Part 6: The buildup to war

By John Biewen

Gwen Westerman and I have driven west, out on the prairie, for the next part of the story -- the buildup to the war.

We've come to the Lower Sioux Agency, the federal government's outpost on Dakota land, near Redwood Falls, Minn. (Sioux was the white man's name for the Dakota.) The director of the historic site is Anthony Morse.

"I'm ninth-generation Lower Sioux Mdewakanton. My family's been here for at least 150 years. We actually have a picture of my seven-times great-grandfather in the museum here," said Morse, referring to his ancestor John Bluestone.

The government's two-story stone warehouse is still here, surrounded by open grassland. In 1862 it was stocked with government food shipments for distribution to the Dakota. Under the terms of the treaty, those payments were to be handed out once a year.

"They're coming off a bad crop year in 1861," Morse explained. "There's a lot of bad feelings that are kind of brewing. They're really waiting for that annuity payment in June. They're waiting for their food and gold."

The annual federal shipment of gold and food, promised in the 1851 treaty, did not arrive on schedule in June 1862. July passed and it still didn't come. The U.S. government was preoccupied with a bigger problem -- the Civil War raging in the South.

In the decade since the Dakota signed away their land, Minnesota had become a state. The white population exploded, from 5,000 in 1850 to more than 170,000. Put another way: In 1850, Indians outnumbered whites in Minnesota by 5-1. By 1860 it was the other way around.

And the Dakota were being squeezed into less and less space. Washington changed the terms of those 1851 treaties, taking half the reservation back, and forced the Dakota to accept the new terms. Now the tribe only had one 10-mile wide swath of land on one bank of the Minnesota River, stretching for 150 miles. This didn't go down well.

Minnesota's white leaders thought everything would be fine if the Dakota would just give up hunting -- which required lots of land -- and take up farming. Some did -- cut their hair, raised crops. But, as you'd expect, not everyone wanted to. Dakota men had always been hunters. Farming was seen as women's work.

Hemmed in on their skinny reservation, lots of people couldn't feed themselves. By that August, things were desperate.

"They were allowing their children to eat the unripened fruit off the trees because they had to eat something," Morse said. "However, this unripened fruit would then make them sick. They would be even worse, and some people would end up dying because of these problems."

Meanwhile, the federal agent had food in the warehouse, but he refused to give it out to the Dakota until the complete June payment arrived from the federal government.

Dakota men confronted a storekeeper named Andrew Myrick, asking him for help or credit.

"And he said 'Let them eat grass.' He considered them basically like livestock. They were considered animals to him," said Morse. Gwen added: "There are some versions of that story that say Andrew Myrick said, 'Let them eat grass, or their own dung.'"

In 200 years, there hadn't been much violence between Indians and whites in Minnesota. But in August of 1862, Dakota country was ready to blow up. The only question was where the spark would come from.

Part 7: The spark that ignites the war >>>

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