My recent Iowa trip was to the Lake Okoboji area, up in the northwest corner. Those not from this part of the Midwest probably haven't heard of it; even here in the Twin Cities, I would say it's not well known, unless you're originally from Iowa. But it's famous in that state: a large, irregular, glacier-carved lake lined with homes, summer resorts, and — I hear — religious revival camps.
While I was there, I was looking for things to do that aren't the usual lakeside drinking-types of activities, and I saw something on the map called the Gardner Cabin. A quick look told me it had something to do with a massacre, and I knew there was some history to investigate.
It turns out it's an infamous event in the region, called the Spirit Lake Massacre. It took place not long before Minnesota's 1862 Dakota War, and generally happened for the same reasons: the incursion of white settlers into Dakota land, treaties made with different groups of people with payments promised that were not made, hard winters and people starving, violence following.
This spot in what is now Arnolds Park on Lake Okoboji had become a settlement of about 40 white people, many of them related, by early 1857. They lived in a cluster of log cabins on a rise in view of the lake.
A band of Wahpekute Dakota, led by Inkpaduta, had been cut out of the Treaty of Mendota or refused to sell out their land by signing it. In the years that followed, they had run-ins with settlers in Iowa, in which the settlers were violent to the band, for instance killing Inkpaduta's brother and destroying the band's encampment. The band came to Spirit Lake (Okoboji) in March 1857. It's unclear to me what happened exactly; Abbie Gardner's memory painting shows that teepees were pitched near the cabins, and the events transpired over five days, so it wasn't sudden:
Burning Mattocks cabin.
This essay gives what seems like a reasonable explanation for the Dakota actions: the white settlement had set up housekeeping on the summer lands of the band, which had just returned from its winter location. As the writer says, it was like Goldilocks in the three bears' house, except all of the parties were armed with guns.
Thirty-six settlers ended up dead. There's no record of whether any Dakota died. The official state monuments on the site record it this way:
The pioneer settlers named below were massacred by Sioux Indians March 8–13, 1857. The barbarous work was commenced near this spot and continued to Springfield now Jackson Minn.
The names listed include Robert Clark, three members of the Gardner family, Carl Granger, Jos. Harshman, Isaac Harriot, eight members of the Howe family, four members of the Luce family, seven members of the Mattocks family, William Marble, Robert Mathieson, three members of the Nobles family, Enoch Ryan, Bertell Snyder, four members of the Stewart family, two members of the Thatcher family, and two men named Woods.
The monument plaques also say:
Miss Abbie Gardner, Mrs. Margaret Marble, Mrs. Lydia Noble, Mrs. Elizabeth Thatcher were carried into captivity. Mrs. Marble was rescued May 21, and Miss Gardner June 23, 1857.... Mrs. Noble and Mrs. Thatcher were murdered by the Indians.
What happened to the four women/girls who were taken?
Elizabeth Thatcher was young (her husband was 19). She had recently given birth; her three-week-old daughter died somehow during the violence at Spirit Lake. After six weeks of travel with the band, while crossing the Big Sioux River by Lake Flandreau, S.D. in late April, Abbie Gardner reported that Thatcher was pushed into the water and then finally shot. One of the paintings Abbie later commissioned showed this event:
Sad fate of Mrs. Thatcher
One can imagine that Thatcher's physical condition was slowing travel and possibly endangering the band, which was being pursued.
Then in early May, Margaret Marble was sold to two Dakota men who took her back into Minnesota and turned her over to U.S. authorities there. As happened later with Abbie, these men were likely bounty hunters for the Minnesota or U.S. government.
In June, Lydia Noble (cousin of Elizabeth Thatcher) was despairing of the situation and refused to come out of a teepee. Abbie's account is that Noble was dragged out by Inkpaduta's son Roaring Cloud and beaten to death.
Soon after, three other Dakota men in Western clothes arrived and purchased Abbie, taking her back into Minnesota to state authorities in Saint Paul. They were clearly bounty hunters, paid $1,000. According to the interpretive material on the walls at the Gardner site, they were all on the side of the U.S. in 1862 Dakota War. So not exactly loyal to Dakota causes.
Abbie Gardner, of course, is the focus of the historic site. She was 13 in 1857 (sometimes said to have been 14). After she was ransomed, she soon married Casswell Sharp, while still 13. He was an 18-year-old relative of the Noble and Thatcher families. They had two sons, born in 1859 (when Abbie was 15) and 1862, and a daughter who died very young. They moved around the Midwest and had multiple houses burn down. I gather they divorced at some point in the 1870s or later, which seems pretty unusual for the time.
Abbie tried to reclaim her family's cabin and land immediately after she was ransomed, but it had been purchased by someone else and she was not allowed to — which is an interesting commentary on American property laws, since less than a year had passed. Eventually, in 1891 she purchased the cabin and land, where visitors had made this memorial pyramid from lakeshore rocks:
She opened the grave site and cabin as a tourist attraction soon after her return, and wrote a book about her experiences in captivity. The cabin was the first tourist attraction at Lake Okoboji, which seems like a grim way to go on vacation at a lake, but such was the late 19th century. She convinced the state to erect a monument to the massacre victims, and money was allocated to erect a much taller obelisk with the plaques I've quoted. It was dedicated in 1895.
Abbie Gardner Sharp operated a small museum with her sons until her death in 1921. She commissioned an unknown artist to paint four scenes of the massacre and her experiences in captivity, which are contained in the building adjacent to the cabin.
Last night with the Yanktons
After her death and the later deaths of her sons, a bench was placed as a headstone for their graves across the street from the main site. On the back of it, it reads:
Abigail Gardner Sharp
Orphaned and enslaved by hostile Sioux
She lived to embrace in Christian benevolence the American Indian and all mankind.
The state of Iowa became the owner of the site in 1942. In 1974, the State Historical Society restored the cabin to its original appearance. The four corners of the cabin are the original oak logs and sit on their original location.
The museum Abbie opened contains the cultural objects she collected to tell the story of her time and captivity to people who visited, keeping the memory alive of earlier decades as the 20th century arrived. Butter churns, iron-bound trunks, and firkins sit beside cases of Dakota beadwork and arrowheads. The walls tell the story from her perspective, with just a glimpse of how the Wahpekute Dakota may have perceived it. There's little thought given to what may have led them to act as they did.
While we were at the Gardner Cabin, I said that Abbie seemed like the inverse of our local Jane DeBow Gibbs, who with her husband Heman Gibbs ran a farm around the same time, just north of what is now Saint Paul. They welcomed the nomadic Dakota people each year as they traveled through on their way back and forth from the northern ricing lakes, sharing space with them.
Who knows what happened back in 1857 by Spirit Lake, and whether a 13-year-old eyewitness to part of it could even understand it, or interpret it fairly if she did, given what had happened before the Wahpekute Dakota arrived there that day. I suspect the Dakota descendants have their own version of it, but I don't see mention of it on the interweb, and the state of Iowa and its historical society have not worked to find it the way Minnesota has begun to reconcile with the truths of its Dakota War.
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