An author, artist and lecturer from Rochester with extensive knowledge of the Spirit Lake and Springfield massacres and the Native American warrior who led them, will be the keynote speaker at the Jackson County Historical Society’s annual meeting this Saturday.
Mark Diedrich will address society members following the annual business meeting, which begins at 1:30 p.m. at the Jackson County Historical Society Museum in Lakefield.
Diedrich lived with his family in West St. Paul until the fourth grade, when they moved to Leominster, Mass. He graduated from St. Paul High School and continued his education at the University of Minnesota, studying studio art for three years and finished his college education at the University of Illinois in art education.
On Saturday, Diedrich will speak on Inkpaduta and the Wahpekute Tribe. Inkpaduta was the renegade Indian that led the Spirit Lake Massacre and the Springfield Massacre that followed in Jackson County.
Diedrich is the author of 16 books and has dedicated the last 30 years of his life to researching, writing and illustrating the history of the major Native American groups of the Midwest and their relationships with the settlers of that era.
“My interest in history began as a youngster, reading about the Civil War,” Diedrich said. “When I was in college I read several books which got me interested in Native American history. The two books were Dee Brown’s ‘Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee,’ and Mari Sandoz’s biography of Crazy Horse.”
After school, Diedrich began looking for a subject area for his artwork and eventually turned to early photos of American Indians. He then came up with the idea of doing a book mainly to present portraits of Indian leaders.
“But my initial attempts to find a publisher failed,” he said. “I then tried to get a grant so that I could develop my Indian portraits to larger canvases, and as a collection, but this also failed. By that time, I began to do historical research on certain Indian leaders. I was mainly interested in how Indian leaders lived and dealt with all the changes that came upon them with the advance of white settlements toward the West. I wrote a small manuscript on Black Kettle of the Cheyenne for a school-age audience, but failed to win over a publisher of such books.”
In 1978, Diedrich moved back to the Twin Cities from Chicago and began researching a Minnesota Indian leader named Little Crow. He came up with a book-length manuscript and had it reviewed by the University of Oklahoma for publishing.
“At first they agreed to publish it, but with some rewrites and further research. After about two years, they suddenly dropped the project,” Diedrich said. “Due to my problems in getting published, I decided to try publishing my own work under the publishing name, Coyote Books. I began with a short book on the Chiefs Hole-in-the-Day in 1986. It was my goal to publish one work a year. As it turned out, I have published 16 works in about 25 years.”
One of his earlier projects was “Famous Chiefs of the Eastern Sioux,” now revised as “Famous Dakota Chiefs.” Diedrich selected five famous leaders who all had a different slant in regard to their chieftainship.
“I covered Inkpaduta (Scarlet Point) in this work, as he was not only famous/infamous, but had an ‘outlaw’ background and had been extremely vilified by white authors,” Diedrich said. “Aside from the Spirit Lake Massacre, Inkpaduta was interesting in that he later joined up with Sitting Bull and was at the Battle of the Little Big Horn in 1876. He then escaped into Canada, where he died.”
In his lecture at the historical society, Diedrich will give historical background to Inkpaduta’s people, the Wahpekute (Shooters in the Leaves) Dakota, and discuss the various views about Inkpaduta’s role in the history of his people and the West in general.
“Inkpaduta has been much written about in recent years with the publishing of a book by Maxwell Van Nuys and, more recently, by Paul Beck,” he added. “My writing goes back to the late 1980s.”
According to Diedrich, there were earlier writers who stressed varying points about Inkpaduta — writers who concentrated on the Spirit Lake Massacre mostly turned Inkpaduta into a demonic fiend.
“However, Doane Robinson came along at the turn of the century and kept this view of Inkpaduta, but also tried to make a case that Inkpaduta had actually been a kind of ‘Indian general’ in later battles between U.S. forces and various combinations of Indian forces,” he said. “Robinson later experienced a fire in his office and said that the notes he had gotten on Inkpaduta from various Indian sources were lost. Eventually, Peggy Larson wrote of Inkpaduta, as well as I, both of us presenting a more moderate view. We explained various injustices that Inkpaduta bore from white people, which eventually led to the reaction of the massacres.”
Diedrich noted Van Nuys has tried to resurrect Robinson’s views about Inkpaduta as an “Indian general.” And presently, Paul Beck has tried to make a case that there is no proof that Inkpaduta was actually an Indian outlaw.
“However, Beck missed some important manuscript material, which indicates that he was, in fact, outlawed by the Wahpekute Dakota and considered a ‘bad man’ by many of the reservation Dakota of the 1850s,” Diedrich said. “As for the local history at Jackson, there is not much insight to be had. Inkpaduta, as a person, never left much trace in recorded history of the time, except for the fact that he was involved in the massacres.”
Diedrich said the main question related to the killings at Springfield was, “Why did Inkpaduta delay almost two weeks in making his attack on them?”
“The attack may have been almost an afterthought, since he had not premeditatedly attacked the Spirit Lake settlers,” he said. “However, the Woods’ brothers trading store was a tempting prize, given the fact that his actions would necessarily keep him from trading with white traders as he had been accustomed to doing through his entire life.”
A question-and-answer period, as well as a book signing, will follow Diedrich’s talk Saturday.
The appearance in Jackson County will also be an opportunity for Diedrich to address controversy surrounding a disagreement with author Beck.
“I commented on his book on Amazon.com and, soon after, I discovered that the commentary had spread to about a dozen other Web sites,” Diedrich said. “Then, Beck wrote back and criticized me for my comments. So, I welcome an opportunity to set the record straight as far as I can on Inkpaduta.”
