Fifty years after the Civil War's brutal 1863 bloodbath at Gettysburg, veterans from both the Union and the Confederacy came in goodly numbers to a battlefield reunion.
Accounts at the time said that boys who had gone off to war had become old men who "reunited in brotherly love and affection." When Pickett's Charge was reenacted, it ended with two lines of old soldiers embracing as fellow countrymen.
This summer marks the 150th anniversary of another bloody conflict. For six weeks in August and September 1862 -- while the rest of the nation's eyes were fixed on fighting in northern Virginia -- Dakota Indian men attacked and killed white settlers and soldiers in the Minnesota River valley before being subdued and captured themselves.
The 1862 death toll in what came to be called the Dakota War was never certain, but it ran well past 500, including 38 Dakota men who were hanged on Dec. 26, 1862, in Mankato. Many more Dakota people died in ensuing years of forced marches, fugitive hunts, imprisonment and exile in South Dakota and Nebraska.
In the 150 years since, there's been little public show of "brotherly love and affection" between the triumphant U.S. forces and the vanquished Dakota people. Old enemies never came to Fort Ridgely or Birch Coulee to put a coda of public embrace on the violent episodes there.
No state government site celebrates the life of Little Crow, the Dakota military leader, the way Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee is venerated at Arlington National Cemetery. (What happened to Little Crow's body speaks volumes about the attitudes of the Dakota War victors. It was mutilated the day after he was shot in 1863; his scalp, skull and bones were exhibited at the Capitol until 1915; and the remains weren't returned to his family until 1971.)
And while the Civil War battles of 1862 are now staples of schoolkids' lessons, the Dakota War's dark shadow on Minnesota history has been comparatively ignored.
But this sesquicentennial year could change all that. A potentially potent catalyst for a positive turn in Minnesota-Dakota relations went on display on June 30 at the Minnesota History Center in St. Paul. It's an exhibit titled, simply, "The U.S.-Dakota War of 1862."