Compiled and written by David R. Schleper, 2022
Snásna (snah-snah) was born in Mdote on April 28, 1839. Her Dakota name, Snásna, translates to Tinkling, according to the Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux Community. Both she and her mother, Wamnuka (Barleycorn), were members of the Kapoza band of Mdewakanton Dakota.
While growing up, Snásna lived for a time with her relatives, including Mary Brown and Jennie Robertson, and also boarded for a time with the family of Dr. Thomas Smith Williamson. From 1849 to 1852, Snásna attended Williamson’s Presbyterian mission school at Kapoza village, where she learned to read and write. She also became fluent in English.
In late 1853, Snásna and her mother moved with other Mdewakanton to the Lower Sioux Indian Reservation. They moved from Kapoza, which was near present-day South St. Paul on the upper Mississippi River, to the new reservation on the Minnesota River.
In 1854, at the age of fifteen, Snásna married Wakinyanwaste (Good Thunder). Wakinyanwaste offered gifts to her mother in the Dakota tradition, but Snásna insisted on marrying in a church. Snásna and Wakinyanwaste were married in the Episcopal mission established by Rev. Samuel Dutton Hinman. In 1861, Snásna and her husband became the first Dakotas confirmed as Christians at the Mission of St. John, the Episcopal church at the Lower Sioux Agency. After that, they went by the names Maggie and Andrew Good Thunder, according to Minnesota Historical Society.
In early August 1862, Snásna Tinkling Maggie Good Thunder and Andrew Good Thunder’s oldest daughter Lydia died at the age of seven.
Upon hearing from one of her uncles that a “nice looking girl” had been captured, Maggie and her mother arranged to trade her pony for the hostage, 14-year-old Mary Schwandt. Mary had been captured while fleeing eight miles from New Ulm with a family she worked for. Maggie sent her mother to negotiate the trade.
“When she brought this girl, whose name was Mary Schwandt, she was much larger than the one I had lost, who was only seven years old; but my heart was so sad that I was willing to take any girl at that time. The reason why I wished to keep this girl was to have her in place of the one I lost. So, I loved her and pitied her, and she was dear to me just the same as my own daughter,” said Snásna Tinkling Maggie Good Thunder Brass.
Snásna and her mother hid Mary under blankets and buffalo robes and would tell the warriors that she had run away. Snásna explained her determination to protect Mary, “I thought to myself that if they would kill my girl they must kill me first. Though I had two of my own children at the time with me, I thought of this girl just as much as of the others,” said Snásna in Narration of a Friendly Sioux, in 1901.
Snásna dressed Mary in Dakota clothes and beaded moccasins for her, thinking that she was less likely to be hurt that way.
Mary Schwandt said that she called Maggie her “Indian mother.” She was aware that Maggie was fluent in English, but that they seldom spoke “because it made the other Indians suspicious.” Mary also looked after Maggie’s two young children, who Mary knew as Winona and baby CheeChee, according to The Story of Mary Schwandt: Her Captivity During the Sioux Outbreak of 1862.
On September 23, 1862, Snásna dug a hole in her tent. She hid Mary and her two children in the hole and covered it with poles. She then sat on the poles nonchalantly to protect them while their camp was thrown into pandemonium as many planned to flee to Canada
With the arrival of Colonel Henry Hastings Sibley and his army nearby on September 25, 1862, Snásna had sadness in parting with Mary at Camp Release. “When I turned this dear child over to the soldiers, my heart ached again; but afterwards I knew that I had done something which was right.”
After the war, Maggie and Andrew Good Thunder lived at the internment camp at Fort Snelling, where their other two children died. In the spring of 1863, most Dakota were expelled from Minnesota and were removed to Crow Creek Indian Reservation in present-day South Dakota. However, Good Thunder joined the Sibley expedition as a scout, and Maggie was given permission to move to Faribault, Minnesota. Around 1865, Snásna separated from Good Thunder and moved to the Santee Sioux Reservation in Nebraska, where many Dakota had moved after Crow Creek.
At the Santee Reservation, she married Charles Brass (Mazazezee), a respected Dakota scout, after which she became known as Maggie Brass. They had one son and two adopted daughters. Charles died in 1894 of injuries he received while serving under General Alfred Terry and General George Armstrong Custer, according to Kenneth Carley in the book The Dakota War of 1862: Minnesota’s Other Civil War, and “Heroine of the Sioux Massacre” in the July 20, 1901 Minneapolis Journal.
In the fall of 1894, historian Return Ira Holcombe edited and published survivor Mary Schwandt-Schmidt’s narrative in the St. Paul Pioneer Press. The matron at the Santee Sioux Reservation saw the article and showed it to Maggie. Maggie Brass wrote a letter to Mary, leading to regular correspondence between the two women. Soon, she was on her way to St. Paul to meet Mary. Snásna said of their reunion, “It was just as if I went to visit my own child.” She and Mary became very close, and Maggie would continue to visit Mary at her home once a year.
Snásna Tinkling Maggie Good Thunder Brass died on April 24, 1908, in Knox County, Nebraska. She was buried at the Santee Catholic Cemetery.
Bibliography
Carley, Kenneth. The Dakota War of 1862: Minnesota’s Other Civil War, 1976. p. 76-79.
“Heroine of the Sioux Massacre.” Minneapolis Journal, 20 July 1901.
Schwandt, Mary. The Story of Mary Schwandt: Her Captivity During the Sioux Outbreak of 1862.
“Snasna (Maggie Brass).” Minnesota Historical Society. www.mnhs.org/usdakotawar/stories/history/snana-maggie-brass.
Snásna. Narration of a Friendly Sioux, 1901.