Mall of America's Gruesome History
Mall Complex Built on Site of Nation’s Largest Mass Execution
Sep 24, 2009
Mall of America is a $650 million tourist destination sprawled over 78 acres in southwest Minnesota. With over four miles of storefront footage and four million square feet of gross building area, it’s the nation’s largest retail and entertainment complex. Each year, 40 million visitors from around the globe visit Mall of America.
Located near the town of Mankato, it has 520 stores and 50 restaurants. Mall of America also boasts the nation’s largest indoor theme park, a million-gallon Underwater Adventures Aquarium, a four-story LEGO store and museum, and the Amazing Mirror Maze.
But sinister realities from the past seep up from beneath the massive foundations of this gleaming tourist trap.
Civil War Out East; Ethnic Cleansing Out West
Flash back to 1862: As the Civil War raged out East, American settlers were streaming into the Minnesota frontier, pushing the native Dakota (also known as the Sioux) from their ancestral hunting grounds and onto a 20-mile-wide Indian reservation along the Minnesota River.
History textbooks wash over the grisly details with broad generalizations. Readers can dig into specifics with resources like Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Brown or Minnesota by essayist Phillip Connors. These resources retrace the unsavory chain of events that led to the largest mass execution in U.S. history.
Buffalo -- the traditional source of food, shelter and clothing for the Plains Indians -- had been hunted to near extinction by the white man, and game of every type had become sparse. Consequently, the Dakota had become increasingly dependent on annual payments from the government in order to buy food. Unfortunately in 1862, with government funds going to support the war, the Dakota’s annuity payment was several months past due.
Facing starvation, the Dakotas begged agency traders to release food stores. But the traders refused. One by the name of Andrew Myrick even stated, “As far as I am concerned, if they are hungry, let them eat grass or their own dung.”
Not surprisingly, that enraged the humiliated Dakota. This was the final straw after 10 years of broken treaties, lost hunting grounds, unkempt promises, undelivered annuities, and degrading assaults on native pride. The Dakotas went on the warpath.
On the Warpath
On Sunday, August 17, 1862, the Dakota Conflict erupted with vengeful attacks against white settlers and soldiers… and the fighting dragged on for six weeks. At least 500 whites were killed. Myrick’s corpse, significantly, had its mouth stuffed with grass.
The number of Dakota fatalities was never accurately accounted for, but nearly 2,000 were imprisoned that winter in a concentration camp near the present site of Mall of America.
Death Sentence for the Native Americans
Eventually, survivors were forced to move onto reservations in Nebraska and South Dakota. That is, except for more than 300 Dakota prisoners who were convicted of murder and rape by military tribunals and sentenced to death by hanging.
Although President Lincoln reviewed each case and commuted most of the death sentences, the remaining 38 Dakota men were found guilty as accused. As they approached the gallows erected in Mankato’s town square, they sang in unison the Sioux Death SongThey were all hanged simultaneously from a single gallows the day after Christmas in 1862, constituting the largest mass execution on a single day in American history.
Today, Mall of America sparkles on the Minnesota horizon as a landmark for capitalism and The American Way, and millions of visitors make it a happy vacation destination, blissfully ignorant of the site’s grisly history.
But efforts are under way to change that. An educational program -- disguised as a dramatic series of historically-based ghost stories -- has been developed to shed light on America's dirty little secrets from the past. A new course has been developed by Eden Valley Enterprises for the Cuyahoga Community College's Encore Program on American History, featuring spooky but true stories rarely found in history textbooks.
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