Lincoln's Bishop by Gustav Niebuhr

Author:Gustav Niebuhr
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins

Six

Whipple’s Dakota Allies and the War’s End

WARFARE IS BY NATURE OFTEN CONFUSING TO ITS ground-level participants, the clichéd “smoke of battle” obscuring individual and group actions, even after the event. The Dakota War, begun with a surprise attack and then carried on in bloody acts great and small for five weeks, seems especially susceptible to being told in fragments. The darkness that settled over Minnesota’s prairies—sometimes literally, with clouds of smoke from the burning of farmhouses and other buildings—was seldom dispersed by the incidental reports and rumors spread by refugees.

Bishop Whipple, for one, wrote later of feeling cut off from any real news “for weeks.”1 Eventually, he heard that during the initial attack on the Lower Sioux Agency, Little Crow’s soldiers put the mission of Saint John to the torch and burned it to the ground. But he also joyfully learned that Samuel Hinman had survived, as had Emily West, along with the Dakotas who belonged to the small congregation. He heard, too, a touching story of remarkable, physical courage shown by one of the Dakota women he knew there. “At the time of the burning of the Mission House, the wife of Good Thunder crept in and seized the Bible from the altar, wrapped it in a surplice, and buried it in the forest. As soon as she was able to do so she sent the message to me.”2 That Bible had been designed to look impressive, a heavy, formal presentation copy given by a European aristocrat. Its savior had acted under the impression, Whipple discovered, that the book she saved from the flames was the only Bible in the world. That woman was Snana—a Dakota name that translated as “Tinkling.” Whites knew her as Maggie. In a powerfully positive way, she complicated the story of the Schwandt family, described in the previous chapter. Maggie’s interactions throughout the war with Mary Schwandt indicate how difficult it is to generalize about the acts committed by Dakotas on the prairies. The violence that rained down on southern Minnesota came mixed, as happens in times of war, with acts of radical kindness and generosity.

Historians of the war have pointed out that many Dakotas—especially outside the Mdewakanton band—had little or nothing to do with the fighting. Some opposed it from the start, and they became increasingly vocal as the war went on. More important, some Dakotas distinguished themselves by intervening to save whites, either individually or en masse. When Mary Schwandt retold her story in 1894, she laid considerable emphasis on the friendship she had developed with Snana, who lived then in Little Crow’s camp. Schwandt came to feel an enormous gratitude toward the woman she called Maggie. “Maggie was one of the handsomest Indians I ever saw, and one of the best. She had been educated and was a Christian. She could speak English fluently (but never liked to), and she could read and write. . . . Maggie and her mother were both very kind to me, and Maggie could not have treated me more tenderly if I had been her daughter.

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