On December 26, 1862, thirty-eight Indians were hanged in a mass execution in downtown Mankato. They were executed for their parts in the Sioux Uprising which took place in August of that year. The Sioux Uprising was a short-lived and bloody conflict that took the lives of many settlers and Indians in the Minnesota River Valley in southern Minnesota. The Sioux Uprising eventually touched off other conflicts between whites and Indians that spread across the Great Plains 'til 1890. A military tribunal originally sentenced 308 Indians to death for their parts in the uprising - but President Lincoln (upon the...