479: Little War on the Prairie

Ira Glass

So John, you're from Minnesota. Right?

John Biewen

I am from Minnesota.

Ira Glass

John Biewen's a public radio guy, makes documentaries. And he says growing up in Minnesota, there was a way that people usually talked about the history of the state.

John Biewen

And it's often told in a kind of light and self-deprecating way that northern Europeans came over, and they staggered out onto the tundra and said, oh, this reminds us of home. And they didn't know enough to keep going to some more pleasant place. And so they built their sod huts and laid out their farms.

Ira Glass

Sometimes there's an oh, by the way, Indians were here when we got here.

John Biewen

It's either an afterthought or it doesn't come up at all. And there was always a sense, too, growing up in a place like southern Minnesota, that nothing had ever happened there.

Ira Glass

Which, John points out, is completely weird. Southern Minnesota-- he's learned since he grew up there-- was the location of one of the major wars with the Plains Indians, the US-Dakota War. It happened during the same period as the Civil War.

More people died in that war than died at Little Big Horn or Wounded Knee. In fact, John's own hometown-- Mankato-- was the site of the largest mass execution in US history of Dakota warriors. 38 of them were hanged by the order of Abraham Lincoln, a little more than 150 years ago, the day after Christmas, 1862.

John Biewen

And the place where that hanging happened, it's right in the heart of downtown. I would've hung out at the mall not far from there, a few blocks down the street. I would have ridden past that spot on my way to Pizza Hut with my buddies, who knows how many times. And never-- it just never-- I didn't hear about it.

Ira Glass

He says he doesn't remember it being taught in school or being mentioned at all his entire childhood by anybody, even though this war is arguably the biggest event in the state's history. It paved the way for Minnesota to become the place it is today, led directly to all the Dakota being kicked off their own land and expelled from the state under conditions that killed hundreds of them.

John Biewen

And if anybody should have heard about it, it should have been me. My parents worked on the McGovern campaign. They admired Martin Luther King. My dad was a high school English teacher who taught To Kill a Mockingbird. And every Sidney Poitier movie that came on TV, they would sit us down and watch it. And I was raised to have a social-- look, I went on to be a public radio reporter.

Ira Glass

I was going to say. Really, how did you end up in public broadcasting?

[LAUGHTER]

John Biewen

I was raised to be aware of the nation's racial injustices. It's just that they all happened someplace else, not in Minnesota.

Ira Glass

For the last 17 years, John's lived down south, in North Carolina. And he says that at some point the contrast in how people saw their own history down south really hit him.

John Biewen

Not that people down south are sitting around reminiscing about Stonewall Jackson all day long. I mean, that's really not the case. But there is a general and pervasive understanding in the South that something very big happened in the 1860s that shaped the place right up to the present. And that's what's missing in Minnesota.

Ira Glass

So a while back John Biewen started traveling around the state with two questions-- first, what exactly happened back in 1862? And, second--

John Biewen

Why don't we talk about it? Why haven't we internalized this story in Minnesota into our understanding of the place?

Ira Glass

And so, today, the week after Thanksgiving, we bring you this story of Indians and settlers. I found so many of the details of what John learned to be completely surprising. Maybe you will too. From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. Stay with us.

So now I turn things over to John Biewen.

John Biewen

In setting out to understand what happened in southern Minnesota in 1862, I called up Gwen Westerman. She agreed to spend a few days with me driving around the state to the spots where it all occurred, so I could tell the story here on the radio.

We meet up in Mankato. I grew up there but haven't lived there for 30 years. She's lived and taught there for the last 20 years.

John Biewen

That's us, in Gwen's SUV.

John Biewen

Gwen's an English professor at Minnesota State University in Mankato and a member of the Dakota tribe. She's in her 50s like me. She grew up in Kansas, part of the Dakota diaspora. A lot of her family was banished from Minnesota after the 1862 war-- not that she's always known that herself.

See, I grew up in Mankato, a white kid knowing next to nothing about the bloody history that happened beneath my feet. Gwen got a teaching job and moved to Mankato, also knowing nothing about that history. She found out later that some older people in her family did know.

John Biewen

That's all she said?

John Biewen

Gwen didn't know it, but she and her friend Kimberly were going to see the annual ceremony for the Dakota warriors who were hanged in the town square in 1862.

They arrived late for the ceremony and stood in the back for the prayers and songs. They still didn't know what the event was about. And then it was over.

John Biewen

Come on.

[LAUGHTER]

That's crazy.

John Biewen

After that, she learned all about it-- how the Dakota chief who led the uprising in 1862-- Little Crow-- was the brother of her great-great-great-great-grandmother. Another relative, Mazamani, was killed in the last battle of the war. Now she is so steeped in it, she co-wrote a book about the history of the Dakota people in Minnesota.

John Biewen

On a gravel farm road an hour and a half from Mankato, there's an oddly placed historic marker.

John Biewen

To find it, you have to pull into somebody's driveway. The yard is sheltered by pine trees.

John Biewen

It's a short obelisk etched with the names of five white settlers who were killed here by Dakota men in August of 1862. This was the incident that started the US-Dakota War. Gwen reads a steel plaque that was put up in the 1960s--

John Biewen

It's hard for me to picture the story this plaque tells. It says the Dakotas and the white man went to a neighbor's cabin-- right here where the monument is now-- and got into a target-shooting contest. Maybe that's what people did with passing strangers on the frontier in 1862. Then the plaque says the Indians suddenly turned on the whites and shot three men, and two women dead.

John Biewen

You shook your head at that part.

John Biewen

To get some of the story that's not on the sign, Gwen and I drive to a small museum. From the outside, it looks like one of those wayside rest buildings. It sits on a highway 15 miles north of Mankato, just outside the town where I went to college, St. Peter.

John Biewen

Ben Leonard's tall and lanky. He directs this museum-- The Traverse des Sioux Treaty Site.

John Biewen

Really?

Our Carolina connection noted, we have the required conversation about college hoops--

John Biewen

Then get down to the reason Gwen and I are here. This museum, with its big, central room of maps and panels, gives the history that led to the 1862 war.

First, the basics-- the Dakota have lived in Minnesota at least 1,000 years and maybe a lot longer. They vastly outnumbered any Europeans who showed up until the mid-1800s, when white people started flooding in.

And you can probably guess what happened next, because it happened all across the country. The country's leaders, going back to the founders, talked bluntly about prying land out of Indian hands. I'd never realized just how bluntly until talking to Ben. On the wall of the museum is a blown-up text from a letter I'd never seen. Thomas Jefferson wrote it in 1803.

John Biewen

All right. How did Jefferson really say that?

John Biewen

It's pretty straightforward. That's what he said.

And that's exactly what happened in the Minnesota territory. By 1851, the Dakota had come to rely on things they got from white traders-- guns, food, horses, kettles, and blankets, and traps. They were deep in debt, at least according to the traders themselves. And they were the ones keeping track. Here's Gwen.

John Biewen

Ben, could you sort of sum up what was the deal essentially?

John Biewen

Plus some pieces of what would become Iowa and South Dakota. In two big treaties, one of them signed very near to the spot where the museum sits, the Dakota people traded away 35 million acres for about $3 million, which was a better price than some other tribes got.

The treaties set aside a reservation for the Dakota-- 10 miles on either side of the Minnesota River stretching for 150 miles, a skinny strip in the middle of the vast territory the Dakota were giving up.

They didn't have much choice. They could see what was coming from the east-- a tidal wave of white settlers hungry for farm land, statehood, settlement. The white negotiators didn't have to say it out loud, but one of them did anyway. A guy named Luke Lea reminded the Dakota chiefs that the US government, quote, "could come with 100,000 men and drive you off to the Rocky Mountains."

A leading negotiator for the whites during these treaty deals was a man named Henry Sibley. Nobody was more important in the creation of the state of Minnesota. He'd later become its first governor.

John Biewen

To learn more about Sibley, I talked to this historian.

John Biewen

And it's pretty much the definitive history of Minnesota up to and including the US-Dakota War, isn't it?

John Biewen

Wingerd says Henry Sibley moved in from Detroit in the 1830s. He was just 23. The American Fur Company gave him a big job overseeing the southern half of what's now Minnesota.

Sibley had a child with a Dakota woman. He understood the Dakota language. He went before Congress criticizing treaties that, quote, "betrayed and deceived Indians."

John Biewen

By this time, the region had been over-hunted. Revenues were down. And everyone, from managers like Sibley to local traders on the frontier, down to the Dakota men who did the actual hunting, was in hock to the fur company, who would advance them money for all the supplies, traps, and guns.

John Biewen

Sibley and Chouteau said the Dakota owed them a lot of money. Those are the claims he's talking about. And they saw the treaties as a way to get paid. The way it happened was pretty ugly.

Take the treaty signed it Traverse des Sioux. The treaty was copied into the Dakota language for the chiefs to discuss. But their copy left out a key fact-- the government wasn't going to give the Dakota their payment in a lump sum, as the Dakota wanted and expected.

Instead, the money would stay in the hands of the government to be doled out in much smaller, annual payments-- not just in gold, but also food and things like farming equipment.

The treaty did provide $305,000 in cash right away, most of it so the Dakota could quote-unquote "settle their affairs." After the signing of the treaty, Sibley's allies took the chiefs aside to sign a second document. The chiefs later said they thought it was just another copy of the treaty. But, in fact, they were agreeing to hand over most of that $305,000 to the traders, all but $60,000 to settle their debts.

So the traders got their money. Sibley himself walked away with $66,000-- more cash than the Dakota people got. Again, Mary Wingerd--

John Biewen

No, we didn't.

John Biewen

Gwen Westerman and I have driven west, out on the prairie, for the next bit of the story-- the build-up to the war. We've come to the Lower Sioux Agency. This was the federal government's outpost on Dakota land, near Redwood Falls, Minnesota. Sioux was the white man's name for the Dakota.

John Biewen

Morse is just 26. He wears glasses and a wispy beard. He directs the historic site.

The government's two-story stone warehouse is still here, surrounded by open grassland. In 1862, it was stocked with government food shipments for distribution to the Dakota. These were paid out once a year under the terms of the treaty.

John Biewen

The annual federal shipment of gold and food promised in the 1851 treaty did not arrive on schedule in June. July passed and it didn't come. In the decade since the Dakota signed away their land, Minnesota had become a state. The white population exploded from 5,000 in 1850 to more than 170,000.

Put another way, in 1850, Indians outnumbered whites in Minnesota 5 to 1. By 1860, it was the other way around.

And the Dakota were being squeezed into less and less space. Washington changed the terms of their treaties, took half the reservation back, and forced them to accept the new terms.

This didn't go down well. Minnesota's leaders thought that everything would be fine if the Dakota would just give up hunting, which required lots of land, and take up farming. Some did, cut their hair, raised crops.

But, as you'd expect, a lot of Dakota wanted to live as they always had. Dakota man had always been hunters. Farming was seen as women's work. Hemmed in on their skinny reservation, lots of people couldn't feed themselves. By that August, things were desperate.

John Biewen

Meanwhile, the federal agent had food in the warehouse. But he refused to give it out to the Dakota until their full June payment arrived. Dakota men confronted a store-keeper named Andrew Myrick, asking him for help or credit.

What do you expect us to feed our families?

John Biewen

In 200 years, there hadn't been much violence between Indians and whites in Minnesota. But in August of 1862, Dakota country was ready to blow up. Maybe the only question was, where would the spark come from?

That brings us back to the part of the story where Gwen and I began, in that farmyard in Acton, where the four young Dakota men killed the five settlers. There are other versions of the story. One comes from a Dakota, who spoke with the four young men, that don't include the Indians asking for liquor or the target-shooting contest.

The story ends the same way, though, with five settlers dead.

John Biewen

This is Anthony Morse again.

John Biewen

Little Crow was one of the leaders who signed the 1851 treaty that turned out so badly for the Dakota. When the chiefs and some riled up young men showed up at his house in the middle of the night, Little Crow said the white world would come down hard on all the Dakota, not just the four men who'd been at Acton.

A lot of the young warriors said the Dakota should attack first. Enough is enough, let's drive the whites out. But Little Crow wanted no part of that. He'd been to Washington, D.C. In those days the government liked to invite American Indian leaders to the capital to show them how powerful the new white man's country was.

Gwen Westerman, my traveling companion, is related to Little Crow. Like I said, her great-great-great-great-grandmother was the chief's sister. She says Little Crow-- whose name in Dakota is Ta Oyate Duta-- was one of many Dakota trying to adjust to the white culture and find a place in it.

John Biewen

And going to church.

John Biewen

At first, when the young men started calling for war, what was Ta Oyate Duta's reaction, his take?

John Biewen

Everyone argued about what to do. Little Crow made a speech that his son years later recited to a lawyer, who had it translated and written down. We asked an actor to read it.

John Biewen

He's talking about the Civil War going on, to the southeast.

John Biewen

The young warriors called Little Crow a coward. His response--

John Biewen

Most of Little Crow's band, along with men from other Dakota bands, decided to go to war. Historian Mary Wingerd calls the fighters a group of rash, young men. She says this is a crucial point that's often missed when the story of the conflict is told in Minnesota.

John Biewen

Many men in those two bands did not fight. Over the coming weeks, the war and peace factions had angry debates and almost went to war with each other. Gwen Westerman tells me her own family was split. And she's not sure who did the right thing.

Ira Glass

Coming up, a prairie home explosion. And, after it, a prairie home expulsion. That's in a minute, from Chicago Public Radio, when our program continues.

Ira Glass

It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Our program today for the week after Thanksgiving-- "Little War on the Prairie," the history of settlers and Dakota Indians in Minnesota. John Biewen first put this story together for our show a few years ago, on the 150th anniversary of the so-called Sioux uprising and the war it led to.

During that anniversary year a few years back, probably more was said in Minnesota about these events than in the previous 100 years combined-- lots of newspaper articles and broadcasts and talks. Our guide to the story, John Biewen, grew up in Mankato. He now picks up the story where we left off before the break.

John Biewen

So the morning after Little Crow's speech, and after the murders at the Acton farm, August 18, 1862, several hundred Dakota warriors, led by Little Crow, started their assault at the federal outpost that sat on their land, the Lower Sioux Agency.

They took food from the stone warehouse, burned buildings, and killed about 20 men, one-fourth of the whites at the agency. The dead included the storekeeper who said that if Dakota families were hungry, they could eat grass. Again, Anthony Morse, who runs the agency's history center.

John Biewen

Most of Minnesota's trained soldiers were off at the Civil War. When word of the attacks reached a nearby fort, some green, unprepared soldiers came to help. The Dakota ambushed them, killing almost everyone, and sending the rest fleeing for their lives.

From there, the Dakota men fanned out down the river valley, attacking the homes of settlers, most of them unarmed. Joseph Godfrey was a young, black man, who lived among the Dakota. He testified later that fall, telling how Dakota warriors he was with went house to house. This is an actor reading.

John Biewen

Some Dakota killed every settler they saw. Others killed only the men and took women and children captive. But many Dakota warriors spared and protected white people they knew. Even Chief Little Crow, the leader of the uprising, allowed a white woman named Sarah Wakefield, the wife of a local doctor, to take shelter in his house during the six weeks of the War.

One Dakota woman who opposed the fighting, named Snana, took in a 14-year-old German girl who had been captured by a warrior. Snana traded him a pony for the girl. Snana wrote down her story in 1901. Turns out, her daughter had died recently, and she was heartbroken.

John Biewen

The historian Mary Wingerd is a fifth-generation Minnesotan. She says for 100 years or more, Minnesotans who heard the story at all heard a one-sided tale of savage Indians attacking innocent whites out of the blue.

Now most historians like herself blame the war mainly on white double-dealing and bullying.

John Biewen

Meaning the men in St. Paul and Washington, D.C. who wrote, then violated, the treaties. The fighting lasted 36 days. Dakota warriors attacked New Ulm twice and looted and burned a couple other towns.

White settlers turned into panicked refugees, fleeing across the prairie. And the man appointed to lead a force to defeat the Dakota? Henry Sibley. You remember Sibley, the fur trader who helped orchestrate the treaties of 1851.

John Biewen

They called him a snail and a coward and the state undertaker, because Sibley's militia showed a knack for arriving after battles were over to help bury the dead.

John Biewen

Sibley had seen himself as a friend to the Dakota. He believed they could take up farming and co-exist with white people in Minnesota. But now even some Dakota he knew-- men who had started to assimilate-- were murdering settlers.

In his letters, Sibley was bitter. Quote, "A great public crime has been committed, not by wild Indians who did not know better, but by men who have had advantages, intercourse with white men."

In another he wrote, "Tame the Indian. Cultivate him. Strive to Christianize him as you will. And the sight of blood will, in an instant, call out the savage, wolfish, devilish instincts in his race."

Years before all this, Sibley had warned that if the federal government kept cheating Indians in treaties, the result would be war. Now that very thing was happening in his own state. And he himself had helped convinced the Indians to sign those crooked treaties. But there was no indication Sibley took any blame, says Wingerd.

John Biewen

Altogether in the six-week war, somewhere between 400 and 1,000 white people died, most of them settlers. Not as many Dakota died-- maybe 50 to 100 in the war itself. But payback was still to come.

John Biewen

This is what Minnesota governor Alexander Ramsey said to a special session of the state legislature, during the war in September of 1862.

John Biewen

It's not surprising that white Minnesotans were enraged by the attacks. But things got extreme. A newspaper columnist named Jane Grey Swisshelm called for a bounty for Sioux scalps. And months later, the state started offering $75 each, and eventually $200.

Chief Little Crow and a couple hundred of the most militant warriors had fled west, out of Minnesota. The rest of the Dakota people gathered voluntarily at a makeshift camp on the prairie to wait for Colonel Henry Sibley.

Most were women, children, and old men who had not participated in the killing. Here's Gwen again.

John Biewen

And like some other promises that had been made along the way--

John Biewen

The Dakota trusted Sibley's promise that only those who had murdered settlers would be punished. But the 1,700 Dakota civilians were marched 150 miles down the Minnesota River, a mini Trail of Tears. In towns along the way, white people attacked them with rocks, clubs, and knives.

A half-Dakota man named Samuel Brown was long for the march, working for the government. He wrote in his diary that in the town of Henderson, a white woman grabbed a baby from a Dakota woman's arms and threw it at the ground, killing the baby.

The Dakota walked for a week, says historian Mary Wingerd, until they reached their destination near St. Paul.

John Biewen

Hundreds of Dakota, mostly children and old people, died of disease over the winter in Fort Snelling. About 100 more died on boats that took them down the Mississippi and up the Missouri to Dakota Territory.

Still more hundreds died at the South Dakota reservation. As Wingerd puts it, this was the thanks most of the Dakota got for opposing the war.

John Biewen

OK, I'm going to get some sound of the wind here.

Gwen and I are back in Mankato, my hometown, where she now teaches at the State University. It's windy, but otherwise a nice day in October. We're in an old park, a favorite place of mine-- big trees with bright yellow leaves, picnic tables.

Alongside the park, the Blue Earth River, that I canoed on as a kid, flows into the Minnesota River.

And it was right down here, on this sandy river bank that my family used to build a fire and roast hot dogs and marshmallows and sit out here at night and have just a lovely time on a fall night like this.

John Biewen

This is where the Dakota men ended up-- the ones who turned themselves in after Henry Sibley promised to treat them fairly. Sibley set up a kangaroo court out on the prairie and tried 400 of them in a few weeks.

He didn't let the Dakota have lawyers or witnesses. Some trials lasted five minutes. He named a panel of five US soldiers who had just been fighting against the Dakota to hand out verdicts and death sentences.

Sibley's court condemned 303 Dakota men. A report was sent to President Lincoln on the plan to hang all of them. The president, fresh off the bloodiest day in American history at Antietam, was stunned by the long list. He ordered the Minnesotans to hold off on the hangings until his office could review the trial transcripts. So they waited right here. They called it Camp Lincoln.

John Biewen

She points up at a high bluff across the river. Vengeful settlers would perch up there and shoot into the camp at the Dakota.

John Biewen

I can tell you that growing up, I had no idea. Never heard of Camp Lincoln.

For me and most people in Mankato, this was just Sibley Park. That's right-- Sibley Park, named after the man who led the charge to shove the Dakota off their homeland to make way for-- well, people like me.

There's a Henry Sibley High School in the Twin Cities. Sibley County is just up the road from Mankato. Living in the South for more than a decade, I still shake my head a little at the highways and schools named after the great defenders of slavery-- Jeff Davis, Nathan Bedford Forrest.

Now here I am, well into middle age, and it's just now sinking in-- in my hometown, Sibley Park.

In Washington, in the fall of 1862, President Lincoln was getting heated messages from the governor and others in Minnesota. They said he'd better allow the hanging of the 303 Dakota men or else furious white people might go vigilante.

Lynch mobs formed in Mankato and other towns and had to be quelled by soldiers. Newspapers told horrifying stories that Dakota warriors had mutilated babies and raped countless settler women, though very few of those claims were ever backed up. President Lincoln wired back to Minnesota.

John Biewen

And hanging two Indians would not satisfy the people of Minnesota, the president was told. So Lincoln had his people review the trial transcripts for evidence that the men had attacked settlers, and not just shown up at battles.

In the end, Lincoln himself wrote out a list of 39 Dakota names-- later trimmed to 38. The day after Christmas, those men were marched on to a big platform in Mankato's town square. Hoods were pulled over their heads.

4,000 people had come from miles around to watch. The men held each other's hands and sang prayers till the moment the floor under them dropped away. They fell. And the chanting stopped.

Little Crow was shot six months after the hangings. And his scalp, skull, and wrist bones were displayed at the Minnesota Historical Society for decades. Mary Wingerd says, for a short time after the war, Minnesotans were triumphant at having beaten back the savage Indians. They relished the story.

John Biewen

So, she says, Minnesotans clammed up about the nastiness of 1862. Instead, they embraced a gauzy, fantastical version of the state's Indian heritage.

John Biewen

So does that help explain how I could grow up in Minnesota 100 years later, in Mankato even, and not hear anything about all this history?

John Biewen

Today, visitors to Minneapolis can drive down Hiawatha Boulevard and visit Minnehaha Falls, references to Longfellow's romanticized poem, "Song of Hiawatha." Countless Minnesota businesses use native names and imagery-- Land O'Lakes butter, with its Indian maiden on the box. There's a Little Crow country club. For years, the logo of the gas company-- Minnegasco-- was an Indian girl with a blue flame as the feather in her headdress.

There are probably other reasons white Minnesotans don't remember the US-Dakota War. I suspect a big one is we won. Mary Wingerd and Gwen Westerman both say they routinely meet students who've grown up in the area and arrive at college with no knowledge of the US-Dakota War-- never heard of it.

John Biewen

I stopped by my old high school, Mankato West, to see what kids know now.

John Biewen

The girls' tennis coach rounded up a few seniors for an extremely unscientific survey.

So what do you know about-- it's usually called, these days, the Dakota War, the US-Dakota War?

John Biewen

I did talk to other young people in southern Minnesota who knew nothing of the Dakota War. But things have changed since I was a kid. Every sixth grader in Minnesota is now supposed to learn about the war, at least a little.

It's a week-long unit in the state's Minnesota History textbook. In Mankato they do more. I met a teacher who spends twice as much time because of the local connection. Every third grader goes to a Dakota powwow in September. But the quality of the teaching varies.

John Biewen

Monroe Elementary is just across the Minnesota River from the hanging site. Patricia Hammann is prepping her third grade class for the powwow. I asked her how she presents the war of 1862, standing with her in front of her students.

John Biewen

My guess is that no Dakota children were in the room to take offense. In 1863, Congress passed a law confiscating all the Dakota's land in Minnesota. President Lincoln signed it, effectively banishing the Dakota from the state.

About 25 years later, Congress allowed some Dakota, who were considered "friendly," to return and establish small settlements in the state. So today four Dakota communities are dotted across southern Minnesota.

But for Gwen and all the other Dakota who grew up elsewhere, the federal expulsion from Minnesota-- their homeland-- is still on the books.

John Biewen

This past August, to mark the 150th anniversary of the start of the US-Dakota War, a symbolic walk home, organized by several Dakota bands and reservations. Gwen and I went.

John Biewen

The highway patrol has closed off a section of road, where South Dakota's Highway 34 meets Minnesota Highway 30.

[HORSE NOISE]

There are a dozen Dakota on horseback and many more on foot. A handful of white Minnesotans greet them with signs saying "Welcome home."

John Biewen

About 40 yards shy of the state line--

John Biewen

--organizers ask reporters to turn off our equipment if we want to witness the ceremony up close.

Maybe 100 people form a big circle around eight older Dakota women. They pass eagle feathers across the line into Minnesota and sweep sage smoke on themselves. There are prayers and tears.

[BACKGROUND CHATTER]

John Biewen

Minnesota's governor, Mark Dayton, said he was appalled by Governor Ramsay's words in 1862. Dayton stated flatly that the US used deception and force to take Indian lands and broke its promises.

John Biewen

The history of every place is more complicated than the people who live there like to believe. And every moment in history is just as complex as the moment we're living in right now.

I have a friend, Tim Tyson, a historian I work with at Duke, who points out that in his home state of North Carolina, up to one third of the white people were pro-Union during the Civil War. And a year into the war-- 1862-- the state elected a governor who'd opposed both slavery and secession.

John Biewen

One place to see fake history-- on a state flag of Minnesota. The image on the flag, the state seal, was chosen by Henry Sibley. It shows a white farmer behind a plow, tilling the soil. He's looking up to watch an Indian ride away on a horse. In the original, he's literally riding into the sunset. The Indian looks back at the white man. As far as you can tell, he's leaving willingly.

Ira Glass

John Biewen. John is the director of the audio program at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University. And these days, if you liked this story, you can hear others like it. He's the producer of their Peabody-nominated podcast "Scene on Radio," now in its third season. That's scene-- S-C-E-N-E on radio.

Today's program was produced by me and Brian Reed, with Alex Blumberg, Ben Calhoun, Sarah Koenig, Jonathan Menjivar, Lisa Pollack, Robyn Semien, Alissa Shipp, and Nancy Updike. Our senior producer for today's show is Julie Snyder. Mixing today by Stowe Nelson and our technical director, Matt Tierney.

Production help from Anna Martin, music help from Damian Graef, from Rob Geddes. Our actors today-- Jake Hart, Kobi Libii, Irma Laguerre, and John Ellison Conlee. Special thanks today to David Larsen, Tiokasin Ghosthorse, Seth Barrish, Diane Fraher, Gary Clayton Anderson, and Michelle Harris.

Our website-- thisamericanlife.org-- where you can listen to our archive of over 600 episodes for absolutely free. This American Life is distributed by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange.

Thanks, as always, to our program's co-founder, Mr. Torey Malatia. I know what you're asking-- is the secret to his vast success a combination of deception, cunning, suavish good looks, rock hard abs, millions of dollars that he stole from a Federal Reserve armored car, Brylcreem, and the ability to change into a tiny little mouse and crawl into any space at will? Is it?

Ira Glass

I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life.