Ultimate sacrifice shaped Dakota identity

I posted this quote as a Facebook discussion & note...

While the American founders and the Constitution provided powerful images and precedents for many Dakota settlers, the more immediate and personal cultural reference point was the Civil War. One U.S. Senate report noted of Dakota that it was “safe to assert that in no State or Territory can there be found so large a proportion of the people who fought the battles of the Union.” A large percentage of Dakota settlers, a pioneer fondly recalled in his memoirs, “carried the musket to the front in the darkest days of the rebellion.” Arthur Mellette [first Governor of SD] said that many Dakota settlers had been “scarred and maimed in defense of the Union which they helped to preserve.”

Jon K. Lauck, Prairie Republic.