Daybreak Woman by Jane Lamm Carroll

Author:Jane Lamm Carroll
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781681341675
Publisher: Minnesota Historical Society Press
Published: 2020-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Camp Release

The last battle of the US–Dakota War was fought at Wood Lake. On September 21, the news came that Sibley and his forces were camped just below the Yellow Medicine River, only a few miles away from the Dakota camps. Little Crow’s forces immediately began planning a large-scale surprise attack on Sibley’s camp.

As they had been at the earlier battles of Fort Ridgely and New Ulm, Euro-Dakota men were pressed into fighting for the Dakota at Wood Lake. Thomas recalled:

Soon after this, runners came reporting that Sibley was on his way. In fact, runners were coming in every few hours. The hostiles at once made preparations to meet him, and as runners again came in with word that Sibley was making his camp at Wood Lake or Lone Tree Lake, as the Indians called it, they decided to attack the camp that night, or early in the morning, and everyone was ordered to go that night…. This battle ground of Wood Lake is about twelve or fifteen miles from where we were then camped. As soon as it got dark, nearly all the men, both hostile and friendly, started, but on the way and in the dark most of the friendlies dropped out and came back to camp.31

The planned attack was upended when some soldiers who were harvesting potatoes from the Dakota farmers’ fields at the Yellow Medicine Agency nearly ran over Dakota warriors preparing to attack. This precipitated the battle. While the Dakota soldiers had the initial advantage, once Sibley’s army regrouped, the warriors could not rout them.32

During the battle, the peace faction recovered most of the captives still held in Little Crow’s camp and moved them to their own (soon to be known as Camp Release), digging trenches and holes inside their dwellings to protect them. They feared the warriors, victorious or not, would return from the battle and try to kill the captives. The fighting was about fifteen miles away, but the captives could hear the gunfire and the reports of cannons in the Dakota camp. They listened closely for the battle’s end.33

When the defeated Dakota warriors returned, they found that most of the captives, except for about sixty, were now protected by the peace faction in the Upper Dakota camp. Joe Campbell, who acted as Little Crow’s assistant throughout the war, also had been actively working with the peace faction. After the defeat at Wood Lake, he asked Little Crow to turn over the remaining captives. The leader acquiesced, allowing Campbell to take forty-six captives over to the peace camp. The warriors were more focused on saving themselves and their families than on the fate of the captives.34

However, four long days ensued before Sibley finally arrived to liberate the captives, during which both Euro-Dakota and white captives were assailed with death threats. Time crawled by as the captives, gripped by profound anxiety, feared they would all be killed before Sibley arrived. Mary Renville, a white woman married to a Dakota man, John Renville, who was

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