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North Country: The Making of Minnesota
In 1862, four years after Minnesota was ratified as the thirty-second state in the Union, simmering tensions between indigenous Dakota and white settlers culminated in the violent, six-week-long U.S.–Dakota War. Hundreds of lives were lost on both sides, and the war ended with the execution of thirty-eight Dakotas on December 26, 1862, in Mankato, Minnesota—the largest mass execution in American history. The following April, after suffering a long internment at Fort Snelling, the Dakota and Winnebago peoples were forcefully removed to South Dakota, precipitating the near destruction of the area’s native communities while simultaneously laying the foundation for what we know and recognize today as Minnesota.
In North Country: The Making of Minnesota, Mary Lethert Wingerd unlocks the complex origins of the state—origins that have often been ignored in favor of legend and a far more benign narrative of immigration, settlement, and cultural exchange. Moving from the earliest years of contact between Europeans and the indigenous peoples of the western Great Lakes region to the era of French and British influence during the fur trade and beyond, Wingerd charts how for two centuries prior to official statehood Native people and Europeans in the region maintained a hesitant, largely cobeneficial relationship. Founded on intermarriage, kinship, and trade between the two parties, this racially hybridized society was a meeting point for cultural and economic exchange until the western expansion of American capitalism and violation of treaties by the U.S. government during the 1850s wore sharply at this tremulous bond, ultimately leading to what Wingerd calls Minnesota’s Civil War. A cornerstone text in the chronicle of Minnesota’s history, Wingerd’s narrative is augmented by more than 170 illustrations chosen and described by Kirsten Delegard in comprehensive captions that depict the fascinating, often haunting representations of the region and its inhabitants over two and a half centuries. North Country is the unflinching account of how the land the Dakota named Mini Sota Makoce became the State of Minnesota and of the people who have called it, at one time or another, home.
In North Country: The Making of Minnesota, Mary Lethert Wingerd unlocks the complex origins of the state—origins that have often been ignored in favor of legend and a far more benign narrative of immigration, settlement, and cultural exchange. Moving from the earliest years of contact between Europeans and the indigenous peoples of the western Great Lakes region to the era of French and British influence during the fur trade and beyond, Wingerd charts how for two centuries prior to official statehood Native people and Europeans in the region maintained a hesitant, largely cobeneficial relationship. Founded on intermarriage, kinship, and trade between the two parties, this racially hybridized society was a meeting point for cultural and economic exchange until the western expansion of American capitalism and violation of treaties by the U.S. government during the 1850s wore sharply at this tremulous bond, ultimately leading to what Wingerd calls Minnesota’s Civil War. A cornerstone text in the chronicle of Minnesota’s history, Wingerd’s narrative is augmented by more than 170 illustrations chosen and described by Kirsten Delegard in comprehensive captions that depict the fascinating, often haunting representations of the region and its inhabitants over two and a half centuries. North Country is the unflinching account of how the land the Dakota named Mini Sota Makoce became the State of Minnesota and of the people who have called it, at one time or another, home.
448 pages, Hardcover
First published May 29, 2010
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722 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews
November 22, 2010
I loved this book - Loved. This. Book. It's pretty much as perfect a book about the pre-1865 history of the Upper Midwest as one could hope to find - a great melding of existing scholarship, with attention to some key primary sources. The writing is clear and compelling, and it's going to be a book I come back to again and again over the next couple of years, both for work and for pleasure.
One thing I particularly love about this book? The full plate illustrations, plus the incredible annotation Kirsten Delegard offers below each one. They are an unimaginable luxury, utterly gorgeous, pulled from collections all over North America (and beyond) and I could (and did!) stare at them for hours.
One thing I particularly love about this book? The full plate illustrations, plus the incredible annotation Kirsten Delegard offers below each one. They are an unimaginable luxury, utterly gorgeous, pulled from collections all over North America (and beyond) and I could (and did!) stare at them for hours.
Currently reading
June 18, 2010God, what a depressing book. Turns out this state was founded entirely by killing Native Americans after lowering their quality of life step by step. It's hard to be rah rah rah for Sky-u-mah once you realize the 10,000 lakes are red with blood.
August 9, 2020
In celebration of the sesquicentennial, the University of Minnesota - probably Hy Berman - commissioned a new authoritative history of how Minnesota became a state. Mary Lethert Wingerd from St Cloud State University took up the challenge.
Wingerd's narrative begins with establishing what she sees as missing from state histories - a two hundred-year-old multicultural society where European voyageurs, different tribes living around the Great Lakes, and their mixed-blood offspring lived in relative harmony trading furs for guns and other goods. In re-writing this narrative, Wingred cites Richard White's The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815 , an award-winning book that transformed how historians approached this period of American history. White's book is on my to-read shelf, but here's a summary:
Unlike other histories of Minnesota that depict the two centuries of contact prior to Minnesota statehood as transitional, the prequel to the 'real' story of the founding of Minnesota, Wingred investigates what White's thesis means for the state history: what did the flourishing of the fur trade mean to the peoples of the North Country, what sorts of relationships were built, communities formed, and what sort of pressures blew them all apart.
Wingred's history focuses on the Ojibwe and Chief Hole-in-the-Day, the Dakota and Chief Little Crow, and the Europeans focusing on Henry Sibley and Henry Rice. For Wingred, Sibley is a very problematic figure - she sees him as someone who straddles the transition from a more multicultural North Country accommodating a plurality of peoples to one where white European greed, ignorance, fear built a racist society with devastating consequence for the Ojibwe and especially - as her narrative culminates in the 1862 war- the Dakota. Wingred covers Sibley's long history of working with/exploiting/wooing/manipulating/cheating the Ojibwe and Dakota. She is clear that he was always focused on building his own wealth and power, but she is also looking for how he still embodied some of the more egalitarian mores of an earlier period. Ultimately, Sibley will lead troops against the Dakota, imprisoning almost four hundred men, some who had been aggressors as well many who had protected European farmers and their families. Thirty-nine of these prisoners would be hung in Mankato in front of thousands of Anglo-European men, women and children while the remaining ended up prisoners at Ft. Sibley's troops also imprisoned hundreds of women, children, most dying in captivity in the river bottoms of Ft. Snelling or in the desolation of the Crow Creek reservation in Dakota Territory. Sibley will also lead troops into Dakota territory in search of Little Crow who had fled earlier with a small group. Little Crow is killed by a farmer; having abandoned hope of finding refuge among tribes in the West, Little Crow and his son are travelling back to Minnesota. He and his son are resting, eating raspberries when shot by a farmer, unaware of whom his victim was other than an Indian.
I don't know what I think of the Wingred/White thesis. North Country is so much better, richer than previous state histories as the story is less inevitable, the characters on all sides more human. And I think she is right that the Dakota/US war of 1862 is the defining moment in the history of Minnesota as a state. I am still not convinced by her tone in places - Minnesota as a "twenty-first century" dynamo? I also think she needs to recognize that the continuing failure to write a more honest history of Minnesota is matched by a continuing failure of the state to do right by the Ojibwe or Anishinaabe and Dakota and others living in the state today
Mnisota Makoce: A Dakota Place
Wingerd's narrative begins with establishing what she sees as missing from state histories - a two hundred-year-old multicultural society where European voyageurs, different tribes living around the Great Lakes, and their mixed-blood offspring lived in relative harmony trading furs for guns and other goods. In re-writing this narrative, Wingred cites Richard White's The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815 , an award-winning book that transformed how historians approached this period of American history. White's book is on my to-read shelf, but here's a summary:
It tells how Europeans and Indians met, regarding each other as alien, as other, as virtually nonhuman, and how between 1650 and 1815 they constructed a common, mutually comprehensible world in the region around the Great Lakes that the French called pays d'en haut . Here the older worlds of the Algonquians and of various Europeans overlapped, and their mixture created new systems of meaning and of exchange. Finally, the book tells of the breakdown of accommodation and common meanings and the re-creation of the Indians as alien and exotic.
Unlike other histories of Minnesota that depict the two centuries of contact prior to Minnesota statehood as transitional, the prequel to the 'real' story of the founding of Minnesota, Wingred investigates what White's thesis means for the state history: what did the flourishing of the fur trade mean to the peoples of the North Country, what sorts of relationships were built, communities formed, and what sort of pressures blew them all apart.
Wingred's history focuses on the Ojibwe and Chief Hole-in-the-Day, the Dakota and Chief Little Crow, and the Europeans focusing on Henry Sibley and Henry Rice. For Wingred, Sibley is a very problematic figure - she sees him as someone who straddles the transition from a more multicultural North Country accommodating a plurality of peoples to one where white European greed, ignorance, fear built a racist society with devastating consequence for the Ojibwe and especially - as her narrative culminates in the 1862 war- the Dakota. Wingred covers Sibley's long history of working with/exploiting/wooing/manipulating/cheating the Ojibwe and Dakota. She is clear that he was always focused on building his own wealth and power, but she is also looking for how he still embodied some of the more egalitarian mores of an earlier period. Ultimately, Sibley will lead troops against the Dakota, imprisoning almost four hundred men, some who had been aggressors as well many who had protected European farmers and their families. Thirty-nine of these prisoners would be hung in Mankato in front of thousands of Anglo-European men, women and children while the remaining ended up prisoners at Ft. Sibley's troops also imprisoned hundreds of women, children, most dying in captivity in the river bottoms of Ft. Snelling or in the desolation of the Crow Creek reservation in Dakota Territory. Sibley will also lead troops into Dakota territory in search of Little Crow who had fled earlier with a small group. Little Crow is killed by a farmer; having abandoned hope of finding refuge among tribes in the West, Little Crow and his son are travelling back to Minnesota. He and his son are resting, eating raspberries when shot by a farmer, unaware of whom his victim was other than an Indian.
I don't know what I think of the Wingred/White thesis. North Country is so much better, richer than previous state histories as the story is less inevitable, the characters on all sides more human. And I think she is right that the Dakota/US war of 1862 is the defining moment in the history of Minnesota as a state. I am still not convinced by her tone in places - Minnesota as a "twenty-first century" dynamo? I also think she needs to recognize that the continuing failure to write a more honest history of Minnesota is matched by a continuing failure of the state to do right by the Ojibwe or Anishinaabe and Dakota and others living in the state today
Mnisota Makoce: A Dakota Place
September 27, 2018
I don't usually read non-fiction, but this book felt like a story, a tragic story about Minnesota's bloody birth. In North Country, Wingerd eloquently and movingly illustrates the atrocities of Minnesota's forgotten war, the Dakota War, and demonstrates how little we have done to make reparations. And the figures that populate early 19th-century Minnesota are vividly drawn. There is Sibley, the man in conflict with his own values, who loved a Native woman, but ultimately let his anti-Native sentiment prevail, when he became instrumental in the Mankato hangings. There is Little Crow, the chief who saw the end coming, and yet decided to die alongside his warriors. There is Ramsey, Minnesota's first governor, whose conniving and greed cost many Native lives at Sandy Lake.
The story here is a very sad one, but it is one that all Minnesotans, no, all Americans, should know.
The story here is a very sad one, but it is one that all Minnesotans, no, all Americans, should know.
May 27, 2021
"North Country" is, I guess, the new Big Book on early Minnesota History--literally and figuratively. I've taught Minnesota History for 13 years and had spent the last few trying to figure out a way to get the press to send me a copy of this for free, but finally broke down and bought a copy this past winter. It is a great book, richly exploring the history of the Western Great Lakes region--the "pays d'en haut," as the French labeled it, or "Proto-Minnesota" as I call it in class--from the 1600s through the 1860s. The defining feature of the period is the Native-European/Euro-American fur trade, which thrived for around 200 years and shaped a surprisingly positive and enduring pattern of intercultural interaction between Native peoples and Europeans--but the demise of the fur trade after the 1820s eroded white-Native relations, culminating in a sudden and jarring shift to a white-dominated society in the few short years of the 1850s. Having taught this history for years I'm relieved to say that there wasn't much that was startlingly new to me here, but I can say that I did learn a lot of rich detail and found the book highly enjoyable and valuable. [Note: Wingerd sometimes goes back in the timeline and re-covers events from a new perspective in a new section or chapter without being explicit about the fact that she is doing so--so at first I was thrown off by a sense of déja vu. Once I realized this was her pattern I just rolled with it, though I wish she'd provided more segué.]
June 7, 2020
This book was used as a text in one of my college classes. I’m glad I was exposed to it there, as I may have missed it otherwise. It is well written and informative. I learned many things about my home state I had not known before; many things were extremely unpleasant to read, but they needed to be heard.
April 5, 2021
This is a comprehensive history of how Minnesota came to be a state. It's inclusive of all the threads of the history from pre-European to fur trading to the war against and displacement of the Native American/European melting pot that mutually beneficial fur trading and kin relationships created before the United States took over the state.
September 5, 2022
This book is so well written and researched. Unfortunately, the making of Minnesota has a shameful past of treating the Native Americans terribly. Another tale of White greed and avarice , often under the banner of Christianity. Knowing this history is important if ever we hope to change anything and pass the truth on to our children .
March 26, 2020
A history that shines a new light on Minnesota's past. Impressive in every way!
July 5, 2025
6 stars. Excellent history beginning with the first Europeans’ arrival in what would become Minnesota and ending with the horrific 1860s. An epic tale, but of course very real.
September 26, 2025
must read for anyone living in MN. I learned so many new things! Great insights to the early history of the state
October 30, 2014
This one was a toughie! It read more like a high school social studies book. I was fascinated about reading the history of Minnesota and the cruelty the Indians endured from the "white man". I enjoyed seeing all the local towns talked about - Hutchinson, New Ulm, St. Peter, Mankato, Howard Lake....and didn't remember hearing about the largest mass hanging in US history where 38 Sioux men were hung in Mankatoon December 26, 1862 by orders from President Lincoln.(265 were spared due to lack of evidence) How sad to think that some were most likely innocent victims.
September 4, 2010
You've got to read this fascinating history of Minnesota and its Indians. Although I've done significant reading over the years about the Dakota conflict, this book provided more insight and much more too. It begins much earlier and contained surprising descriptions of the multi-cultural nature of pre-statehood Minnesota. Superb read for those interested in history and Minnesota
November 28, 2017
Only a few chapters in so far, but I find it fascinating. More later...
March 16, 2017
Probably tied with Meridel Le Seuer's "North Star Country" for being my favorite nonfiction book about Minnesota. Incredibly eye-opening.
February 22, 2016
This is an amazing new history on MN -- including a great deal about Native American history in the Upper Midwest.
April 7, 2013
A fascinating story about how the native population dealt with the encroachment of Europeans, then how they and the white Americans swindled and stole the land from them.. all for money.
Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews