MINNEAPOLIS — Prayers and grit kept a team of Dakota riders going through two snowstorms and long, frigid days on horses this month, through South Dakota and southern Minnesota to reach Mankato on Dec. 26 — to mark the 160th anniversary of the largest mass execution in American history, and honor the 38 of their ancestors killed on that day in 1862.
Every December since 2005, riders have traveled 330 miles on horseback from Lower Brule, South Dakota, to Mankato. The journey retraces steps of the riders' ancestors forced out of Minnesota and onto a reservation in South Dakota, following the executions in Mankato and a deadly winter in a concentration camp at Fort Snelling.
In Mankato on Monday morning, hundreds of people cheered the riders' arrival, and listened as the names of the executed were read — the 38 killed on Dec. 26, 1862, and two others later captured and hanged, known as the Dakota 38+2.
