Manatako city i Blue Earth county i Minnesota i USA

Arkiv: Blue Earth County, Minnesota Genealogy
Länk: Mankato, Minnesota
Alias:

1852-

Mankato Township was not settled by European Americans until Parsons King Johnson in February 1852, as part of the 19th-century migration of people from the east across the Midwest.

1858-05-11

New residents organized the city of Mankato on the day Minnesota became a state. The city was organized by Johnson, Henry Jackson, Daniel A. Robertson, Justus C. Ramsey, and others.

• Ishtakhaba, also known as Chief Sleepy Eye, of the Sisseton band, was said to have directed settlers to this location. He said the site at the confluence of the Minnesota and Blue Earth Rivers was well suited to building and river traffic, and yet safe from flooding.

1862-12-26

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 3 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.

A popular story says that the city was supposed to have been named Mahkato, but a typographical error by a clerk established the name as Mankato. According to Warren Upham, quoting historian Thomas Hughes of Mankato, ”The honor of christening the new city was accorded to Col. Robertson. He had taken the name from Nicollet's book, in which the French explorer compared the 'Mahkato' or Blue Earth River, with all its tributaries, to the water nymphs and their uncle in the German legend of Undine…No more appropriate name could be given the new city, than that of the noble river at whose mouth it is located.” While it is uncertain that the city was intended to be called Mahkato, the Dakota called the river Makato Osa Watapa (”the river where blue earth is gathered”). The Anglo settlers adapted that as ”Blue Earth River”. Frederick Webb Hodge, in the Handbook of American Indians North of Mexico, said the town was named after the older of the two like-named chiefs of the Mdewakanton nation of the Santee Dakota, whose village stood on or near the site of the present town.