"On Labor Day 1930, an 85-year-old man named Robert Boyd shuffled across a wooden stage toward a microphone on the rolling plains of western Minnesota, 16 miles northeast of Fort Ridgely.
Thousands of folks had driven up gravel roads in boxy cars to watch parachutists, Indian lasso tricks, foot races and a re-enactment of the Battle of Birch Coulie -- the pivotal standoff in the U.S.-Dakota War.
"The air, which 68 years earlier had been filled with the stench of dead soldiers and horse carcasses, now smelled of freshly plowed sod," John Christgau writes, toward the end of his new book, "Birch Coulie, the Epic Battle of the Dakota War.""
Get the Story:"Birch Coulie," by John Christgau (The Minneapolis Star Tribune 3/4)
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