Upper Sioux Agency and Fort Ridgely State Parks

WEREWOLVES OF SOUTH DAKOTA

by Geordie

Today, what remains of the Upper Sioux Agency sits within the boundaries of Upper Sioux Agency State Park, a pretty stretch of land along the Minnesota River, about nine miles south of Granite Falls.

On the day that Mandy and I drive out the sky is bright and sunny, and the temperature display on our very fancy 2002 Toyota Camry reads 93 degrees. This weekend, my uncle Zane is hosting an annual get together on the family farm in Irene, South Dakota, to mark the third year since his daughter Brooke’s death, as well as his anniversary to his second wife Sandy. I have never been a paragon of familial closeness. Indeed, I haven’t seen much of my extended kin in the last eight or so years, but when Mandy points out that we can conceivably go to my uncle’s party and finish all the parks in the southwest corner of the state, I have to admit that it seems like a good idea.

When we get to Upper Sioux Agency then, on a tight schedule, it’s barely eight o'clock. The sun is shining hard, and Mandy and I saunter up to the ranger station/visitor center, past a withered looking patch of corn and squash, apparently planted as a demonstration of traditional native agriculture.

[visitor center]

Inside, a ranger agrees to tell us about the park. She seems anxious to me, but I could just be projecting. She has curly hair and a pleasant face, and once she starts talking, it quickly becomes clear that she possesses a storehouse of information about the park and the history of the agency.

It has been my intention all along to visit the parks in this part of the state as a group, in order to tell the story of the War of 1862, probably the single most pivotal event in the state’s 150+ year history. Planning is not quite the same as looking forward to, however. It’s a dark chapter, and I want to say something worth while. I want to connect the past to the present and make it stick. I want to help people think about themselves and the place that they live in a different way. I will struggle with and fail at this for weeks, but right now I am just standing on the worn carpet in the station, looking over pamphlets and other materials as the friendly, knowledgeable ranger lectures us, relating a version of the Andrew Myrick story, which–as she points out–probably took place just over the bluff, where the traders shops once stood.

Eventually, a pair of curious locals wander in, and the ranger supplies them with a ledger listing all the families who’s property was damaged during the war, and how much reparation money they got from the government–taken directly out of the Dakota’s permanently discontinued annuities.

“Here they are!” the woman says, pointing at the book with a shock of recognition.

According to the ranger the family received a relatively large payment. “They must have had a lot of damage,” she says, as though the event were a bad tornado.

When Mandy and I head out to do our obligatory lap around the park, we spot the two locals from inside driving off in a fancy sports car, and glare at them for being rich off of stolen Indian money. Never mind the fact that we have always lived, slept, been fed, watched Die Hard, eaten Craisins in tie-died shirts, etc. on stolen Indian land. Of course, so have Bill Clinton, Barrack Obama, Snooki, and that lady with all those babies out in California, just to name a few, but still, it starts to change the way you see the world when you consider that every step you take, the land beneath your feet was bought with blood.

[Sports Car of Death. Mandy gives it the stare-down.]

This sort of thing can be hard to hold in your mind, however, especially when you are amongst history’s winners, and everything–from the labels on butter packages to the stories they taught you in school–is designed to foster a foggy collective kind of forgetfulness. There is no conspiracy in this. But as it has been pointed out before, history is written by the winners, and it’s easier to mow your lawn if you don’t have to worry about who was starved, raped, murdered just to get it.

The prairie at Upper Sioux Agency State Park is beautiful, and we enjoy our walk through it. The actual mix of grasses feels different here, filled with more Big Blue Stem than anywhere else we have seen since we lived in Indiana. The paths are wide, and a bunch of middle-aged white women can be seen steering horses down them. At one point, on a high knoll overlooking the park, a large tipi sits amidst the swaying grasses. It looks very proud and indigenous, though a tag inside reveals that it was made in Oregon by the same people who did the props for Dances with Wolves.

[Tipi]

After the Dakota were banished en masse from the state following the war, all of their annuities and treaties with the government were unilaterally abolished. The reservation here was closed down, and the land sold to white settlers. This stretch of bluff and valley along the Minnesota River was of historical interest due to the old agency site, however, and so in 1963 the area was set aside as a state park.

Today, the place still has tipis, horses, even a reconstruction of an original 1860’s style building that would have housed agency employees. Everything but the Indians.

Mandy and I make our rounds, snapping pictures of the reconstructed duplex, which was built in 1854, then rebuilt after it burned down in the war, then knocked down and rebuilt again to look more like the original. We peer in windows and poke around the stone foundations of a barracks, a school, a bake house.

The western half of the state–like much of the country–is currently in an increasingly severe drought. The grass around the ruins is brown, and as we make our way around the park we begin to wilt a little in the heat, grasshoppers knocking against our legs and ankles.

Out at the end of a long bluff, standing amidst bees and wildflowers, we peer across the valley at the campground. The Dakota call this place Pezihutazizik'api “the place where they dig for yellow medicine.” There is a tiny native population these days in nearby Redwood Falls, but most of the exiled Dakota still live on reservations in Nebraska and South Dakota–in some of the poorest places in the United States.

Standing here, not far from where I grew up on a dairy farm, I keep waiting for the realness and nearness of all this history to rise up out of the ground and grab me by the ankles. It doesn’t, however. I’m preoccupied, sweaty and thirsty, and before long we hike back to the car.

[prairie]

While I am struggling to connect with the past, however, the events of 1862 remain alive for local people, and especially for the Dakota. The seemingly-anxious ranger in the station turned out to be anxious after all. She asked not to be named in this post, due to an earlier incident when she was taken to task by Dakota activists protesting a program at the park she had coordinated. Protesters felt that a historical re-enactment of life at the agency in the 1850’s presented a warped view of history and celebrated the genocide committed against their people. “This stuff gets so political,” the ranger told us wearily.

On our way to Fort Ridgely, Mandy and I drive through ever sicklier cornfields, getting lost exactly once and making a gigantic square through the countryside, much of the dying corn here tilting woozily or blown down, lying flat on the ground like so many fallen soldiers. We are trying to make it to a one o'clock talk at the fort by local expert and author Curtis Dahlin. The event is co-sponsored by the Nicollett county historical society and the state historical society, and as Mandy and I have been pretty impressed by the MHS’s work so far–you might remember Jeffers Petroglyphs–we’re looking forward to it.

When we step inside the large stone bulk of the fort, however, an elderly woman behind a tiny desk insists that there’s an entrance fee, though the website didn’t mention one.

“Are you students?” the woman asks us curtly.

“Yes,” I lie, though not very well, and she makes me repeat it. “Yes,” I say again, and she finally takes our money and lets us in.

In a narrow room on the west side of the fort, perhaps thirty people are seated close together on rows of folding chairs. We appear to be the only ones under forty. Excusing ourselves, as the lecture has already started, we make our way to the only open seats in the front of the room.

[Fort]

Before us, a little man in a button up shirt holds a microphone, reading from an imageless PowerPoint in a quavering voice. He is so nervous that the microphone shakes in his hand like a tree about to come down in a storm. My first instinct is one of deep sympathy, and I half imagine what it might be like to cradle his craggly, dessicated body like an infant’s.

When the gist of his lecture sinks in, however, I quickly sower on him. Though timid and adorable in the way that old people sometimes get, he also turns out to be a grade A apologist for genocide (in my humble opinion) and all but the very worst of the atrocities committed by whites and the U.S. Government against the Dakotas. Compared to this, the helpful ranger at Upper Sioux seems like a radical leftist, and I trade skeptical looks with Mandy, shifting uncomfortably in my seat.

Mr. Dahlin’s thesis, which seems less than intellectually stringent, boils down to something like ‘the strong shall conquer the weak’ and 'hey guys, this all happened a long time ago so let’s not get too bent out of shape about it.’

To my relief, most of the people in the room don’t seem to be buying it. One lady who I imagine is a school teacher stops him in the middle of his speech, raising her hand and peppering him with deceptively polite questions. If you weren’t Minnesotan, you might not realize that we have a full-scale mutiny on our hands.

“Excuse me,” the lady says, “but isn’t it true that a lot of women and children and old people died while the Indians were locked up on Pike Island?”

No, Mr. Dahlin assures her. The Indians were given the same provisions as the soldiers, and the disease outbreaks were just as bad in the camps of white refugees who had been forced out of their homes. Anyway, the camp at Pike Island was designed to protect the Indians, not to jail them.

The lady politely accepts this answer, but she doesn’t give up, raising her hand again. “Excuse me,” she says…

Soon, another hand rises into the air, and another. Does he know how the current reservation in the area came to be after the original ones were abolished? He does not. What about the bounties of twenty-five dollars per Dakota scalp set by the state government?

“Bounty is a strong word,” he insists. “The government gives people incentives for lots of things.”

This, apparently, is my tipping point, and my body goes through a seemingly automatic process of rejection that probably sounds something like a loud scoff. I turn around in my chair. “Incentives for killing people?” I say, louder than could strictly be called 'to myself.’ A large woman in a purple Minnesota Vikings t-shirt sits next to her plump husband behind me. “I don’t think that’s right,” she says, and I suffer a brief pang of hope for humanity.

Poor Mr. Dahlin never gets to finish his PowerPoint, and after the whole debacle eventually breaks up I am feeling not so bad about having cheated the historical site out of a couple of extra bucks.

Mandy and I take a brief turn around the fort, which contains some rather limp looking displays of civil-war era clothing and a large replica of the fort as it was before the war, housed in a plastic bubble like a giant air-hockey table. In the far corner, a single fly buzzes around a piece of dusty hard tack.

Outside, we breathe like animals escaped from a cage. We take a turn down a few of the paths, though both of us have a bad taste in our mouths after the talk, and we pretty much immediately decide that this is the worst park ever. Among its many incongruities, the park doubles as a municipal golf course, the trails we take weaving between the greens. Even its map is the wrong size, printed on different paper than all the other park maps, which in our current state of displeasure, irks us. One of the war’s major battles was fought here when Dakota warriors tried to gain hold of the army stronghold, but all of the markers and monuments seem to be about the brave soldiers who died protecting their fort, and I can’t stop thinking that this is a Bad Place. I don’t like the way my feet feel on the ground.

Below the fort, the woods are overgrown and drab, and we’re running behind to the point that we end up literally running through them just to finish our mile.

This is funny, sort of, and I feel myself caught in the increasingly familiar position of being thankful for adversity because it will make a good post, but also feeling hot and annoyed and, frankly, kind of pissed off.

It’s a combustible situation, and when I refuse to walk back along a fairway because I’m afraid of getting in trouble, Mandy is ticked.

“You never let us have any fun,” she complains. “I’m so patient with you, but I’m sorry, sometimes all your anxieties and fears are so fucking annoying.”

I feel my hackles rise. This is one of our clear red lines, and now I want to punish her for crossing it. “I’m putting that in the blog,” I taunt.

Mandy narrows her eyes. “No you’re not,” she says.

“Yes I am,” I say. “I’m putting it in the blog so that people can see what a bitch you are to me.”

“I’m putting that in the blog,” she says.

“Oh no you’re not,” I say.

“Yes I am.”

“No you’re not,” I say, “because if you do I’m going to kill you.”

We are kind of joking, but also kind of fighting, all with a painfully annoying amount of self-awareness that I find exhausting.

“There you go,” Mandy says, turning away. “Just another white man re-writing history.” So I put it all in the blog.

[Love is a battlefield]

On our way to South Dakota the corn grows browner, shorter, and more of it is lying down. The bean fields are wilted and yellow, and as we pull off the highway a blood red sun sinks dead ahead, stabbing us in the eyes. The roads narrow the farther south we get from Sioux Falls, and you can see the dust from the parched earth in the form of a glowing haze hanging in the air.

By the time we get to the party the sun has sunk, and when I spot it again in the kitchen window of the old farmhouse–completely remodeled since I was a kid–I do a double take.

I haven’t been back here since my cousin’s funeral. This is the house my mom grew up in, carrying water in from the yard, learning to read in a one room school house. There is still a virgin acre here, supposedly, where my great, great grandparents built their dug-out long ago, 'improving’ the land in order to gain forty acres from the government.

In the kitchen, I feel confused. This whole day has been disorienting and discombobulating, and I point at the wall behind me. “I thought the moon already went down,” I say.

My sister gives me a look. “Pretty sure that was the sun,” she says.

I wander outside, holding a beer and listening to garrulous voices. The actual moon hangs over the fields like a hole in the sky. I sit, spread my hands over the brittle grass. My cousin Alicia has let her Corgis out of the kennel–the same kind of dogs that we had as kids–and they race around the house.

Now, Alicia joins me, followed by her husband Andy and my sister’s soon-to-be husband Mike. Alicia tells a story about her own sister—the first time I hear Brooke’s name mentioned all night—and everyone looks down at their feet. This party is, in part, a marker of Brooke’s death, but some things are easier not to talk about. I change the subject and we drink, orbited by all our banished thoughts. A hundred and seventy miles from here, north and west, some Dakota still live on the Crow Creek reservation, where they were resettled after being expelled from Minnesota.

Once, when I was very young, I dreamed a werewolf crouched outside my bedroom door. It had silver fur and flashing eyes, and afterword I made a deal with myself. Werewolves, I decided, only lived in South Dakota.

Now, one of the dogs trots by, long tongue lolling out, and I reach out an arm to pull it against my chest. I check its teeth, look deep into its eyes. No, I think. Not this one. Not this one by a long shot.

COMING UP NEXT: The War of 1862 Part Two, A Little Bit (More) History