Charles Duncan’s life is a
microcosm of the frontier experience in nineteenth-century America. Born in Iowa County, Wisconsin, in 1847, to Robert
and Rachel (Gard) Duncan, he moved with his family to New Auburn, Minnesota, at
a time when Minnesota was still a territory, not a state. The Sioux Indians (also referred to as the
Dakota) were dominant in the area.
Treaties between the Dakota and the United States had sometimes been
broken by the government, and finally, roused with anger, the Indians entered
upon violent attacks not only on military sites such as Fort Abercrombie, but
also on white settlers, including women, children, and even infants.
Mrs. Justin
Kreiger, an eyewitness to some of the violence, told what the settlers were up
against:
"Mr. Massipost had two daughters, young ladies, intelligent
and accomplished. These the savages murdered most brutally. The head of one of
them was afterward found, severed from the body, attached to a fish-hook, and
hung upon a nail. His son, a young man of twenty-four years, was also killed. Mr.
Massipost and a son of eight years escaped to New Ulm. . . . The daughter of
Mr. Schwandt, enceinte [pregnant], was cut open, as was learned
afterward, the child taken alive from the mother, and nailed to a tree. The son
of Mr. Schwandt, aged thirteen years, who had been beaten by the Indians, until
dead, as was supposed, was present, and saw the entire tragedy. He saw the
child taken alive from the body of his sister, Mrs. Waltz, and nailed to a tree
in the yard. It struggled some time after the nails were driven through it!
This occurred in the forenoon of Monday, 18th of August, 1862."
Fortunately, Charles’s father, Robert Duncan, had made
friends with some of the Sioux, who warned him to leave the area before the
all-out assault began in what would come to be called the Dakota War of
1862. This allowed Robert to get the
family to the relative safety of Fort Snelling in eastern Minnesota and almost
certainly saved their lives. In
December, thirty-eight Sioux were hanged at Fort Snelling for rape and murder
of settlers. More than 300 had actually
been sentenced to death, but President Lincoln had commuted all the death
sentences except for the thirty-eight.
About a year later in the fall of 1863, the U.S. soldiers
operating out of Fort Abercrombie attacked Little Crow and a band of warriors
near the Pembina River, resulting in the surrender of the leader and about 200
of his warriors, who were held at Pembina, a military outpost at the confluence
of the Red River and the Pembina River very close to the Canadian border. Early
in 1864, Little Six and Medicine Bottle were also captured and delivered to Pembina, and late
in February Major Joseph R. Brown set out with the captive Indians (all except
Little Six and Medicine Bottle) for Fort Snelling.
The records show that at about this same time, on February
27, 1864, still four months shy of his sixteenth birthday, Charles Duncan
fudged on his enlistment papers, saying he was seventeen (the required age for military service) and enlisted with the Independent Battalion
Volunteers, Cavalry Co. D (Hatch’s Company).
In March, he was mustered into the Army and in August was sent with his
company to Fort Abercrombie where they were under orders to patrol the area
near Red River (today the boundary between North Dakota and Minnesota). According to Fort Abercrombie’s web site,
“Minnesota Volunteer soldiers manned the fort when area settlers sought shelter
there. The ‘regular’ U.S. Army soldiers had been withdrawn during the Civil War
and had been replaced by the Minnesota Volunteer Infantry.”
The Civil War over, Charles Duncan, who had initially
enlisted for a period of three years, continued to serve at Fort Abercrombie
until his honorable discharge in May 1866.
The Fort Abercrombie web site lists the various activities the fort
supported. It “guarded the oxcart trails
of the later fur trade era, military supply wagon trains, stagecoach routes,
and steamboat traffic on the Red River. It also was a supply base for two major
gold-seeking expeditions across Dakota into Minnesota . . . and served as a hub
for several major transportation routes through the northern plains.” The Dakota War and these various activities
all typify the America of the 1860s and give us a glimpse, through Charles
Duncan’s eyes, of what life was like at those times. And in those eyes it is possible to catch a
glimpse of both the terror and the hope of the times.
Sources:
“Charles A. Duncan’s
Service: Hatch's Independent Battalion, Minnesota Cavalry Dakota Territory,
February 1864-June 1866.” Ancestry.com. n.d. Web. 21 Mar. 2013. http://o.mfcreative.com/f4/exports/9/9a64eb43-b388-4a5f-a541-8df56de63f16/Charles%20Duncan%20during%20Civil%20Wa.pdf
“Dakota War of 1812.” Wikipedia. 2013. Web. 21 Mar 2013. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dakota_War
“Dakota War of 1812.” Wikipedia. 2013. Web. 21 Mar 2013. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dakota_War
Fort Abercrombie State
Historic Site. 2013. Web. 21 Mar 2013. http://history.nd.gov/historicsites/abercrombie/index.html
“Fort Abercrombie State Historical Site.”
Wahpeton-Breckenridge Chamber of Commere. n.d. Web. 21 Mar. 2013. http://www.wahpetonbreckenridgechamber.com/visitor_fort.ht
“Fort
Snelling.” Wikipedia. 22 Mar.
2013. Web. 22 Mar. 2013.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Snelling
Hubbard, Lucius
Frederick, et al. “Hatch’s Independent
Battalion of Cavalry.” Minnesota in Three
Centuries: 1655-1908. Vol. 3. 1908. Web. 21 Mar. 2013. http://archive.org/details/minnesotainthree03hubb
© Eileen Cunningham, 2013
© Eileen Cunningham, 2013
