Resources

The stories told in both books took place only a few years after the Battle of the Little Bighorn, and during years when the Great Plains tribes were staging their final attempts to hold onto their ancestral lands in the face of White expansion. Within Dakota Territory, much of the land Irish and his team were marking for the railroad had been off-limits just years before, or remained so. In their wake, settlers rapidly claimed land, leading to tens of thousands of settlers impacted by the blizzards of the Hard Winter.

The westward rush had a very dark side, one I merely brush upon in these works. The land these settlers were rushing onto, of course, had been the home of various Native peoples, and they were being displaced with callous disregard, greed, and prejudice. It is a topic that deserves its own honest, humbling, and healing attention, and it is beyond the scope of my two books.

The reader is encouraged to learn more about the ramifications that railroads such as the Dakota Central and expansion in general had upon the culture and lives of the people who had lived on this land for centuries before the White man came to “claim the empty spaces.” Some well-researched and thoughtful resources are listed immediately below (descriptions are mostly taken from official synopsis statements):

• Life Painted Red (2023) by Chuck Raasch
  Well-researched non-fiction about a young White woman named Cora who came west in 1884 to teach Native children in Nebraska and Dakota Territory. (She taught at multiple locations central to the surveying work of Irish and his crew just four years earlier, and some people overlap as well.) She hoped her missionary work would improve the lives of the Dakota and Lakota Sioux people by helping them assimilate into white culture, following the predominant government policy at the time. But after years of living among the Native people, it was Cora’s perceptions of life, love, and faith that were transformed. Then Cora met Sam Campbell, a man from Scottish and Sioux stock. They fell in love and were married, though the match made national headlines after Cora’s family disowned her. The couple struggled to find a place in the American frontier, straddling two worlds. Chuck Raasch, the book’s author, noted in a recent interview, “Humans are not perfect, and neither is their history. Some … equate acknowledging the sins of our past with being unpatriotic, anti-American. Just the opposite is true; learning from history’s hard truths and transgressions is the act of an enlightened patriot.”
• The 2023 PBS documentary The American Buffalo – A Film by Ken Burns does an excellent job with the wider story of the darker ramifications of white expansion westward, one most commonly taught from an expansionist perspective. Ken Burns and his in-depth research and presentation provides an honest and sensitive telling of a very uncomfortable – but true – part of our history.
• Many Voices, Many Stories, One Place: Engaging Scholarship, Audience, and Diversity at Historic Fort Snelling. This new exhibit introduces visitors to the full 12,500-year history of the historic site and helps them understand the enduring significance of Fort Snelling and Bdote today. The exhibit team spent more than seven years conducting research, developing prototypes, and engaging with the site’s diverse community stakeholders in order to capture the complexity of this history.
• As a part of the PBS U.S. History Collection, The West Transformed, 1865-1900 covers the time after the Civil War, when Americans, white and Black, continued to move westward as they dreamed of open lands and economic opportunities, facilitated by federal policies. But not all benefited: the indigenous and Mexican American peoples living there lost their lands and faced discrimination, while Chinese immigrants, who labored in mines and on transcontinental rail systems, were legally excluded from citizenship.
• Unrepentant Dakota Woman: Angelique Renville and the Struggle for Indigenous Identity, 1845-1876 (2023) by Linda M. Clemmons
  Author Linda Clemmons works from extensive primary sources, including letters written by Angelique herself—a rarity for American Indian women who are all too often silent or ignored in the historical record. Unrepentant Dakota Woman follows Angelique’s remarkable struggle for Indigenous identity and self-determination, while revealing new insights into relations between missionaries and their converts, education of American Indians, disparities between Native and Euro-American conceptions of family, and the challenges faced by Dakotas during one of the most tumultuous periods in their history.
• Beneath the Same Stars: A Novel of the 1862 U.S.-Dakota war (2018) by Phyllis Cole-Dai
  On the Sioux reservation in southwestern Minnesota, Indians desperate for food and freedom rise up against whites in the region. Sarah Wakefield, the wife of a physician, is taken captive with her two babies by the warrior Ćaske. As war rages, little does she know how entwined their lives will become. This is the gripping story of two people, caught between worlds, who are willing to do almost anything to defend those they care about—including each other. But the drama is bigger than themselves. Tragic forces have been set in motion.…