CRIME OR CULTURE?

On the morning of December 26, 1862, 38 men were hanged on a single gallows in Mankato, Minnesota. It was the largest simultaneous execution in American history. The execution of these men, all Dakota Indians, closed the first chapter of the most violent American Indian war of the 19th century. It was a short war, with actual fighting lasting only six weeks, but more lives were lost in this conflict than in any other war of the American frontier period.

In the aftermath of the carnage, the officer in command of U.S. Army forces in the field, Colonel Henry Hastings Sibley, convened a military commission to try Dakotas accused of various atrocities. This hasty, field-expedient tribunal conducted 392 trials and sentenced 303 defendants to death, ultimately resulting in the 38 executions.

Perhaps the worst miscarriage of justice, worse even than an innocent person being wrongly convicted of a crime, would be to convict someone of a crime that never occurred in the first place. Several lines of thought hold that this is precisely what happened to the Indians tried by Sibley’s highly controversial military commission. One contends that the violence that characterized the Dakota War of 1862 was