More than 300 captured Dakota were perfunctorily tried and then sentenced to death, but President Lincoln set aside the sentences of all but 38 of them. Their hanging, which took place in Mankato, Minn., on Dec. 26, 1862, was nevertheless the largest mass execution in US history. According to Thomas Maltman's wrenching description, the doomed Dakota were shamed, in the terms of their own culture, by being masked by the hangmen before they died. Today, in the 21st century, there is something distressingly contemporary in the image of those hooded victims of the US government.
The 1862 climax of the Dakota conflict is the kernel of Maltman's first novel, "The Night Birds." Scarcely any serious American writer has ever set out to write an acceptable minor work (though such projects are not uncommon in other countries); rather we all set our sights on the Great American Novel, in one of its protean forms. This consistent hubris has produced one of the most vital literatures in the world, along with plenty of comical overreaching. If Maltman attempts a little too much in this first outing, he also comes impressively close to laying his hands on the grail.
Not content with his wonderfully nuanced story of the complex relationship between Minnesota settlers and the Sioux before, during, and after the crisis of 1862, Maltman is also determined to cover the struggle over slavery in Missouri during the 1850s (including a runaway-slave episode that escaped, perhaps, from "Uncle Tom's Cabin"), a good chunk of the Civil War, and the depredations of the James Gang in the 1870s. With so many threads in the story, it seems impossible for all to run true, but somehow Maltman makes sense of most of them.
