July 13, 2023 • 46 mins
At her best, Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie books offer a door for readers to walk through to get the full picture of the world the Ingalls were living in. She may not tell you everything in the books (and in some cases, she tells you very little), but ideally she leaves you wanting more. For instance: Who were the Native Americans living alongside the Ingalls? What were buffalo wolves? Do they still exist? In this episode, we’re going to try and paint a bigger picture for you. Imagine you are standing in the doorway of any one of Laura’s Little Houses. You’re looking outside. What might you actually be seeing?
Go Deeper:
More on the buffalo slaughtering of the 19th century
Learn more about the US Dakota War of 1862
Little War on the Prairie (This American Life ep 479), featuring Gwen Westerman
Mni Sota Makoce: Land of the Dakota by Gwen Westerman and Bruce White
Dr. Chris Wells’ work
Dr. Flannery Burke’s work
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
This episode contains descriptions of racist depictions.
Speaker 2 (00:04):
Listeners please be advised.
Speaker 1 (00:11):
At her best, Laura Ingles Wylder's Little House on the
Prairie books offered door for readers to walk through or
drive through, as we did, to find out what is
on the other side.
Speaker 2 (00:22):
Ideally, they prompt you to want to know more.
Speaker 3 (00:27):
They're an artifact of what's erased and what's alighted and
what you haven't been told, and that's valuable too, Like
so much of learning about our history and understanding the
literature is also looking at the negative spaces.
Speaker 1 (00:40):
You want to know where in the country the houses
were located. You want to know why it was called
Indian territory. Who were the Native Americans living alongside the Ingles.
You want to know if that long hard winter really existed?
What we're buffalo wolves? Do they still exist? What was
(01:00):
the full picture of Laura's world?
Speaker 3 (01:03):
For those who have an impulse to do it, to
continue to think about the role that that narrative played
and why and how.
Speaker 1 (01:13):
There are hints of that outside world in the books
if you look for them, but there are few and
can be confusing if you don't know the bigger picture.
Speaker 4 (01:22):
Multiple times Laura Ingall's Wilder will say MA hated Indians.
MA hates Indians, but we never know why. At least
in the Little House series.
Speaker 1 (01:39):
Laura and Rose did an extraordinary job of painting a cozy,
magical picture of the Ingles family alone and self sufficient
against the world. But they were neither alone nor in
many cases as self sufficient as the books would like
readers to believe.
Speaker 2 (01:55):
No one was.
Speaker 1 (01:57):
But understanding the Ingles story as part of a whole
demands understanding that many things can be true at the
same time.
Speaker 5 (02:05):
Part of what's interesting about stories like Little House on
the Prairie is that they are true.
Speaker 6 (02:13):
Right.
Speaker 5 (02:13):
The perspective is an accurate one as far as it goes,
but it requires putting yourself in the shoes of an
individual embedded and really complicated, sometimes violent systems. The way
that American culture knows and doesn't know that history is
pretty remarkable.
Speaker 1 (02:33):
In this episode, we're going to briefly try and paint
a bigger picture for you. Imagine you are standing in
the doorway of any one of Laura's Little houses. You're
looking outside. What might you actually be seeing. I'm Glennis McNicol,
(02:55):
and this is Wilder Let's start by going over some
(03:43):
of the basics. Laura was born in Wisconsin in eighteen
sixty seven, two years after the end of the Civil
War and five years after the US Dakota War of
eighteen sixty two. Unless you read the Little House Books
alongside an encyclopedia, you'd know neither of these things. The
only nod we get to the Civil War and Little
House is in the first book, Little House in the
(04:05):
Big Woods, Laura's uncle George briefly appears at Grandma's house.
According to Pa, George has been quote wild since he
came back from the war. Uncle George still wears his
blue army coat with brass buttons and blows his bugle
into the woods.
Speaker 2 (04:23):
But that's it. There's no further explanation.
Speaker 1 (04:27):
As a kid in Canada having no concept of the
Civil War, this meant nothing to me. I'm considering the
global reach of the Little House Books. I doubt I'm
alone in not understanding the reference. But it's obviously important
in the context of Laura's life and the America that
would spend her childhood.
Speaker 2 (04:46):
Moving through.
Speaker 1 (04:47):
The entire Little House series takes place in the aftermath
of the Civil War and at the height of the
push for westward expansion.
Speaker 5 (04:55):
So the period after the Civil War, which is when
all of this manifested, was one big land giveaway after
another from the federal government in an effort to push
settlement west of the Mississippi River.
Speaker 2 (05:14):
This is environmental historian Chris Wells.
Speaker 1 (05:17):
He talked to us about the Homestead Act of eighteen
sixty two, one of the largest government efforts to convince
settlers to go west.
Speaker 5 (05:24):
The basic premise is that anyone who was a citizen
or who could become a citizen, could make a land claim,
and after paying minimal filing fees, could have the land
needed to them by the federal government as long as
you stayed on the land for a certain period of
time and made some improvements to it.
Speaker 1 (05:47):
Little House is how I learned about the Homestead Act.
The process of staking a claim is detailed and by
the shores of Silver Lake in a chapter called Pause
bet After their first winter in the Dakota Tis territories,
pau goes to file on his claim.
Speaker 2 (06:04):
He lines up overnight.
Speaker 1 (06:05):
The men behind him try to tackle him because they
want his land, but mister Edwards, the wildcat from Tennessee,
appears and saves Paw. In the books, we're led to
believe that homesteaders have an almost.
Speaker 2 (06:21):
Divine right to this new land. Paw makes it sound
like a game.
Speaker 1 (06:26):
Quote, girls, I've bet Uncle Sam fourteen dollars against one
hundred and sixty acres of land, going to help me
win the bet? But of course, the motives behind the
Homestead Act are far more complicated than what we're told
in the book.
Speaker 5 (06:42):
The federal government's claim on that land was complicated by
the fact that this was essentially a colonial takeover of
Native American territory. One of the reasons the country's leaders
wanted to get people onto the land and to say,
was basically to stake a irreversible claim to it and
(07:05):
to finalize the process of wresting it from hands of
Indigenous inhabitants.
Speaker 1 (07:13):
And naturally, the government's decisions were also intertwined with the
interests of American industry, namely the railroad.
Speaker 7 (07:23):
There are a couple of ways in which the railroad
and the Homestead Act are intertwined.
Speaker 1 (07:31):
That's Flannery Burke, Professor of American Studies at Saint Louis University.
Speaker 7 (07:36):
The railroad was financed by grants of so called public
land to the railroad, which the railroad could then sell
to potential settlers to finance the building of the railroad itself.
And for the most part, this financing scheme.
Speaker 2 (07:55):
Did not work at all.
Speaker 7 (07:59):
Almost every railroad, I think all but one railroad went
bankrupt at some point, so it was not an effective
form of financing the railroad.
Speaker 1 (08:08):
The Homestead Act also meant a lot of land was
available to people who hadn't been able to own property before,
and a lot of people, regardless of their farming experience,
were willing to take the gamble.
Speaker 7 (08:21):
The Homestead Act was extraordinarily democratic for its time period.
Women could homestead, immigrants could homestead, African Americans could homestead.
It was locally administered, so discrimination against all of those
groups might mitigate against their successful settlement on the land,
but it was really open to a wide variety of people.
(08:45):
North Dakota was one of the most ethnically and linguistically
diverse places in the late nineteenth century of almost any
place in the United States.
Speaker 1 (08:55):
That diversity is almost entirely absent from the Little House Books,
with the exception of the Native Americans, the Ingles encounter.
The only non English speaking characters we meet is mister Hanson,
who the Ingles by the dugout from, and Missus Nelson
and her daughter Anna, who only speaks Norwegian. This absence
was intentional on Laura and Rose's part. Rose in particular
(09:19):
was keen to emphasize the self sufficiency of the Ingles family,
a core theme in the series. The Ingle's ability to
fend for themselves is part of the cozy magic of
the books. The idea of absolute independence from all systems
of support reappears again and again. These themes are deeply familiar.
(09:39):
The belief in self sufficiency, the rugged individual, the hard worker,
pulling themselves up by their bootstraps. These traits are as
closely associated with what it means to be American as
cowboys in apple Pie.
Speaker 2 (09:56):
The truth is much different.
Speaker 1 (10:00):
Any hope of survival on the American frontier was impossible
without some sort of outside structural support. The individual is
a fantasy, a brutal fantasy.
Speaker 7 (10:13):
The forced removal of Native people was a social service
for settlers.
Speaker 1 (10:19):
The forced removal of Native Americans was government support.
Speaker 2 (10:23):
It made the Homestead Act possible.
Speaker 1 (10:25):
Settlers couldn't be settlers if the government hadn't cleared to
the land, and settlers wouldn't be able to remain on
that land if the government hadn't aligned themselves with the railroads.
Speaker 7 (10:37):
The financing of the railroad was a social service for settlers.
They actually want more government in their life.
Speaker 1 (10:46):
And here's where we get into multiple things being true
at the same time, because it's also true that on
an individual level, homesteaders were often left to fend for
themselves under the most brutal circumstances.
Speaker 5 (10:59):
I mean, people were that are really starving.
Speaker 6 (11:00):
Right.
Speaker 2 (11:01):
Here's environmental historian Chris Wells.
Speaker 6 (11:03):
Again.
Speaker 5 (11:04):
You have these plagues multiple years in a row for
people who have to feed themselves as you can't feed yourself.
Speaker 1 (11:10):
Remember the grasshoppers that plagued the Ingles and on the
banks of Plumb Creek. There were no social services to
help starving settlers. Instead of providing food or money, one
of the government's solutions to the problem was to tell
farmers to pray the grasshoppers away. Obviously, that didn't solve
the problem, but eventually the government did provide some relief,
(11:35):
though it was scant and at times seemingly cruel.
Speaker 5 (11:39):
There was a requirement that farmers had to sell their
livestock before they could claim any sort of aid, and
they had to sign a sworn oath that they were
entirely without means. So this is something that Lori Ingle's
father had to do. He signed the pledge, he got
a barrel of flour worth about five bucks, and then
(12:02):
walked a couple hundred miles to a farm where he
could hire himself out for the harvest season.
Speaker 1 (12:10):
In the books, after the grasshoppers destroy the crops, Paw
sets out to look for work.
Speaker 2 (12:15):
Of his own volition.
Speaker 1 (12:17):
Any hint that he was participating in a government relief
program is completely absent. It's also true that the little
relief that was provided was more than had ever existed
prior to this, so.
Speaker 5 (12:31):
The idea that any sort of aid from the public
sector would have been available seems kind of remarkable.
Speaker 1 (12:39):
What gets lost in how we learn about all this,
whether it be from the Little House series or the
general narrative of American history, is that two things can
be true at the same time. Homesteaders could be getting
more support than ever before, and yet it was still
not enough.
Speaker 5 (12:57):
So what's true for an individual and what's true in
the broader context are often not the same thing.
Speaker 2 (13:04):
And I think that's a useful way of thinking.
Speaker 5 (13:06):
About the debates over POD being a failure and what
it was like to be out on the frontier and
to be a settler trying to turn what had up
until very recently been indigenous land that got often violently
rested away and then turned over to anyone who bothered
(13:29):
to show up and had the will and the means
to try to make a go of it.
Speaker 1 (13:34):
Settlers could be participating in violent systems and still be
left enormously vulnerable.
Speaker 5 (13:41):
So it took a huge amount of violence and willpower
and throwing the nation's way around to make the land
available to settlers. But then they were sort of on
their own, and so that's not a great set of
conditions to set people up for success.
Speaker 1 (14:00):
Home centers may have been left on their own, but
they were not left without purpose. If there's one thing
America knows how to do better than anyone else, it's
telling a story. And more powerful than any government service
was the mythology the nation wrapped around itself in the
nineteenth century. We're talking of course, about manifest destiny, the
(14:24):
belief that white settlers were destined to expand across America, from.
Speaker 2 (14:28):
Coast to coast.
Speaker 1 (14:31):
I did not encounter the term manifest destiny until well
into my twenties, long after I'd moved to the US.
I wanted to know from someone who grew up here
whether it was still taught as a part of American history,
and if so, how so, I asked Joe. So, obviously
(14:51):
I didn't grow up in the American education system. I
grew up in the Canadian education system.
Speaker 8 (14:58):
Which is probably better than I.
Speaker 2 (15:01):
It's just very it's very different.
Speaker 1 (15:03):
And so a lot of my American history education came
through television and also through a very Canadian lens. Of
the Americans like to say they won this war, but
if they had, we'd be part of America sort of skepticism.
But so I'm just curious as we're talking about this,
you know, the idea of manifest destiny comes up again
(15:24):
and again where Rose particular is concerned, but where Little
House is concerned, and I want to sort of understand
if that was a concept you were taught, and if so,
how you were taught.
Speaker 8 (15:37):
I don't remember learning about manifest destiny when I was
a kid or a teenager. I learned it when I
was in grad school at NYU studying religious studies.
Speaker 2 (15:49):
I think that.
Speaker 8 (15:51):
Was the first time that I heard the phrase manifest destiny.
Isn't that crazy that I was in graduate school?
Speaker 1 (15:59):
But I also think gets so telling that you heard
it in religious studies. That says quite a lot because
my understanding of it now, I mean, the idea that
white Americans were divinely ordained to settle the entire continent
of North America feels like a religious belief system.
Speaker 8 (16:16):
Oh ahead and sending up in a religious studies master's program.
Speaker 1 (16:21):
Threaded throughout the Little House books is the idea the
Ingles are pursuing some kind of mythic Western movement. One
of Pau's core character traits is that he always wants
to keep going all the way out to a place
called Oregon.
Speaker 2 (16:36):
He tells Laura.
Speaker 1 (16:37):
This reinvention of self is core to American mythology. If
one enterprise fails, you simply pick up and keep going
to the next, driven by hope and the potential of
winning the bat With Uncle Sam, we think of the
Little House series and the Ingles family as fulfilling this
idea of the westward American journey. When we talked to
(17:01):
historian Flannery Burke about this, she pointed out something so obvious.
Speaker 2 (17:05):
I was stunned it had never occurred to me before.
Speaker 7 (17:09):
One of the things that is frequently overlooked, even by
scholars these days, is that Laura Ingles and her family
were moving north and south much more frequently than they
were moving west.
Speaker 1 (17:28):
Of course, I knew this practically. I'd mapped out Laura's
travels on an atlas since childhood. We had driven to
all of the houses Laura was born in Wisconsin. Then
the family went south to Kansas, back up to Wisconsin,
then over to Minnesota, south again to Iowa, then back
(17:52):
up on a little bit west.
Speaker 2 (17:54):
To South Dakota.
Speaker 1 (17:56):
And that's where they stop until Laura and all Manso
and Rose go south again to Missouri. But here's an
extraordinary example of mythology over reality, because even knowing all
of this, I'd always conceived of their journey as a
westward one.
Speaker 7 (18:18):
I think that the power of the mythology that makes
it hard for us to imagine the Ingles family moving
north and south. That same mythology of the frontier, the
mythology of manifest destiny, the power of that myth cannot
be underestimated. It is just extraordinarily, extraordinarily powerful, and so
(18:38):
people think, well, we move further and further west, even
if they didn't, and if we move further in fur
their west, then we had to do better and better.
Progress is a necessary part of that mythology.
Speaker 1 (18:51):
But the Ingles never really did better until Laura achieved
financial success in our seventies. Every member of the family
essentially died in poverty. But that mythology of Western movement
and progress and success is a hard one to shake
because its promise of a new beginning is so appealing.
Speaker 2 (19:12):
For Rose especially.
Speaker 1 (19:14):
It may have provided her with the dramatic and purposeful
narrative her actual upbringing lacked. No one romanticized the Ozarks.
The Ozarks are where the Wilders settled. It's where Rosewilder
Lane grew up until she finished high.
Speaker 2 (19:29):
School in the South, and the Ozarks.
Speaker 7 (19:33):
If the Midwest is overlooked, the Ozarks are overlooked by everybody,
you know, not part of the Midwest, not part of
the West, not part of the South, their own place.
It's not surprising to me that Rose Wilder Lane and
the Little House Books might come out of that environment.
Speaker 1 (19:56):
Rose had always resented her poor upbringing in the Ozarks.
The Frontier myth, on the other hand, gave poverty and suffering,
meaning there was a lot of poverty and a lot
of suffering, and without that fantasy, it's easy to imagine
it would have been unbearable. The divide between American mythology
(20:17):
and reality is perhaps never more stark than when it
comes to the history of Native Americans. The mythology of
the heroic white settler has enabled us to look away
from the brutal truth.
Speaker 2 (20:29):
Of the Native American experience.
Speaker 1 (20:31):
After the break, we're going to talk about one of
the most significant events in American history, one that contributes
to the worst narratives but continues to be left out
of many history books. It also helps put in context
some of Maa's worst behavior. In some ways, the Little
(20:56):
House books can read like an elegy for a lost world,
and to.
Speaker 2 (21:00):
A degree, that's what they are.
Speaker 1 (21:03):
Pau moves his family out of the Big Woods because
he complains that there is no game.
Speaker 2 (21:08):
The land has been stripped bare.
Speaker 5 (21:11):
In eighteen fifty, which is right after Minnesota Territory was
created as a territory, the settler population was six thousand,
seventy seven.
Speaker 2 (21:24):
That's environmental historian Chris Wells. Again.
Speaker 5 (21:27):
By eighteen fifty seven, the population swelled to more than
one hundred and fifty thousand. The population doubled between eighteen
sixty and eighteen seventy. Then it nearly doubled again by
eighteen eighty to seven hundred and eighty thousand, and by
eighteen ninety it was one point three million.
Speaker 1 (21:50):
This influx of settlers took an immediate toll on the
land and the people who had long called it home.
Prior to this population explosiona had literally been the land
of plenty, looking.
Speaker 5 (22:03):
As far as you could see across the Great Plains,
and have it just be covered with an undulating mass
of bison as far as you could see. So those
experiences of overwhelming numbers of a single animal or insect
or bird were one of the ways that some people
thought of what made America different and special compared to
(22:26):
the old World Europe, and that super abundance was characteristic.
Speaker 1 (22:33):
That superabundance quickly disappeared much of it during Laura's lifetime.
The extraordinary descriptions she provides of our natural surroundings in
the books are actually a landscape that no longer exists,
and while she doesn't say so specifically, all through the
books is woven this sense of loss. In the final
(22:54):
pages of By the Shores of Silver Lake, the last
book to convey any feeling of wildness, Laura's youngest sister, Grace,
gets lost on the prairie. Laura eventually finds her in
a large, round hollow in the ground that's carpeted in violets.
Speaker 2 (23:11):
She later asked.
Speaker 1 (23:11):
Paw what the hollow was, quote, could it be a
fairy ring? It isn't like a real place, truly. They
aren't like ordinary violets. Ma naturally admonishes Laura for believing
in fairies, but then pa explains, quote, you're right, Laura.
Speaker 2 (23:32):
Human hands didn't.
Speaker 1 (23:33):
Make that place, but your fairies were big, ugly brutes.
That place is an old buffalo wallow. Now the buffalo
are gone and grass grows over their wallows, grass and violets.
Speaker 6 (23:49):
I know that was so appealing to me, you know,
Laura riding free on the prairie or the buffalo wallow
with the crocuses.
Speaker 1 (23:58):
Here's Lizzie Skernick, writer and professor of children's literature at.
Speaker 4 (24:02):
NYU, and what's interesting is of course, when you say, oh,
that's an old buffalo wallow, it's like, yeah, it's so
old general Buffalo anymore.
Speaker 2 (24:12):
Paw never tells us why the buffalo are all gone.
Speaker 1 (24:16):
The buffalo are all gone because the US government had
exterminated them in an attempt to remove the main food
source of the Native Americans and make the land available
for white settlement. In the late eighteen sixties, the government
called for huntsmen to slaughter as many buffalo as they could.
Buffalo Bill, the legendary Western figure, was so named because
(24:41):
he claimed to have killed over four thousand buffalo in
eighteen months. One US Army colonel was quoted as saying, quote,
kill every buffalo you can. Every buffalo dead is an
Indian gone end quote. Many of the hunters were equipped
by the US Army with guns to do just that.
(25:04):
Between eighteen forty and eighteen ninety, the population of buffalo
in the US went from thirty five million to five
hundred and forty one. The removal of food sources for
Native Americans by the US government is a reoccurring event
(25:25):
over the nineteenth century, and one that takes many forms.
It is also the root cause of one of the
most important conflicts between settlers and Native Americans in American history,
one that for a long time has been left out
of many history books. It's almost entirely left out of
the Little House books.
Speaker 4 (25:46):
Multiple times, lor Ingalls Wilder will say Ma hated Indians.
Maw hates Indians, but we never know why. There's a
hint there, but we don't know what it is.
Speaker 1 (26:03):
That's Gwen Westerman, author of the book Minnesota Macoche, The
Land of the Dakota.
Speaker 2 (26:10):
Doctor.
Speaker 1 (26:10):
Westerman is a professor of English literature at Minnesota State
University in man Cato. In the book Little House on
the Prairie, there is a scene where Ma is talking
to the neighbor Missus Scott, the woman who voices the
most racist lines in the Little House series.
Speaker 2 (26:27):
Missus Scott says.
Speaker 1 (26:28):
Quote, I can't forget the Minnesota Massacre. My pawn brothers
went out with the rest of the settlers. At this point,
Ma hushes Missus Scott, and when Laura later asks what
is a massacre? Ma says it is something Laura would
understand when she was older. The Minnesota Massacre is referring
(26:50):
to the US Dakota War of eighteen sixty two, and
whether or not Laura did understand it later, no further
mention of it is made. The explanation behind all these
hints lies in a place called Mancato, Minnesota.
Speaker 2 (27:05):
Man Cato is located eighty.
Speaker 1 (27:06):
Two miles south southwest of Minneapolis and seventy nine miles
due west of Walnut Grove, Minnesota. Mankato is never mentioned
in the books, but if you watched the Little House
TV series, the name will likely be familiar to you.
In the television show, it feels like someone is either
going to or coming from man Cato every second episode.
Speaker 4 (27:31):
I also watched The Little House on the Prairie TV series,
and what I knew was that when mon Pa wanted
to get away from the kids, they went to man Cato.
Speaker 1 (27:44):
Last summer, Joe and Emily and I went to man Cato.
We needed a stop over between Burr Oak, Iowa and
just smet South Dakota, and I knew the name from
the television show and thought it would be fun to
be there.
Speaker 2 (27:57):
This is a cute little town. Yeah, that's not a Mabel. Well,
they've got a pride flag in then the coffee Hag.
We you've got to go to the coffee on my
going through.
Speaker 1 (28:07):
It turned out to be one of the most important
stops on our trip. Mancato, Minnesota, is the site of
the largest mass execution in American history, the hanging of
thirty eight Dakota men in eighteen sixty two, known as
the Dakota thirty eight. President Abraham Lincoln mandated the execution
(28:30):
as punishment for the US Dakota War of eighteen sixty two.
Speaker 4 (28:35):
The history of the Quota people in Minnesota is often
condensed to one event, and that's the war in eighteen
sixty two, and that is even condensed in a way
that makes it sound like there was one event that
caused it.
Speaker 2 (28:55):
This is doctor Gwen Westerman again.
Speaker 4 (28:58):
Sometimes that story is told as Dakota men were out
hunting and took eggs from a farmer and there was
an argument and there was shooting and the farmer was dead.
It's not that simple. It's never that simple. This is
decades of interactions, negotiations, and treaties that had legal, documented
(29:23):
and implied obligations on both sides.
Speaker 1 (29:28):
Between eighteen thirty seven and eighteen fifty eight, the Eastern Dakota,
who resided in what is now Minnesota signed a series
of treaties with the US government, seating land in exchange
for annual cash payments and other provisions. The eastern Dakota
were then displaced and moved to a reservation that was
twenty miles wide along either side of the Minnesota River.
(29:53):
The Civil War resulted in the US government falling behind
on their payments, and this, combined with the particularly harsh
wind of eighteen sixty one, left the Dakota on the
brink of starvation.
Speaker 4 (30:05):
It was a hard time in eighteen sixty two for
everybody who lived here. There had been drought, there had
been grasshopper infestations. Settlers were struggling and failing.
Speaker 9 (30:17):
They were moving.
Speaker 4 (30:18):
Away because of the difficult situation they were in, because
of what was happening on the land for everybody, so
failure to supply the promised goods and services of the
eighteen fifty treaty, conditions of the land and the environment
at the time, the tension among people because of these
(30:41):
adverse conditions are all circumstances that led up to what
happened in eighteen sixty two. So there is no single
cause that we can point to you.
Speaker 1 (30:53):
The US Dakota War took place between August and December
of eighteen sixty two. We're going to go over the
base facts of what happened, but as Gwen Westerman noted,
the full history of the war is a long and
complicated one, and we've included links to further resources in
the show notes. On August seventeenth, a Dakota hunting party
(31:14):
stole eggs from settlers in a town west of Minneapolis.
This raid led to the deaths of five settlers. After
extensive discussion, Little Crow, a chief of the Metawacatan Band
of Dakota, decided.
Speaker 2 (31:30):
To continue the raids.
Speaker 1 (31:32):
Remember this was eighteen sixty two, the height of the
Civil War, and because of this, the US government was
slow to send troops to Minnesota. Instead, former Minnesota Governor
Henry Sibley led a mostly volunteer militia against the Dakota.
The following month, US forces defeated the Dakota. Three days
(31:54):
after this defeat, the Dakota surrendered, releasing nearly three hundred captives.
The Dakota were then held until military trials could take
place in November. In the end, three hundred and fifty
eight settlers had been killed. In addition, to seventy seven
soldiers in twenty nine volunteer militia. It is not known
(32:17):
how many Dakota died. We do know what happened in
the aftermath. Approximately two thousand Dakota were rounded up, whether
they had participated in the war or not, including women
and children, and they were then marched under harsh winter conditions,
hundreds of miles away to Fort Snelling, where they were
(32:39):
interned in a stockade under punishing conditions.
Speaker 2 (32:43):
One hundreds died.
Speaker 1 (32:47):
A military commission found three hundred and ninety two Dakota
men guilty.
Speaker 2 (32:52):
Many of these trials lasted less than five minutes.
Speaker 1 (32:55):
Of the three hundred and ninety two men, President Abraham Lincoln,
wanting to PA's white settlers but concerned about further conflict
that might divert resources from the Civil War, sentenced thirty
nine Dakota men to death. One was reprieved, and thirty
eight men were hanged. Two more were later captured and
(33:16):
they were also hanged.
Speaker 5 (33:18):
The US Dakota were ended with the largest mass hanging
in American history.
Speaker 2 (33:26):
Thirty eight people were hanged.
Speaker 5 (33:29):
President Abraham Lincoln signed the order to do it, but
only after issuing a ton of pardons to reduce the
number to the much smaller but still largest in US
history thirty eight, and then several hundred more people died
in sort of the non combatant camps that got set
(33:52):
up through the winter.
Speaker 1 (33:56):
When we were in man Cato, we visited the site
of the hanging. It is located on a sliver of
pavement between lanes of traffic and railroad tracks. There's a
buffalo statue at one end and at the other a
large structure that looks like parchment with the poem commemorating
the deaths of the war.
Speaker 10 (34:14):
This is the hanging spot. This is the spot where
the thirty eight were hung at once. Like I said,
it's actually the spots in the street between the Winter
Warrior statue which is over there, and then this mound
was kind of the in between, with that being the
(34:37):
buffalo being the trying.
Speaker 11 (34:38):
And making it out.
Speaker 1 (34:41):
This is Dan Zielski, chair of the Mikado Metawauketan Association,
which hosts educational events for non Dakota to learn more
about Dakota culture, and.
Speaker 2 (34:52):
Can you explain to us what we're sitting in front of.
Speaker 10 (34:56):
This is a memorial to the thirty eight plus two
who were hung. Now, as you can see, there are
tobacco ties all over it. Those are sacred items that
are made where they take the tobacco roll it up
(35:16):
into a tie. As you see, the four basic colors
that represent our Mancato boockets and people here are the black,
the red, the yellow, and the white, and so you'll
see those colors quite often around here.
Speaker 1 (35:36):
Before researching this podcast, I had never heard of the
US Dakota War. But as usual, I wasn't sure if
this was because I grew up in Canada or because
it's not widely taught in the American education system.
Speaker 2 (35:48):
So once again I asked Joe.
Speaker 1 (35:51):
I think my impression, and one that's only grown stronger
from the trip we did last summer, is that the
American education system is very fractured and often localized to
the state you grew up in. So did you learn
about the US Dakota War when you were in school?
Speaker 8 (36:14):
I can tell you right off the bat that our
Native American history was sorely lacking a lot of things
were glossed over. Specific wars were glossed over, so we
got kind of a bird's eye view. I didn't hear
anything about the Dakota War until we got to man
(36:35):
Cato on our road trip.
Speaker 1 (36:37):
And then it felt like to me that people who'd
grown up in Minnesota were familiar with it, but that
literally the further we got away from Minnesota, like as
the miles ticked up, there was less and less familiarity
with that as an historic event. Even though it was
a huge historic event, it sort of doesn't factor into
America's idea of itself, I guess no.
Speaker 8 (36:59):
I don't think a lot of things having to do
with the westward expansion of the American colonies and the
early American States factor into how America wants to mythologize itself.
And I'd be really interested actually to talk to a
current high school student about what they're being taught, because
(37:20):
American history that was taught in the eighties, I'm sure
is very different, I would hope is different than the
American history that's being taught now. But what I've realized
is that what I was taught in terms of American
history was largely through the eyes of the people who
had power and then were allowed to tell the stories.
Speaker 1 (37:41):
Does learning any of this make you reconsider your idea
of the.
Speaker 8 (37:44):
Country working on this podcast with You has made me
reconsider the idea of our country and the ideals that
we were founded on, and it is definitely making me
reconsider how we should and who should be telling American history.
Speaker 1 (38:05):
When I began asking around on our travels, it became
clear that despite its national historic implications, and despite the
fact it's the largest mass execution in US.
Speaker 2 (38:15):
History, the US Dakota.
Speaker 1 (38:17):
War is treated as local history outside of Minnesota.
Speaker 2 (38:22):
It's seemingly not well known at all.
Speaker 11 (38:25):
In Minnesota. You're in your I think it's sixth grade.
You have to take a Minnesota history class, and I
think it's a full semester long. So yes, we did
learn about this, and then the man Cato massacre.
Speaker 9 (38:38):
It was horrible.
Speaker 1 (38:40):
That's the young college student who waited on us when
we had dinner on our first night in man Cato.
She told us that in man Cato, the memory of
the war and the Dakota thirty eight is very well known.
Speaker 11 (38:52):
Recitation Park, it's a hot spot for protests in the city.
So that's really cool down there. I actually started I
tried to start a petition on our university, the Mankato University.
There's a statue of Abraham Lincoln there, which I always
always thought was a horrible taste. I mean he did
a lot of great things, don't get me wrong, but
(39:13):
it was the fact that he signed off on that
and in man Cato where this mass.
Speaker 2 (39:19):
Hanging, the biggest in history, happened.
Speaker 11 (39:22):
So it just felt wrong and unethical to have the
statue of film on the University Robert here.
Speaker 2 (39:29):
But did it go to to work?
Speaker 10 (39:30):
Did it go anywhere?
Speaker 11 (39:31):
No, it's they've been trying for years to get it
out of there. I don't know what's They're just really
dragging their toes.
Speaker 1 (39:40):
The US Dakota War resulted in the Dakota being entirely
banished from Minnesota. In eighteen sixty three, the government voided
all treaties with the Dakota, and that summer, the governor
of Minnesota offered twenty five dollars bounties for the scalps
of Dakota men. The remaining Dakota were moved to a
reservation in what is now South Dakota. Take a minute
(40:03):
and think about that two states in this country are
named after Native American tribes that originated from elsewhere. Their
presence in what is now North and South Dakota was
only the result of their expulsion from their original home.
More than one hundred and fifty years later, the US
Dakota War still brings up complicated, passionate feelings in Minnesota.
(40:28):
In some places, it continues to be referred to as
a conflict or an uprising instead of a war until
the nineteen seventies, when it was removed. The Hanging Monument,
as it was known, marked the mass execution site, but
had been erected by white residents and viewed as a
celebration of the event. Even if you didn't learn about
(40:51):
it in history class or realize the connection, we are
still filling the legacy of that war now.
Speaker 2 (40:58):
The coverage of it by the media at.
Speaker 1 (40:59):
The time time, which focused almost exclusively on the accounts
of white settlers, determined much of the narrative around quote dangerous,
bloodthirsty Indians that we still see in culture today.
Speaker 12 (41:13):
The idea that is so predominant in the way that
history is taught here is that Indians were bloodthirsty savages
and they attacked those brave, courageous pioneers.
Speaker 2 (41:25):
That's doctor W. Reese again.
Speaker 1 (41:28):
You might remember we spoke to doctor Reese in the
first episode, and that she runs a website called American
Indians and Children's Literature.
Speaker 6 (41:36):
What is left out is those men who were engaged
in that were dads, and you know, they had babies
at home, and they had farms and they had crops,
and all of their identity as people of a community
is erased when we think of them as this just
bloodthirsty savage.
Speaker 1 (41:54):
That narrative was embedded in the frontier shortly afterward and
was still strong seven years old later when the Ingles
arrived and the osage diminished reserve in eighteen seventy. In fact,
maybe even more than the Civil War, the US dakode
of War is the event that greatly affected Laura's childhood.
It's so significant that Laura's biographer, Caroline Fraser chose to
(42:18):
open her book Prairie Fires with it.
Speaker 9 (42:20):
It was just one of the bloodiest and most horrifying
spectacles of American history, and certainly as the event that
tipped off the whole next thirty years in terms of
Indian policy and Indian removal and so forth. It was
(42:42):
really quite shattering to figure out what that is. And
I just thought I have to write about this because
it puts her entire childhood, but also particularly the events
that she covers in Little House on the Prairie, which
is the most important of the series. I think in
an entirely different light than I had ever understood before,
(43:06):
and so I just felt like I have to open
with this. This is in many ways, who she was,
what her life was, what her mother's relationship, and fear,
intense fear of Indians. That's what that was all about.
That's where that was coming from.
Speaker 1 (43:24):
It's reasonable to assume this was the narrative that Ma
was taking with her when pau relocated the family to
a legally squat on osage land. That terror we sense
in her is in part the terror of the experience
that had been sold to white homesteaders on the frontier
by the press for years, and it's a narrative that
(43:45):
has persisted through many Hollywood westerns ever since. How much
of all this context in history should have been included
in the books is, I think up for debate. Laura
did not sit down to write the history of America,
which is not to suggest Laura is not responsible for
the racist, violent content that is in the books, and
(44:10):
there's plenty. Next week, we're stepping back into the little Houses.
We're going to take a long, hard look at the
problems of Laura and talk about what is in the
books that has resulted in a lot of criticism and
the renaming of a major children's literary award. There's more
than you might think or even remember. That's next week
(44:34):
on Wilder. Wilder is written and hosted by Me Glennis McNicol.
Our story editors are Joe Piazza and Emily Meroanoff. Our
senior producer is Emily Meranoff. Our producers are Mary do
(44:55):
Shina Ozaki and Jessica Crinchich. Our associate producer is Lauren Philip.
Sound design and mixing by Amanda ro Smith. Production help
from a Boo Zafar and a Savory Sharma. Our scene
in additional music was composed by Elise McCoy.
Speaker 2 (45:11):
We are executive produced by Joe Piazza, Nikki tor, Ali
Perry and Me.
Speaker 1 (45:16):
If you're enjoying Wilder, please consider rating and reviewing us
on Apple Podcasts. It actually helps us out quite a lot.
Special thanks to Gwen Westerman. Doctor Westerman is featured on
an episode of This American Life about the US Dakota
War titled Little War on the Prairie, and we encourage
you to check it out.
Speaker 2 (45:35):
You'll find a link to it in our notes.
Speaker 1 (45:37):
Thanks to danzy Elski for showing us around Reconciliation Park
in Mankato, and thank you to everyone at the hotel
and restaurant in man Cato.
Speaker 2 (45:44):
Who shared their thoughts on this history with us. Thank you,
as always to CDM Studios.
Speaker 1 (45:50):
Please see our show notes if you want to know
more about the people we interviewed, the places we visited,
the books we mentioned. You can also find our contact
and go there if you want to write to us
with your own thoughts and questions. Follow us on Instagram
at Wilder Underscore podcast and on TikTok at Wilder Podcast,
where you can see behind the scenes footage from all
our travels.
Speaker 2 (46:10):
Thank you for listening. We'll see you next week.
This episode contains descriptions of racist depictions.
Speaker 2 (00:04):
Listeners please be advised.
Speaker 1 (00:11):
At her best, Laura Ingles Wylder's Little House on the
Prairie books offered door for readers to walk through or
drive through, as we did, to find out what is
on the other side.
Speaker 2 (00:22):
Ideally, they prompt you to want to know more.
Speaker 3 (00:27):
They're an artifact of what's erased and what's alighted and
what you haven't been told, and that's valuable too, Like
so much of learning about our history and understanding the
literature is also looking at the negative spaces.
Speaker 1 (00:40):
You want to know where in the country the houses
were located. You want to know why it was called
Indian territory. Who were the Native Americans living alongside the Ingles.
You want to know if that long hard winter really existed?
What we're buffalo wolves? Do they still exist? What was
(01:00):
the full picture of Laura's world?
Speaker 3 (01:03):
For those who have an impulse to do it, to
continue to think about the role that that narrative played
and why and how.
Speaker 1 (01:13):
There are hints of that outside world in the books
if you look for them, but there are few and
can be confusing if you don't know the bigger picture.
Speaker 4 (01:22):
Multiple times Laura Ingall's Wilder will say MA hated Indians.
MA hates Indians, but we never know why. At least
in the Little House series.
Speaker 1 (01:39):
Laura and Rose did an extraordinary job of painting a cozy,
magical picture of the Ingles family alone and self sufficient
against the world. But they were neither alone nor in
many cases as self sufficient as the books would like
readers to believe.
Speaker 2 (01:55):
No one was.
Speaker 1 (01:57):
But understanding the Ingles story as part of a whole
demands understanding that many things can be true at the
same time.
Speaker 5 (02:05):
Part of what's interesting about stories like Little House on
the Prairie is that they are true.
Speaker 6 (02:13):
Right.
Speaker 5 (02:13):
The perspective is an accurate one as far as it goes,
but it requires putting yourself in the shoes of an
individual embedded and really complicated, sometimes violent systems. The way
that American culture knows and doesn't know that history is
pretty remarkable.
Speaker 1 (02:33):
In this episode, we're going to briefly try and paint
a bigger picture for you. Imagine you are standing in
the doorway of any one of Laura's Little houses. You're
looking outside. What might you actually be seeing. I'm Glennis McNicol,
(02:55):
and this is Wilder Let's start by going over some
(03:43):
of the basics. Laura was born in Wisconsin in eighteen
sixty seven, two years after the end of the Civil
War and five years after the US Dakota War of
eighteen sixty two. Unless you read the Little House Books
alongside an encyclopedia, you'd know neither of these things. The
only nod we get to the Civil War and Little
House is in the first book, Little House in the
(04:05):
Big Woods, Laura's uncle George briefly appears at Grandma's house.
According to Pa, George has been quote wild since he
came back from the war. Uncle George still wears his
blue army coat with brass buttons and blows his bugle
into the woods.
Speaker 2 (04:23):
But that's it. There's no further explanation.
Speaker 1 (04:27):
As a kid in Canada having no concept of the
Civil War, this meant nothing to me. I'm considering the
global reach of the Little House Books. I doubt I'm
alone in not understanding the reference. But it's obviously important
in the context of Laura's life and the America that
would spend her childhood.
Speaker 2 (04:46):
Moving through.
Speaker 1 (04:47):
The entire Little House series takes place in the aftermath
of the Civil War and at the height of the
push for westward expansion.
Speaker 5 (04:55):
So the period after the Civil War, which is when
all of this manifested, was one big land giveaway after
another from the federal government in an effort to push
settlement west of the Mississippi River.
Speaker 2 (05:14):
This is environmental historian Chris Wells.
Speaker 1 (05:17):
He talked to us about the Homestead Act of eighteen
sixty two, one of the largest government efforts to convince
settlers to go west.
Speaker 5 (05:24):
The basic premise is that anyone who was a citizen
or who could become a citizen, could make a land claim,
and after paying minimal filing fees, could have the land
needed to them by the federal government as long as
you stayed on the land for a certain period of
time and made some improvements to it.
Speaker 1 (05:47):
Little House is how I learned about the Homestead Act.
The process of staking a claim is detailed and by
the shores of Silver Lake in a chapter called Pause
bet After their first winter in the Dakota Tis territories,
pau goes to file on his claim.
Speaker 2 (06:04):
He lines up overnight.
Speaker 1 (06:05):
The men behind him try to tackle him because they
want his land, but mister Edwards, the wildcat from Tennessee,
appears and saves Paw. In the books, we're led to
believe that homesteaders have an almost.
Speaker 2 (06:21):
Divine right to this new land. Paw makes it sound
like a game.
Speaker 1 (06:26):
Quote, girls, I've bet Uncle Sam fourteen dollars against one
hundred and sixty acres of land, going to help me
win the bet? But of course, the motives behind the
Homestead Act are far more complicated than what we're told
in the book.
Speaker 5 (06:42):
The federal government's claim on that land was complicated by
the fact that this was essentially a colonial takeover of
Native American territory. One of the reasons the country's leaders
wanted to get people onto the land and to say,
was basically to stake a irreversible claim to it and
(07:05):
to finalize the process of wresting it from hands of
Indigenous inhabitants.
Speaker 1 (07:13):
And naturally, the government's decisions were also intertwined with the
interests of American industry, namely the railroad.
Speaker 7 (07:23):
There are a couple of ways in which the railroad
and the Homestead Act are intertwined.
Speaker 1 (07:31):
That's Flannery Burke, Professor of American Studies at Saint Louis University.
Speaker 7 (07:36):
The railroad was financed by grants of so called public
land to the railroad, which the railroad could then sell
to potential settlers to finance the building of the railroad itself.
And for the most part, this financing scheme.
Speaker 2 (07:55):
Did not work at all.
Speaker 7 (07:59):
Almost every railroad, I think all but one railroad went
bankrupt at some point, so it was not an effective
form of financing the railroad.
Speaker 1 (08:08):
The Homestead Act also meant a lot of land was
available to people who hadn't been able to own property before,
and a lot of people, regardless of their farming experience,
were willing to take the gamble.
Speaker 7 (08:21):
The Homestead Act was extraordinarily democratic for its time period.
Women could homestead, immigrants could homestead, African Americans could homestead.
It was locally administered, so discrimination against all of those
groups might mitigate against their successful settlement on the land,
but it was really open to a wide variety of people.
(08:45):
North Dakota was one of the most ethnically and linguistically
diverse places in the late nineteenth century of almost any
place in the United States.
Speaker 1 (08:55):
That diversity is almost entirely absent from the Little House Books,
with the exception of the Native Americans, the Ingles encounter.
The only non English speaking characters we meet is mister Hanson,
who the Ingles by the dugout from, and Missus Nelson
and her daughter Anna, who only speaks Norwegian. This absence
was intentional on Laura and Rose's part. Rose in particular
(09:19):
was keen to emphasize the self sufficiency of the Ingles family,
a core theme in the series. The Ingle's ability to
fend for themselves is part of the cozy magic of
the books. The idea of absolute independence from all systems
of support reappears again and again. These themes are deeply familiar.
(09:39):
The belief in self sufficiency, the rugged individual, the hard worker,
pulling themselves up by their bootstraps. These traits are as
closely associated with what it means to be American as
cowboys in apple Pie.
Speaker 2 (09:56):
The truth is much different.
Speaker 1 (10:00):
Any hope of survival on the American frontier was impossible
without some sort of outside structural support. The individual is
a fantasy, a brutal fantasy.
Speaker 7 (10:13):
The forced removal of Native people was a social service
for settlers.
Speaker 1 (10:19):
The forced removal of Native Americans was government support.
Speaker 2 (10:23):
It made the Homestead Act possible.
Speaker 1 (10:25):
Settlers couldn't be settlers if the government hadn't cleared to
the land, and settlers wouldn't be able to remain on
that land if the government hadn't aligned themselves with the railroads.
Speaker 7 (10:37):
The financing of the railroad was a social service for settlers.
They actually want more government in their life.
Speaker 1 (10:46):
And here's where we get into multiple things being true
at the same time, because it's also true that on
an individual level, homesteaders were often left to fend for
themselves under the most brutal circumstances.
Speaker 5 (10:59):
I mean, people were that are really starving.
Speaker 6 (11:00):
Right.
Speaker 2 (11:01):
Here's environmental historian Chris Wells.
Speaker 6 (11:03):
Again.
Speaker 5 (11:04):
You have these plagues multiple years in a row for
people who have to feed themselves as you can't feed yourself.
Speaker 1 (11:10):
Remember the grasshoppers that plagued the Ingles and on the
banks of Plumb Creek. There were no social services to
help starving settlers. Instead of providing food or money, one
of the government's solutions to the problem was to tell
farmers to pray the grasshoppers away. Obviously, that didn't solve
the problem, but eventually the government did provide some relief,
(11:35):
though it was scant and at times seemingly cruel.
Speaker 5 (11:39):
There was a requirement that farmers had to sell their
livestock before they could claim any sort of aid, and
they had to sign a sworn oath that they were
entirely without means. So this is something that Lori Ingle's
father had to do. He signed the pledge, he got
a barrel of flour worth about five bucks, and then
(12:02):
walked a couple hundred miles to a farm where he
could hire himself out for the harvest season.
Speaker 1 (12:10):
In the books, after the grasshoppers destroy the crops, Paw
sets out to look for work.
Speaker 2 (12:15):
Of his own volition.
Speaker 1 (12:17):
Any hint that he was participating in a government relief
program is completely absent. It's also true that the little
relief that was provided was more than had ever existed
prior to this, so.
Speaker 5 (12:31):
The idea that any sort of aid from the public
sector would have been available seems kind of remarkable.
Speaker 1 (12:39):
What gets lost in how we learn about all this,
whether it be from the Little House series or the
general narrative of American history, is that two things can
be true at the same time. Homesteaders could be getting
more support than ever before, and yet it was still
not enough.
Speaker 5 (12:57):
So what's true for an individual and what's true in
the broader context are often not the same thing.
Speaker 2 (13:04):
And I think that's a useful way of thinking.
Speaker 5 (13:06):
About the debates over POD being a failure and what
it was like to be out on the frontier and
to be a settler trying to turn what had up
until very recently been indigenous land that got often violently
rested away and then turned over to anyone who bothered
(13:29):
to show up and had the will and the means
to try to make a go of it.
Speaker 1 (13:34):
Settlers could be participating in violent systems and still be
left enormously vulnerable.
Speaker 5 (13:41):
So it took a huge amount of violence and willpower
and throwing the nation's way around to make the land
available to settlers. But then they were sort of on
their own, and so that's not a great set of
conditions to set people up for success.
Speaker 1 (14:00):
Home centers may have been left on their own, but
they were not left without purpose. If there's one thing
America knows how to do better than anyone else, it's
telling a story. And more powerful than any government service
was the mythology the nation wrapped around itself in the
nineteenth century. We're talking of course, about manifest destiny, the
(14:24):
belief that white settlers were destined to expand across America, from.
Speaker 2 (14:28):
Coast to coast.
Speaker 1 (14:31):
I did not encounter the term manifest destiny until well
into my twenties, long after I'd moved to the US.
I wanted to know from someone who grew up here
whether it was still taught as a part of American history,
and if so, how so, I asked Joe. So, obviously
(14:51):
I didn't grow up in the American education system. I
grew up in the Canadian education system.
Speaker 8 (14:58):
Which is probably better than I.
Speaker 2 (15:01):
It's just very it's very different.
Speaker 1 (15:03):
And so a lot of my American history education came
through television and also through a very Canadian lens. Of
the Americans like to say they won this war, but
if they had, we'd be part of America sort of skepticism.
But so I'm just curious as we're talking about this,
you know, the idea of manifest destiny comes up again
(15:24):
and again where Rose particular is concerned, but where Little
House is concerned, and I want to sort of understand
if that was a concept you were taught, and if so,
how you were taught.
Speaker 8 (15:37):
I don't remember learning about manifest destiny when I was
a kid or a teenager. I learned it when I
was in grad school at NYU studying religious studies.
Speaker 2 (15:49):
I think that.
Speaker 8 (15:51):
Was the first time that I heard the phrase manifest destiny.
Isn't that crazy that I was in graduate school?
Speaker 1 (15:59):
But I also think gets so telling that you heard
it in religious studies. That says quite a lot because
my understanding of it now, I mean, the idea that
white Americans were divinely ordained to settle the entire continent
of North America feels like a religious belief system.
Speaker 8 (16:16):
Oh ahead and sending up in a religious studies master's program.
Speaker 1 (16:21):
Threaded throughout the Little House books is the idea the
Ingles are pursuing some kind of mythic Western movement. One
of Pau's core character traits is that he always wants
to keep going all the way out to a place
called Oregon.
Speaker 2 (16:36):
He tells Laura.
Speaker 1 (16:37):
This reinvention of self is core to American mythology. If
one enterprise fails, you simply pick up and keep going
to the next, driven by hope and the potential of
winning the bat With Uncle Sam, we think of the
Little House series and the Ingles family as fulfilling this
idea of the westward American journey. When we talked to
(17:01):
historian Flannery Burke about this, she pointed out something so obvious.
Speaker 2 (17:05):
I was stunned it had never occurred to me before.
Speaker 7 (17:09):
One of the things that is frequently overlooked, even by
scholars these days, is that Laura Ingles and her family
were moving north and south much more frequently than they
were moving west.
Speaker 1 (17:28):
Of course, I knew this practically. I'd mapped out Laura's
travels on an atlas since childhood. We had driven to
all of the houses Laura was born in Wisconsin. Then
the family went south to Kansas, back up to Wisconsin,
then over to Minnesota, south again to Iowa, then back
(17:52):
up on a little bit west.
Speaker 2 (17:54):
To South Dakota.
Speaker 1 (17:56):
And that's where they stop until Laura and all Manso
and Rose go south again to Missouri. But here's an
extraordinary example of mythology over reality, because even knowing all
of this, I'd always conceived of their journey as a
westward one.
Speaker 7 (18:18):
I think that the power of the mythology that makes
it hard for us to imagine the Ingles family moving
north and south. That same mythology of the frontier, the
mythology of manifest destiny, the power of that myth cannot
be underestimated. It is just extraordinarily, extraordinarily powerful, and so
(18:38):
people think, well, we move further and further west, even
if they didn't, and if we move further in fur
their west, then we had to do better and better.
Progress is a necessary part of that mythology.
Speaker 1 (18:51):
But the Ingles never really did better until Laura achieved
financial success in our seventies. Every member of the family
essentially died in poverty. But that mythology of Western movement
and progress and success is a hard one to shake
because its promise of a new beginning is so appealing.
Speaker 2 (19:12):
For Rose especially.
Speaker 1 (19:14):
It may have provided her with the dramatic and purposeful
narrative her actual upbringing lacked. No one romanticized the Ozarks.
The Ozarks are where the Wilders settled. It's where Rosewilder
Lane grew up until she finished high.
Speaker 2 (19:29):
School in the South, and the Ozarks.
Speaker 7 (19:33):
If the Midwest is overlooked, the Ozarks are overlooked by everybody,
you know, not part of the Midwest, not part of
the West, not part of the South, their own place.
It's not surprising to me that Rose Wilder Lane and
the Little House Books might come out of that environment.
Speaker 1 (19:56):
Rose had always resented her poor upbringing in the Ozarks.
The Frontier myth, on the other hand, gave poverty and suffering,
meaning there was a lot of poverty and a lot
of suffering, and without that fantasy, it's easy to imagine
it would have been unbearable. The divide between American mythology
(20:17):
and reality is perhaps never more stark than when it
comes to the history of Native Americans. The mythology of
the heroic white settler has enabled us to look away
from the brutal truth.
Speaker 2 (20:29):
Of the Native American experience.
Speaker 1 (20:31):
After the break, we're going to talk about one of
the most significant events in American history, one that contributes
to the worst narratives but continues to be left out
of many history books. It also helps put in context
some of Maa's worst behavior. In some ways, the Little
(20:56):
House books can read like an elegy for a lost world,
and to.
Speaker 2 (21:00):
A degree, that's what they are.
Speaker 1 (21:03):
Pau moves his family out of the Big Woods because
he complains that there is no game.
Speaker 2 (21:08):
The land has been stripped bare.
Speaker 5 (21:11):
In eighteen fifty, which is right after Minnesota Territory was
created as a territory, the settler population was six thousand,
seventy seven.
Speaker 2 (21:24):
That's environmental historian Chris Wells. Again.
Speaker 5 (21:27):
By eighteen fifty seven, the population swelled to more than
one hundred and fifty thousand. The population doubled between eighteen
sixty and eighteen seventy. Then it nearly doubled again by
eighteen eighty to seven hundred and eighty thousand, and by
eighteen ninety it was one point three million.
Speaker 1 (21:50):
This influx of settlers took an immediate toll on the
land and the people who had long called it home.
Prior to this population explosiona had literally been the land
of plenty, looking.
Speaker 5 (22:03):
As far as you could see across the Great Plains,
and have it just be covered with an undulating mass
of bison as far as you could see. So those
experiences of overwhelming numbers of a single animal or insect
or bird were one of the ways that some people
thought of what made America different and special compared to
(22:26):
the old World Europe, and that super abundance was characteristic.
Speaker 1 (22:33):
That superabundance quickly disappeared much of it during Laura's lifetime.
The extraordinary descriptions she provides of our natural surroundings in
the books are actually a landscape that no longer exists,
and while she doesn't say so specifically, all through the
books is woven this sense of loss. In the final
(22:54):
pages of By the Shores of Silver Lake, the last
book to convey any feeling of wildness, Laura's youngest sister, Grace,
gets lost on the prairie. Laura eventually finds her in
a large, round hollow in the ground that's carpeted in violets.
Speaker 2 (23:11):
She later asked.
Speaker 1 (23:11):
Paw what the hollow was, quote, could it be a
fairy ring? It isn't like a real place, truly. They
aren't like ordinary violets. Ma naturally admonishes Laura for believing
in fairies, but then pa explains, quote, you're right, Laura.
Speaker 2 (23:32):
Human hands didn't.
Speaker 1 (23:33):
Make that place, but your fairies were big, ugly brutes.
That place is an old buffalo wallow. Now the buffalo
are gone and grass grows over their wallows, grass and violets.
Speaker 6 (23:49):
I know that was so appealing to me, you know,
Laura riding free on the prairie or the buffalo wallow
with the crocuses.
Speaker 1 (23:58):
Here's Lizzie Skernick, writer and professor of children's literature at.
Speaker 4 (24:02):
NYU, and what's interesting is of course, when you say, oh,
that's an old buffalo wallow, it's like, yeah, it's so
old general Buffalo anymore.
Speaker 2 (24:12):
Paw never tells us why the buffalo are all gone.
Speaker 1 (24:16):
The buffalo are all gone because the US government had
exterminated them in an attempt to remove the main food
source of the Native Americans and make the land available
for white settlement. In the late eighteen sixties, the government
called for huntsmen to slaughter as many buffalo as they could.
Buffalo Bill, the legendary Western figure, was so named because
(24:41):
he claimed to have killed over four thousand buffalo in
eighteen months. One US Army colonel was quoted as saying, quote,
kill every buffalo you can. Every buffalo dead is an
Indian gone end quote. Many of the hunters were equipped
by the US Army with guns to do just that.
(25:04):
Between eighteen forty and eighteen ninety, the population of buffalo
in the US went from thirty five million to five
hundred and forty one. The removal of food sources for
Native Americans by the US government is a reoccurring event
(25:25):
over the nineteenth century, and one that takes many forms.
It is also the root cause of one of the
most important conflicts between settlers and Native Americans in American history,
one that for a long time has been left out
of many history books. It's almost entirely left out of
the Little House books.
Speaker 4 (25:46):
Multiple times, lor Ingalls Wilder will say Ma hated Indians.
Maw hates Indians, but we never know why. There's a
hint there, but we don't know what it is.
Speaker 1 (26:03):
That's Gwen Westerman, author of the book Minnesota Macoche, The
Land of the Dakota.
Speaker 2 (26:10):
Doctor.
Speaker 1 (26:10):
Westerman is a professor of English literature at Minnesota State
University in man Cato. In the book Little House on
the Prairie, there is a scene where Ma is talking
to the neighbor Missus Scott, the woman who voices the
most racist lines in the Little House series.
Speaker 2 (26:27):
Missus Scott says.
Speaker 1 (26:28):
Quote, I can't forget the Minnesota Massacre. My pawn brothers
went out with the rest of the settlers. At this point,
Ma hushes Missus Scott, and when Laura later asks what
is a massacre? Ma says it is something Laura would
understand when she was older. The Minnesota Massacre is referring
(26:50):
to the US Dakota War of eighteen sixty two, and
whether or not Laura did understand it later, no further
mention of it is made. The explanation behind all these
hints lies in a place called Mancato, Minnesota.
Speaker 2 (27:05):
Man Cato is located eighty.
Speaker 1 (27:06):
Two miles south southwest of Minneapolis and seventy nine miles
due west of Walnut Grove, Minnesota. Mankato is never mentioned
in the books, but if you watched the Little House
TV series, the name will likely be familiar to you.
In the television show, it feels like someone is either
going to or coming from man Cato every second episode.
Speaker 4 (27:31):
I also watched The Little House on the Prairie TV series,
and what I knew was that when mon Pa wanted
to get away from the kids, they went to man Cato.
Speaker 1 (27:44):
Last summer, Joe and Emily and I went to man Cato.
We needed a stop over between Burr Oak, Iowa and
just smet South Dakota, and I knew the name from
the television show and thought it would be fun to
be there.
Speaker 2 (27:57):
This is a cute little town. Yeah, that's not a Mabel. Well,
they've got a pride flag in then the coffee Hag.
We you've got to go to the coffee on my
going through.
Speaker 1 (28:07):
It turned out to be one of the most important
stops on our trip. Mancato, Minnesota, is the site of
the largest mass execution in American history, the hanging of
thirty eight Dakota men in eighteen sixty two, known as
the Dakota thirty eight. President Abraham Lincoln mandated the execution
(28:30):
as punishment for the US Dakota War of eighteen sixty two.
Speaker 4 (28:35):
The history of the Quota people in Minnesota is often
condensed to one event, and that's the war in eighteen
sixty two, and that is even condensed in a way
that makes it sound like there was one event that
caused it.
Speaker 2 (28:55):
This is doctor Gwen Westerman again.
Speaker 4 (28:58):
Sometimes that story is told as Dakota men were out
hunting and took eggs from a farmer and there was
an argument and there was shooting and the farmer was dead.
It's not that simple. It's never that simple. This is
decades of interactions, negotiations, and treaties that had legal, documented
(29:23):
and implied obligations on both sides.
Speaker 1 (29:28):
Between eighteen thirty seven and eighteen fifty eight, the Eastern Dakota,
who resided in what is now Minnesota signed a series
of treaties with the US government, seating land in exchange
for annual cash payments and other provisions. The eastern Dakota
were then displaced and moved to a reservation that was
twenty miles wide along either side of the Minnesota River.
(29:53):
The Civil War resulted in the US government falling behind
on their payments, and this, combined with the particularly harsh
wind of eighteen sixty one, left the Dakota on the
brink of starvation.
Speaker 4 (30:05):
It was a hard time in eighteen sixty two for
everybody who lived here. There had been drought, there had
been grasshopper infestations. Settlers were struggling and failing.
Speaker 9 (30:17):
They were moving.
Speaker 4 (30:18):
Away because of the difficult situation they were in, because
of what was happening on the land for everybody, so
failure to supply the promised goods and services of the
eighteen fifty treaty, conditions of the land and the environment
at the time, the tension among people because of these
(30:41):
adverse conditions are all circumstances that led up to what
happened in eighteen sixty two. So there is no single
cause that we can point to you.
Speaker 1 (30:53):
The US Dakota War took place between August and December
of eighteen sixty two. We're going to go over the
base facts of what happened, but as Gwen Westerman noted,
the full history of the war is a long and
complicated one, and we've included links to further resources in
the show notes. On August seventeenth, a Dakota hunting party
(31:14):
stole eggs from settlers in a town west of Minneapolis.
This raid led to the deaths of five settlers. After
extensive discussion, Little Crow, a chief of the Metawacatan Band
of Dakota, decided.
Speaker 2 (31:30):
To continue the raids.
Speaker 1 (31:32):
Remember this was eighteen sixty two, the height of the
Civil War, and because of this, the US government was
slow to send troops to Minnesota. Instead, former Minnesota Governor
Henry Sibley led a mostly volunteer militia against the Dakota.
The following month, US forces defeated the Dakota. Three days
(31:54):
after this defeat, the Dakota surrendered, releasing nearly three hundred captives.
The Dakota were then held until military trials could take
place in November. In the end, three hundred and fifty
eight settlers had been killed. In addition, to seventy seven
soldiers in twenty nine volunteer militia. It is not known
(32:17):
how many Dakota died. We do know what happened in
the aftermath. Approximately two thousand Dakota were rounded up, whether
they had participated in the war or not, including women
and children, and they were then marched under harsh winter conditions,
hundreds of miles away to Fort Snelling, where they were
(32:39):
interned in a stockade under punishing conditions.
Speaker 2 (32:43):
One hundreds died.
Speaker 1 (32:47):
A military commission found three hundred and ninety two Dakota
men guilty.
Speaker 2 (32:52):
Many of these trials lasted less than five minutes.
Speaker 1 (32:55):
Of the three hundred and ninety two men, President Abraham Lincoln,
wanting to PA's white settlers but concerned about further conflict
that might divert resources from the Civil War, sentenced thirty
nine Dakota men to death. One was reprieved, and thirty
eight men were hanged. Two more were later captured and
(33:16):
they were also hanged.
Speaker 5 (33:18):
The US Dakota were ended with the largest mass hanging
in American history.
Speaker 2 (33:26):
Thirty eight people were hanged.
Speaker 5 (33:29):
President Abraham Lincoln signed the order to do it, but
only after issuing a ton of pardons to reduce the
number to the much smaller but still largest in US
history thirty eight, and then several hundred more people died
in sort of the non combatant camps that got set
(33:52):
up through the winter.
Speaker 1 (33:56):
When we were in man Cato, we visited the site
of the hanging. It is located on a sliver of
pavement between lanes of traffic and railroad tracks. There's a
buffalo statue at one end and at the other a
large structure that looks like parchment with the poem commemorating
the deaths of the war.
Speaker 10 (34:14):
This is the hanging spot. This is the spot where
the thirty eight were hung at once. Like I said,
it's actually the spots in the street between the Winter
Warrior statue which is over there, and then this mound
was kind of the in between, with that being the
(34:37):
buffalo being the trying.
Speaker 11 (34:38):
And making it out.
Speaker 1 (34:41):
This is Dan Zielski, chair of the Mikado Metawauketan Association,
which hosts educational events for non Dakota to learn more
about Dakota culture, and.
Speaker 2 (34:52):
Can you explain to us what we're sitting in front of.
Speaker 10 (34:56):
This is a memorial to the thirty eight plus two
who were hung. Now, as you can see, there are
tobacco ties all over it. Those are sacred items that
are made where they take the tobacco roll it up
(35:16):
into a tie. As you see, the four basic colors
that represent our Mancato boockets and people here are the black,
the red, the yellow, and the white, and so you'll
see those colors quite often around here.
Speaker 1 (35:36):
Before researching this podcast, I had never heard of the
US Dakota War. But as usual, I wasn't sure if
this was because I grew up in Canada or because
it's not widely taught in the American education system.
Speaker 2 (35:48):
So once again I asked Joe.
Speaker 1 (35:51):
I think my impression, and one that's only grown stronger
from the trip we did last summer, is that the
American education system is very fractured and often localized to
the state you grew up in. So did you learn
about the US Dakota War when you were in school?
Speaker 8 (36:14):
I can tell you right off the bat that our
Native American history was sorely lacking a lot of things
were glossed over. Specific wars were glossed over, so we
got kind of a bird's eye view. I didn't hear
anything about the Dakota War until we got to man
(36:35):
Cato on our road trip.
Speaker 1 (36:37):
And then it felt like to me that people who'd
grown up in Minnesota were familiar with it, but that
literally the further we got away from Minnesota, like as
the miles ticked up, there was less and less familiarity
with that as an historic event. Even though it was
a huge historic event, it sort of doesn't factor into
America's idea of itself, I guess no.
Speaker 8 (36:59):
I don't think a lot of things having to do
with the westward expansion of the American colonies and the
early American States factor into how America wants to mythologize itself.
And I'd be really interested actually to talk to a
current high school student about what they're being taught, because
(37:20):
American history that was taught in the eighties, I'm sure
is very different, I would hope is different than the
American history that's being taught now. But what I've realized
is that what I was taught in terms of American
history was largely through the eyes of the people who
had power and then were allowed to tell the stories.
Speaker 1 (37:41):
Does learning any of this make you reconsider your idea
of the.
Speaker 8 (37:44):
Country working on this podcast with You has made me
reconsider the idea of our country and the ideals that
we were founded on, and it is definitely making me
reconsider how we should and who should be telling American history.
Speaker 1 (38:05):
When I began asking around on our travels, it became
clear that despite its national historic implications, and despite the
fact it's the largest mass execution in US.
Speaker 2 (38:15):
History, the US Dakota.
Speaker 1 (38:17):
War is treated as local history outside of Minnesota.
Speaker 2 (38:22):
It's seemingly not well known at all.
Speaker 11 (38:25):
In Minnesota. You're in your I think it's sixth grade.
You have to take a Minnesota history class, and I
think it's a full semester long. So yes, we did
learn about this, and then the man Cato massacre.
Speaker 9 (38:38):
It was horrible.
Speaker 1 (38:40):
That's the young college student who waited on us when
we had dinner on our first night in man Cato.
She told us that in man Cato, the memory of
the war and the Dakota thirty eight is very well known.
Speaker 11 (38:52):
Recitation Park, it's a hot spot for protests in the city.
So that's really cool down there. I actually started I
tried to start a petition on our university, the Mankato University.
There's a statue of Abraham Lincoln there, which I always
always thought was a horrible taste. I mean he did
a lot of great things, don't get me wrong, but
(39:13):
it was the fact that he signed off on that
and in man Cato where this mass.
Speaker 2 (39:19):
Hanging, the biggest in history, happened.
Speaker 11 (39:22):
So it just felt wrong and unethical to have the
statue of film on the University Robert here.
Speaker 2 (39:29):
But did it go to to work?
Speaker 10 (39:30):
Did it go anywhere?
Speaker 11 (39:31):
No, it's they've been trying for years to get it
out of there. I don't know what's They're just really
dragging their toes.
Speaker 1 (39:40):
The US Dakota War resulted in the Dakota being entirely
banished from Minnesota. In eighteen sixty three, the government voided
all treaties with the Dakota, and that summer, the governor
of Minnesota offered twenty five dollars bounties for the scalps
of Dakota men. The remaining Dakota were moved to a
reservation in what is now South Dakota. Take a minute
(40:03):
and think about that two states in this country are
named after Native American tribes that originated from elsewhere. Their
presence in what is now North and South Dakota was
only the result of their expulsion from their original home.
More than one hundred and fifty years later, the US
Dakota War still brings up complicated, passionate feelings in Minnesota.
(40:28):
In some places, it continues to be referred to as
a conflict or an uprising instead of a war until
the nineteen seventies, when it was removed. The Hanging Monument,
as it was known, marked the mass execution site, but
had been erected by white residents and viewed as a
celebration of the event. Even if you didn't learn about
(40:51):
it in history class or realize the connection, we are
still filling the legacy of that war now.
Speaker 2 (40:58):
The coverage of it by the media at.
Speaker 1 (40:59):
The time time, which focused almost exclusively on the accounts
of white settlers, determined much of the narrative around quote dangerous,
bloodthirsty Indians that we still see in culture today.
Speaker 12 (41:13):
The idea that is so predominant in the way that
history is taught here is that Indians were bloodthirsty savages
and they attacked those brave, courageous pioneers.
Speaker 2 (41:25):
That's doctor W. Reese again.
Speaker 1 (41:28):
You might remember we spoke to doctor Reese in the
first episode, and that she runs a website called American
Indians and Children's Literature.
Speaker 6 (41:36):
What is left out is those men who were engaged
in that were dads, and you know, they had babies
at home, and they had farms and they had crops,
and all of their identity as people of a community
is erased when we think of them as this just
bloodthirsty savage.
Speaker 1 (41:54):
That narrative was embedded in the frontier shortly afterward and
was still strong seven years old later when the Ingles
arrived and the osage diminished reserve in eighteen seventy. In fact,
maybe even more than the Civil War, the US dakode
of War is the event that greatly affected Laura's childhood.
It's so significant that Laura's biographer, Caroline Fraser chose to
(42:18):
open her book Prairie Fires with it.
Speaker 9 (42:20):
It was just one of the bloodiest and most horrifying
spectacles of American history, and certainly as the event that
tipped off the whole next thirty years in terms of
Indian policy and Indian removal and so forth. It was
(42:42):
really quite shattering to figure out what that is. And
I just thought I have to write about this because
it puts her entire childhood, but also particularly the events
that she covers in Little House on the Prairie, which
is the most important of the series. I think in
an entirely different light than I had ever understood before,
(43:06):
and so I just felt like I have to open
with this. This is in many ways, who she was,
what her life was, what her mother's relationship, and fear,
intense fear of Indians. That's what that was all about.
That's where that was coming from.
Speaker 1 (43:24):
It's reasonable to assume this was the narrative that Ma
was taking with her when pau relocated the family to
a legally squat on osage land. That terror we sense
in her is in part the terror of the experience
that had been sold to white homesteaders on the frontier
by the press for years, and it's a narrative that
(43:45):
has persisted through many Hollywood westerns ever since. How much
of all this context in history should have been included
in the books is, I think up for debate. Laura
did not sit down to write the history of America,
which is not to suggest Laura is not responsible for
the racist, violent content that is in the books, and
(44:10):
there's plenty. Next week, we're stepping back into the little Houses.
We're going to take a long, hard look at the
problems of Laura and talk about what is in the
books that has resulted in a lot of criticism and
the renaming of a major children's literary award. There's more
than you might think or even remember. That's next week
(44:34):
on Wilder. Wilder is written and hosted by Me Glennis McNicol.
Our story editors are Joe Piazza and Emily Meroanoff. Our
senior producer is Emily Meranoff. Our producers are Mary do
(44:55):
Shina Ozaki and Jessica Crinchich. Our associate producer is Lauren Philip.
Sound design and mixing by Amanda ro Smith. Production help
from a Boo Zafar and a Savory Sharma. Our scene
in additional music was composed by Elise McCoy.
Speaker 2 (45:11):
We are executive produced by Joe Piazza, Nikki tor, Ali
Perry and Me.
Speaker 1 (45:16):
If you're enjoying Wilder, please consider rating and reviewing us
on Apple Podcasts. It actually helps us out quite a lot.
Special thanks to Gwen Westerman. Doctor Westerman is featured on
an episode of This American Life about the US Dakota
War titled Little War on the Prairie, and we encourage
you to check it out.
Speaker 2 (45:35):
You'll find a link to it in our notes.
Speaker 1 (45:37):
Thanks to danzy Elski for showing us around Reconciliation Park
in Mankato, and thank you to everyone at the hotel
and restaurant in man Cato.
Speaker 2 (45:44):
Who shared their thoughts on this history with us. Thank you,
as always to CDM Studios.
Speaker 1 (45:50):
Please see our show notes if you want to know
more about the people we interviewed, the places we visited,
the books we mentioned. You can also find our contact
and go there if you want to write to us
with your own thoughts and questions. Follow us on Instagram
at Wilder Underscore podcast and on TikTok at Wilder Podcast,
where you can see behind the scenes footage from all
our travels.
Speaker 2 (46:10):
Thank you for listening. We'll see you next week.
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