Henry Hastings Sibley: Divided Heart Review

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Rhoda Gilman has written an authoritative and interesting account of Henry Hasting Sibley's life. Although Sibley's entire life and career centered around the upper midwest, he was involved in a number of different activities, from the fur trade to representing Minnesota as its first state governor. He had many dealings with the Sioux (and other) Indians in Minnesota and the Dakota Territory, producing the "Divided Heart" of Gilman's subtitle.
Sibley was born in Detroit in 1811, a town known for its cultural diversity at the time, and he knew French and French ways. He first worked for the American Fur Company on Mackinac Island, but then was put in charge of the company's operations on the upper Mississippi. This is when he built his famous stone house at Mendota, across the river from Fort Snelling. He went to Washington in 1848 to help secure recognition of Minnesota as a territory. He was able to cede lands from the Sioux in 1851 and was elected first state governor in 1857. He opposed the harsh policies against the Indians popular with the federal government at the time, but to no avail. In 1862, as the head of the state militia, he was instrumental in subduing the Sioux at Wood Lake during the Minnesota Uprising. The following year he led an expedition into Dakota Territory to reduce the remaining Sioux. After this successful campaign he retired to St. Paul, where among other things, he was president of the Minnesota Historical Society for a number of years.
Sibley left all his papers to the Society and Gilman makes excellent use of them. She writes in a very forceful style and her book should remain the definitive biography of Sibley for years to come. Highly recommended.

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Congressman, governor, military leader, and senior statesman--no person played a longer, more influential, or more varied role in the shaping of Minnesota than Henry Hastings Sibley (1811-91). Yet Sibley's history reveals universal tensions about the duality of the nineteenth century frontiersman who is at once an accommodating trade partner of the Indian/European/Metis worlds and the conquering government official of the ever-expanding West. Rhoda Gilman has spent over thirty years examining Sibley--through hints and fragments of stories that Sibley himself left in articles, an unfinished autobiography, and scores of family letters--and uncovers in this perceptive and balanced biography the complexities of a man who embodied these clashing extremes. As Gilman writes in her preface, On the broader stage of national history Sibley's life spanned nineteenth-century America. Rooted in the political and social establishment of the old Northwest Territory, he witnessed the colonizing of a continent and its people, the closing of the frontier, the agony of civil war, and the explosive birth of an urban, industrial society. He was keenly conscious of what he conceived to be the nation?s destiny, and he identified closely with it. An heir to the Indian policy of Lewis Cass, who had managed to dispossess the Great Lakes tribes without war, Sibley belonged to the generation that was left to pay the price of that betrayal in blood and shame. And unlike Cass, he had personal ties to the Dakota people that placed him in a deeply ambiguous position. Gilman sets the controversial but altogether human Sibley against the tapestry of trade, politics, frontier expansion, and intercultural relations in the Upper Mississippi valley, and reminds us that throughout his life Sibley was poised to become a national figure but always chose to remain in the place he loved and had helped to name "Minnesota."

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