Compiled and written by David R. Schleper, 2023

Ann Pow was born December 12, 1811, in Tranent, East Lothian, Scotland. Her parents were Robert Pow (1770-1854) and Jean Richardson Pow, born in 1780 in Scotland.

In Tranent, on December 19, 1830, Ann married David Kinghorn, who was born in Scotland in 1809. David’s parents were George H. Kinghorn, born in 1785 in Fogo, Scotland, and died on January 29, 1871 in Shakopee, and Agnes MacLaren Kinghorn, born in 1786 and died in Scotland in 1866.

David learned the miller’s trade. Around 1830, David and Ann headed to Ontario, Canada. David was employed as a miller for four years, according to The History of the Minnesota Valley by Edward Duffield Neill in 1882. He then worked in New York for six years. Then, in 1839, the family moved to Kane County, Illinois, where David worked in milling for three years, and then bought 160 acres of land. He later sold the land and purchased one section of Cook County, Illinois, where he farmed for ten years.

Meanwhile, Ann gave birth to twelve children: David, Agnes, George Franklin, Janet, John Mitchell, William, Robert, David, Thomas, Elsie, Margaret, and Charles Kinghorn.

In 1852, the family came to Eagle Creek, now Shakopee, Minnesota Territory, where they pre-empted 160 acres of land. He later owned eighty acres. David Kinghorn was sergeant-at-arms at the first constitutional convention in the state, was a representative in the first legislature, and for years held offices of trust in the town and county.

The family moved to Redwood, Lower Sioux Agency in 1860, when Ann was 52 years old. David taught school there for two and a half years.

In the summer of 1862, the Redwood Agency was one of the first places attacked during the U.S.-Dakota War. The government had defaulted on their treaty with the Dakota Indians. The Dakota were supposed to be paid and supplied with provisions for surrendering (or taking) their lands. The summer was extremely hot and dry, and food supplies were running low. There was no forthcoming help for the people and so in their desperation for survival, the Dakota began to attack colonists-settlements and farms.

A story has been passed down that David and Ann were rescued from the attack on the Lower Sioux Agency by their Dakota friends who hid them in a wagon and covered them with hay and took them to a place of safety, according to the Kinghorn History by Elaine Kinghorn Hill, Linda Martin, and others who have cooperated with its compilation.

The Lower Sioux Agency, or Redwood Agency, was built by the federal government in 1853 near the Redwood River in south-central Minnesota Territory. The agency served as an administrative center for the Lower Sioux Reservation of Santee Dakota. It was also the site of key events related to the U.S.-Dakota War of 1862, according to Matt Reicher at “Lower Sioux Agency.” MNopedia, Minnesota Historical Society. http://www.mnopedia.org/place/lower-sioux-agency (accessed August 29, 2024).

Four bands of Dakota—the Mdewakanton, Wahpekute, Sisseton, and Wahpeton—ceded most of their homelands in southern Minnesota with the 1851 treaties of Traverse des Sioux and Mendota. They were forced to reservations along the Minnesota River in exchange for food, supplies, and regular payments from the U.S. government. In 1853 the U.S. created the Lower Sioux Agency near Morton to issue these goods to the Mdewakanton and Wahpekute bands. An agency for the Sisseton and Wahpeton bands was built north of the Lower Agency at the mouth of the Yellow Medicine River.

The Lower Agency compound was made up of about a dozen buildings clustered around a council square. Four traders’ stores stood nearby. Laborers, teachers, merchants, and missionaries lived on-site. The agency housed officials and provisions to meet the Dakota people’s needs related to the treaties. It also built manual labor schools, mills, and blacksmith shops. David Kinghorn and family were there while David taught at the school there.

Agency workers tried to persuade the Dakota to conform to Euro-American customs. They encouraged them to give up hunting and gathering and to rely on farmed crops and livestock for food. Only about 150 of the 3200 Dakota on the reservation became farmers.

A poor harvest in 1861 followed by a harsh winter ravaged the Dakota on the reservation. In 1862, many were starving. Tribal leaders looked to agency officials to meet the government’s treaty obligations: food, supplies, and money. Previous payments had been made in June. When that month passed without a delivery of gold from Washington, Indian Agent Thomas Galbraith (from Shakopee) promised to issue the goods and money together by July 20.

In early August, Mdewakanton leader Thaóyate Dúta (His Red Nation, also known as Little Crow) met with Galbraith and the traders to persuade them to open their stores. Thaóyate Dúta asked the agent to give out food right away and pay the money later. He spoke of the stores filled with food while Dakota people remained hungry. In response, agency storekeeper Andrew Myrick exclaimed, “If they are hungry, let them eat grass or their own dung.”

After Myrick’s remark, frustration that had simmered within the Dakota for years boiled over. On the morning of Aug. 18, Mdewakanton warriors attacked the traders’ stores. Many of the traders and staff of the agency were killed, including Myrick and Galbraith’s clerk. Buildings were looted and burned down. Some of the agency’s residents fled to nearby Fort Ridgely.

The attack at the agency was the first organized incident of the U.S.-Dakota War. The six-week series of battles took the lives of more than six hundred white civilians and soldiers and an unknown number of Dakota.

In October of 1862 the trials of 392 Dakota prisoners started at Camp Release and then were moved to the agency and held in the cabin of trader Francis LaBathe. Thirty-eight of the men tried were later executed in Mankato.

Acts of U.S. Congress passed in 1863 exiled the Dakota from Minnesota. They dissolved their reservations and agencies, including Lower Sioux. According to Society of Architectural Historians (SAH) Archipedia, at the end of the war, the majority of Dakota were relocated to reservations outside Minnesota, first to the Crow Creek Reservation in what is now central South Dakota, and later to the Santee Reservation in Nebraska.

David and Ann Pow Kinghorn and family moved back to Eagle Creek according to the 1870 United States Federal Census. They had ten children, four of whom are living; nineteen grand-children and two great-grandchildren. David and Ann had two of their sons in the Civil War. On Aug. 15, 1862, Corporal George Franklin Kinghorn (1838-1914) and Private William A. Kinghorn (1843-1864) served in Company I, Ninth Minnesota volunteers. While Corporal George Franklin Kinghorn returned home, and died in 1914, Private William A. Kinghorn was taken prisoner in Memphis, where he died of disease on Sept. 6, 1864.

Ann died March 3, 1889 at age 77. She was buried at Mount Moriah Cemetery in Deadwood, South Dakota. Her husband, David, died April 24, 1890 and was buried at the Rochester State Hospital Cemetery.