On the morning of August 18, 1862, Dakota warriors launched a devastating attack on the Lower Sioux Agency, igniting the Dakota War. For years, the Dakota had endured broken treaties, starvation, and the callous exploitation of corrupt traders. Among the most despised was Andrew Myrick, a trader who had married a Santee Dakota woman to secure access to the profitable trade with her people. Despite this connection, Myrick became a symbol of cruelty and greed. Earlier that summer, when desperate Dakota leaders pleaded for food to save their starving families, Myrick infamously sneered, “As far as I’m concerned, if the Indians are hungry, let them eat grass, or their own dung!”
When the attack began, Myrick tried to escape through an attic window but was shot and killed by Dakota warriors. His death, however, was not the end of his story. His body was later found mutilated in a grisly act of symbolic revenge. His head had been cut off, his mouth stuffed with grass—a direct and macabre answer to his heartless remark. Grass had also been stuffed into his buttocks, a final, brutal gesture underscoring the Dakota’s rage at his cold indifference to their suffering.
Mdewakanton chief Big Eagle (Waŋbdí Tháŋka) said, “Now he was lying on the ground dead, with his mouth stuffed full of grass, and the Indians were saying tauntingly: 'Myrick is eating grass himself.'”
Myrick’s death became an enduring symbol of the Dakota War, encapsulating the deep anger born of years of systemic injustice. For the Dakota, it was an act of vengeance against a man who had profited while they starved, a visceral demonstration of their desperation and fury. For settlers and historians, his gruesome fate serves as a stark reminder that they were now at war. As the Dakota War unfolded, Myrick’s death stood out as a brutal warning of the costs of exploitation, neglect, and the path of unchecked greed and cruelty that can lead to catastrophic consequences.
The full story of the Dakota War is available from Legends of the Old West at:
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