Democratic Sentinel, Volume 12, Number 5, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 24 February 1888 — A MEMORABLE EXECUTION. [ARTICLE]

A MEMORABLE EXECUTION.

When “Cut-Noie” ud HU Thirty- UTen Redskin Followers 'Were Bu(«d at Mankato. Mm. In the criminal annals of this country executions hare been frequent, but the spectacle of a number of men expiating their misdeeds on the same gallows has been unusual enough to be extraordinary. Perhaps its most notable instance was the hanging of thirtyeight Indians at Mankato, Minn., ,on Dec. 26, 1862. During the spring and early summer of that year reports from various sources reached the capital that the Indian tribes of the Northwest were about to ravage the almost defenseless settlements of the Territories and frontier States. It was then claimed that emissaries from the Confederate States had come among the tribes to stir them to rise up to plunder and destroy, and that Canadians also visited them, urging that they bring their furs over the line, and promising aid and arms with which to drive the Americans from their old camping grounds. Be this as it may be, unquestionably the Indians had just grounds of complaint, though, of course, there can be no palliation for the awful crimes that resulted therefrom. The failure of Congress to pass certain appropriation bills left them without their annuities, and the rascally government agents had swindled and defrauded them. This treatment awakened a spirit of revenge among the redskins, and the Western Minnesota settlers, utterly unconscious of danger and with no fear of treachery, became the innocent victims of the horrible slaughter. The first open trouble began on Aug. 17, when a few drunken members of Little Crow’s band of Sioux quarreled among themselves as to their individual bravery, and the barbarous test of killing whites was chosen as the surest and best. After committing several murders they fled at once to Redwood, where their village was, and told their story. The chief expected retaliation from the settlers, and so determined to strike the first blow. With 300 of his “braves” he marched to the agency at Yellow Medicine and began their murderous assaults. The small body of soldiers sent out from Fort Ridgeley were attacked by ambushed Indians, and half of their number were killed. On Aug. 21 New Ulm, a flourishing German settlement, was reached, and there they engaged in the most fiendish brutalities and in the most revolting atrocities. Nearly half the town was left in ashes, and sixty of its defenders were dead or wounded. Gov. Ramsey sent a special messenger to the Minnesota Legislature in which he presented a horrible picture of the scenes, while he hurried off four companies of State troops toward the camps of the savages. Two days later he dispatched seven more campanies, with Col. H. H. Sibley in command. On Aug. 23 New Ulm was again assailed. The Indians were repulsed, however, by the citizens, but remained in the neighborhood until a detachment of Sibley’s forces scattered them. At the village some 2,000 women and children were gathered, and it was thought best to take them to a place of permanent safety, and the town was deserted. For nine days Fort Ridgeley was besieged and bravely defended. Driven from there the plunderers marched northward, marking their way with a bloody path. At this time the great civil conflict was raging, and the greatest of Indian wars, which in two years cost the lives of over 1,200 whites and $11,000,000, occupied a secondary place in the public mind. The number of victims to the savage fury of the Indians has been variously estimated, but it is probable that something less than eight hundred were massacred in two weeks by the unrelenting tribe. Only the Sioux were guilty of the outrages, the Chippewas even offering their services to the State. After a campaign of a few weeks a band of the Indians surrendered. Soon afterward a court-martial was instituted, and after trial about forty were condemned to die. An appeal was made to President Lincoln, who, upon examination of the facts, refused to interfere, and on Dec. 26, 1862, “CutNose,” the leader in the terrible work, and thirty-seven other members of his band were hanged upon the same scaffold at Mankato Minn. “Cut-Nose,” it is said, gloried in his brave record of having killed thirty-two women and children in the New Ulm massacre. After the executions his skin was tanned and stuffed and brought to Chicago, where it was to be seen until the fire of 1871, in which it was destroyed. A strip of the tanned skin had been cut from across his back a short time before, and this ghastly relic of the massacre and big hanging is still preserved among the archives of the Chicago Historical Society.