned themselves in after Henry Sibley promised to treat them fairly.

Sibley set up a kangaroo court out on the prairie and tried 400 of them in a few weeks. He didn't let the Dakota have lawyers or witnesses. Some trials lasted five minutes. He named a panel of five U.S. soldiers who had just been fighting against the Dakota to hand out verdicts -- and death sentences.

Sibley's court condemned 303 Dakota men. A report was sent to President Lincoln outlining the plan to hang all of them. The president, fresh off the bloodiest day in American history -- the Civil War battle of Antietam -- was stunned by the long list. He ordered the Minnesotans to hold off on the hangings until his office could review the trial transcripts.

So they waited right here. They called the spot Camp Lincoln.

"You can imagine teepees and fires and tents, and soldiers," said Gwen.

She points up at a high bluff across the river -- a perch where vengeful settlers would go to shoot at the Dakota prisoners in the camp.

"There were people who died here because of that. So a lot of people don't know that that's what was here," Gwen said. "Or they think Camp Lincoln ... was near here, they don't know where, or they don't think about it at all."

Growing up, I had never heard of Camp Lincoln. For me, and most people in Mankato, this was just Sibley Park. That's right, Sibley Park, named after the man who led the charge to shove the Dakota off their homeland to make way for, well, people like me. There's a Henry Sibley high school in the Twin Cities. Sibley County is just up the road from Mankato.

In Washington, in the fall of 1862, President Lincoln was getting heated messages from Gov. Alexander Ramsey and others in Minnesota. They said he'd better allow the hanging of the 303 Dakota men, or else furious white people might go vigilante. Lynch mobs formed in Mankato and other towns and had to be quelled by soldiers.

Newspapers told horrifying stories that Dakota warriors had mutilated babies and raped countless settler women, though very few of those claims were ever proven. President Lincoln wired his response back to Minnesota.

"Lincoln says, OK, the ones who ought to be put to death are the ones who raped women, so go through these cases and identify the ones who are guilty of violating women," said Mary Wingerd. "As it turns out, they can only find two cases of rape."

Hanging two Indians would not satisfy the people of Minnesota, the president was told. So Lincoln had his people review the trial transcripts for evidence that the men had attacked settlers, and not just shown up at battles.

In the end, Lincoln himself wrote out a list of 39 Dakota names -- later trimmed to 38.

The day after Christmas, those men were marched onto a big platform in Mankato's town square. Some 4,000 people had come from miles around to watch.

Hoods were pulled over the condemned men's heads. They held each other's hands and sang prayers until the moment the floor under them dropped away. They fell and the chanting stopped.

Part 12: Minnesota forgets her history >>>

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