Through Dakota Eyes: Narrative Accounts of the Minnesota Indian War of 1862 Edited by Gary Clayton Anderson and Alan R. Woolworth (1988. Minnesota Historical Society Press. ISBN 0-87351-216-2)
I picked up this nonfiction study devoted to the Sioux side of the 1862 conflict in Minnesota because I was interested in writing on a novel about the so-called 1862 Sioux Wart. Partway into my research, I decided that there had been too much written on the skirmish (it really wasn’t much of a war) but despite the fact I abandoned the project, I continued to read Through Dakota Eyes for pleasure. Candidly, there was very little about this book that gave me satisfaction as a reader or a historian.
My main point of contention is that there is so little narrative from the editors, the book meanders and wanders aimlessly, bumping into aspects of the conflict along the way like a pilot-less ship bumping into shoals. Narrative, putting the snippets of essays and reportage from the Indian combatants and participants on both sides of the uprising in context and would have added nuance and personal experience to the history most Minnesotans already know. Sadly, the editors provide very little such context or structure and the entire book reads like a master’s thesis in need of editing.
Then too, the individual reports and stories of the Indians wander in and out of view like a drunk on a bad binge. For whatever reason, the editors chose to interrupt one person’s story with another person’s version of the same event before continuing the first narrative dozens, sometimes hundreds, of pages, further into the book. This again is, in my humble view, a very poor way to tell a story; even a non-fiction one attempting to portray history in a scholarly light.
Overall, this book was extremely unreadable and is of value only as a collection of narratives perhaps not compiled in any other single source. Through Dakota Eyes is not a cohesive or compelling read, which, had the editors and publisher done some major re-writing of the tome, it could have been.
2 and 1/2 stars out of 5.
