By the summer of 1862, residents of the Santee Sioux villages situated along the middle Minnesota River, a tributary of the Mississippi, were weary of the constant influx of German settlers in the area and frustrated from seeing their government annuity payments stolen by unscrupulous traders. New Ulm, the primary village in the region, had been settled by a German emigration society in 1854. Over the past eight years, the community had grown in population to more than 700, and the German farmers and their Scandinavian neighbors felt they had done well by migrating to this remote part of frontier Minnesota.
On August 17, when four young Santee tribesmen killed five German farmers, the uneasy peace that had existed between the Sioux and the settlers began to deteriorate. Little Crow, a leader of the Sioux peace faction, had always tried to maintain friendly relations with the whites, but after much cajoling by the more war-like elements in his tribe, he was persuaded to take up the tomahawk against the European farmers in the area. On the following day, 400 German and Scandinavian settlers were killed by a large body of Sioux warriors.
A few days later, Little Crow, with a force of 800 men, attacked Fort Ridgely. There, the garrison was armed with howitzers, and the blistering artillery fire laid down by the defenders discouraged the Indians and sent them into retreat, causing one warrior to remark, “That gun the soldiers used at the end was terrible.” On August 19, Little Crow’s warriors attempted to raid the village of New Ulm, but after only desultory fighting, a severe thunderstorm sent the Indians scurrying for cover. Again, on August 23, a Sioux band numbering about 350 fighters, struck New Ulm. The townspeople put up a brave defense, but in the end, several hundred more settlers were slaughtered.
Jacob Nix was an eyewitness to the Sioux uprising of 1862. Nix, a forty-year-old emigrant who had fled the German revolution of 1848 and eventually arrived in New Ulm in 1858, was placed in charge of defending his village as soon as the news reached its citizens that the Santee Sioux were on the warpath.
Nix published his memoirs of the bloody event in 1887 under the title, The Uprising of the Sioux Indians in Minnesota. The following passage vividly describes what Nix observed on the day that New Ulm was attacked: “On the southeast corner of Minnesota and Center Sts. stood a large log house. The front part of this building was a blacksmith shop, the back part was the dwelling of the blacksmith, Mr. August Kiesling.”
Nix continued, “This strong bulwark was located outside of the barricades but was occupied by our men. Suddenly, shortly before 4:30 P.M., the Indians, with terrible cries, attacked with increased manpower and took the blockhouse, the strongest position of the southeast side of the town. Now the moment had arrived which was to determine New Ulm's existence. If, within a quarter of an hour, the Indians could not be driven out of this position which was so advantageous to them
and so dangerous to the defenders, then all would be lost, because the center of the town, between the two main barricades on the north side of Minnesota St. was now exposed to the gunfire of the Indians. And they did not hesitate for a moment to maximize the advantage they had gained.”
Fortunately, for the residents of New Ulm, 60 to 70 townsmen, under the command of Jacob Nix, came to the rescue and drove the Indians, who had outnumbered the Germans by four to one, from the blockhouse. “The town was saved,” wrote Nix, “but how great were the sacrifices.”
Among the casualties of the bloody battle at New Ulm was an early victim of American friendly fire. Nix sadly reported the circumstances of the incident in his book: “In the evening, then, the gunfire of the besieged was reduced to only single shots, which were either fired at random, or at any object which in the darkness one mistook for an Indian. In the cool and dark evening the baker of the besieged town, clad in a buffalo coat, was on his way to his bakery on Broadway. He was mistaken for an Indian....The name of this dutiful man, who was tireless in his efforts during the siege of New Ulm, and who so sadly lost his life, was Jacob Castor.”
During late summer of 1862, former United States congressman and former Minnesota governor Henry Hastings Sibley was placed in command of the military contingent being organized for punitive action against Little Crow and his followers.
Sibley, a one-time fur trader for the American Fur Company, had a deep respect for the Indians and on more than one occasion had championed their cause in the halls of Congress. But now, things were different. He had been charged with defeating the Santee Sioux, and that is exactly what he and his army did during a heated battle with Little Crow and his warriors at Wood Lake in late September.
The Sioux trouncing broke the Indian resistance once and for all. Several hundred white captives were released and in the ensuing weeks, many tribesmen and their families surrendered to Sibley’s forces.
After the affair at Wood Lake, Sibley held court for nearly 400 captured Santee Sioux warriors and sentenced around 300 of them to death for their participation in the uprising. When the names of the convicted were sent to President Abraham Lincoln for approval, however, he commuted the sentences of 265 men and allowed the death sentence to stand for 38 others. They were hanged at Mankato, a town situated about 15 miles from New Ulm, on December 26, 1862.
Ironically, neither Little Crow nor the four young men who were responsible for the bloody Sioux uprising were ever captured, nor did they surrender. They fled to Dakota, seeking refuge, but the following year, Little Crow returned to Minnesota where he was killed in a farmer’s berry patch. His body was dumped on a trash heap in Hutchinson, Minnesota, where it stayed until someone rescued the skeleton, which eventually became the property of the Minnesota Historical Society. In 1971, his remains were re-interred in a Sioux cemetery in South Dakota.
James A. Crutchfield can be reached at TNcrutch@aol.com
