the time Scott arrived in St. Paul and noted the stately bearing of the Ojibwes he encountered there, Ojibwe claims to land, which in his uncle’s day had encompassed fully half the northern part of the state, had been reluctantly ceded to whites. The remaining six thousand or so tribal members in the state had “relinquished the meadows, forests and wild rice beds of the lake country for the harsh climate, poor soil, and ‘immense swamps’ of new reservations located hundreds of miles from population centers.”61 In the southern part of the state, the Dakotas, who had actively facilitated the establishment of an American presence at Mendota, the site of Fort Snelling, and along the valleys of the Mississippi’s tributaries, had fared even worse. Their lands and subsistence had been squeezed and encroached on by an influx of land-hungry settlers and speculators and they had been extorted and strong-armed by traders and Indian agents.
By the outbreak of the Civil War, the once-dominant Dakota had seen their domain reduced to an untenable ribbon of land along the Minnesota River. When the exigencies of war being waged in the East further delayed annuity payments throughout the summer of 1862, frustrated and deeply angry young men launched an attack on white settlers in the Minnesota River valley with tragic consequences. The Dakota attacks on white communities in southern Minnesota left between four hundred and a thousand men, women, and children dead. The killings inflamed the white population of Minnesota against all Indians—not just the fraction of Dakota men who took part in the killing, but also against the majority of the bands who had rebuffed the incitements to war and provided protection for and even taken the side of whites in the conflict.
The Dakota War reshaped ethnic identity in the four-year-old state. The conflict destroyed the vestiges of the mixed-race border culture and sense of shared kinship between whites and natives. It also marked the beginning of a new phase of conflict between indigenous people west of Minnesota and an encroaching white civilization that would last another two decades. It led, in other words, to the war Scott was hastening to join.
For the Dakota, the war was devastating. They lost all but a tiny remnant of their once-extensive lands; Congress passed a bill authorizing the exile of Dakota people from the state, annulling all treaties the United States had made with any of the bands and diverting the remaining Dakota annuities to pay reparations to the white victims of the violence.62 In the aftermath of the conflict on the Minnesota, thirty-eight Dakota men were hanged in a gruesome ritual of state-sanctioned retribution the day after Christmas 1862. Hundreds of others were imprisoned for three years at Camp McClellan in Davenport, Iowa. Some sixteen hundred women, children, and old men, those explicitly not guilty of involvement in the attacks except by virtue of tribal association, were force-marched from their communities on the Minnesota to a prison camp set up below the walls of Fort Snelling, where close to three hundred died during the winter of 1862–63 as the authorities waited for the ice on the Mississippi to melt enough to permit their deportation out of the state. Those who surrendered, including many Sissetunwan and Wahpetunwan who had not fought against the United States, were deported to Crow Creek, Dakota Territory, or imprisoned. Exiled from Minnesota, hundreds, especially children, died of disease and starvation. Others fled onto the western plains and north into Canada.63 The Minnesota state legislature instituted a bounty on Dakota scalps.64
The Dakota had been defeated, but the war for control of Dakota Territory and eastern Montana was just beginning. In the aftermath of the attacks on Minnesota River settlements, the state’s leaders joined with federal forces to mount massive punitive expeditions to chase the renegades who had fled onto the western plains. There, the exiles from Minnesota joined with bands of the Teton Sioux (Hunkpapa and Blackfeet) who were engaged in the crucial summer activity of hunting and drying meat to secure a food supply for the coming winter.
The Dakota (or Santee Sioux) of Minnesota represented the easternmost tribe in a loosely confederated and widely dispersed people who recognized common descent from seven ancestral political units called council fires.65 The Lakota in turn were one of seven tribes of the Teton Sioux: the Lakota, Hunk-papa, Brule, Miniconjou, Sans Arcs, Two Kettles, and Sihaspas. In the course of making war on the Dakota who had sought refuge in the lands of their kinsmen, the Lakota, the United States attacked the Lakota indiscriminately as well. Just as significantly, the punitive campaigns into the Dakotas were intrusions into a country where the soldiers had no right to be, according to the Lakota view of the proper relations between their people and the wasichu (whites) who had recently begun encroaching on areas they had long viewed—and fought to defend—as their own.
Like other punitive wars fought for control over territory inhabited by people deemed to be savages by expansive colonial powers, the expeditions to punish the Dakota launched from Minnesota in 1863 and 1864 combined a rhetoric of righteous retribution with the strategic goal of extending sovereignty claims over contested territory. They were also intended to intimidate and serve as a warning to Indians further west, like the Lakota, and discourage their active resistance to white-settler expansion.
While punitive actions are associated with volatile and primal emotions, such as anger and the desire for vengeance, the military rationale for such wars stresses their role in disciplining the adversary; punitive actions are launched not just to punish but also to “teach a lesson.” Not surprisingly, the military literature on the history and theory of punitive wars often discusses them in the context of colonial warfare. The theory behind punitive wars is that “primitive, less organized enemies” cannot be dissuaded from unwanted behaviors by the mere knowledge that their actions may elicit the wrath of a more powerful adversary.66
The concept of a military action whose primary objective is to punish implies the arrogation of the moral authority to mete out justice to the other side. Similarly, expeditions are one-sided actions in which the initiative to invade and pursue is claimed by the punitive authority, the one in pursuit. Such inherently asymmetrical language reveals the presumption that the great power possesses a monopoly on moral authority to act in a way that is intended to teach a lesson. Moral right is assumed to lie with the greater power that is in pursuit. This is an unquestioned premise of punitive actions. Indeed, one might say that the rhetorical force of acting with punitive intent is in itself an act that asserts the moral high ground and overwhelms contesting claims of justice and moral authority.
The punitive expeditions of 1863 and 1864 represented the largest forces yet assembled against western Indians as they pursued the remnants of the Dakota fleeing as far as the Missouri River. Led by Henry Hastings Sibley, a fur trader who had become Minnesota’s first governor, and by Alfred Sully, a general redirected from the Civil War to lead the effort, the punitive raids penetrated deep into the Coteau du Missouri country, a land of elevated rolling plains stretching from close to the Canadian border generally east of the Missouri River and south into what is today north-central South Dakota. This was a hot, dry, and inhospitable region, which Sully famously described as “Hell with the fires put out.”67
The massive expeditions that set forth into the Dakota Territory each included thousands of soldiers and hundreds of Indian scouts drawn from the Winnebagos and also from among the Dakotas. Sully and Sibley ranged up the Missouri River and across the hot arid grasslands in search of Indian encampments to chastise. The brigades were supported by hundreds of wagons and mule teams, as well as herds of cattle brought along to furnish meat for the soldiers.68 During the summers of 1863 and 1864, the forces of Sully and Sibley attacked Indian villages camped at Big Mound (northeast of present-day Bismarck) as well as at Whitestone Hill to the south and Killdeer Mountain further west. Made up of different Sioux bands who had come together to hunt, the number of lodges ranged from hundreds to an estimated fifteen hundred at Killdeer. In each of these major engagements, the Indians fought first to cover the retreat of women and children from their encampments. Estimates of the number of casualties in each battle vary widely, but run into the hundreds. At Whitestone alone, it is thought that 150 to 300 Santee, Yanktonai, and Teton Sioux were killed, including women and children. The number of soldiers killed is better known; in the same battle, Sully’s forces lost twenty-two men killed and fifty injured. At Killdeer
