Here Is Where: Discovering America's Great Forgotten History (35 page)

Up until 1862 relations between Minnesota’s approximately seven thousand Dakota Indians and the U.S. government had been peaceful, albeit strained. Eleven years earlier tribal members had acquiesced to living on reservations in exchange for guaranteed payments from Washington. Many, however, chafed under federal authority and resented being wards of the state. Hostilities escalated in August 1862 when Congress, preoccupied with the Civil War, went months without paying its promised allotment. Starvation loomed, and some Dakota began hunting in “white” territory, aggravating tensions with local farmers. After a violent confrontation on August 17, the tribe’s warriors rampaged across the Minnesota River valley, torching barns and homes, slaughtering livestock, and killing hundreds of white settlers. Rounded up by U.S. soldiers and militia, the Dakota accused of committing the most egregious crimes were sentenced to die (whether they were actually guilty is another matter altogether), with the hanging scheduled for the day after Christmas.

An “air of cheerful unconcern marked all of them,” a
St. Paul Pioneer Press
reporter observed of the prisoners as they prepared themselves on the morning of their execution. They carried “little pocket mirrors and before they were bound, employed themselves in putting on the finishing touches of paint, and arranging their hair according to the Indian mode.” They marched to the gallows, heads high, and rushed the steps almost in “a race to see which would get up first.” As white cloths were draped over their faces, the men started singing.

“The tones seemed somewhat discordant, and yet there was a harmony to it,” the reporter continued.

The scaffolding didn’t break, but one rope did snap, sending a body crumpling to the ground. Soldiers rushed over to the shaken prisoner, gently helped him to his feet, and then returned him to the platform, where he was strung up for a second and final time.

Most died within seconds, but after ten minutes one man kept twitching and his raspy, labored breathing could be heard faintly under the white cloth. Finally a soldier tightened the noose with a hard jerk and the spasms stopped.

Declared “extinct” by Army doctors after half an hour, the thirty-eight bodies were cut down, piled onto mule-drawn wagons, taken down to the Minnesota River, and hastily buried in a sandbar. With the show over, Mankato began emptying out as most of the spectators drifted off. Most, but not all; lagging behind were a group of men, spades in hand, waiting for nightfall. Once the sun set, they hiked down to the riverbank, found the shallow graves, disinterred the corpses, and hauled the prized but cumbersome human loot back home.

“They even drew lots to determine who got the best cadavers,” Professor Bill Lass tells me as we pass Mankato’s public library, where the gallows had been erected. “Everyone wanted Cut Nose. He was six feet four inches and considered a magnificent specimen.”

Bill, now in his eighties, taught for forty-two years at Minnesota State University and is an expert on local history, particularly the Dakota.

Near the library is a statue called
Winter Warrior
depicting a gaunt, pensive Dakota, resting on one knee and gazing into the distance. Next to him is a bronze plaque that describes the December 26 hanging—the largest mass execution carried out by the government on American soil—but there’s no mention of its aftermath.

As we walk along Riverfront Street toward the Minnesota River, Bill points to a long patch of dark, wet sand below. “The river has changed since 1862, but the Dakotas were buried right around there.”

When I ask why in the sand, Bill says that, in late December, the ground anywhere else would have been frozen.

“Do you think I could walk on that?” I ask, unsure of how firm it is.

“I can’t tell from this distance.”

“Any interest in joining me?”

“I’ll wait up here,” Bill says.

Maneuvering cautiously down the steep riverbank and through thick brambles, I try to keep my balance without picking up too much speed. No use. Gravity takes over and my shuffle turns into a trot and then a full run. I hit the ground with a thud (yup, it’s solid) and regain my footing. Strewn along the sandbar are small piles of ash-white driftwood that look eerily like discarded bones.

The men who came to this same spot to steal the Dakotas were all respected citizens from Mankato and neighboring towns. Had they been caught—and authorities most likely knew and turned a blind eye to what they were up to—they would have justified their actions as benefiting the common good. They were all doctors in search of corpses for anatomical study, and as gruesome as their actions no doubt were, “body snatching” was common practice in America and had been for two hundred years. In other countries it had been going on much longer.

“A beautiful prostitute, taken by the students from a tomb in the church of San Antonio of Padua, was employed for the public dissection,
the last one held by me in Padua,” Andreas Vesalius wrote in a 1546 letter. “Her body was slightly emaciated and therefore [ideal].” Vesalius is considered the father of modern anatomy and authored
De humani corporis fabrica
(
On the Fabric of the Human Body
), a beautifully illustrated book that was unprecedented in depth and detail. Vesalius believed that nothing could replace that fingers-in-the-gristle experience of an actual dissection, and doctors throughout Europe and America were of a similar mind.

With the proliferation of medical schools in the 1800s, the demand for cadavers surged. Amputated legs and arms discarded by hospitals went only so far. Doctors wanted heads, necks, and torsos, preferably attached. The most committed and apparently least sentimental among them even rolled their own dead loved ones onto the dissecting slab. Dr. William Harvey, who mapped out the human circulatory system in the 1620s, famously took a scalpel to his sister and father after they died.

In 1744, Massachusetts enacted a law, the first of its kind in the colonies, allowing physicians to acquire corpses from county coroners—but only of men shot dead in duels or executed for having killed someone while dueling. Legislators weren’t so much interested in furthering scientific knowledge, however, as they were in adding a mark of shame to dueling, a tradition that increasing numbers of religious and political leaders deemed uncivilized. To be carted off after dying and cut up by a bunch of students was, to many, a great indignity, and this stigma made it all the more difficult for medical schools to acquire bodies.

“No occurrences in the course of my life have given me more trouble and anxiety than the procuring of subjects for dissection,” one of America’s most distinguished nineteenth-century surgeons wrote while reflecting on his career. “Executed criminals were occasionally procured,” he continued,

That doctor was John C. Warren, who had allowed both William Morton and Horace Wells to demonstrate anesthesia at Mass General and whose father had helped establish Harvard Medical School. Warren went on to recall his youthful adventures:

Warren’s reminiscence abounds with euphemisms. Here’s how “subjects” were, in fact, often “obtained”: Body snatchers, and these included both eminent doctors and first-year med students, secretly cased cemeteries for recent burials or bribed groundskeepers for the locations. Then they would return past midnight, dig a hole near the tombstone (where the head would be), break open the top half of the coffin with a crowbar, loop a rope around the corpse’s neck or underarms,
yank it out, and leave behind clothes, valuables, and whatever small tokens of affection had been tenderly placed with the departed. To ensure that no one recognized the body later, any unique scar or birthmark—and sometimes the entire face—was cut off. Not all physicians, it should be noted, engaged in such deeds. Many hired professional “resurrectionists” to handle their dirty work for them.

Body snatchers embraced a peculiar sense of honor and haughtily disassociated themselves from grave robbing, which was stealing from the dead. To them, while only a low-life thief would swipe rings or jewelry from the deceased, the whole corpse was fair game. And the law was on their side; in most states body snatching was a misdemeanor or no crime at all.

The 1788 Doctors’ Riot had a hand in changing that. Details are hazy, but according to the most intriguing version, on April 13 a young boy peeked into a New York Hospital window and saw several Columbia College medical students and their teacher carving up a dead woman. Either in jest or to scare him off, someone waved a severed arm at the boy and said that it had belonged to his mother. Coincidentally, the lad’s mom
had
just passed away, and he went off screaming to his father. Word spread, and within hours an angry rabble descended on the hospital and ransacked the dissecting room. The students who had instigated the ruckus were locked up—for their own safety—and the horde, now numbering in the thousands, surrounded the jail hollering for justice. (Founding Father John Jay got smacked in the head by a brick while trying to calm the situation.) Governor George Clinton called in state militia troops, who opened fire on the crowd, killing seven people and wounding eight. Within a year New York passed “An Act to Prevent the Odious Practice of Digging Up and Removing, for the Purpose of Dissection, Dead Bodies Interred in Cemeteries or Burial Places,” which imposed on body snatchers stiff fines, corporal punishment, and imprisonment. But legislators acknowledged that corpses were necessary for anatomical study, and they granted doctors a whole new crop of bodies to dissect, including executed arsonists, murderers, and burglars.

Legislation in America was also influenced by events abroad, particularly the misdeeds of two Irish immigrants in Scotland named William Burke and William Hare. From November 1827 to November 1828, Burke and Hare had been providing the respected anatomy lecturer Dr. Robert Knox with a steady supply of fresh corpses. A bit too fresh, police later realized. Burke and Hare, authorities discovered, had been killing residents at an Edinburgh lodging house run by Hare’s wife. It began (somewhat) innocently enough. The first tenant had died of natural causes and he was overdue on his rent. Hare thought it only fair to sell the body for what was owed, plus maybe a few extra pounds for his troubles. Victim number two was deathly ill, and Burke and Hare hurried him along in the process. Then, tired of waiting for people to get sick and die, they started offing people willy-nilly. Thirteen murders later they got nabbed, and Hare testified against Burke for immunity. Burke was hanged in January 1829, and his corpse was publicly dissected before a standing-room-only crowd at the Edinburgh Medical College.

Outrage over the Burke and Hare murders prodded Massachusetts legislators in 1831 to outlaw body snatching, but they didn’t want to deprive the medical community entirely of corpses, so they permitted doctors to take, with some restrictions, the unclaimed bodies of those who would otherwise have been buried “at the public expense.” Dead paupers, transients, African Americans (enslaved or free), and anyone else considered down and out had already been plundered on a regular basis from city-run cemeteries, but with this new act they could be acquired legally.

Tougher laws notwithstanding, bodies continued to be stolen from church graveyards and family lots, and those who could afford it hired armed guards and invested in massive stone sepulchers, crypts, and iron fences to thwart intruders. One company in the Midwest even sold “torpedo” coffins rigged to blow up when tampered with.

Neither money nor status, however, guaranteed protection. When the Honorable John Scott Harrison was laid to rest in North Bend, Ohio, Harrison’s family secured his casket in a brick-lined vault buried
under heavy stones and paid a night watchman to patrol the area. Incredibly, Harrison’s body was found days later—during a search for another corpse—at the Ohio Medical College. Harrison’s posthumous reappearance made a few headlines, considering that he was a former congressman and the son of U.S. president William Henry Harrison. (John Harrison’s own son Benjamin also became president.)

VIP corpses were usually avoided, but on rare occasions a high-profile name proved too irresistible. In 1859 students from the medical college in Winchester, Virginia, rushed to Harpers Ferry when they heard that Watson Brown had been mortally wounded during the failed raid led by his father, John, the legendary abolitionist. After stealing and dissecting Watson’s body, the students proudly exhibited his remains in their school’s laboratory. Three years later Union troops marching through Winchester discovered Watson’s skeleton on display and burned the college down in retaliation. It was never rebuilt.