(somber violin music) - [Narrator] In August of 1862, Sheriff Charles Roos of Brown County, Minnesota, wrote a hurried dispatch to Governor Alexander Ramsey detailing the gruesome murder of several German immigrants at the hands of a group of Dakota warriors.

The last sentence of his letter identified an unexpected suspect among the culprits, Wabasha's band, a negro leading them.

The events that followed, which we now recognize as the US-Dakota War, were perhaps the most consequential days in Minnesota's history.

A unique set of circumstances placed a young Black man at their center.

- In his 1935 study, "Black Reconstruction in America," W. E. B.

Du Bois asked a pointed question about the ethical obligations of history.

"Nations reel and stagger on their way.

They make hideous mistakes.

They commit frightful wrongs.

They do great and beautiful things.

And shall we not best guide humanity by telling the truth about all this, so far as the truth is ascertainable?"

One of the traumatic wrongs in US history was the prolonged insistence upon chattel slavery.

Another was the violent land dispossession on indigenous peoples.

And the story of Joseph Godfrey, a Black man living among the Dakota as a fugitive, we see a unique perspective that blurs our popular understanding of a free North.

I'm Troy Jackson II with Prairie Public.

Our narrator is Matt Aline, and this is "Black Histories of the Northern Plains."

(somber violin music) - [Matt] Though the Northwest ordinance of 1787 and the Missouri Compromise of 1820 both effectively outlawed slavery in the United States territorial lands of the Great Lakes and Northern Plains, enslaved African Americans were a regular feature of life in the Northwest.

Several thousand slaves had lived in French and British Canada before the European empires abolished slavery there in 1793 and 1834.

Many of them were indigenous Pawnee, but this group included enslaved Africans as well.

When France ceded Illinois country to England as a consequence of the French and Indian War, for example, 900 enslaved Africans lived in the region, according to Professor Christopher Layman.

Some of these enslaved men and women worked as the personal servants of fur traders and explorers, but many were enslaved by the very people tasked with enforcing law and order in the Northwest frontier, officers in the US army, who had moved steadily westward from the original 13 colonies since the United States declared independence.

In the Northern Plains, the epicenter of slavery was at Fort Snelling, a military outpost built at the confluence of the Mississippi and Minnesota rivers in the 1820's, and the small Metis communities that formed nearby at Camp Coldwater and Mendota.

The unique driver of slavery around Fort Snelling was an extralegal army program that reimbursed officers for the expense of their personal servants.

In this way, the US Army incentivized and even subsidized the cheapest personal servants available to officers on the free frontier: enslaved African children.

In 1831, a slave named Courtney was sold to Alexis Bailey, an American fur company trader, for $450.

She would work as a domestic servant in the Mendota home Bailey shared with his wife Lucy, the Metis daughter of Jean-Baptiste Faribault.

Courtney raised her son Joseph, fathered by a French Canadian trader named Joseph Godfrey, in the Bailey household, and together, the two seemed to have endured regular violence.

The next few years brought some profound changes for Courtney and Joseph.

They moved with the Baileys throughout the Mississippi River Valley, first to Prairie du Chien and then to Wabasha.

In 1835, they were separated when Bailey sold Courtney and her younger son William to a Missouri lawyer who helped them successfully sue for their freedom in a precursor to the lawsuit later filed by Dred Scott, another African American enslaved in the Fort Snelling community.

As a teenager in the late 1840's, Joseph Godfrey escaped to live with the Red Wing Band of the Dakota and moved with them to the Lower Sioux Agency on the Minnesota River in 1853.

He lived among them, married a Dakota woman named Takanheca, and fathered a child as a fugitive unsure of his fate in US courts.

Nine years later, Godfrey took part in the US-Dakota War.

though his role in the conflict has been unclear.

During the military trial that followed the Dakota Surrender in the fall of 1862, Godfrey claimed that Dakota Warriors had threatened him with death to take part.

And in a letter sent from prison to the missionary Stephen Riggs in 1865, he reiterated his innocence, writing, "God alone knows I have done nothing bad."

Godfrey was one of the 303 Dakota men tried in the aftermath of the war and sentenced to death.

He narrowly avoided joining the 38 Dakota warriors publicly hanged in Mankato on December 26th, 1862.

Godfrey spent three years in prison before he was pardoned and freed.

He spent the rest of his life on the Santee Reservation in Nebraska until his death in 1909.

- The Civil War and the US-Dakota Wars revealed the complexities of race in the Northern Plains and profoundly reshaped life here afterwards.

The results of the conflicts redefined who was welcome to live in Minnesota communities and with what levels of personal freedom.

Amidst a population boom driven primarily by European immigrants, the fate of free and enslaved Blacks and indigenous Americans, which had previously been intertwined in the lives of the Bangas and Joseph Godfrey, began to diverge.

For the indigenous peoples of the Northern Plains, the end of the 19th century brought continued population decline and adjustments to a new way of life on reservations.

Black folks, on the other hand, begin to migrate to the Northern plains on their own volition.

The end of the 19th century offered new possibilities both real and imagined.

I'm Troy Jackson II for Prairie Public.

Thanks for watching.

(somber violin and harp music) - Funded by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund with money from the vote of the people of Minnesota on November 4th, 2008.

And by the members of Prairie Public.