Beyond the Margin

By Joe Spear

Listen to the monuments

How we face events in history can leave a community with an identity to embrace and inspiration to shape a better future.

History informs but also can be motivating. It can also be dangerous. We know, as Irish statesman Edmund Burke said, those who don’t know history are “destined to repeat it.”

Mankato history has plenty of fodder to offer lessons and chances to “not repeat it.”

The U.S.-Dakota War that culminated in the hanging of 38 Dakota in Mankato on Dec. 26, 1862, stands as Mankato’s most significant historical event. History has judged it the largest mass execution in U.S. history.

And the reconciliation effort that started nearly a hundred years later in the 1970s with longtime Mankato businessman Bud Lawrence and tribal leader Amos Owen is remarkable if not legendary. That the events of 1862 could somehow bring people together in the place of the occurrence is nothing short of amazing.

We should be grateful we have such a poignant example of the reckoning and forgiveness around one of the most horrific moments in U.S. and Minnesota history.

And even today, people can discuss the implications. Couch-occupying historians have raised arguments and issues from time to time on who suffered the most through loss of life and the severity of suffering.

Hundreds of white settlers died, those historians argue, comparing it to “only” 38 Dakota. But 1,200 Dakota elders, women and children were marched to an internment camp at Fort Snelling in the winter of 1862-63. Many died along the way in horrific conditions.

We can put those stories to rest with the words inscribed on a stone bench at the Dakota memorial on Main Street and Riverfront Drive that says: “Forgive everyone everything.”

That epithet is a small example of the community not repeating history.

A stone marker that lauded the hanging site as a monument to justice in 1912 was quietly removed in the decades after and sat in a Mankato warehouse until former Mayor Stan Christ removed it and took it to a place he said he will never reveal.

Christ makes the list of Mankato’s most interesting people. He resigned the office of mayor in 1999 and quietly left town under the cover of darkness saying only he didn’t like the way the city was being run.

Christ, an undefeated three-time state champion wrestler, made perhaps his biggest contribution shaping the peace in Mankato by his stalwart commitment to it and his ability to move a severalhundred pound stone to a dark place.

But Mankato offered another history lesson in the 1860s.

Just six months after the end of the Dakota War, Minnesota soldiers were fighting the Civil War in the bloody Battle of Gettysburg.

The 1st Minnesota Infantry Regiment was the first unit of all the states to volunteer to fight in the Civil War after the Confederacy attacked Fort Sumter. The unit was not only the first but also deemed the key to the Union winning the Battle of Gettysburg.

Minnesota’s young men took to the charge to advance, double time, to an oncoming Confederate unit that far outnumbered it and would have made a significant break in the Union lines.

Only 47 of the 262-person 1st Minnesota Regiment survived the day. Today the 2nd Battalion, 135th Infantry Regiment that now has its base in Mankato ties its history to the 1st Minnesota. Both remarkable events have been memorialized with appropriate monuments. Local sculptor Tom Miller created the Kasota stone buffalo statue in Reconciliation Park. A few decades later, a memorial to the Dakota who were hanged was erected in a scroll monument with a teepee-like structure. On one side is a list of those hanged. On the other there is a poem by local poet Katharine Hughes and a prayer by Dakota Elder Eli Taylor.

Local and state Civil War veterans are honored by The Boy in Blue statue in historic Lincoln Park. It was resurrected from a former statue that fell into decay decades ago and occupies a majestic place surrounded by a fountain in the Lincoln Park neighborhood where the original once stood.

About 680 soldiers from Blue Earth County served in the Civil War.

Both monuments offer an identity of the place Mankato became and helped shape the place it is. Both represent a remarkable reconciliation, an admirable effort at peace.

Reconciliation and peace are in short supply these days. We can learn from our history.

Visit the monuments and consider the lessons.

Joe Spear is editor of Mankato Magazine. Contact him at jspear@mankatofreepress.com or 344-6382. Follow on Twitter @jfspear.