As a native son of the State of Minnesota, with a degree in history, a minor in American Indian Studies and someone who is hooked on anything on Lincoln and the Civil War, I felt compelled to check this book out.
Mr. Berg's book covers the history of the war between the white settlers in the central and western portion of the state of Minnesota and the Native Sioux tribesmen that lived in that region in 1862. After years of poor treaty agreements, mismanagement and mistreatment by the whites, and during a hard spring and summer in 1862 a band of the Sioux, led by Little Crow decided enough was enough and began a war to drive away the whites and reclaim the land that had been taken from them. This is the story of that fight and the ramifications that came in its aftermath.
Bates does a good job covering the whole story, looking at it from multiple angles: the Native, the Settlers, Bishop Whipple (quite an interesting character he turns out to be), President Lincoln, a Minnesotan trader, turned politician, turned military leader Henry Sibley, Brigadier General and failed civil war general John Pope, the native Chaska, and more. All of this was well placed in the zeitgeist of the Civil War and mid 19th century frontier life.
Backed by factual events, Scott Berg weaves the tale from the beginning of the story , well before a shot had been fired, to its end near the conclusion of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st century.
I would say this is a great work of history and one that should not be ignored or relegated to good regional history. This is a story for everyone, everywhere, in any time. It is a tale of warning to the victors as much as it is to the losers, and to all the those who thought themselves too fringe to be worried about being affected.
Mr. Berg employs written prose, though the audio book narrator was so stiff it distracted from the actual story.
As a "local" and armchair scholar on the topics, I found this to be a great book and one I would not hesitate to recommend to anyone. ( )

In this history of the Dakota War of 1862, in which Little Crow reluctantly led a series of attacks on frontier settlements in southwestern Minnesota, Berg illuminates a little-known chapter of the blood-stained American West, long over-shadowed by the Civil War raging at the time. After the killing of several hundred whites, the state militia and federal troops struck back, capturing or killing most of Little Crow's warriors, and driving the remainder, including their chief, into the Dakota Territory.

Of the captured warriors, just over 300 in number, nearly all were condemned to death by a U.S. Army court-martial which acted in haste as spurred on by the overwhelming anger and demand for vengeance among the white people of Minnesota. But President Lincoln, responding to reports and messages to him from cooler, less blood-thirsty, advocates for justice, intervened, directing that only those whose guilt in murdering non-combatants was beyond doubt. should be condemned to hang.

38 Dakota warriors, including one who had sheltered white captives and who was condemned because of mistaken identity, were hanged together in a public spectacle on the day after Christmas, 1862. This seemed to appease those calling for the eradication of the Dakota presence in Minnesota, but as Berg notes, a turning point had been reached on the path that led to the end of native freedom on the Great Plains. ( )