Historic Site

In 2007, the Lower Sioux Indian Community began managing the site through a cooperative agreement between the tribe and the Minnesota Historical Society. The Lower Sioux Agency was established in 1853 by the U.S. government to serve as administrative center for government efforts to remove the Bdewakantunwan and Wahpekute bands of Dakota to its reservation lands and to colonize them to become self-sufficient farmers. This reservation was just four percent of the land the Dakota previously inhabited.

As the United States drifted toward civil war, promises to the Dakota tribes were all but forgotten amidst the graft and corruption in the Indian service. Frustrated and provoked by a series of broken promises and by reservation policies that forced cultural change, Dakota warriors decided to go to war with the United States on a hot August Sunday in 1862. The fighting lasted six weeks and took the lives of nearly five hundred whites, mostly civilians, and an unknown but substantial number of Dakota.