Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Fort Snelling—
it's a place that should
be remembered, but there's
immense sadness there.
In 1819, the U.S. Army built
a fort at the junction of
the Mississippi and Minnesota Rivers—
a place that is the sacred center
of the Dakota homeland.
Fort Snelling would go on
to become a site of
major significance in
U.S. and state history.
But in the turbulent wake of
the U.S.-Dakota War of 1862,
the fort would also become,
for more than 1,700 Dakota people,
a place of disease,
brutality, and death.
In early November 1862,
U.S. soldiers gathered these
survivors of the conflict—
mostly women, children, and elders
who had surrendered—and forced them
to march from the Lower Sioux Agency
to Fort Snelling, a distance of
more than 100 miles.
Unlike the more than 300 captured
Dakota warriors, most of these
survivors had not been
sentenced to death or prison.
but they were to be held at
an internment camp, surrounded by
a high stockade and located
on flat land below the fort.
Here they would spend
a harsh winter, awaiting their fate.
That confluence of the
Mississippi and Minnesota Rivers
is a really important site to
Dakota people because it marks
another geographic and
ancient sacred place.
And then on top of that,
it's where the concentration camp
was and where people were
imprisoned, so it has a bittersweet
connotation there.
It's a place of rebirth and birth,
but it's also a place of great tragedy.
Armed soldiers and angry
white settlers harassed and
brutalized the Dakota
interned at the site.
Visiting missionaries
worked to convert the
Dakota to Christianity.
Estimates of deaths in the camp
that winter range from 100 to 300,
mostly due to outbreaks of
measles and other diseases.
There must have been
a lot of them that died there.
And what happened to them?
Expendable, I guess.
In spring 1863,
U.S. government officials
declared that almost all
Dakota were to be exiled
permanently from the state.
Steamboats took the
internment camp survivors
to the barren Crow Creek
reservation, more than
400 miles west.
Today, the site of the
Dakota internment camp
is part of Fort Snelling State Park
and serves as a place
of remembrance and education.
The memories of all the
old people are still present
in the land.
There's no way one person
could say exactly what
happened at Fort Snelling.
It's something that should
have never happened.