By Eric Ringham

MPR News/90.1 FM

As a state on the winning side of the Civil War, Minnesota has escaped some of the turmoil surrounding war memorials in the South — like the events last August at the University of North Carolina, where protesters pulled down a century-old statue of a Confederate soldier.

Minnesota’s most prominent Civil War statue, the Soldiers and Sailors Memorial, stands just down the hill from the Cathedral of St. Paul. Erected in 1903, it shows a Union soldier in a greatcoat, standing at parade rest atop a stone column.

Not much fodder for protest there. Not, that is, until you look a little more closely.

The statue’s face is that of Josias King, a Union officer who served with the First Minnesota Volunteer Infantry. He holds the distinction of having been the first soldier to volunteer in the Union cause. King fought with the First Minnesota in a number of bloody engagements, and at one point had his horse shot out from under him.

But King wasn’t with the First Minnesota during its finest, or at least its most famous, hour at Gettysburg. That’s because he spent part of that year, 1863, back home, in and around Minnesota, engaged in what today might be considered ethnic cleansing. Or a war crime.

“We’re looking at something that we might have seen in Hungary after 1939, when the Nazis came in and did not consider the people they were killing as human beings,” said Laura Waterman Wittstock, a longtime Minnesota journalist, radio host and Indian activist. “They were simply an enemy that needed to be eliminated.”

“Lincoln himself fought in an Indian war. He didn’t hurt anybody,” Wittstock said. “But there were other military men who had the will to kill Indians, that didn’t consider them humans in the same way they would consider somebody from Kentucky or somebody from Minnesota. They were not the same. So when they killed them, they didn’t really have an ability to see them as human beings.”

For a time in 1863, Josias King was aide de camp to Gen. Alfred Sully, who led troops on a campaign to punish Native Americans for the U.S.-Dakota War of the previous year. King was with Sully on Sept. 3, when the general’s scouts reported finding a village of several hundred teepees at a place called Whitestone Hill, in the Dakota Territory.

An item on the Minnesota Historical Society website describes the bloodbath that followed: “On September 3, 1863, at Whitestone Hill, Dakota Territory, as reprisal for the Dakota Conflict of 1862, [Sully’s] troops destroyed a village of some 500 tipis that lodged Yankton, Dakota, Hunkpapa Lakota, and Blackfeet. Men, women, and children were killed or captured. The troopers’ casualties were small. One of Sully’s interpreters, Samuel J. Brown, a mixed-blood Sioux, said ‘it was a perfect massacre’ and ‘lamentable to hear how those women and children was massacred.’”

“The violence was indiscriminate, so noncombatants were killed,” said Peter DeCarlo, a research historian with the Historical Society. “In particular to this massacre, it occurred late in the day. The U.S. Army had surrounded the encampment, and they surrounded it throughout the night as well. And if the soldiers heard movements, they fired at those movements, as King recounts in his own experience of the massacre. And then in the morning they went through the encampment, and there’s accounts of wounded Native people being shot and killed.”

But the Army wasn’t finished. Soldiers did what they could to make sure any survivors would suffer in the coming winter.

“And afterwards their lodges were burned, their ponies were rounded up, the dogs that they used for transportation were killed,” DeCarlo said. “The army proceeded to destroy their tools and their kettles and cooking utensils and burn their food and then take what was left. This is purposeful. It’s meant to bring about the death of a people.”