Little Crow and Abraham Lincoln and thirty eight nooses

Cougar Face

   The end of the frontier seemed to occur immediately in Minnesota as the scene in Minnesota around 1862. After years of broken treaties an egg stealing incident lead to a massacre and a preemptive strike by the Sioux Indians n the settlers of Western Minnesota. The Sioux failed to get other major tribes in the region to join the war against this young expansive country that was experiencing a civil war. For Six weeks an tense slaughtering war was waged along the Minnesota frontier and the Siux smashed and men arrested all over their former country. Three hundred were condemned to be hanged to avenge the murder of some three to four hundred women and children who were brutally slain by hyped up Soux in the fort weeks of the war.

 Author Scott Berg narrates tis conflict with his book called "Thirty Eight nooses" as eventually Abraham Lincoln pardoned many of hundreds Indians much to the anger and chagrin of the local Minnesota population that wanted blood after this uprising. Much of this book is about Little Crow, the reluctant chief of the Indians who wanted to avoid war and bloodshed but like Many chiefdom s of North America had real little authority in controlling the wild pinger male members of horse raiding societies. The book follows Henry Sibley  and the tactics that were used to quickly and surprisingly subdue this revolt. He used the old tactic to use Indian rivalry from other tribes and into internal Sioux factions attests more than firepower to the ability of Sibly  to successfully wager such a war far from civilization. The Sioux war of 1862-4 was the beginning of a Westward expansion to destroy the last vestiges of Sioux Western Indian power and Minnesota was the NorthWest of this time. This book also follows Abraham Lincoln and his role in deciding the fate of some three hundred Indians accused of crimes and mass genocide against settlers. Lincoln interceded and saved many Sioux who hadn't committed some of these brutal crimes against civilians and many Sioux paid the price for this praising with the effective and extreme campaign against Indians by a White society bloodthirsty for revenge. Little Crow would be killed by one of these settlers as he was hunting with is son secretly returning to Minnesota. Little Crow and his uprising during the Civil War is often a historical minor footnote nut it represented one of the last major and serious Indian uprisings of the era as Berg to point.