The Story of Nancy McClure, Captivity Among the Sioux by Nancy McClure

Huggins said the exceptions were, sometimes, married men and missionaries. Eli Huggins agreed with Stephen Riggs’s assessment that it was “exceedingly common” for military officers stationed on the frontier to have a temporary relationship with a Native American woman. We’ve already seen the context of John S. All the actors played real, if unrecognized, roles in the real-life drama we call ‘history.’ Some of those relationships resulted in the births of real children. These were real relationships between real men and women.

But I share the sources, thin as they are, to underline the point that the questions I have raised in this series about relationships between army officers and Dakota women are not esoteric. Marsh had allied himself with a Dakota band via kinship: that he had a relationship with a Dakota woman who, it is said, was carrying Marsh’s child the day Marsh died.Įvidence is scattered and insubstantial enough to leave me wondering, not convinced. But the story is complicated by a source suggesting that while stationed at Fort Ridgely, John S. I make no claim to solving the mystery of Marsh’s deadly bravado. The monument in the Fort Ridgely Cemetery marking the graves of the soldiers killed at Redwood Ferry August 18, 1862. He would not have so resolved had he known or, if knowing he had reflected that he would find himself in one of the Sioux villages.” Captain Marsh decided to cross the stream, thus escaping the Indians’ fire, and make his way toward the fort along the south bank. “At length a point was reached where the cover was too thin. Folwell explained that after the ambush, Marsh and some of his men retreated under cover of the brushy tree-line on the north bank of the river until,

Other survivors headed the opposite direction, toward Fort Ridgely. No one has adequately explained what Marsh was doing at the time he drowned, hours later while trying to cross the Minnesota River toward the Lower Reservation. But to hear the story survivors told, Marsh brushed off every caution urged by settlers fleeing the Agency and marched half his command to their deaths in a Dakota ambush at Redwood Ferry. Was he “gallant” or “misguided” for marching boldly out of Fort Ridgely the morning of August 18, 1862, to put down the rumored unrest at the Lower Sioux Agency? Marsh was an officer with front-line experience at Bull Run in Virginia. Marsh of the 5th Minnesota Volunteers, Company B has always been a mystery to me. But upon a close reading of the texts, we are left to wonder.Ĭaptain John S. The file of leads appears to be straight-forward.

This post is a classic exercise in doing history.

The Story of Nancy McClure, Captivity Among the Sioux by Nancy McClure