Where do you start, and how far back do you go?

Mr. Runck reflects on the U.S.-Dakota War.

Audio Chapters

DL: Do you have anything you want to add to any question or any answer?

RR: You ask the questions, I don’t know. I could talk for two more hours, but I mean, it just is an endless subject. I wish – it should be drawn back and rewritten from the beginning to the end so the average person who’s never read it before can get a better understanding of it, so it doesn’t become one opinion. Like here’s the lecturer talking about how the government did this to the Indians. It wasn’t the government that did this to the Indians; it was done by the circumstances at the time. And the thing is, you go back in history, it’s going to battle after battle after battle. Archeologists can’t find any good habitation sites around this area from 1400 on; they think it’s due to fighting. The Cheyenne were in here before the Dakota. Who was before that? We don’t know. Where do you start, and how far back do you go? There are Indian relics from 6000-7000 years ago in this area. So we don’t know what happened back then. But do we blame them for it, what happened? We can’t. We gotta live and life is too short. What are you gonna do? Make the best of it.

Oral History- Interview | Narrator Richard Runck Interviewer Deborah Locke made in New Ulm, Milford Township, MN | Friday, April 1, 2011

Citation: Minnesota Historical Society. U.S. - Dakota War of 1862. Where do you start, and how far back do you go? March 28, 2024. http://www.usdakotawar.org/node/1108

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