Mankato Beam & John Ford Meagher

When a new museum will give place for the exhibition of this rough but business-like looking stick, many will look at it and read its label with singular interest, for with its service the practice of hanging for murder died out in our state; other methods of punishment, less effective, perhaps, but more humane, have taken its place. But the stick will attract more attention for its historical associations. It marks the close of the brutal and bloody Sioux outbreak which swept through the Minnesota valley in 1862. This outbreak was begun with bread riots and murders in the midsummer of 1862, while the settlers in that part of the state were busy at their harvests, and continued with all the conceivable horrors attending an Indian war until the close of September. When the savages had been subdued, a military commission in which Col. Crooks, Lieut. Col. Marshall and Capt. Grant were conspicuous, had four hundred and twenty-five men arraigned before it for trial. Of this number three hundred and three were sentenced to be hung, twenty to imprisonment and the rest set free. But to the indignant surprise of the whole state, President Lincoln did not approve the work of this commission when it was laid before him. After a most energetic protest against his humanity by Senator Wilkinson and Representatives Aldrich and Windom, the President consented to the deaths of thirty-eight of the bloodiest culprits. Their execution occurred at Mankato, whither all the condemned had been taken after the trial in camp on the 26th of December. 

The thanks of the University are due to Mr. Meagher for his kindly interest in the institution, which interest has been shown in many other ways than this.

As it turns out, the beam Meagher sent to the General Museum is almost certainly not from the 1862 Mankato gallows. The Blue Earth County Historical Society undertook extensive efforts to ascertain its origins and the beam does not match the known descriptions of the gallows. Furthermore, Meagher was not the one who purchased the wood from the gallows at auction. Those gallows beams were described as being heavily racked (twisted) as the wood was recently cut white oak rather than seasoned beams. The beam Meagher sent is too short for the gallows and includes many mortise holes that would not have been in the gallows. The notches Meagher claimed were cut to hold the nooses are irregularly spaced, too many in number and of varying sizes. At least one contemporary report also notes that Meagher’s building was constructed in 1857, five years before the gallows’ existence. Consequently, the support beam from Meagher’s store was most likely a seasoned beam used in a previous construction and did not come from the 1862 gallows.

The General Museum may have been Meagher’s second choice for the beam’s donation. A month and a half before Meagher tore down his building, the State Capital, which housed the Minnesota Historical Society’s collections burned to the ground. Consequently, the historical society would have had no space to store a beam over eighteen feet long. As things turned out, the General Museum did not really have the space either.

A Minneapolis Journal article of September 10, 1911, by Edward A. Bromley noted the forty-ninth anniversary of the outbreak of the 1862 conflict and mentioned the beam’s setting.

Lying on the floor at one end of the geological museum in Pillsbury Hall at the state university is a weather-beaten beam, eighteen feet long and a foot and a half in diameter, hewn out of white oak timber. There are mortises about two feet apart in two of its sides, and in another place there are several deep bored peg holes.

For over twenty-five years that beam has occupied a place in the museum, but, because it has during most of that time, been concealed behind some cases, has neither excited comment, nor often caught the gaze of visitors. It is not labeled and hence might naturally be supposed to be of little value. Nevertheless, it has more historical interest than all the other timbers in the building. It played a part in the grim tragedy which took place forty-nine years ago; and although the long struggle of the civil war was just beginning, excited universal interest throughout the United States.

The tragedy in which the beam had a place was the hanging of thirty-eight Sioux Indians at Mankato, Dec. 26, 1862. It comprised part of the scaffold and soon after the direful event, was sold with the other gallows timbers to John F. Meagher, a hardware merchant at Mankato, who used most of them in erecting a building on Front Street in the block west of the present Salpaugh House. Later, Mr. Meagher donated this beam to the Minnesota Historical Society. At the time, the society was in very small quarters and had no place to store it. J. Fletcher Williams, then secretary, suggested to professor N. H. Winchell, then state geologist, that the university receive and store it. This was done, and the beam, as it has already been said, has rested on the floor of the museum ever since.’

After the hangings, several parties stole the bodies of some Dakota dead to be used in medical practices. Infamously, one of those was Dr. William Mayo of Le Sueur, who stole the body of Marpiya Okinajin and used his skeleton to teach his children anatomy. Marpiya Okinajin’s skull remained on display in the Mayo Clinic until 1998. It was not until 2018 that the Mayo Clinic formally apologized for the desecration. 

Meagher was another who stole Dakota dead, but he had a specific target. Meagher believed one of the executed Dakota, Wicaƞḣpi Wastedaƞpi, had killed a friend, George Gleason. Wicaƞḣpi Wastedaƞpi went by the name Chaska (or Chas kay dan), a common Dakota name for first-born sons. In retaliation for his friend’s death, Meagher disinterred and stole Chaska’s body, also taking the ropes that bound him and a braid of his hair.

Only one thing could make Meagher’s story darker, which was that Chaska was innocent of Gleason’s death. As described in Justin Walker’s ‘The Execution of the Innocent in Military Tribunals: Problems from the Past and Solutions for the Future’ (2016), on the first day of the conflict, Chaska and another Dakota man named Hapa encountered a wagon driven by George Gleason that also carried Sarah Wakefield and her two young children. Hapa shot Gleason but when he turned his gun on Wakefield, Chaska knocked Hapa’s gun aside. Chaska argued with Hapa for an hour before convincing him to take Wakefield and her children captive instead of killing them. Chaska then spent much of the next six weeks protecting Wakefield and her children while they were held captive, dressing them in Dakota clothes, and moving them frequently from one trusted family to another. To protect Wakefield from sexual assault, Chaska claimed she was his wife and kept up the charade until Wakefield’s rescue. Despite Wakefield’s and others’ testimony that Chaska saved her and her children’s lives, and was innocent of any wrongdoing, Chaska was still tried for ‘murders and massacres.’ Chaska was convicted of Gleason’s murder and ‘sundry hostile acts against the whites’ on a trial that only lasted a few minutes. Although President Lincoln would later stay his execution, Chaska was still hung. When the officer reading the execution role called out the name ‘Chaska’ for another man, Wicaƞḣpi Wastedaƞpi stepped forward and was executed. Some sources question whether his death was a mistake, suggesting instead that Chaska was deliberately targeted for having claimed a relationship with a white woman, even though it was only a ruse to save her life. This was the man whose body Meagher desecrated and then took his hair for a watch chain.

The watch chain has been missing from the Minnesota Historical Society collections since the 1920’s. However, the noose used to kill Wicaƞḣpi Wastedaƞpi was taken by Adj. A. K. Arnold and donated to the society in 1869. In his donation letter to the Minnesota Historical Society secretary, J. Fletcher Williams, Arnold wrote:

Dear “Fletch,”

Your acknowledgment rec’d “OK.” Many Thanks. Only when your next meeting comes off have the resolution acknowledging receipt of the document be made to the “Seventh Regiment, Minn Infty thro’ J. K. Arnold Adjutant &c.” I fw’d to day the rope, original with knot and noose just as it was taken off from Chaska’s head. It has never been untied, and is, as it was taken from his neck. I stole it. Col. Miller was going to send them all (38) to Washington, but I wanted this one which hung Chaska. I took it off his neck hid it under my coat, went to my room. Hid it under my blankets (bed) and slept on it until the excitement was over for the missing rope, when I shipped it home by Express, since which I have carefully preserved it. “Old Steph” made an awful fuss about it wondering what could have become of it, &c & does not know to this day that his Adjutant had the same.

Well enough. Accept it, from your friend. And—one word more. Any thing—Relics—Statistics or whatever you wish I can furnish. Call upon

Your Friend (I hope)

J. K Arnold 

That noose was only returned to the Prairie Island Indian Community in the summer of 2024. For many years it had been on display in the society museum, along with the scalp, skull, and arm bones of Taoyateduta (Little Crow), whose remains were not repatriated until 1971. It is not known what happened to the skeleton of Wicaƞḣpi Wastedaƞpi. Only the remains of three individuals have been returned to the Dakota for reburial, and only one of those, Marpiya Okinajin, had a known identification. In 2014, a fourth skeleton from the killings was discovered but has apparently not  been returned.

In April of 1916, Charles A. Chapman, another member of the Knights of the Forest, wrote a newspaper story in which he included the oath each member took.

I, _____, of my own free will and accord, in the full belief that every Indian should be removed from the State, by the memory of the inhuman cruelties perpetrated on defenseless citizens, and in the presence of the members of the order here assembled, do most solemnly promise, without any mental reservation whatever, to use every exertion and influence in my power, to cause the removal of all tribes of Indians from the State of Minnesota. I will sacrifice every political and other preference to accomplish that object. I will not aid or assist in any manner to elect to office in this State or the United States any person outside of this order who will not publicly or privately pledge himself for the permanent removal of all tribes of Indians from the State of Minnesota. I will protect and defend at every hazard, all members in carrying out the objects of this order. I will faithfully observe the constitution, rules, and by-laws of this lodge or any grand or working lodge of Knights of the Forest to which I may be attached. I will never in any manner reveal the name, existence, or secrets of this order to any person not entitled to know the same. And in case I should be expelled or voluntarily withdraw from the order, I will consider this obligation still binding. To all of which I pledge my sacred honor.

In an earlier 1886 article, also apparently written by Chapman, the uncredited author went further, claiming that the Knights of the Forest employed members to lie in ambush along the outskirts of the Ho-Chunk reservation to shoot any Indian caught outside its boundaries. The author suggests a number of people were killed but ‘For obvious reasons their reports were not made a matter of record.’

What clearly did become a matter of record was the success of the Knights of the Forest in expelling the Ho-Chunk from Minnesota. By spring of 1863, the Ho-Chunk in Minnesota, despite having nothing to do with the 1862 war, were held in a concentration camp on the banks of the Blue Earth River awaiting deportation to Crow Creek, South Dakota. More than 550 of their people died during, or shortly after, that forced expulsion – over a fourth of all those forced to leave. Even after their arrival, the conditions on their South Dakota reservation were so terrible that many Ho-Chunk escaped to return to Wisconsin and Minnesota. Others moved to the Omaha Reservation in Nebraska where a Winnebago Reservation was created in 1865. Once the federal government removed the Ho-Chunk from Minnesota, the Knights of the Forest ceased to exist, with the known members, including Meagher, purchasing much of the stolen Ho-Chunk lands.

All of Meagher’s biographers extolled his fine qualities, generous nature, and cheerful disposition. In a photograph taken around 1890, Meagher struck a jovial pose, smiling at the camera and appearing a cheerful grandfatherly figure. An image jarringly difficult to reconcile with a man who had desecrated graves, used a watchchain woven from another man’s scalp, and strove to forcibly exile a people, ensuring the deaths of a fourth of their relations. 

Although Meagher was never directly associated with our department, we should acknowledge he was a donor to our General Museum and was at the time generously thanked for his gift, a gift that should not have been accepted. 

To date, I have not yet discovered in what other ways Meagher’s ‘kindly interest’ in our institution was shown, as mentioned at the end of the 1881 Ariel article.

Any concerns or suggestions?

email: Kent Kirkby ([email protected])