Compiled and written by David R. Schleper, 2022
Thaóyate Dúta (tah-o-yah-tay-dew-tah) was a Dakota leader and orator. He was born in Kapożia (ka-po-zi-az), in what is now South St. Paul. Kapożia translates to swift-footed or unencumbered, reflecting how easy it was to move from the east to the west side of the Mississippi River, close enough to the St. Croix and Minnesota rivers to serve as a beehive of trading. He was the eldest son of Waŋbdí Tháŋka (Big Eagle) and Minnei-okha-da-wiŋ, or Musical Sound of Water Running Under the Ice.
Thaóyate Dúta, also known as Little Crow, often visited the Faribault Trading Post in Prairie des Français (later called Shakopee). Sarah-Iréne was the seventh of nine children of Oliver Faribault and Wakan Yaŋke Wiŋ, or the Woman Who Sits at the High Place, and was born in 1847. She was one of the four girls who grew up at the Faribault Cabin and Trading Post on the Prairie des Français (French Prairie) on the Rivière Saint-Pierre (St. Peter’s River), and she remembered Thaóyate Dúta.
Sarah-Iréne recalled that Little Crow would stop on his way from St. Paul and usually camped with his attendants on the vacant prairie opposite the Faribault Trading Post (and across the road from Dangerfield’s in Shakopee today).
Thaóyate Dúta (ca. 1810 – July 3, 1863)’s given name translates to His Scarlet Nation, but he was known as Little Crow because of his grandfather’s name, Čhetáŋ Wakhúwa Máni, (literally, Hawk That Chases/Hunts Walking) was mistranslated by the whites to Little Crow.
According to Sarah-Iréne, “My father was fond of him (Thaóyate Dúta) too, and said he was always honest. Little Crow was often at our house and was much loved by us children. He used to bring us candy and maple sugar.”
“We used often to go to the sacred stone of the Indians, and I have often seen the Sioux warriors (Dakota) around it. It was on the prairie below town. There was room for one to lie down by it, and the rest would dance or sit in council around it. They always went to it before going into battle,” said Sarah-Iréne in the book Old Rail Fence Corners: The A.B.C.’s of Minnesota History, edited by Lucy Leavenworth Wilder Morris. “They left gifts which the white people stole. I can remember taking some little thing from it myself. I passed a party of Indians with it in my hand.”
Sarah-Iréne remembered that one Dakota woman saw what she had and became very angry. “She made me take it back. She seemed to feel as we would if our church had been violated.”
Sarah-Iréne remembered, “The Indians did not understand the white man’s ways. When the white man had a big storehouse full of goods belonging to the Indians and the Indian was cold and hungry, he could not see why he could not have what was there, belonging to him, if it would keep him warm and feed him.”
Thaóyate Dúta is notable for his role in the negotiation of the Treaties of Traverse des Sioux and Mdota of 1851, in which he agreed to move his band of Dakota to a reservation near the Minnesota River in exchange for goods. However, the government reneged on its promises to provide food and annuities to the tribe. He was also a leader in the Treaty of 1858.
Artist Frank Blackwell Mayer described his as “a man of some forty-five years of age and of a very determined and ambitious nature, but withal exceedingly gentle and dignified in his deportment. His face is full of intelligence when he is in conversation and his whole bearing is that of a gentleman.”
Thaóyate Dúta participated in the U.S.-Dakota War of 1862. His diplomatic and oratorical skills caused him to be head speaker for the Dakota people. As Thaóyate Dúta told the U.S president, “Tell our Great Father that it is hard for him to expect our hearts to be good when he permits men with bad hearts to do us wrong so often.”
By 1862, the Dakota people were dying. “A plague of cutworms in the fall of 1861 had ravaged reservation crops that could have been stored. Late treaty payments made buying food impossible. Dakota women and children moaned with hunger, their muscles wasting, arms thin as sticks, abdomens distending with the classic symptom of extreme malnutrition. They began to die of starvation,” said Curt Brown in a series of articles in the Minneapolis Star Tribune in April 2015.
“Dakota families ate whatever they could scavenge: unripe potatoes, roots, berries. When government officials agreed to pass out some soda crackers, one soldier described the scene in his diary as men scrambling ‘like wild cats’ over each other.”
“‘These poor creatures subsisted on a tall grass which they find in the marshes, chewing the roots and eating the wild turnip,’ wrote Sarah Wakefield. ‘Many died from starvation or disease caused by eating improper food. It made my heart ache.’” Curt Brown noted, “While Dakota parents watched their children starve to death, pork and grain filled the Lower Sioux Agency’s new stone warehouse…”
Thaóyate Dúta participated in most of the battles during the U.S.-Dakota War. After a defeat at the Battle of Wood Lake, Thaóyate Dúta fled west.
Thaóyate Dúta was on foot, slipping back into Minnesota in 1863, along with fewer than twenty, including his son, Wowinape, 16. Thaóyate Dúta and Wowinape were just northeast of Hutchinson as evening fell on July 3, 1863. They stumbled upon a raspberry patch and laid down their guns. The father and son stood munching red berries in the twilight.
Nathan Lamson, a 62-year-old farmer, and his son, Chaucey, knew there was a state bounty on Dakota caught wandering in the Big Woods if a private citizen brought in a scalp, according to Curt Brown. Lamson’s first shot hit Thaóyate Dúta just above the hip. Thaóyate Dúta headed toward the gun smoke near the poplar tree, his gun cocked against his shoulder. Chauncey jumped from behind some cover and they both fired. Thaóyate Dúta’s shot whizzed by Chauncey’s head. Chauncey’s bullet struck Thaóyate Dúta’s gun stock and ricocheted into his chest.
Knocked to the ground, Thaóyate Dúta died gazing up at the sky above the land he loved. Chauncey would get $75 for the scalp, and his father would net $500 — double the annual salary of the era – from the 1864 Minnesota Legislature for “great service to the state in shooting Little Crow.” Not everyone approved. “Such a spectacle reflects sadly upon the humanity of Christian people,” Dr. Asa Daniels wrote in 1908, noting that other states fought Indians but didn’t display “the scalp of a fallen foe.”
The Minnesota Historical Society received his scalp in 1868, and his skull in 1896. Other bones were collected at other times.
In 1971, Thaóyate Dúta’s remains were returned to his grandson, Jesse Wakeman (son of Wowinape), for burial. Unlike most tombstones, Little Crow’s bears three dates. The first is his birth year, estimated as 1818. Then comes July 3, 1863, the day of his death in the raspberry bushes near Hutchinson. Finally, there is September 27, 1971, the day his remains were buried.
For more information about Thaóyate Dúta, Ṡakpe II, Tínṫa Otuŋwe, and the Dakota, Hoċokata Ti [ho-cho-kah-tah-tee], the Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux Community’s (SMSC) cultural center and gathering space, is worth visiting. The public exhibit, “Mdewakanton: Dwellers of the Spirit Lake,” enhances the knowledge and understanding of the Mdewakanton Dakota people and their history. Hoċokata Ti is at 2300 Tiwahe Circle, Shakopee, MN 55379. (952) 233-9151.