Dakota in Exile: The Untold Stories of Captives in the Aftermath of the U.S.-Dakota War

In Conflicted Mission, Clemmons (history, Illinois State Univ.) began her chronicle of the Minnesota frontier in 1835 with the arrival of missionaries who endeavored to "save" the Dakota. While living and working with the Dakota into the early 1860s, the missionaries documented how the mistreatment of Native peoples set the stage for the U.S.-Dakota War of 1862. The author's latest work focuses on the U.S.-Dakota War and its catastrophic consequences to the Dakota, including the mass execution of 38 Dakota men in Mankato, MN, in 1862. Many of the men who were spared the gallows by President Abraham Lincoln were imprisoned for several years at Iowa's Camp Kearney while their families were dispersed to the Crow Creek Reservation. In 1866, the men were released and allowed to reunite with their families at a reservation in the Nebraska Territory. The Dakota were unable to return to their homelands since Minnesota had banned them from its boundaries.