Small monuments

I'm a fan of This American Life. I've probably written before about how I adore Ira Glass who hosts the show. It is one of my favorite walking time podcasts, my only regret is that there is only one show a week...what will I listen to on the other 6 days? 

I had gotten a little behind and over the weekend listened to episode #479, "Little War on the Prairie" which aired November 23rd.  This hour long story details the Sioux uprising of 1862 in Minnesota, an event that ended in the hanging of 38 Dakota men in Mankato, Minnesota.  It is a horrifying piece of history, told with the help of current Dakota living in Minnesota.  The lead up to the execution is long and twisted, with wrongs carried out and bad decisions made on all sides.  However, there is no doubt that the American government and settlers treated the Native Dakotans abysmally.  Determined not to let this image ruin their public perception, the event was, until recently, pretty much ignored in American and Minnesotan history.

Early in the broadcast, the reporter accompanies a Dakota woman to a site of a small memorial marking the spot where 5 settlers were murdered by 4 Dakota men, the event attributed with starting what is sometimes called the "U.S.-Dakota war." He reads the inscription on the monument and then comments that his companion is shaking her head. She responds, sadly, "It leaves so much out."  Then  you can almost hear her shrug her shoulders as she says softly, "It's a small monument, you can't get everything on there."

Wow.

How can we ever make a monument big enough to explain the complexities of war? How can we ever record any meaningful event in our life with enough words to convey the emotions and feelings associated with it?  Instead, we go through life creating small monuments, short paragraphs that try to capture some essence of what has happened to us...but fall so short.


http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/479/little-war-on-the-prairie







The Inscription Reads


On a bright Sunday afternoon. August 17, 1862, four young Sioux hunters, on a spur-of-the-moment dare. They decided to prove their bravery by shooting Robinson Jones, the postmaster and storekeeper at Acton in western Meeker County. Stopping at his cabin they requested liquor and were refused. Then Jones, followed by the seemingly friendly indians, went to the neighboring Howard Baker cabin, which stood on this site.

Here the whites and the Indian engaged in a target-shooting contest. Suddenly, the Indians turned on the settlers and without warning shot Baken Viranus Webster, another settler and Mr. and Mrs. Jones. Mrs. Baker, Mrs, Webster, and several children escapes by hiding. Then the Indians rode off shooting Jone's adopted daughter, Clara D. Wilson as they passed the Jones cabin.

The indians fled south to their village forty miles away on the Minnesota River. There they reported what they had done, and the Sioux chiefs decided to wage an all-out war against the white triggered the bloody Sioux Uprising of 1862.

The bodies of the settlers were buried in a single grave in the New Lutheran Cemetery. Near present-day Litchfield. In 1878 the state of Minnesota erected a granite monument there. This site, where the Makers cabin stood. Was similarly marked in 1909.