Prairie Fires

by Caroline Fraser

  Her mother, behind him, sat down in shock, holding her two-year-old, Caroline. An Indian bullet passed through both their bodies, the child giving “one little scream and a gasp or two.”42 Another of Minnie’s sisters lay dead nearby. “The birds were singing in the trees above,” she wrote, “there was not a cloud in the sky. I have often wondered how there could be so much suffering … on such a perfect August day.”43 When she and her two remaining siblings tried to run, they were swept up and taken captive.

  Their neighbors, the Boelters—two brothers and their parents, wives, and children, originally from Prussia—had filed claims on Beaver Creek. Breakfasting early, John Boelter and his family were startled when an Indian woman bearing an ax ran into the house and dashed out again. Shots were heard. Boelter rushed to protect his cattle and was never seen again. His wife, Justina, had been baking bread and was so rattled that she stuck a loaf just out of the oven on the nail meant for her oven mitt. With her baby in her arms, leading two younger children, she hurried to her brother-in-law’s house. But when she saw Indians killing a neighbor, she dragged the children into the trees along the river bottom. They hid there for weeks, surviving on grape leaves, raw potatoes scavenged from root cellars, and cucumbers from abandoned gardens. In heavy rains, her eldest daughter died of exposure. Justina once ventured back to one of the family’s houses, only to find her mother-in-law’s body, beheaded, on the floor.44

  On nearby Hawk Creek, the Ingalls family took flight.45 Jedediah Hibbard Ingalls, a widower, heard the alarm when a settler from the Upper Agency tore past on horseback, yelling that Indians were attacking. He rushed his four children, Elizabeth Jane (fourteen), Amanda (twelve), George Washington (ten), and Lavina (eight), into a wagon and started for Fort Ridgely, the nearest U.S. Army outpost. But not fast enough. The family was overrun by Dakota soldiers.

  The two older girls leapt from the wagon and dashed to a neighbor’s house, only to be taken hostage by a fearsome warrior named Cut Nose.46 As the younger children watched, Jedediah Ingalls was killed and scalped. Absorbed by another Indian band, Lavina wound up in Missouri, while George Washington Ingalls became one of Little Crow’s hostages. His red hair was reportedly a source of fascination: on the medicine wheel of the Plains Indians, red represents north, denoting wisdom. The dramatic story of his captivity—he was taken so young and held for so long that he would forget the English language—would be widely publicized in coming years, in newspapers and at least one book, Dakota War Whoop.47

  No one knows the relationship between Jedediah Ingalls and the clan that produced Laura’s father, Charles Ingalls, and his family.48 No gravestone marks the spot where Jedediah fell. So many were killed so quickly that bodies were left to lie in the fields.

  * * *

  WHEN news of the killings reached New Ulm, men erected barricades on the main street, ordering women and children into the basement of the brick building housing Frank Erd’s Variety Store. Little Crow’s men attacked on the afternoon of August 19, inflicting casualties in fierce fighting and burning outlying farms. A downpour provided temporary reprieve, but within a few days Little Crow was back, with a force of around 650.

  Waged over twenty-four hours, the battle of New Ulm has no counterpart in the nineteenth-century frontier: it is the only occasion on which Indians surrounded and laid siege to a western town. Settlers would long remember the sound of the war cry of the Dakota leader Shakopee, though they could not understand the words. He was shouting: “The Dutch [Germans] have made me so angry, I will butcher them alive.”49

  Army reinforcements arrived just in time to keep New Ulm from being overrun. Thirty-four settlers had been killed, sixty wounded. The town was gutted. The following day, more than one hundred and fifty wagons loaded with women, children, and wounded men—some two thousand people in all, gathered from the entire region—were evacuated to the town of Mankato. One of the soldiers later wrote that “a more heart-rending procession was never witnessed in America.”50

  Sporadic and chaotic, the U.S.-Dakota War ground on for weeks, waged throughout the Minnesota River valley and across the state.51 Henry Hastings Sibley, the former governor of Minnesota, was commissioned to lead untried volunteers against the Indians, since older, experienced men had already been deployed to fight in the Civil War. Those who were left were poorly supplied, having to melt down water pipes into bullets.52

  During the hostilities, an estimated 650 to 800 white settlers were killed, some 265 of them on the first day alone. In casualties and in consequences, the conflict was historic. Since the founding of the country, the uprising marked the largest number of whites killed in a war with Indians, the largest attack on a fort and a town, the largest evacuation (of New Ulm), and the largest number of refugees, in the tens of thousands.53 Survivors fled northeast to St. Paul and Minneapolis, north to St. Cloud, or out of the state entirely, emptying settlements throughout the southern part of Minnesota.54

  After the attack on New Ulm, the Dakota continued fighting for over a month. But by the end of September, their own ammunition depleted, they were decisively defeated at the Battle of Wood Lake. Little Crow and other Dakota soldiers escaped to the north, leaving their prisoners near the ruins of the Upper Agency with Indian bands who had chosen not to fight. There, at what became known as Camp Release, 269 captives were turned over to Sibley, among them Minnie Buce and Elizabeth Jane and Amanda Ingalls.

  The relentless Minnesota winter was setting in, and provisions were low. The combat was over, but for every Indian remaining in Minnesota—regardless of tribal identity, regardless of whether or not he had fought in Little Crow’s war—the backlash was about to begin.

  * * *

  GRAPHIC, sensational accounts of killings carried out by the Dakota whipped survivors, city dwellers, and politicians into a frenzy of revenge. Minnesota newspapers published lurid reports of bodies hacked to pieces, of scalpings, and of children nailed to trees, walls, and fences. The national press took up the tale.

  It took only days for Minnesota’s governor, Alexander Ramsey, to seize upon the massacre as the pretext for doing what state and federal officials had wanted to do all along. On September 9, 1862, Ramsey declared that “the Sioux Indians of Minnesota must be exterminated or driven forever beyond the borders of the state.”55 After decades of hostilities with the Indians, it was not the first explicit call for extermination, but it was in deadly earnest.56 It would soon be followed by an Interior Department report considering any means necessary for driving out the Dakota: “extermination, massacre, banishment, torture, huddling together, killing with small-pox, poison, and kindness.”57

  At Camp Release, a military commission was appointed to try, convict, and execute the Indians responsible. In little more than a month, calling few witnesses and marshaling little evidence, it pronounced death sentences on 303 Dakota prisoners. Sibley planned to execute them immediately, and only fear of stepping on presidential authority delayed the proceedings. When Lincoln’s permission was sought by telegram, he called a halt, recognizing that many of the convicted were guilty only of fighting against American forces: they were prisoners of war, subject to release. He requested that a list be prepared of those who had committed rapes and murders of unarmed civilians. In the end, to near-universal outrage in Minnesota, he upheld thirty-nine of the death sentences but commuted the rest.

  Carried out in the morning of December 26, 1862, the execution was one of the most grotesque public events in the nation’s history, a triumphal display of race hatred. Mankato’s carpenters and Sibley’s soldiers had constructed an enormous scaffold, twenty-four feet square, designed to hang ten men on a side.58 At the cutting of a single rope, the central platform would drop, hanging all at once. Several thousand spectators gathered to cheer on the ceremony. Captured in an elaborate drawing by Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, it remains the largest mass execution in American history.59

  But not even that extreme reprisal could stanch the local lust for revenge. Frustr
ated by Lincoln’s clemency, Minnesota sought satisfaction through other means, killing, imprisoning, or banishing Indians found within its borders. Seventeen hundred women, children, elderly, and “friendly” villagers who refused to fight during the uprising were forced to march with a wagon train, in another heartrending procession, 150 miles from Camp Release to the Lower Agency to Fort Snelling, where they were held all winter, outside, in an internment camp.60 Attacked on the journey by angry whites, as many as three hundred died of injuries, exposure, measles, and malnutrition. Survivors were forcibly removed, first to a harsh and distant reservation in Dakota Territory, then to Nebraska.61

  The treaties were abrogated, the reservations seized, and the annuity money owed to the Dakota was redistributed to the settlers whose farms and crops had been destroyed.62 The estate of Jedediah Ingalls was credited with $865 for “depredations committed by Sioux Indians,” money that paid for clothing and feeding his orphaned children.

  Reparations, and outright vengeance, did not stop there. Minnesota found ways to drive the Winnebago tribe—who took no part in the uprising—off their reservation south of Mankato, freeing up coveted farmland. After a spell at Fort Snelling, nearly two thousand were shipped off to share the Dakota’s exile, first in Dakota Territory, then in Nebraska.63

  During the summer of 1863, Sibley led an expedition of several thousand men to drive all remaining Dakota from the state. More than 150 were taken prisoner; two hundred unarmed Yankton men, women, and children camped in Dakota Territory were slaughtered. To ensure the extirpation of all remaining Indians, Governor Ramsey declared a bounty on male Dakota scalps, twenty-five dollars a head. Volunteer scouts combed the Big Woods for any Dakota left alive. The order would remain in effect until 1868. Among its victims was Little Crow, shot in the back the year after the war, his scalp put on display in the state capitol.64

  * * *

  LARGELY forgotten outside of Minnesota, the U.S.-Dakota War of 1862 was among the most pivotal in American history. More white Americans died that summer in Minnesota than were killed at the Battle of the Little Bighorn or at any other military engagement in the Plains Indian Wars. But in the end, the 1862 war was defined not by the ferocity of its battles or the number of its casualties (far eclipsed by those of the Civil War), but by Dakota atrocities—some real, some imagined—and the indignation they inflamed, inspiring retaliatory massacres of Indians at Sand Creek, Washita River, and Wounded Knee.65 In the eyes of politicians, it was the atrocities that justified extermination as state policy. They also gave rise to the ubiquitous slur, “The only good Indian is a dead Indian.”66 As a result of the war, thousands of Indians would be driven out of Minnesota, and white settlers would permanently take their place.

  The Homestead Act gave the settlers official permission and incentive. But ultimately, it was not policy or legislation that opened the far west. It was not reasoned debate. It was wrath and righteous retribution that did it, forever changing the contour and condition of the land, pushing settlers farther west than they had ever gone before, flooding the prairies with farms, towns, fields, grain elevators, and train stations. It was the massacre that cleared the way for thousands of white families to seek their fortunes on the Great Plains.

  By 1867, there were only fifty Dakota left in Minnesota.67 That year, a baby girl was born just across the Mississippi, in a little house in the Big Woods.

  PART I

  THE PIONEER

  Chapter 1

  Maiden Rock

  The Legend

  “I was born in a log house within … miles of legend-haunted Lake Pepin,” Laura Ingalls Wilder would write.1

  The lake was legendary before she was born. Where the Mississippi swallows the Chippewa, a wide tributary flowing sluggishly out of great Wisconsin pine forests to the north, the river swells at the delta, like a snake that has just devoured something. That swollen spot, widest on the Mississippi, is Lake Pepin.

  Its dark waters are presided over by Maiden Rock, an immense four-hundred-foot limestone bluff so visually arresting that everyone had a story to tell about it. Like everything else, the story belonged to the Indians: Maiden Rock was a lover’s leap, they said, where a Dakota girl in love with a young man leapt impetuously to her death rather than marry another. Those who passed at dusk were said to hear her sorrowful song.2

  Whites would tell and retell the story until it had been rubbed smooth, playing up its romanticism, painting the scene in gloomy olives and mauves. George Catlin camped for days along Lake Pepin, hauling his canoe out of the water and gathering colorful pebbles by the handful, “precious gems … rich agates.”3 Catlin told the story, and so did Mark Twain and the poet William Cullen Bryant, who specialized in brooding Indians.4

  Maiden Rock captured the imagination of Charles Ingalls, who told his daughters stories about the rock, the lake, and the Indians. On one memorable occasion, he brought them to the beach bordering the town of Pepin, just across the water from Minnesota, where they discovered the same pebbles, “pretty pebbles that had been rolled back and forth by the waves until they were polished smooth.”5

  Like Catlin, Wilder as a tiny girl gathered them by the handful, stuffing so many in her pocket that they tore her dress. Her mother gently reproved her for being so greedy. But as Wilder chose to remember it, her father just laughed, delighted.

  She loved both her parents, but her primary, overwhelming identification was with her father. Charles had brown hair and blue eyes, just as she did. Whenever she did something naughty, even as he punished her he had a glint in his eye that told her it would be all right, that he was moments away from holding her on his knee and telling her how bad he himself had been as a boy. He was charming, cheerful, and musical, playing by ear songs that would lift his family’s spirits—and he was an incomparable storyteller.

  All of her stories begin with him, all of her memories. Her first, she would say later, was “of my Father always,” carrying her in his arms, rocking her to sleep. “The feeling, the voice and the dim light over the log wall make a picture that will never fade,” she wrote.6

  * * *

  DISCOVERING how Charles Ingalls and his family came to find themselves a few miles from the shores of Lake Pepin, just a few years after Pepin County was first marked on a map, is a detective story tracking generations into the past. Pieces of the family portrait survive, but the whole remains elusive, obscured under the soot of time. It may never be complete.

  That is always a problem, in writing about poor people. The powerful, the rich and influential, tend to have a healthy sense of their self-importance. They keep things: letters, portraits, and key documents, such as the farm record of Thomas Jefferson, which preserved the number and identity of his slaves. No matter how far they may travel, people of high status and position are likely to be rooted by their very wealth, protecting fragile ephemera in a manse or great home. They have a Mount Vernon, a Monticello, a Montpelier.

  But the Ingallses were not people of power or wealth. Generation after generation, they traveled light, leaving things behind. Looking for their ancestry is like looking through a glass darkly, images flickering in obscurity. As far as we can tell, from the moment they arrived on this continent they were poor, restless, struggling, constantly moving from one place to another in an attempt to find greater security from hunger and want. And as they moved, the traces of their existence were scattered and lost. Sometimes their lives vanish from view, as if in a puff of smoke.

  So as we look back across the ages, trying to find what made Laura’s parents who they were, imagine that we’re on a prairie in a storm. The wind is whipping past and everything is obscured. But there are the occasional bright, blinding moments that illuminate a face here and there. Sometimes we hear a voice, a song snatched out of the air.

  That Poverty Beat

  Charles Ingalls was born at a crossroads. As if to fulfill the prophecy in that, he would always be a wanderer, propelled by hopes of a better future farther on.


  But his rootlessness was not simply the sign of a “wandering foot,” as his daughter would suggest.7 It reflected generations of struggle, trying to break through, hoping to latch on to land. He would be among the first to make his way west, but he was not the first to know poverty. From the family’s earliest beginnings in Puritan New England, that was all they would ever know. And the life of the previous generations had been even harder than Charles’s own.

  When Charles’s father was a young boy, Charles told his daughters, he and his brothers labored for six days a week, Monday through Saturday.8 During the winter, they got up in the dark, did their chores by lamplight, and worked until the sun went down, going to bed directly after supper. For play, they had a few hours off on Saturday afternoons. At sundown on Saturday, the “Puritan Sabbath” would begin.

  On the Sabbath, all recreational pursuits, indeed all activities other than going to church or praying or studying a catechism, were strictly forbidden. There was no visiting, no sweeping, no gardening, no hunting, no haying, no fishing, no frivolous talk, no writing of notes or cutting of hair or kissing of children. Hot meals could not be prepared and horses could not be hitched to the wagon. To obey the Sabbath, the Ingalls family walked, reverently, to church. To break the Sabbath was a grave, even criminal offense, punishable by fines, public censure, or imprisonment.9

  A flash of lightning in history’s darkness gives us a glimpse of one such Sunday, more than two centuries before Laura’s birth. Family lore has long maintained that the very first member of the Ingalls clan on this continent, Edmund Ingalls, arrived in Salem Harbor in 1628 with the expedition of John Endecott, first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. We know little about the man; there isn’t even a portrait of him. But we know that on April 20, 1646, he was fined for “bringing home sticks in both his arms on the Sabbath day,” presumably for firewood.10 Even worse, the sticks were stolen from somebody else’s fence.