" "No one not here can conceive the panic in the state," exclaimed Minnesota Governor Alexander Ramsey in a telegram to President Abraham Lincoln. At the time Ramsey wired the White House, on August 26, 1862, thousands of his constituents were fleeing from their homes across 23 counties. Terror, fed by grim evidence and wild rumors, had engulfed Minnesota in the form of an American Indian uprising.
The fearful events had been ignited in a flash after years of smoldering portents. Organized as a territory in 1849, Minnesota had been inundated throughout the next decade with settlers in search of cheap, fertile farmland. The influx of white homesteaders onto ancestral Indian lands fueled resistance, particularly from the Dakota Sioux.
In 1851, in two separate treaties, the Dakota ceded land to the federal government in return for annual payments in foodstuffs and gold, and a reservation. Nine years later, as Minnesota obtained statehood, a third treaty eliminated Dakota claims to land north of the Minnesota River, further reducing the size of their reservation…"
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