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Abstract: John Pope received command of the Department of the Northwest after his defeat at Second Bull Run. Tapped to combat the Sioux population along the Minnesota-Dakota border, he created new military policies for the US Army in the Dakota Territories. Fighting the Sioux between 1862 and 1865, Pope's policies dealt with both the local issue of white-Indian relations and the national concern of the US Civil War.
Keywords: Dakota Territories, Dakota War of 1862, Indian reservations, punitive expeditions, US Army
On August 30, 1862, Sgt. Dennis Tuttle of the Twentieth Indiana Infantry Regiment sat outside Yorktown, Virginia, preparing to move into northern Virginia with the remainder of Maj. Gen. George B. McClellan's Army of the Potomac. While the Second Battle of Bull Run raged twenty-five miles outside Washington, DC, Tuttle wrote to his wife about a different, seemingly more obscure conflict. "What a terrible time they are having in Minnesota with the Indians" he wrote of what was then called the "Sioux Uprising" the initial violent outbreak in the US-Dakota Conflict of 1862 and the subsequent punitive expeditions in 1863 and 1864. "If they have risen in strength," he believed the US government would "require a strong force to put down the Sioux." He continued, "I was fearful at the very commencement of the [Civil War] that Minnesota would suffer from the Indians" He alleged, "The Sioux will have to be driven from Minnesota before they can be subdued as they are very numerous and powerful"1 Despite being stationed in what many considered the central theater of the Civil War-Virginia-Tuttle, who resided in Wisconsin when he enlisted in the Union forces, still kept his focus on the regional problems near his home state.2 Little did Tuttle know that the defeat at Second Bull Run would connect that theater to the conflict on the frontier.
Only a week after Tuttle wrote to his wife about Minnesota, secretary of war Edwin M. Stanton ordered Union major general John Pope, who recently suffered defeat at Second Bull Run, to respond quickly to the frontier crisis. Knowing the pressure placed on the Union armies in the East and now the frontier forces on the Northern Plains, Stanton ordered Pope to "employ whatever force may be necessary to...