"Oh let me, let me kill them,” one woman cried, a knife in one hand, a rasping file in the other, as she struggled with the soldier trying to restrain her. “They killed my husband. They burned my house and child. Oh, let me through.” It was November 1862, in the immediate aftermath of the U.S.–Dakota War, and a crowd of white settlers had surrounded the wagons full of Dakota prisoners passing through New Ulm, Minnesota. “Oh God let me at them,” cried another woman. “They have killed my husband and all my children.”
The witness to these anguished outbursts was Amos Glanville, a soldier in Company F of the 10th Minnesota Volunteer Infantry and one of those responsible for shepherding the wagons through town. I read his account last fall at an exhibition documenting the war at in 1863. It showed white women, waists cinched and skirts billowing, crouching to scoop rocks from the dirt, flinging them at the prisoners. One Dakota man stands in the middle of the wagon. Is he pleading for mercy? Standing in defiance? Trying to explain? Three white men unfurl whips above the crowd—whether they are trying to drive off the white women or reach over them to strike the Dakota is not clear. A soldier in a Union Army uniform rushes at the women from the left, a long stick in his left hand, perhaps a gun in his right. Rocks fly in every direction. The horses, oblivious to their embattled cargo, pull stolidly on.
