Comments   Summary   Contents   Author Notes

Summary: Congressman, governor, military leader, and senior statesman -- no person played a longer, more influential or more varied role in the shaping of Minnesota than Henry Hastings Sibley (1811-91). Yet Sibley's history reveals universal tensions about the duality of the 19th century frontiersman who is at once an accommodating trade partner of the Indian/European/Métis worlds and the conquering government official of the ever-expanding West. Rhoda Gilman has spent over thirty years examining Sibley -- through hints and fragments of stories that Sibley himself left in articles, an unfinished autobiography, and scores of family letters -- and uncovers in this perceptive and balanced biography the complexities of a man who embodied these clashing extremes.