Minneapolis Murder & Mayhem

By Ron de Beaulieu

Minneapolis has a bloody, unacknowledged heritage. On the shore of Lake Harriet, Ojibwe warriors killed a Dakota man, triggering two retaliatory massacres. Ten years later, pioneer settlers roved the land of Minneapolis in gangs for protection from other pioneer gangs. When a lynch mob hanged a violent criminal across the street from Central High School, they left his corpse dangling for hours. Rioting Riversiders toppled a streetcar and attacked the driver. A man murdered a kind stranger because he misunderstood his intentions. Separate industrial disasters shattered the St. Anthony Falls, causing one fatality, and nearly razed the Mill District, killing eighteen more and injuring countless others. Author Ron de Beaulieu uncovers the dark, sinister history beneath the city.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The History Press
• Release date: Jun 13, 2022
• ISBN: 9781439675243

Ron de Beaulieu

Ron de Beaulieu first came to St. Paul for college. She left for a year but couldn't stay away and came back to the area to go to grad school at the U. Ron now lives in Minneapolis but still loves exploring St. Paul. Her new favorite spot there is Shadow Falls. Ron is also the author of Minneapolis Murder & Mayhem .

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

Minneapolis, to most outsiders, is either fly-over country or a mecca of progressive hipsterism. Locals know that the truth is darker and more intriguing. This city, and the land on which it rests, has seen revenge killings, land sharking, scalp dances, riots, murder, explosions and fires. In this book, you will find the highlights of our chaotic history.

PART I

PRE-MINNEAPOLIS

THE LAST SCALP DANCE ON THE LAND OF MINNEAPOLIS

On May 27, 1825, a few hundred Ojibwes canoed down the Mississippi River and camped on the east bank, across from Fort Snelling. (Ojibwe, also Ojibwa, is a modern spelling of Chippewa.) Before crossing the river, they set up their tents. They planned to stay for a little while to visit the Indian agency near the fort.

Within hours, Dakota warriors arrived in canoes.¹ They alighted on the riverbank and attacked the Ojibwes. The Dakota warriors scalped women and children, crossed the river to the west bank and ran toward the prairie that is now Minneapolis. There they danced around the scalps. This was not the last scalp dance on that land.

It wasn’t the first either. The initial salvo in the Ojibwe-Dakota conflict is lost to memory, as is the case long-standing international feuds the world over. Whichever side it was that committed the original offense against its enemy centuries ago hardly matters nowadays. It was the same with the historic rivalry between these two nations in Minnesota.² The Dakota Sioux filled most of Minnesota, leading early European explorers to call the region Suland (Sioux Land). The Ojibwes lived all around Lake Superior to the northeast. Other nations, including the Winnebago and the Sac and Fox, lived in or near the region as well, but they were not a party to the specific feud between the Dakotas and Ojibwes.

European entanglements farther east intensified the conflict. The English armed the already-powerful Iroquois and enabled them to drive out rivals. Their early adoption of the combination of Native battle tactics with European firearms made them nearly invincible.

The Ojibwes were already migrating west, in fulfillment of an ancient prophecy, but the Iroquois and their allies shoved them out faster than they had planned. In the land that would become the state of Minnesota, the Ojibwes faced intense competition for hunting grounds with Dakotas. The encouragement from European traders to hunt fauna to extinction for their furs only made matters worse. It was not greed for traders’ goods that motivated the Natives to do this. Firearms were among the most prized items that Natives received from the traders in exchange for pelts. The traders’ weapons gave rivals an extreme advantage. This led to an unending drive to outdo each other’s fur acquisitions so as to secure more arms. By the 1830s, the situation was heading toward existential threat for those who could not compete.

White settlers were moving farther and farther west as well, tying up land that had before been used for hunting, in order to plant crops and let their livestock graze. Before, the Dakotas had circulated among different but established settlements as soon as the game animal population began to thin out. This change of home would allow for animal repopulation, so that there was never real scarcity. All of that was changing with new pressures.

Rivalries among Native groups had typically manifested in fly-by-night raids, not drawn-out battles. In modern terms, all sides involved engaged exclusively in guerrilla warfare. Raids had once occurred occasionally, but now that there was so much more at stake, they went down at nearly every opportunity. They would sometimes kill their enemies on sight. Then, the victim’s community would retaliate, sparking further retaliation, such that a single killing could snowball into a years-long cycle of eye-for-an-eye homicide.

The Dakota-Ojibwe feud was by no means the origin of retributive justice in North America. It’s a common system of law, found in cultures all over the world. Pre-Christian Scandinavia had formal courts and judges who ruled on, and oversaw, the fair practice of retributive justice. In England, where it was called blood feud, William of Normandy tried and failed to stamp it out in the north of the country. It is widely believed that the infamous family grudges among white communities in Appalachia are a legacy of Scotland’s version of it. North America would have been exceptional if retributive justice hadn’t organically developed here. But there was no denying that it was worse now.

Man of the Sky³ was born in the mid-1880s to a Dakota mother and French father. He lived a typical Dakota life, but his son-in-law, the Indian agent for the Dakotas, tried to persuade him to settle down and take up European-style agriculture. With population pressure from the East in the form of both Ojibwes and whites, there was something to be said for staking out a permanent settlement that couldn’t be pulled out from under the Dakotas in their absence, which was currently a risk if they traveled to other hunting grounds. With European agriculture, said the agent, they could cultivate and tend designated fields that wouldn’t be taken from them.

Despite his fondness for the agent, Man of the Sky didn’t take his advice. A few Dakota chiefs⁴ were interested, but that interest did not extend to implementation. Man of the Sky changed his mind in the late winter of 1828. He was with a hunting party on the plains when he and his fellows were caught in a snowstorm. They survived, but barely, after three days of being buried in snow, with only their blankets for shelter and with slim rations. The time had come, Man of the Sky decided, to take his son-in-law’s recommendation and settle down with what the agent had told him would be a steady, stable food supply.

The agent thought that the shore of Bde Maka Ska—in what is now Lakewood Cemetery—would be a good location for his father-in-law’s project. He furnished Man of the Sky with agricultural equipment that he paid for out of his own pocket. Around the same time, a pair of wannabe missionaries, two fresh-faced, highly unqualified white brothers in their early twenties, Samuel and Gideon Pond, turned up on his doorstep to volunteer their services to the Dakotas. The agent sent them along to Bde Maka Ska. Man of the Sky brought residents. He went to the village of Black Dog, who had told Man of the Sky that he himself would have tried his hand at white-style agriculture if he had been a younger man. There, Man of the Sky recruited families who felt the same way as the elderly Black Dog. The year after his daughter, The Day Sets Taliaferro, gave birth to his granddaughter, Mary, Man of the Sky was elected chief of the experimental Dakota agricultural village. Ten years later, the fallout from a cycle of raids between the Dakotas and Ojibwes would end the experiment.

MARY’S FATHER, LAWRENCE TALIAFERRO, was born into an old Virginia family. His distant immigrant ancestors had Anglicized the pronunciation, though not the spelling, of their name to Tolliver. They were a wealthy slaveholding family who owned the Whitehall Plantation, where Lawrence was born in 1794. Lawrence was exactly the sort of person whom a lavish, privileged upbringing would be expected to produce. He was a perpetually petulant, self-absorbed, spoiled brat, to the immense irritation of his detractors and the amusement of his friends. The ever-flowing income from the forced labor of others made him generous. He was arrogant but trustworthy and believed himself to be a very good man. He had first served in the U.S. Army during the War of 1812, when he was eighteen years old, and he was now a major. In 1820, he was appointed Indian agent for the Dakotas.

Taliaferro must have known, on some level, that it is wrong to hold other people in captivity and force them to work for you, because he planned to free them at some future date. For this reason, he never sold them. There was only one exception to his no-sell rule. As justice of the peace, Taliaferro officiated the wedding of Harriet Robinson, whom he owned, to Dred Scott in 1836. Taliaferro then sold Mrs. Scott to Dr. John Emerson, the Fort Snelling military surgeon and owner of Dred Scott, so that the couple would stay together. One could argue that Taliaferro also could have kept them together if he had bought Mr. Scott’s freedom and freed Mrs. Scott so that the spouses could do as they pleased, and one would be right. Eventually, he would release every single enslaved person in his household, although why he took so long in doing it is unclear.

Taliaferro had custody of Mary, the only child he would ever have, even after a second marriage to a white woman back east. He extended the affection he felt for Mary to all of her mother’s kin, with the downside that this affection was paternal. He genuinely felt that all the Dakotas were his children—and yes, he did call them that. No one can dispute that the Dakotas needed allies. Along with other North American nations, the Dakotas had been greatly reduced in power and numbers by this time. The traders had introduced smallpox, venereal disease, influenza and measles to their populations, which had had no prior exposure. It is estimated that these diseases wiped out 90 percent of North Americans. It is indicative of how shriveled the hunting grounds had become in terms of acreage, and how many game animals had been killed for traders’ pelts, that the Dakotas and Ojibwes now struggled to find enough food to go around.

Fur traders resented Taliaferro’s efforts to prevent them from taking advantage of the Dakotas. Before his arrival at the fort, and behind his back, the traders persuaded the Dakotas with whom they did business to sign deeds and contracts written in untranslated English and got them heavily drunk so that they couldn’t think straight when they did so. The Dakotas had no way of knowing the market value of the goods they either bought or sold. The traders underpaid them and overcharged them, miring them in debt.

Taliaferro was also unpopular with some of the Dakotas because he was so patronizing. It frustrated them that he inserted himself into their dealings with the traders. He also tried to prevent the Dakotas from partying with their drinking buddies, the enlisted men, whom he believed to be a bad influence on his children.

Taliaferro and Colonel Josiah Snelling, the commandant who oversaw the fort’s construction, immediately got to work in 1820, organizing peace talks between Ojibwe and Dakota chiefs. Many of them already wanted peace. The chiefs would show up, cooperate and reach an agreement, and then their men would resume fighting, sometimes within twenty-four hours. Having done this without success for five years, Taliaferro sought a more official approach. In preparation for the August 19, 1825 Multinational Treaty at Prairie du Chien, Taliaferro arranged for a surveyed map of the area, with a firm, on-paper boundary between Ojibwe and Dakota territory for living and hunting.⁵ Taliaferro made sure that the treaty specified the boundary line. One of the provisions was that the Dakotas and Ojibwes would stay on their own sides and leave each other alone. The leaders signed it, pledging to respect the line that had been drawn and marked by the white man’s science.⁶

Taliaferro and his fellow American officials (at that time, Natives did not self-identify as Americans, and they reserved that term for the people of the United States) may have been temporarily satisfied, but the Native signatories concurred in the arrangement…proposed by the U.S. Commissioners… [only because they thought] that compulsion would otherwise be used. But they were not satisfied, nor had they reason to be, for their ancient limits were grievously abridged.⁷ A tragedy befell the Natives at the Prairie du Chien council that further undermined the treaty. Their U.S. hosts provided them with food, and many of the Natives came down