Compiled and written by David R. Schleper, 2022

On New Year’s Day 1850, Eli Pettijohn, born Jan. 28, 1819, and in Minnesota Territory since 1841, married Lucy Prescott, of Shakopee, at Fort Snelling. It was the highlight of the Fort Snelling social season.

Lucy was half Mdewakanton Dakota, the daughter of Na-he-no-Wenah (Spirit of the Moon) and Philander Prescott. Lucy’s parents were Catherine Totedutawin, a Wahpeton Dakota, and sister of Wapahaṡa, and Keeiyah (Flying Man), brother of Maȟpíya Wičhášta (Cloudman).

Rev. Edward D. Neill performed the ceremony, and the guests included the officers in full uniform, their wives, the United States Agent for the Dakotas, and family, the bois brules of the neighborhood, and Indian relatives of the mother.

The ceremony presented a “symbolic tableau of the cultural transition that was taking place from one generation to the next in Lucy Prescott’s family. Her Dakota relatives viewed the wedding from the hallway, not as full guests or participants, but as interested observers—and also as a people whose culture Lucy was leaving farther behind as she married an Anglo-American,” said Jane Lamm Carroll in Cultural Identity Across Three Generations of an Anglo Dakota Family in Minnesota History, Summer 2012.

Despite Naginowenah’s forty-year marriage to Philander, she only spoke the Dakota language, although she perfectly understood both French and English. She raised her children as Anglo-Americans. One of her children was Sophia Oyate Kagewin Prescott.

Sophia was born Jan. 24, 1844, at the Old Military Reserve at Fort Snelling, Minnesota Territory. She married Emsley Jackson Hamilton on June 7, 1867, in Richfield. Emsley was born Jan. 7, 1842, in Quincy, Illinois, son of William Hamilton and Elizabeth Zeiger. He arrived at Minnesota by 1860.

Emsley was a private at the First Regiment of the Minnesota Infantry during the U.S. Civil War. He became a prisoner of war at Andersonville Prison in Georgia from 1864-1865.

Andersonville Prison (also known as Camp Sumter) was a Confederate prisoner-of-war camp during the final fourteen months of the Civil War. The site was commanded by Capt. Henry Wirz, who was tried and executed after the war for war crimes. It was overcrowded to four times its capacity, with an inadequate water supply, inadequate food, and unsanitary conditions. Of the approximately 45 thousand Union prisoners held at Camp Sumter during the war, nearly 13 thousand died. The chief causes of death were scurvy, diarrhea, and dysentery.

Robert H. Kellogg, sergeant major in the 16th Regiment Connecticut Volunteers, described his entry as a prisoner into the prison camp, May 2, 1864:

“As we entered the place, a spectacle met our eyes that almost froze our blood with horror, and made our hearts fail within us. Before us were forms that had once been active and erect; stalwart men, now nothing but mere walking skeletons, covered with filth and vermin. Many of our men, in the heat and intensity of their feeling, exclaimed with earnestness. ‘Can this be hell?’ ‘God protect us!’ and all thought that he alone could bring them out alive from so terrible a place. In the center of the whole was a swamp, occupying about three or four acres of the narrowed limits, and a part of this marshy place had been used by the prisoners as a sink, and excrement covered the ground, the scent arising from which was suffocating. The ground allotted to our ninety was near the edge of this plague-spot, and how we were to live through the warm summer weather in the midst of such fearful surroundings, was more than we cared to think of just then,” said Robert H. Kellogg in the book Life and Death in Rebel Prisons in 1865.

When Emsley survived, on June 7, 1867, he married Sophia Oyate Kagewin Prescott. They lived in the area, including Shakopee, for many years. On Feb. 10, 1902, Sophia Oyate Kagewin Prescott Hamilton died, and was buried at Valley Cemetery in Shakopee.

Emsley Jackson Hamilton died in Minneapolis on Oct. 24, 1922. He was buried at Valley Cemetery, where a tombstone mentions that he was a private in the Civil War, and was a prisoner of war in Andersonville Prison, and was one of the few who survived the awful experience.