Myths of the Rune Stone

by David M Krueger

  As explorers and settlers ventured west in the early decades of the nineteenth century, white Americans found additional appeal in establishing a primordial history for a young nation. Joseph Smith claimed that an angel named Moroni led him to a collection of golden plates buried in a western New York hillside that told the story of a lost tribe of ancient Israel reaching the Americas in the sixth century BCE. Smith’s “translation” of the golden plates was published in 1830 as the Book of Mormon. When the amateur archaeologist Caleb Atwater encountered massive burial mounds and inscribed copper artifacts in southern Ohio, he imagined them to be the creation of a superior civilization from “Hindoostan.” The ethnologist and geographer Henry Schoolcraft also interpreted a number of artifacts he found as evidence of non-Indian, pre-Columbian visitors from Phoenicia, Gaul, Britain, and, particularly, Scandinavia.12 Politicians such as Governor DeWitt Clinton of New York argued that such advanced peoples had been overwhelmed and “exterminated” by Indian “barbarians.” President Andrew Jackson used this martyrdom narrative to argue for the Indian Removal Act of 1830 to displace nations such as the Creek and the Cherokee and move them west of the Mississippi River.13

  The Dakota War of 1862: Inspiration for a Violent Myth of Origin

  Most Minnesotans in the late nineteenth century had little sympathy for North America’s first residents. Memories of violent encounters with Indians still haunted the memories of living pioneers. During the Dakota War of 1862, hundreds of white settlers and soldiers died at the hands of Dakota warriors following a skirmish with reservation agents. In just a few weeks, vast swaths of Minnesota were virtually depopulated by white settlers fleeing in fear. In all likelihood, the traumatic events of 1862 directly inspired the creation of the Kensington Rune Stone inscription in the nineteenth century, and they influenced the stone’s interpretation in the twentieth.

  The tragedy of the Dakota War has often obscured the nearly two-hundred-year history of reciprocal interaction between Indians and European Americans prior to 1862. French fur traders maintained their networks through the cultivation of kinship relationships with the Ojibwe and the Dakota.14 A wholly distinct culture emerged known as Métis, which was neither Indian nor European. The region during this period should not be viewed as a “site of conquest,” says one historian, but instead “a meeting ground of civilizations, a place where geographic and cultural borders were blurred and unfixed.”15 There was even a short period of peaceful interaction between Presbyterian missionaries and Dakota Indians during the 1830s.16 These cross-cultural relationships would be strained severely as white settlers began to migrate in large numbers.

  When the Minnesota Territory was organized in 1849, the U.S. government increased pressure on Indian tribes to vacate their land. In 1851, Dakota chiefs signed treaties that surrendered some 21 million acres of prime farmland for a mere pittance.17 As a result of the treaties, the Sisseton, Wahpeton, Mdewakanton, and Wahpekute bands of Dakota Indians were relegated to a twenty-mile-wide strip of land along the Minnesota River. It is well documented that these treaties were essentially political theater and that the United States would have forcibly removed the Dakota even without a treaty.18 In 1858, Dakota chiefs were pressured to concede even more land and they signed away the ten-mile strip on the north side of river. To make matters worse, the chiefs signed a document promising that the tribes would reimburse fur traders for debts owed by individual Indians. Reservation land quickly became depleted of wildlife, and nearby white traders were said to have “hovered around them like buzzards around the carcasses of slaughtered buffalo, systematically cheating them out of the greater part of the promised annuities.”19 Many Indians were forced to turn to these traders for credit.

  In August 1862, smoldering tensions between the Dakota and the white settlers ignited a conflagration of violence that swept across the prairies of southern Minnesota. Payments from the federal government were late to arrive at the reservation headquarters and the rumor among the Dakota was that the U.S. government had exhausted its treasury fighting the Civil War. Facing starvation, some Mdewakanton men descended on the Redwood Agency to demand food. One storekeeper, Andrew Myrick, famously refused to extend credit and arrogantly told the men to “eat grass.” A few days later, four frustrated and hungry Wahpeton braves killed a family of seven white settlers near the town of Acton. On August 18, Taoyateduta or “Little Crow,” a longtime mediator between Indians and whites, was persuaded to lead a group of warriors in an attack on the Redwood Agency. They killed twenty agency employees and traders, including Andrew Myrick, whose body was found with his mouth stuffed with grass. Over the next few weeks, the Dakota warriors spread throughout the countryside, killing many white settlers in their homes, including unarmed women and children. In the words of one historian, “survivors hid in the woods or crawled on their knees through the tall prairie grasses, quaking at every sound as they struggled toward the relative safety of Fort Ridgely.” An estimated four hundred civilians were killed and many died of thirst and exposure while fleeing. This was the largest mass killing of civilians in the history of the United States to that point, and the number would not be surpassed until the attack on the World Trade Center in 2001.20

  In coming weeks, soldiers were dispatched from Fort Snelling, and by the end of September, Dakota forces were militarily defeated. Hastily organized military tribunals tried four hundred Dakota prisoners and sentenced 303 of them to death. Some of the court cases lasted as little as five minutes. The generals overseeing the tribunals had every intention of carrying out the executions immediately, largely because of the fear of vigilante violence. This fear was not unwarranted as newspaper headlines from across the state called for the “extermination” of Dakota people. As U.S. troops forcibly relocated a group 1,700 Dakota men, women, and children who were not convicted of a crime to a prison encampment at Fort Snelling, angry white settlers threw rocks and shouted insults at them. In one graphic story, a white woman grabbed a nursing Dakota child from its mother’s arms and threw it to the ground. The baby died a few hours later.21

  The executions could not be carried out immediately because death-penalty cases required presidential review. Upon reading the initial tribunal report, President Lincoln and his cabinet were struck by the “irregularity of the proceedings” and the president ordered a stay of execution until he could personally read the trial transcripts. Lincoln had recently been visited by Episcopal missionary Bishop Henry Whipple, who argued that government policies toward the Dakota were to blame for the violence unleashed in the summer of 1862. In a published letter, Whipple wrote: “Who is guilty of the causes which desolated our border: At whose door is the blood of these innocent victims? I believe that God will hold the nation guilty.”22 Few Minnesotans shared Whipple’s sympathy for the Dakota, and Lincoln faced intense pressure to exact vengeance. In the end, Lincoln agreed to commute most of the death sentences, reserving the penalty for only those charged with killing unarmed civilians.23

  The hanging of thirty-eight Dakota men in Mankato, Minnesota, on December 26, 1862. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

  On the day after Christmas in 1862, thirty-eight Dakota men were hanged in a public square in Mankato, Minnesota. As many as four thousand spectators traveled to Mankato to witness the event. When the thirty-eight were dropped from the gallows and the ropes tightened around their necks, the crowd fell silent for a moment, then released a “loud, drawn-out cheer in approbation.”24 The bodies of the men were buried in a mass grave next to the river, but they did not stay there long. In the middle of the night, local medical doctors opened the grave and divided up the corpses for medical research.25

  The execution of the thirty-eight men did not entirely satisfy most Minnesotans, and a campaign of vengeance against the Dakota would continue. Many Minnesotans were unwilling to distinguish between Indians who committed murder and the overwhelming majority who were innocent. All Indians were lumped together as a distinct and guilty race
incapable of living among whites. The state government offered bounties for Dakota scalps. During a special legislative session, Governor Alexander Ramsey declared, “If any shall escape extinction, the wretched remnant must be driven beyond our borders.”26 A forced exile of Dakota people from the state of Minnesota began in the spring of 1863. Some 1,300 Dakota, mostly women, children, and the elderly, were loaded on overcrowded steamships to take them down the Mississippi River and up the Missouri River to the Crow Creek Reservation. More than three hundred died of disease and starvation along the way, and upon their arrival at the remote site in Dakota Territory, they discovered nearly desolate prairie wasteland with few resources on which to subsist. The Dakota clung to survival in virtual concentration-camp conditions for three years before the U.S. government moved them to a slightly better reservation in northern Nebraska. Within a short time after the 1862 conflict, the Dakota population in Minnesota declined from seven thousand to less than two hundred.27

  Although thousands of pioneer settlers abandoned their claims, never to return, waves of new white settlers poured into southern and western Minnesota following the Civil War. The population of the state mushroomed from 172,023 in 1860 to 439,706 in 1870.28 Many, no doubt, were drawn by the federal government’s offer of 160 acres at little or no cost through the Homestead Act of 1862. Despite the apparent triumph of white civilization over “Indian savagery,” the events of 1862 made an indelible imprint on the social psyche of Minnesotans. Myriad cultural expressions of the event flourished in the decades following the war. Artist John Stevens created a series of tableau paintings representing Minnesota’s “Indian Massacre” of 1862. A panorama exhibit circulated throughout the region, particularly in small towns, through the 1870s.29 In the 1890s, Bohemian-born artist Anton Gág created a large, painted panorama that vividly depicted several scenes of Indians brutalizing white settlers. The panorama was first displayed in New Ulm and later at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago.30 Minnesotans were also avid consumers of memorabilia from the mass execution in Mankato. In 1902, the Standard Brewing Company produced a commemorative beer tray that depicted U.S. soldiers relaxing round a table drinking beer while the gallows dropped on the thirty-eight Dakota men.31 Ignatius Donnelly’s 1883 novel Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel referenced the events of the Dakota War. The story describes the discovery of golden tablets with runic writing in a grassy field, an ancient civilization based in the Midwest, and a cataclysmic comet strike in Minnesota in August 1862.32

  In his famous speech at the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago, historian Frederick Jackson Turner pondered the consequences of the demographic reality that the United States no longer had a frontier line. For Turner, the frontier was the place where pioneer settlers, many of them immigrants, learned the quintessential American virtues of strength, individualism, and creativity.33 The “closing” of the frontier evoked widespread anxiety about a perceived decline of masculinity.34 At the first Old Settlers’ reunion in Alexandria, Minnesota, in 1900, there was a pervasive theme of nostalgia for the hard work of the pioneers. Settlers were asked to share their remembrances of a time when the “region was being subdued from its primeval state” and became transformed into an “abode of civilized men.”35 One speaker warned the younger generation against pursuing education in order to avoid hard work: “Nothing could spoil a boy sooner . . . The successful man is the one who is not afraid of hard work.”36 At the turn of the century, many Minnesotans were fearful that stories of frontier life would not survive the deaths of their aging pioneers. Local historians endeavored to collect memories of these settlers and convey their stories of sacrifice to successive generations.37

  The stories of pioneers were inscribed on civic monuments and memorials throughout the state. In the town of New Ulm, for example, one of the key battle sites of the 1862 war, a state monument called Guardians of the Frontier was dedicated in 1891. Monuments were also dedicated at the Birch Coulee battlefield in 1894, Fort Ridgely in 1896, the Guri Endreson gravesite near Willmar in 1907, and several other locations.38 A painting commemorating the Dakota attack on New Ulm was hung in the state’s new capitol building completed in 1905. Gravestones were also an important means of commemorating the white settlers who died in the Dakota War. A group grave marker for five white settlers near Litchfield was dedicated in 1878. One observer identified and documented two hundred such grave sites, noting that a high number of them specify how each person died. “Probably nowhere else in the nation will one find so many gravestones declaring, ‘Killed by Indians’ or ‘Massacred by Indians.’”39

  The proliferation of gravestones and memorials following the Dakota War should be understood in light of how attitudes about commemorating the dead shifted as a result of the American Civil War. As historian Drew Gilpin Faust has observed, fallen soldiers were no longer considered to be the concern of family and friends, they were thought to be part of a larger “imagined community.” Their memory was evoked for the benefit of the larger society and to provide “meaning for the war and its costs.”40 In his Gettysburg Address, President Lincoln interpreted the deaths of the tens of thousands of soldiers as a sacrifice for the nation to be reborn. In a similar fashion, the Dakota War grave sites and other commemorations in Minnesota incorporated dead pioneer settlers into a larger narrative of sacrifice for American progress and westward expansion.41

  Viking massacre scene from Margaret Leuthner’s Mystery of the Runestone comic book, 1962.

  In this potent civil religious milieu of paintings, memorials, monuments, gravestones, and memorabilia, it is easy to see how a Minnesotan could have been inspired to produce a memorial inscription that commemorated a primeval story of American sacrifice. Observers of the Kensington Rune Stone phenomenon have frequently noted the curious five-hundred-year gap between the dates on the stone’s inscription (1362) and the year of Minnesota’s “most dramatic event” (1862). Although we can only speculate about the motives of those who created the runic inscription, we know that many Minnesotans in the early twentieth century interpreted the artifact as a monument to white pioneer sacrifice. Holand’s mythic narrative about slain Norsemen in the fourteenth century magnified the imagined savagery of “precivilized” Minnesota serving to make the achievements of pioneer settlers in the nineteenth century all the more exceptional. Furthermore, Holand used the rune stone and other purported Viking artifacts to naturalize and justify white claims to the landscape.

  Remember Lake Cormorant! Manufacturing the Site of the Viking Massacre

  Myths carry more power when they are made concrete and visible by occupying a physical space. There is no debate among historians as to the locations of various sites of violence during the Dakota War of 1862. The Battle of New Ulm took place in New Ulm, the Battle of Fort Ridgely took place at Fort Ridgely, and so on. When it came to the imagined Viking massacre in 1362, however, there was no consensus on its location. The rune stone inscription indicates that the location of the fated camp was “by two rocky islets one day’s journey north of this stone.” Holand, the tireless researcher, dedicated himself to solving this mystery and he was confident that he could determine the location of the event with certainty. His aim was to ensure that one day a “fitting monument may be erected over the grave of these first white martyrs of the West.”42 His efforts to identify the “massacre” site reveal the strategies he used to make it appear self-evident to Minnesotans that Norseman had once visited their state and lost their lives at the hands of the region’s first residents.

  In an article published in 1920, Holand said that he had recently investigated several lakes located approximately eighty miles north of the site where the Kensington stone had been discovered. According to Holand, “one day’s journey” refers to a measurement of eighty miles, as understood by Scandinavian sailors in the Middle Ages. He found what he was looking for when he discovered Lake Cormorant in Becker County, where he noticed a large hill rising one hundred feet above the lakeshore. From
the top, he could view two rocky outcroppings or “skerries” that he understood to be the same features mentioned in the inscription. Holand claimed to have been accompanied by local farmer John Johnson, who owned land along the lake. While inspecting the site, they identified two boulders with triangular-shaped holes above the shoreline and determined them to be mooring stones. Holand proclaimed with certainty that this was the site of the massacre: “No one who has stood upon the high hill on the northwestern shore of the lake and has seen these two remarkable skerries lying in a straight line before him can doubt that these are the right skerries.”43

  Minnesota’s sacred Viking sites anchored by mooring stones. Included on this map are locations pertaining to the imagined Viking massacre, the place where the memorial stone was inscribed, and the location of a supposed Viking Catholic Mass service printed in A Pre-Columbian Crusade to America, by Hjalmar Holand, 1962.

  Through “serious deductive reasoning,” Holand described the background to the massacre that he said took place at this site. He claimed that the Norse explorers would have approached this location on their journey that began in Hudson Bay and continued up the Red River. “After a long and wearisome march over the Red River Valley prairie, where game would be scarce and hard to approach, the wooded hills and beautiful expanse of Cormorant Lake would look very pleasant to them and invite them to a long stay.”44 The need for food prompted the men to build a raft in order to go out fishing on the lake. Holand concluded that the raft had to be large enough to accommodate the ten men who were out fishing during the massacre, but it was too big to be pulled onto the shore of the lake, hence the need for the mooring stones he discovered at the site.