BWW Reviews: 38 NOOSES Finds the Mark

The last generation has seen something of a boom in historical narratives that focus on small events with potentially large implications (the latter often inflated in the inevitable subtitle, which in this case is Lincoln, Little Crow, and the Beginning of the Frontier's End).

Encountering any one of these endeavors, questions arise. Is the tale worth telling? Is the author engaging this story only because few, if any, others have? Will it stray from history into eccentricity? Will angels be made to dance on the heads of pins?

In 38 Nooses, Scott W. Berg provides satisfying answers all around and does so with an uncommonly swift and sure narrative style that comes as a breath of fresh air to those who are already inclined to interest in the subject and provides a chance for those who aren't to dive in without fear of getting lost or nodding off.

The story recounts the Dakota War that took place between the late summer of 1862 and the spring of 1863 and ranges from the Minnesota frontier, just then experiencing the boom in settlement that would drive all but a small remnant of the Native American population (mostly various tribes of the Sioux nation in this case) further west, to Lincoln's Civil War White House, where the administration's principal energies were understandably committed to waging war and shaping the Emancipation Proclamation.

That's a big, potentially awkward, mouthful for a small book to swallow. Berg makes it look easy and natural.

By having the big names--Lincoln himself, his private secretary John Nicolay, Union General John Pope--present and well accounted for but on the sidelines, and focusing more on those generally known only to enthusiasts of the subject, if at all--the Dakota Sioux leader Little Crow, the earnest Episcopalian missionary Henry Whipple, the white captive Sarah Wakefield and her protector, a Dakota warrior named Chaska--the book is able to weave some fine narrative magic. I won't give away which fates befall which characters, but they range from the terrible tragedy of an unjust hanging to rifle shots fired from ambush to melancholic survival to a dogged, lifelong pursuit of humane reform. Each hits home.

Of course, an underlying theme of nearly all "western" literature that deals with White Settler/Native American conflict is whether or not the worst consequences were avoidable. It's to Berg's credit that he avoids the common traps and neither beats a drum nor buries the question so deeply it can be ignored:

"For the whites of Minnesota, the killings in the settlements constituted a series of out-and-out massacres. For Little Crow and especially for the members of the wartime tiyotipi, the perspective was different. For centuries the Dakota had fought the Ojibwe in blood conflicts and in disputes over hunting grounds, and for centuries they had seen their adversaries as unyielding. In a battle against the Ojibwe, no one was assumed to be a noncombatant; men, women and children were expected to fight to the end, and subterfuge or surprise was often necessary to gain the upper hand. Indeed, it seems that some of the Dakota attackers viewed the passivity of their white victims as a contemptible cultural weakness, one that increased rather than lessened their anger....Rifles and arrows, of course, made for cleaner kills; the wounds left by war clubs and tomahawks were far more ghastly and the bodies sometimes unrecognizable, a result the Dakota warriors understood as evidence of courage and personal risk even as whites saw only an expression of barbarism and savagery."

That doesn't sound like two peoples who were destined to get along and Berg doesn't pretend otherwise. One can remain angry, even bitter, at White America's long litany of broken treaties, the deep corruption of the average "Indian Agent" and the often senseless concomitant savagery of white settlers and soldiers (savagery that very decidedly did not have the same kind of broad cultural sanction, though it might as well have, given how much winking and nodding and paying for Indian scalps went on) without pretending that Native Americans were flower children who somehow might have been easily assimilated or even accommodated if only the milk of human kindness had flowed a bit more freely:

"For an Indian chief, such a promise bore considerable weight. The Dakota understanding of time often presented whites with a confounding lack of linearity; for Governor Dallas, fifty years was a long, long time, but in Little Crow's mind, any pact made by his grandfather was as present as the early-summer sun now thawing the Red River."

It's in the space created by such gaps in understanding that this story plays out:

Young Dakotas murdering a white family in what was probably a senseless dispute based in common arrogance and wounded pride. The immediate ratcheting of long-simmering tensions and grievances into an all-out Dakota assault, led by Little Crow, that wiped out hundreds of settlers before being blunted by local militia and a diversion of Minnesota troops bound for Union service in the east (some of whom would make a legendary stand on the second day at Gettysburg the following summer). The inevitable spread of gossip and rumor fueling a backlash that swept up hundreds of Dakotas who took no part in atrocities--as opposed to fighting soldiers in an act of war--or, in some cases, took no part at all. The legal wrangling in St. Paul and Washington that led first to military tribunals that condemned over three hundred Dakota to hang and finally led to thirty-eight actual executions (the source of Berg's title) when Lincoln commuted the vast majority of the sentences. The painful aftermath as the Dakota, innocent and guilty alike, are humiliated and pushed off the last of their land. The sincere but ultimately doomed efforts of well-meaning whites to bring about the kind of reform that somebody, at least, might have found satisfying. And finally, the subsequent march of the Dakotas' fellow Sioux to the much better known events at Little Big Horn and Wounded Knee.

The tale is familiar in its outlines, then, but Berg has found a connection between the long scope of nationalist and tribal history on one hand and the tremulous quality of individual fates on the other that does full justice to the full title's claim and makes this as definitive an account of the subject at hand as the general reader is ever likely to encounter or need.

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