Enemies or friends: Pioneer family struggles

Minnie Buce Carrigan

Carrigan began writing and speaking about her 1862 experiences

By Rob Carrigan, robcarrigan1@gmail.com 

My own family struggled with it. Enemies or friends? 

My great-grandmother Minnie Buce Carrigan described the horror in her book, "Captured by the Indians."

"My father began talking to the foremost Indians. My brother has told me that father asked them to take all his property but to let him and his family go," wrote Minnie Buce Carrigan. 

"But the Indian replied in the Sioux language, "Sioux cheche," (the Sioux are bad.) He then leveled his double barreled shot gun and fired both barrels at him. He dropped the baby--she was killed--and running a few yards down the hill, fell on his face, dead. The same Indian then went to where my mother had sat down beside a stone with little Caroline in her lap, reloaded his gun and deliberately fired upon them both. She did not speak or utter a sound, but fell over dead. Caroline gave one little scream and a gasp or two and all was over with her. The cry rang in my ears for years afterward. My father was thirty-three and my mother thirty years of age when they were so cruelly murdered by the Indians."

She was captured, and then finally liberated 10 weeks later.

Yet, she later worked as a cook on the Rosebud Sioux reservation. My Granddad Owen, grew up there.

A memorial in Find A Grave, by Bill Wilcox, talks of Minnie Buce Carrigan's life.

"Minnie (Wilhelmina) was born in Germany to parents Gottfried and Wilhelmina Buce (sometimes spelled Buse or Busse). In 1858, Gottfried, Wilhelmina, and their three children, August, Minnie, and Augusta, came to America and settled at Fox Lake, WI where daughter Amelia was born. 

In the spring of 1860, with five other families, the Buce family moved to Minnesota. After spending a short time in Cannon Falls, where daughter Caroline was born, the family moved farther west to Renville County and settled in the northwest quarter of Section 35, Flora township, an area known as the Middle Creek settlement." 

Another daughter, Bertha, was born here. Several Middle Creek settlers were killed by Indians in an attack on August 18, 1862, the first day of the Dakota uprising. On that day, Minnie's brother, August, was sent to a neighbor's place (the Roessler family) on an errand and found everyone there murdered. The Buce family then fled to a cornfield. 

Later, when they attempted to reach a wooded area, the Indians discovered them and killed Minnie's father and mother, her sister Augusta, and sisters Bertha and Caroline, who were in the arms of their parents. Minnie and her surviving siblings, August and Amelia, were taken captive and spent ten weeks among the Dakotas before all captives were freed at Camp Release. Following their release, the siblings were parted and taken in by three separate families. 

"By age 15, Minnie was on her own, working in the summers and going to school in the winter. In 1879 she married Owen Carrigan. They had six children and farmed in the southeast quarter of section 22, Boon Lake township. On April 13, 1898, she was appointed postmaster of Lakeside, a position previously held by her husband. Mr. Carrigan died in 1898 at Hutchinson, Minnesota, and is buried there. Minnie died in 1912 and is buried in Evergreen Cemetery, two and a half miles west of their farm site," according to Wilcox.

Minnie Buce Carrigan was seven years old in August 1862, when she witnessed the deaths of her mother, her father, and four younger siblings at the hands of Dakota warriors at her home on Middle Creek in Renville County, Minnesota. Carrigan and her ten year old brother, Charlie,  were held captive for six weeks.

In 1884,when she was twenty-nine, Carrigan began writing and speaking about her 1862 experiences. Her best known story is Captured by the Indians.

"Carrigan’s story about a soldier named Louis Thiele was square one in my inquiry into Indian hating in Minnesota in the wake of the U.S.-Dakota War. More about “Indian Hating” in a moment. First, the story Carrigan recorded, dating to late September or early October 1862:" notes research by Carrie Zeman.

“One day while she was staying at Camp Release, Mr. Thiele came into our tent. He told Mrs. Krus how the Indians had killed his wife and child. He assured her that her husband was alive and that she would soon see him again. Then he went on talking about how he and a half-breed named Moore, buried the dead. They had buried quite a number before he had courage enough to bury his wife and child. When he came upon their bodies the dogs had eaten most of them and there was nothing but a few pieces of their clothes. He said he knelt down beside them and cried, prayed, and cursed the Indians, all in one breath. He swore that he would shoot Indians all the rest of his life. At last the half-breed could stand it no longer and asked Thiele if he was going to kill him, too. Mr. Thiele did not answer at which Moore threw down his spade and went away, leaving him to bury his dead alone," according to Carrigan's narrative.

"After burying what dead he could that day, [Thiele] started for the Fort, not caring where he went. With nothing to eat but corn and wild plumbs [sic], he wandered until he met Sibley’s men. He asked the General to let him have some soldiers to bury the dead. General Sibley could not send a force until two weeks later and there was nothing left of the bodies but bones and clothes. They simply dug a hole beside the skeletons, rolled the bones in and covered them up.”

"The story caught my attention for two reasons," says Zeman. "First, I thought I had already encountered 'Mr. Thiele' –Louis Thiele, who first showed up on my historical radar in 1999 as a farmer from Flora Township, Renville County, listed as a refugee at Fort Ridgely during the war, where he reported that his wife and child had been killed," Zeman wrote.

"Second, researching a very early Dakota War novel, I had read Louise K. Barnett’s classic book The Ignoble Savage: American Literary Racism 1790-1890. In it, Barnett identified a stock character in popular mid-19th century American frontier fiction called an “Indian Hater.”

In 1851, American historian Francis Parkman explained the phenomena of Indian Hating: “It is not easy for those living in the tranquility of polished life fully to conceive the depth and force of that unquenchable, indiscriminate hate, which Indian outrages can awaken in those who have suffered them. The chronicles of the American borders are filled with the deeds of men, who, having lost all by the merciless tomahawk, have lived for vengeance alone; and such men will never cease to exist so long as a hostile tribe remains within striking distance of an American settlement.” (quoted in Barnett, 129)

Louis Thiele was one of the citizen soldiers besieged at Fort Ridgely when Van Vorhes penned the “ANNIHILATION” manifesto on August 22.

"But is there proof that Thiele ever did more than threaten to kill Indians in revenge?

"Later, I re-read the accounts of the discovery of Justina Kriegher by members of the Birch Coulie burial party. Kriegher, a German settler wounded on the first day of the war and left for dead, survived for weeks on the prairie, too weak to do more than crawl. When two of Sibley’s soldiers saw a figure creeping toward them through the grass, one soldier raised his rifle and took aim at the head of flowing dark hair. The other stopped him. The soldier who almost shot Kriegher, supposing she was an Indian, was Louis Thiele," notes Zeman.

"Thiele also showed up again as a witness in three of the 1862 Military tribunal trials of Dakota warriors accused of murdering civilians in Flora Township, Renville County. When President Lincoln had the nearly 400 death conviction sifted for evidence of murder of rape, only 39 of the convictions were allowed to stand–including all three against whom Thiele testified. Two of the three were executed on December 26, 1862."

"Later in this series, we’ll meet Louis Thiele again in the story of the attack outside New Ulm on the wagons of chained prisoners being transported to Mankato.

"150 years and too many wars later, we are more aware of the deep and lingering effects of trauma people sustain when they are victimized or witness the victimization of people they love. I can’t imagine what Louis Thiele experienced in 1862," says Zeman.

But historians currently argue that “moral restraint” was the factor that kept ethnic cleansing in Minnesota from crossing the technical line into genocide in the wake of the war. Isn’t it esoteric to insist that body counts are the sole measure “moral restraint” when we know the camps of soldiers guarding the Dakotas were populated with avowed Indian Haters like Louis Thiele?

"Minnie Carrigan’s brother, Charlie (August) Buce, only ten years old when their parents were killed, also grew up to be a soldier, and, it seems, an Indian Hater, says Zeman.

Carrigan wrote:

“My brother left for Montana at the age of 19. When we were at Camp Release he came one day and told me that he saw all the Indians that were to be hung but the one who killed our parents was not among them. He cried and said, “Yes, he is a good Indian now. Just wait until I get big I will hunt Indians the rest of my life and will kill them, too, if I can find them.” For two years after we parted he would write to me regularly but then we heard no more of him. I am inclined to think that he was killed at the time Gen. Custer made his last stand, for that spring I received his last letter.”

On December 26, 1862, United States Volunteers of the State of Minnesota carried out the largest mass execution in U.S. history at Mankato after the Dakota War of 1862. Companies of the 7th, 8th, 9th, 10th Minnesota Infantry Regiments, and Minnesota Cavalry oversaw the hanging of 38 men: 35 Santee Sioux and three biracial French/native American, for their involvement in the war crimes committed during the uprising.

The crimes included intentional killings, mutilations and rapes of hundreds of unarmed civilians. A USV military tribunal reviewed nearly 500 cases, of which 303 received a death sentence, but President Lincoln requested the court files. He reviewed them, placing the rape cases at the top, and pardoning 265. Episcopal Bishop Henry Benjamin Whipple urged leniency to which Lincoln responded that he had to take a balanced approach. His position and dismissals were unpopular in Minnesota. To commemorate the 50th anniversary of the event a large granite marker was erected that stood at the site until 1971, when the city took it down. 

Today, a different monument marks the execution site. Across the street are two monuments to the indigenous people in what it called Reconciliation Park. The Blue Earth County Library, Main street and Reconciliation Park cover the immediate vicinity of the execution site.

Younger Minnie Buce Carrigan

Just a few things I inherited from my granddad

Three generations: Dr. Lars Olov Bygren, with son Magnus and grandson Ludvig in Stockholm.

Umeå University photo

You are what your grandfather ate

By Rob Carrigan, robcarrigan1@gmail.com

Rain or shine, good times or bad, my grandfather always answered same way.

When anybody asked him, “How is it going?” or “How are you?” or “How do you do?”

His answer was always the same: “Still eating.”

He had other little endearing comments and sayings of course (for example, calling black table pepper the Sioux word for fly poop).  But “Still eating,” was his trademark and it reflected his hardscrabble existence as a homestead rancher on the Western Slope of Colorado.

Owen Carrigan, my granddad, filed his first Colorado homestead claim 1914. After subsequently 'proving up' on that, and additional filings, he ran cattle, sheep and other livestock and harvested alfalfa hay for nearly half a century on Morapos Creek near the Hamilton turnoff, between Craig and Meeker. Prior to that, he hailed from Minnesota country, by way of the Dakotas. He came here to escape Asthma and finish recovering from a broken leg he suffered when a horse fell with him while punching cows for a Texas-owned outfit in the Dakotas.

His mother, my great grandmother, Minnie Buce Carrigan, wrote the popular book “Captured by the Indians, Reminiscences of Pioneer Life in Minnesota.” It is an account of the murder of her father, mother, two sisters, and her subsequent captivity among the Sioux after the 1862 uprising and her later experience as an orphan. In the book, she describes her life as a young German immigrant girl prior to her capture and the ten weeks she lived with her captors until being freed by the United States Army.

I guess that was why I was fascinated by a recent Radiolab piece airing on National Public Radio.

"Lars Olov Bygren, a professor at Umeå University in Sweden, grew up in a remote village north of the Arctic Circle. It wasn't an easy place to be a kid, and he has cold, hard data to back him up: book after book of facts and figures on the lives of generations of the town's residents, from their health to their financial success, to detailed records on the boom and bust years for crops. The numbers tell a story of wild swings in fortune — feasts one year, harsh winters and famine the next. Looking at all those records, Olov realized he had a natural experiment on his hands. Along with Sam Kean, Olov explains the bizarre ripples through time that he discovered ... ripples that are totally unexpected, and honestly, sort of terrifying," says the podcast Radiolab.

The village, according to Time Magazine's John Cloud article in 2010, is both unique in its record keeping and it's isolation.

"Norrbotten is so isolated that in the 19th century, if the harvest was bad, people starved. The starving years were all the crueler for their unpredictability. For instance, 1800, 1812, 1821, 1836 and 1856 were years of total crop failure and extreme suffering. But in 1801, 1822, 1828, 1844 and 1863, the land spilled forth such abundance that the same people who had gone hungry in previous winters were able to gorge themselves for months," according to a recent

Back in the 1980s, Dr. Bygren, a preventive-health specialist, now at the prestigious Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, began to wonder what long-term effects the feast and famine years might have had on children growing up in Norrbotten in the 19th century —and not just on them but on their kids and grandkids as well," said the Time Magazine piece that I read as research after hearing the Radiolab podcast.

So Dr. Bygren drew a random sample of 99 individuals born in the Overkalix parish of Norrbotten in 1905 and used historical records to trace their parents and grandparents back to birth. By analyzing meticulous agricultural records, he and two colleagues determined how much food had been available to the parents and grandparents when they were young.

"For instance, Bygren's research showed that in Overkalix, boys who enjoyed those rare overabundant winters — kids who went from normal eating to gluttony in a single season —produced sons and grandsons who lived shorter lives. Far shorter: in the first paper Bygren wrote about Norrbotten, which was published in 2001 in the Dutch journal Acta Biotheoretica, he showed that the grandsons of Overkalix boys who had overeaten died an average of six years earlier than the grandsons of those who had endured a poor harvest. Once Bygren and his team controlled for certain socioeconomic variations, the difference in longevity jumped to an astonishing 32 years. Later papers using different Norrbotten cohorts also found significant drops in life span and discovered that they applied along the female line as well, meaning that the daughters and granddaughters of girls who had gone from normal to gluttonous diets also lived shorter lives," the Time Magazine story said.

Basically the data suggested that a single winter of overeating as a youngster could begin a biological chain of events that would lead one's grandchildren to die decades earlier than their peers did.  

In essence, "you are what your Granddad ate," to some extent.

The findings were particularly pronounced in what your ancestor ate in the formative years time frame of 9-11 years old.

That must have been about the time Owen Carrigan, "Granddad" as I knew him, starting cowboying from Dakotas to Arizona, and Texas. And he might have developed the "Still eating" signature response from the sporadic nature of a trail chuck wagon existence.

For my part, that could be either good or bad. But either way, if you ask how I'm doing, I will tell you. "I am still eating."

Still eating is enough, here in the hardscrabble

Two bodies of water in Rio Blanco County bear granddad’s name

By Rob Carrigan, robcarrigan1@gmail.com

His answer was always the same: “Still eating.”
Rain or shine, good times or bad, my grandfather always answered that way, when anybody asked him, “How is it going?” or “How are you?” or “How do you do?”
He had other little endearing comments and sayings of course (for example, calling black table pepper the Sioux word for fly poop). But “Still eating,” was his trademark and it reflected his hardscrabble existence as a homestead rancher on the Western Slope of Colorado.
Owen Carrigan, my granddad, filed his first Colorado homestead claim 1914. After subsequently 'proving up' on that, and additional filings, he ran cattle, sheep and other livestock and harvested alfalfa hay for nearly half a century on Morapos Creek near the Hamilton turnoff, between Craig and Meeker.
Prior to that, he hailed from Minnesota country, by way of the Dakotas. He came here to escape Asthma and finish recovering from a broken leg he suffered when a horse fell with him while punching cows for a Texas-owned outfit in the Dakotas.
His mother, Minnie Buce Carrigan, wrote the popular book “Captured by the Indians, Reminiscences of Pioneer Life in Minnesota.” It is an account of the murder of her father, mother, two sisters, and her captivity among the Sioux after the 1862 uprising and her subsequent experience as an orphan. In the book, she describes her life as a young German immigrant girl prior to her capture and the ten weeks she lived with her captors until being freed by the United States Army.
In a state where “whiskey is for drinking and water is for fighting over,” two bodies of water in Rio Blanco County bear granddad’s name, Owen Carrigan Reservoir and Owen Carrigan Ditch. I am proud of the fact that, as a family, we go way back around here. Not everyone can say that.
Even after he sold the ranch, he counted irrigation as one of his favorite chores. He liked to make the ditches run. I am probably around to tell stories today, however, because he had a healthy respect for fast moving water. He saved my life one morning when I was about six or seven when he fished me out of the opening in irrigation tube near the 'Grand' as he called it, or Colorado River, before I could be sucked down the tube into oblivion.
Grandma would have given him hell, however, if he somehow managed to allow one of the grandkids to drown while he was checking ditches.
When I was very young, my grandfather would take me with him as he caroused downtown Grand Junction. The trip usually involved a jaunt into a hardware store where he ended up buying me something like an electric drill, or bench vice, or a set of wood chisels.
I think his reasoning was twofold. He was concerned about whether or not I would have the proper tools to survive in the modern world; and he wanted to encourage my creative side, that he saw when I spent hours trying to make boats, cars, spaceships, and such, with the tools on his extensive work bench at the back of his house.
He was a pretty fair blacksmith, ferrier, and agricultural mechanic, himself. Though he tended to cobble stuff together, using whatever scrap material he could scare up.
Another part of those downtown trips involved a stop at one or more bars in town. My granddad liked to make his own beer, but he also always enjoyed company while he drank it. And the bars offered that. That might have been where I picked up my eventual calling — as I listened and learned the art of story telling from the old cowboys, and steam tractor mechanics, and loggers and miners and bums.
Some of the stories were even about him, though I was young enough, and was mostly concerned with the Coca-Cola in a beer glass, I don't recall all the details.
Always, always, always, the folks in the bar seemed to enjoy the salutatory greeting when his shadow graced the door. "“How is it going?” or “How are you?” or “Howdy do?” they called out.
But as my grandfather was prone to say, there really was only one answer that could come back.
“Still eating,” his reply. And that was more than enough, then.

Clear to me, like rattlesnake's tale

Steam rises from the hot swirling water to soften philosophy in front of me

 By Rob Carrigan, robcarrigan1@gmail.com

 It became clear to me. Simplified. Like the Navajo woman staring out to the west in a R.C. Gorman painting. It is not what you say that is important. How do you say it?
The woman, of course, has big feet and hands, abnormally so, as she stares off the page. An inverted sphere, or bowl, describes the light to me. A faint shadow, back on the unseen wall behind her jet-black hair, fills in the detail. The geometric design on the bowl reminds me that not all of life is a circle.
The steam rises from the hot swirling water to soften philosophy in front of me. It is an intended, programed, planned softening.
Folklore says the Ute figure Ouray spent a lot of time in the latter part of his life, languishing in his namesake springs. Utes thought of the springs as sacred ground. Others say the waters softened the edges on his Arthritis, or aches and pains from the strange path he followed.
Ouray popped up like a Forest Gump figure, from culture to culture. From family connections with the Jicarilla Apache, to the French, Spanish and Mexican traders of old Santa Fe, to the negotiations (perhaps with no authority) in Washington ... with Otto Mears, Kit Carson, and the "great white father" Abe Lincoln. Being an Indian was more complicated then. Choose your battles, careful who you befriend. Choose your enemies.
My own family struggled with it. Enemies or friends? Great-grandmother Minnie Buce Carrigan described the horror in her book, "Captured by the Indians."
"My father began talking to the foremost Indians. My brother has told me that father asked them to take all his property but to let him and his family go. But the Indian replied in the Sioux language, "Sioux cheche," (the Sioux are bad.) He then leveled his double barreled shot gun and fired both barrels at him. He dropped the baby--she was killed--and running a few yards down the hill, fell on his face, dead. The same Indian then went to where my mother had sat down beside a stone with little Caroline in her lap, reloaded his gun and deliberately fired upon them both. She did not speak or utter a sound, but fell over dead. Caroline gave one little scream and a gasp or two and all was over with her. The cry rang in my ears for years afterward. My father was thirty-three and my mother thirty years of age when they were so cruelly murdered by the Indians."
She was captured, and then finally liberated 10 weeks later.
Yet, she later worked as a cook on the Rosebud Sioux reservation. My Granddad Owen, grew up there.
Though, in those days, they didn't give you much time to grow up. He worked as a cowboy with a cattle outfit moving herds from the Dakotas to Arizona with the seasons, from age 12, until a horse threw him and he broke his leg. He later homesteaded here in Colorado.
Growing up and Southwestern Colorado, I had some experiences myself with Navajo, Ute, Hopi and the Pueblos of New Mexico. I saw a measure of racism toward Native Americans. Things that were just not fair, not right.
 Listen to me... I will tell you more.
As the Navajo proverbs says, "There is nothing so eloquent, as a rattlesnake's tail."