Fort Snelling at Bdote: A Brief History, Paperback

For millennia, the area where the Minnesota River joins the Mississippi has been a crossroads, a place of strategic power. But its history is deeply complicated. Many Dakota people consider the area, known as Bdote, to be both a sacred place of origin and a site of genocide. Many other people think of Fort Snelling, the limestone fortress built by US soldiers at Bdote in the 1820s, as the "birthplace of Minnesota," an icon of patriotism and pioneer spirit, a place to celebrate the armed forces and honor veterans. That symbolism, too, is complicated: over the decades, many army officers held enslaved African Americans at the fort. The fort itself is also a powerful reminder that most Minnesotans today are descendants of immigrants, living on Dakota land. Fort Snelling at Bdote provides a primer on this place, but its stories touch the heart of American history: the expansion of US power over American Indian lands, Dred and Harriet Scott's struggle for freedom from enslavement, the mustering in of hundreds of thousands of servicemen and -women over the years, the successes of Japanese American linguists who trained at the fort during World War II, and the continuing presence of Dakota people at Bdote, the confluence. By coming together where the rivers meet and listening to all of these stories, Minnesotans can find shared meaning in a complicated past.