“If they’re hungry, let them eat grass”

When you think of the savagery of the Old West, Minnesota doesn’t leap to mind. Montana, yes; South Dakota, yes; Arizona, yes, but not a Midwestern state that sits on the eastern edge of the West. Yet, Minnesota played a pivotal role in the bloody conflict between whites and Indians that spanned nearly three decades: it was here that the first great Plains Indian war began; that one of the most notorious Indian uprisings took hundreds of lives, and where America saw its “greatest mass exe