N.J. Mastro
- Aug 18

Sarah F. Wakefield: A Story of Captivity

Just when you think you know your U.S. history, you come to find that you don’t know as much as you should. I was reminded of this while reading The Lost Wife by Susanna Moore, a superb biographical novel based on the life of Sarah F. Wakefield, a white woman captured by the Dakota during the U.S.-Dakota War of 1862.

I was born, raised, and lived in Minnesota for most of my life, including more than a decade just miles from Shakopee, Minnesota where The Lost Wife begins. I was familiar with the U.S.-Dakota War. But there is more to history than what is taught in school, and as with all conflicts, there are not only two sides to the story, there are thousands.

The storyteller in The Lost Wife is Sarah Brinton, a fictional character based on Sarah Wakefield. Sarah Brinton’s story opens in 1855 while journeying to Shakopee in Minnesota Territory where she hopes to find her friend Maddie—and safety.

Readers quickly recognize the hard-scrabble fighter in Sarah Brinton, who relies on her instincts as she travels by wagon, train, and boat with nothing but a small bit of cash and her wits to guide her. Broke and broken, she has fled her abusive husband in Rhode Island. In doing so she also has abandoned her only child, whom she left with her sister-in-law.

Mourning leaving her child behind, when Sarah finally arrives in Shakopee, she discovers her friend Maddie is dead. Penniless, homeless, and with no one to turn to, Sarah falls into a depression. In time, as do all survivors, she picks herself up. She finds work.

And she finds a new husband.

Sarah marries Dr. Brinton, a graduate of the Medical Institution of Yale College, who provides medical treatment to Shakopee’s residents until 1862, at which time the Brintons move to Upper Sioux Agency in Yellow Medicine. Upper Agency is approximately 100 miles northwest of what is now Mankato, Minnesota. There Dr. Brinton will administer medical treatment to the Dakota living on a nearby reservation and the white settlers in the region.

Sarah Brinton describes their new house as “on a bluff, five hundred feet above the valley, overlooking the meeting of the Yellow Medicine and Minnesota Rivers. There is a brick warehouse, half of which serves as my husband’s dispensary and the other half as the agency’s office.” In her narrative she also details the village, which includes barracks for the agency workers, a school for native children, and some of their neighbors, most of whom are new immigrants to Minnesota. There are few white men in the area. Most have joined the Union Army. The Civil War is in its second year.

Upon adjusting to her new environment, Sarah develops an interest in the Dakota people. She familiarizes herself with their culture and way of life, establishing relationships with specific women. However, her world is turned upside down when the Dakota wage war on the settlers and seize Sarah, her children, and numerous other residents. Suddenly, she is a captive.

So, who was the real Sarah F. Wakefield?

Little seems to be known about Sarah F. Wakefield prior to her arrival in Shakopee. She was born Sarah Brown in Rhode Island in 1829. In 1854, she traveled to Minnesota Territory, where she met and married Dr. John Wakefield two years later.[i]

Sarah F. Wakefield / Photo in the public domain

As portrayed in the novel, she and her husband moved to Yellow Medicine where Dr. Wakefield administered medical care to the Dakota and white settlers living in the area. The Dakota in Minnesota consisted then and now of the Sisseton, Wahpeton, Wahpekute, and Mdewakanton bands. When the U.S. Dakota War broke out, Sarah Wakefield fled with her children to Fort Ridgely and was captured on the way by Chaska, a Mdewakanton warrior.

The U.S.-Dakota War

The U.S.-Dakota War remains a tragic blight on Minnesota state history for many reasons, primary among them the state’s harsh treatment of the Dakota people prior to, during, and after the war. The conflict started on August 18 in 1862 after four Dakota men killed five white settlers near what is now Acton, Minnesota. The Dakota men returned to their village and convinced their leader, Little Crow, to wage war on the white settlers.

Little Crow, Sioux Chief / Photo in the public domain

As war raged on the prairie, a man by the name of Henry Hastings Sibley was appointed brigadier general of the U.S. Army volunteers in Minnesota Territory. General Sibley led the Battle of Wood Lake on September 23, in which the U.S. defeated the Dakota. Most of the Dakota people fled west to Dakota Territory in what is now South and North Dakota. Others left for Canada.

Just days after the Dakota surrendered, Minnesota Territory tried 392 Dakota men for their part in the war. The trials clearly were unfair. “Evidence was sparse, the tribunal was biased, the defendants were unrepresented in unfamiliar proceedings conducted in a foreign language, and authority for the tribunal was lacking.”[iii] Some trials were as short as five minutes in length. Moreover, because of U.S. treaties with the Dakota, the Dakota were a sovereign nation. The prisoners should have been given the same treatment as citizens of other countries who had been taken into U.S. custody during war.

In the courtroom, Sarah Wakefield defended Chaska, who was accused of murder, saying that Chaska had provided shelter for her and her two children by housing them with his family and that he had shielded her, her baby daughter, and her four-year-old son from danger several times. She not only vouched for his character but also served as an eye-witness to the incident for which Chaska was being blamed, reporting that it was another Dakota man who had committed the murder.

At the end of the trial, 303 Dakota men were sentenced to death. Another 16 were given prison terms. The trial and sentencing caught the attention of President Abraham Lincoln, who wanted the trial transcripts reviewed. To Congress, Lincoln said, “Anxious to not act with so much clemency as to encourage another outbreak on one hand, nor with so much severity as to be real cruelty on the other, I ordered a careful examination of the records of the trials to be made, in view of first ordering the execution of such as had been provided guilty of violating females.”

Only two men were found guilty of rape. Lincoln then expanded the list of condemned men to include those who had taken part in “massacres,” as compared to just “battles.” In all, Lincoln ended up sending 39 names to General Sibley for execution.[v]

Image in the public domain

Punishment was swift. Minnesota Territory simultaneously hanged 38 of the 39 men in Mankato on December 26, 1862. A scaffold built specifically for the executions is shown in an artist's rendition above. Chaska was among those hanged. Speculation is that he was not meant to be executed but stepped forward when a man with a similar name was called.

The Aftermath

As to the rest of the Dakota living in Minnesota, General Sibley took them into custody, removing 1,658 Dakota to Fort Snelling in St. Paul, mostly women, children, and elders, confining them to an area at the river bottom of the Minnesota River. The encampment was, essentially, a concentration camp. It's estimated that as many as 300 Dakota died during the winter of 1862-63 from disease and harsh conditions. The following February, Congress annulled all treaties with the Dakota.[vi]

A painter's view of Fort Snelling during peaceful times / Image in the public domain

More than 600 white people were killed during the U.S.-Dakota war, a tragedy by any measure. Roughly 70 of them were white soldiers. Another 50 were white armed citizens. The rest were primarily young men, women, and children. Between 75 and 100 Dakota soldiers died. Another one-quarter of the Dakota people who surrendered died in the year that followed. [vii]

A year after Sarah Wakefield’s captivity, she wrote a book about her experience. In Six Weeks in The Sioux Tepees, Wakefield stated, “If it had not been for Chaska my bones would now be bleaching on the prairie, and my children with Little Crow.”[ii] After publishing the book in 1863, Wakefield expanded it in 1864. Both times the white community criticized her account. Hers was a perspective no one wanted to hear. Wakefield tried to defend the Dakota in her written account.

“People blame me for having sympathy for these creatures, but I take this view of the case: Suppose the same number of whites were living in sight of food, purchased with their own money, and their children dying of starvation, how long do you think they would remain quiet?”[iv] But she also reinforced many of the negative attitudes toward the Dakota by writing they were not “civilized or Christian enough for her.”[viii]

Nevertheless, Sarah Wakefield stands out as one of the few voices of women from the U.S.-Dakota War and from the era in general. After her captivity, she reunited with Dr. Wakefield and had two more children. He died in 1874 at age 50 from a drug overdose. (He was addicted to laudanum.) Afterward, Sarah moved to St. Paul, where she died in 1899. The couple is buried in Shakopee.[ix]

It is worth mentioning that Henry Hastings Sibley went on to serve as the first governor of Minnesota, where his legacy remains a topic of debate due to his interactions with the indigenous population of Minnesota. Before getting married, he was involved in a relationship with a Dakota woman, with whom he had a daughter. He publicly acknowledged his daughter and supported her, even sponsoring her education. Sibley was also critical of the way the U.S. government treated Native Americans. In 1842, he advocated for a treaty that would have designated a significant portion of Southern Minnesota as native land. However, by 1862, it appears that his stance had shifted, possibly influenced by public opinion driven by strong animosity and fear towards Minnesota's indigenous people.[x]

Henry Sibley Hastings / Photo in the public domain

An Interview With the Author, Susanna Moore

Haunted by what I read in The Lost Wife, I contacted Susanna Moore, who graciously agreed to speak with me. When I asked her what compelled her to write about Sarah Wakefield, she said it all started at the beginning of the Covid epidemic. “I was reading a lot captivity stories of the 17th and 18th century,” she said, “especially in the Northeast. Many of the women wrote about what happened to them.”

Sarah Wakefield’s story came much later to Moore than the others. What ultimately compelled her to write The Lost Wife was to find out what really happened. She said she didn’t feel that Sarah Wakefield had been altogether honest in her written account about her captivity. Wakefield seemed more concerned about reclaiming a place of respect among whites than in providing an accurate record. In the period following Wakefield’s time living among the Dakota, whites vilified her.

I was curious why Moore changed Sarah Wakefield’s name to Sarah Brinton when it is common to use the name of a historical figure in biofiction. Her reason was straightforward. “In order to tell the story that interested me, I had to use both fact and fiction. Much has been written about Sarah Wakefield, but no one really knew where she came from and why she ended up in Minnesota Territory.”

To solve that mystery, Moore delved into Ancestry.com. “This opened up a lot of ways to create Sarah Brinton,” she noted. “I could confirm that Sarah Wakefield was from Rhode Island, that she was married, making her a bigamist when she married John Wakefield, and that she abandoned her child with her first husband.” The child, Moore found out, had a physical disability. However, Moore was never able to track down how or why Sarah Wakefield ended up in Minnesota.

Thus the first third of The Lost Wife takes place before Sarah Brinton’s captivity and is based on Moore’s research on Sarah Wakefield. After Sarah and her two children were taken by the Dakota, Moore shifted her narrative to align closely with the facts regarding the U.S.-Dakota War. “The research had to be impeccable,” she said. “I wanted to portray it as accurately as possible.”

In our conversationMoore acknowledged the challenge in accepting that atrocities happened and the rage that occurred at the time on both sides of the conflict. Writing a novel like this required sensitivity. “I could inhabit the imagination of a white woman, but not the Dakota,” she said. As a result, the Dakota never speak in direct quotes in the book. When Moore finished the novel, her publisher also engaged a sensitivity reader to ensure the novel was free of offensive content or stereotypes.

In the end, Moore delivered a first-rate biographical novel with a compelling, incisive narrative, one I highly recommend. I was deeply moved throughout, and the writing is exquisite. If interested in purchasing The Lost Wife, you may do so through my affiliate link on Bookshop.org where I earn a small portion of the profit.

I believe it is important to revisit the history we think we know, in this case the U.S.-Dakota War. Below are several good resoures that include videos and images. It was a tragic time for the Dakota community, the white settlers, and the entire state of Minnesota. The scars it left remain unhealed. Perhaps by revisiting the conflict again and again, each time we gain new understanding, which can only lead to a richer perspective.

A similar book to The Lost Wife that I’d like to recommend is Flight of the Sparrow (affiliate link) by Amy Belden Brown, another highly skilled writer. Flight of the Sparrow is biographical fiction about Mary Rowlandson, a white woman taken captive by a native tribe in 1676 in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Similar to Wakefield, Rowlandson documented her captivity in a book.

Another stunning read about indigenous people's experience at the hands of the U.S. government is Red Clay, Running Waters, a book about the tragic Cherokee removal that I reviewed last year.

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