In July 2013, almost 150 years after the Sioux Claims Commission convened hearings in Minnesota and recorded her testimony, Pauline Dietrich spoke again.
The story of Ernst Dietrich, told by his widow Pauline, was the first of 2,940 lost stories recovered in 2013 when we located the records Sioux Claims Commission in National Archives RG 217 among the settled accounts of the Second Auditor of the Treasury (1).
“Two thousand two hundred & Sixty-two Dollars being the balance of the award of the Commissioners upon the Claim of Ernst Dietrich numbered 289” Receipt [1864] signed by a representative of Bigelow and Dalrymple, the legal firm representing Pauline Dietrich’s case.
Pauline was the widow of Ernst Dietrich, a New Ulm furniture maker and the leader of New Ulm’s civic orchestra. Ernst, Pauline tells us, was worried he might be drafted for three years of service in the Civil War. On the morning of August 18, 1862, accompanied by some brass players from the orchestra, Ernst rode off on a recruiting mission: to sign up enough volunteer soldiers to forestall the impending draft.
The recruiting party, with the United States flag flying from their horse-drawn wagon and brass horns glinting in the sun, unwittingly headed into the epicenter of the U.S. Dakota War of 1862. The Dakota warriors who shot the recruiters may have mistaken them for U.S. cavalry. (2)
Ernst Dietrich died without a will. Pauline’s claim shows Henry Sublius, administrator for the estate, helped Pauline present Ernst’s claim on behalf of herself and their four children. Pauline lived off the $200 cash settlement she received from the Sioux Commissioners in 1863, and off the charity of friends and strangers until her settlement check arrived from the Treasury in 1864.
At hearings held in Minnesota in 1863, Commissioners recorded the testimony of claimants and witnesses in ink that remains remarkably legible 150 years later. Lists of material goods lost, however, like this list presented by Pauline Dietrich, were written in (and on) the material at hand and presented at the hearing. Pauline’s list is written in pencil. The paper was exposed to moisture before it was filed. This image is historic (low-res and digitally enhanced), one of the first made from the claims collection at NARA by Candace Clifford in 2013.
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(1) I use the plural “we” because the discovery was the fruit of teamwork. Like many other scholars since William Watts Folwell at the turn of the 20th century, I had tried and failed to find the missing records of the 1863 Sioux Claims Commission. My mentor, Alan Woolworth, among those who had searched, in his inimitable style, had dubbed them the “Holy Grail” of “things we’re stilling going to find out there [in the National Archives] someday!”
Alan was right. I shared the discovery story with him before he passed away in 2014. “Golly!” Alan said. “We knew where they were all along?!”
Yes, in a way, we have.
In the spring of 2013, researching a different story in the Institutional Archives of the Minnesota Historical Society (MNHS), I discovered that in 1896, the MNHS, at that time, actively developing its collections on the subject of the U.S. Dakota War of 1862, had located the Sioux Claims Commission Records on shelves in the Office of the Second Auditor of the Treasury in Washington D.C. Apparently not able to meet the Treasury’s requirements, the MNHS had not acquired copies.
117 years later in 2013, when I encountered that correspondence, I understood the significance of what I was reading. My burning question was: Had the 1863 Sioux Claims Commission files survived the intervening years to be accessioned among the Records of the Second Auditor of the Treasury when the National Archives was organized in 1935?
A donor with vision wanted to fund the answer. Walt Bachman understood better than anyone else in our research community what the Records of the Second Auditor of the Treasury might contain. Following Helen McCann White’s trail of research breadcrumbs to Second Auditor records in RG 217, Walt used Army Paymaster vouchers to prove that Joseph Godfrey’s mother, Courtney, was enslaved at the time of his birth at Fort Snelling, making Godfrey a slave born in Free territory. (See note 2 below.) Godfrey was said to have been ‘leading’ the Dakota warriors who killed Ernst Dietrich.
Walt connected me with Candace Clifford, a lighthouse historian who has worked in RG 217 for two decades, including compiling an Inventory of Historic Light Stations for the Department of the Interior. Candace accepted the assignment: to be my eyes and feet on the ground in Washington D.C., adding her experience in RG 217 to my knowledge of the history of the 1863 Sioux Claims Commission and the 117-year-old clues I’d found at the MNHS.
After days of improvising search-strategies in the face of dead-ends, on July 27, 2013, we located the missing 1863 Sioux Claims Commission case files in RG 217. Subsequently, I have had the privilege of spending nearly four weeks’ grant-funded research time at NARA exploring and cataloging new Minnesota primary source findings in RG 217, including the 1863 SCC records.
(2) Walt Bachman, Northern Slave, Black Dakota: The Life and Times of Joseph Godfrey (Pond Dakota Press, 2013). Bachman has continued to mine RG 217 and has now documented the extent of slaveholding by army officers in Free territory throughout the United States before the Civil War. The Last White House Slaves: The Story of Jane, President Zachary Taylor’s Enslaved Concubine (2019) is the first book in a series highlighting Bachman’s findings.
A Thrilling Narrative of Indian Captivity: Dispatches from the Dakota War of 1862 
Great recap of the great search, Carrie!