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which displayed “Here Were Hanged 38 Sioux Indians,” Clarence Darrow stated, “I would never

believe that the people of a civilized community would want to commemorate such an atrocious

crime,” or in 1937 when George Ackerman of Chicago stated, “[the people] ought to forget the
incident and attempt to keep it from the minds of their children.”8 The white population in this

region either wanted to honor their heritage, or just put the war behind them, and move forward.

To change this mentality, the community must allow for the revision of old materials,

as well as the inclusion of new material from recent Dakota War scholarship. One major factor

which plagues the Dakota remembrance is the simple way the white population mentions this

Native American group. Referenced as the “Sioux,” various books, monuments, and verbal

discussions give a negative misleading name to the Dakota people. Used by their Algonquin

enemies, the term Sioux translates to “demon-like” or “snake-like enemy.” The severity of this

misnomer plagues the Dakota population, as for the most part, white settlers before the conflict
thought of their group as a peaceful one, as Dakota is translated to “friends [or] allies.”9 Before

the hostilities commenced, the friendly group of Native Americans often participated in trade

with white settlers in the Minnesota River Valley. Frederick Fritsche stated in 1909, “As I had a

good deal of time for seven years in Minnesota been among those Indians, and had the

impression that they were good people, I did not believe that they would do that [describing the
early settlement attacks].”10 Once the conflict escalated, the broader, and more questionable

term “Sioux” would plague the Dakota, and its use would continue into the twenty-first century.

8 Melodie Andrews, “The U.S. Dakota War in Public Memory and Public Space: Mankato’s
Journey Toward Reconciliation,” in The State We’re In: Reflections on Minnesota History (St.
Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2010), 53.
9 Kenneth Carley, The Dakota War of 1862: Minnesota’s Other Civil War (St. Paul: Minnesota
Historical Society press, 1965), 1.
10 Louis Albert Fritsche, Memories of the Battle of New Ulm: Personal Accounts of the Sioux
Uprising, L.A. Fritsche’s History of Brown County, Minnesota (1916), ed. Don Heinrich
Tolzmann (Westminster, Maryland: Heritage Books, 2007), 11.