(gentle music) (gentle energetic music) - [Bret] Coming up on the next "Prairie Sportsman," veterans find solace and comradery in a cast and blast adventure in Western Minnesota.

- [Person] That's what our goal is today, help them heal.

- [Bret] And we learn about life in the Minnesota River Valley before settlers.

- [Person] And he spends the winner of 1766, 1767 at Lockheed Parl.

- Welcome to "Prairie Sportsman."

I'm Bret Amundson.

We've got a great show for ya starting right now.

(gentle energetic music continues) - [Announcer] Funding for Prairie Sportsman is provided by, the Minnesota Environment and Natural Resources Trust Fund, as recommended by the Legislative Citizen Commission on Minnesota Resources.

Mark and Margaret Yackel-Juleen on behalf of Shalom Hill Farm, a retreat and conference center in a prairie setting near Windham, Minnesota on the web at "shalomhillfarm.org."

Live Wide Open, Western Minnesota Prairie Waters and the members of Pioneer PBS.

(solemn patriotic music) - On January 14th, 1969, I had a bad day, and that day I was on a convoy and our convoy was ambushed and I was taking a prisoner war.

(solemn patriotic music continues) (uplifting patriotic music) - [Bret] 13 October, 2023.

Purple Heart recipients, veterans, members of law enforcement and their supporters gather at the VFW in Appleton, Minnesota as part of the first annual cast and blast event put on by Warriors and Walleye Outdoors.

- I am going to right now introduce to you guys and gals, the Purple Heart recipients that made it to this first annual cast and blast.

My goal is to get people to smile and see, have other people see there's people out there that care for 'em.

That's the goal.

There's lots of things we can do in life, but the great outdoors is where it's at.

- [Bret] This event would feature two days of hunting and fishing for the veterans.

These events are important in my opinion, because of the ability to say thank you to guys like this.

You know?

I'm sure it's become more common now to thank a veteran, but some of these guys, especially the guys that were in Vietnam, wasn't exactly the case back then.

So it's nice to see people going up and thanking them.

And I thanked one of the guys here today and he said, "you don't know how much we appreciate hearing that."

(uplifting patriotic music) - And then I need one guy to go up by the fence sign and we're just gonna walk.

Alright guys, let's go.

Nine o'clock, right?

Come on.

Let's go, you love cattails.

Come on.

- Well, I came here with, through Pope County Sheriff's Office.

I was a dispatcher, so they invited us along.

- [Person] Alex Olsson, he's worked for the Starbucks Police Department.

And Nick, the guys walked into a bad situation.

Shots were fired.

A friend of ours was killed.

- We reached out a little bit further than just military.

We brought a couple Pope County guys here that went through an incident here a few months ago, and they need to heal too, you know.

- With Alex being on the scene, he did take one round.

Nick, you did an awesome job.

You really did.

And this is great that you guys are honoring these guys for everything that they do because this profession that we're in is a thankless job.

You guys, thank you very much for everything that you do.

Greatly appreciate it.

Keep doing the job that you are.

- What gives them a chance to talk to somebody that's had, you know, a somewhat relatable experience.

- Correct, and it's healing.

That's what our goal is today, help them heal.

- Hen.

(laughs) Rooster.

One of the first times I've been out, probably 30 years, so a great opportunity and really appreciate all of what the guys are doing for us.

(dramatic music) - [Person] Everybody good?

Looks good, let's go.

- Perfect.

First Cav, second to 12th.

And I did that for six months and then I transferred for a door gunner on a helicopter.

I did that for the rest of my term.

(gunfire bangs) I was at Quan Loi at the time when I went into Vietnam, and that was August 12th is when I got wounded.

And I've had the shrapnel ever since.

I've got shrapnel in my back and in my foot that I've been carrying for ever since.

- [Person] Hey, rooster!

(gunfire bangs) But it don't seem to bother a whole lot, so, I guess it'll be there until I die.

(laughs) (soft somber music) - [Cameraman] Hey, nice shot.

- Thank you.

- [Cameraman] (laughs) You got two birds now?

- [Roger] Yep.

- [Cameraman] (laughs) All right.

(soft somber music continues) - We'll go to a corner.

- [Person] Yeah, we'll go down to the corner and then- - And then walk it south.

- Yep.

- July of '69 to July of '70, I was stationed at Di An.

I flew helicopters, hauling troops in and out of combat situations.

Flew approximately 1,150 hours in Vietnam.

Did a lot of rescue missions, hauling troops in and out and got shot down once.

- [Cameraman] Really?

- And I didn't get hurt too bad.

I got hurt, but not very bad.

This event is just unbelievable.

You see the people that come and help, that's a, I mean, they volunteer their time and it's just incredible the work they do for it.

Shows appreciation to the fire departments, police officers and rescue squads.

They all need the recognition, 'cause it's a lot of work, a lot of training.

A lot of times they're away from their families, so we can't forget all them people either.

(soft somber music continues) (soft somber music continues) - I never did any of these things.

I thought it was for the young guys.

I didn't think it was for us Vietnam.

And I found out that's almost the opposite.

They're happy to have Vietnam guys do it, so it's just kind of a bond.

Everyone has been in, everyone has served.

And I think that just brings a natural bond to us.

(soft music) Day I was on a convoy and our convoy was ambushed and I was taking a prisoner war.

And I spent four years and chained to trees, living in holes in the ground.

And later on during the war, they brought us and they put us in cages, but I was held in the jungle in the south.

Our, if you wanna call it, torture.

It was psychological.

We never was beaten anything like that.

You did get a gun butt for being a jerk.

But they took care of my wounds.

I was hit four times.

Lucky 'em, none of them were really, really bad.

I lost my bicep and my right arm, but otherwise, you know, they doctor them up, they took care of me.

So when I got back in '73, like say a lot of Vietnam, my friends, they came back to a different environment than I did because of the protests and things.

So I didn't have that, you know.

Sometimes it made me feel bad, the attention I got, over the other veterans, but it's just the way it is.

- We had half the people were fishing this morning, half the people were out here pheasant hunting.

And when I say people, I mean these vets that you brought out here, purple Heart recipients, law enforcement, just a really neat group of people.

Really interesting group of people.

Some of the stories we've heard here are pretty amazing.

- Exactly and, you know, those stories would never been told otherwise.

- I was always kind of a loner.

And this helps get that out.

And I think it does help for some people to tell their stories of their experiences.

And I, a lot of people, I've met some people, they're just dying to let it out, but they just, they don't find the right people.

And that's the, I think, is the nicest thing about 'em.

It gives a chance for someone to maybe open up to 'em, and let out some of the things that might bug 'em or that they're proud of even that other people just don't talk about with them.

(soft music) - How many Vietnam veterans do we have in here?

Yeah, that's what I figured.

Quite a few.

(crowd applauds) So to all my veterans here, thank you.

Well done.

You've really set the stage for what is going on in many of our organizations today.

(soft music continues) - It's one vet at a time, and above all, I think for all the young guys, veterans join the service groups because they're the ones that fight.

You guys, they're still gonna be coming up with things that you've experienced and you've gotta have the service organizations there fighting for you.

(soft music continues) (gentle spirited music) - [Bret] The Minnesota River that runs through the state's heartland draws its name from the Dakota Word, "Mni Sota," meaning cloudy water.

The river served as a thoroughfare for the Dakota Nation and fur traders before European settlers arrived.

(gentle spirited music continues) John Robertson, a retired Episcopal priest, manages the historic side at the Lower Sioux Agency.

A community of Indian people whose ancestors once traveled along the Minnesota River.

- If we look at the petroglyphs, which are 30 miles south of this location or so, is that we know based upon those that this area has been a transportation route for millennia.

We have indications that pottery up on Big Stone Lake, Lake Traverse was in the 1600s, 1700 era.

We know that there were things that were resourced in that area.

So the Minnesota River was the highway.

(gentle spirited music continues) (soft spirited music) When the French first made contact with the Dakota.

I believe it was the 1620s or 30, something like that.

But there was no things like boundaries as we know them today in terms of nation states.

Tribal boundaries or aboriginal boundaries were fluid, and one of the ways that we used to describe it is that your territory was that in which your language and culture had influence.

So that sets the early pre-contact Dakota territory from roughly southern Hudson Bay down around into what's the Wisconsin Peninsula or the Wisconsin landmass today into northern, what's now northern Iowa, Eastern north and South Dakota, back up into Canada to Hudson Bay.

(soft spirited music continues) And the center became around what's now known as Mille Lacs Lake or Spirit Lake.

That area was the first center of the Dakota Nation.

The Ojibwe were with the French and the one of the stories goes is that the Ojibwe were telling the French that they were those that lived on the river.

The French, supposedly, according to myth and legend thought they were talking about they were the people of the snake or they were snake.

So then we end up with the "nadouessioux," which is a word that is French for snake and ends up being Sioux.

(soft spirited music continues) (solemn music) Then as the intellectuals disappear and the actual line people, the fur trappers come in.

They then began to.... and we'll put it in parentheses, "married into the Dakota families," realizing that they were the, that by doing that, they had a built in network of access to what they were after, the resource that they were after, which were the furs.

So that meant that most of the French participants in the fur trade learned to speak Dakota.

They lived as Dakota.

During that fur trading time and the development of the emerging colonies and power, there begins to be a shift within the North American landscape in terms of the Aboriginal territories.

The center of their universe shifts from Mille Lacs Lake to the mouth of the Minnesota, Mississippi River.

(energetic music) - [Bret] The Dakota moved south under pressure from the Ojibwe, which diminished some of their food supplies such as maple syrup, wild rice, and woodland game.

The French fur industry brought in much needed supplies and trading posts were established along the waterway as far as Lake Traverse.

- The fur traders would come in, they were lower class French people, the voyagers.

Usually they would make a run down the Minnesota River and then down to Prairie Du Chien and that's where the goods would come in, either from what's now Canada.

And then they would load 'em up and then go back up to Lake Traverse so it was a major trip.

They would do their rendezvous and then they would load up the furs and take 'em back up.

And then they would go out then to Europe from there.

And then the goods would come out here and be distributed amongst the Dakota people.

So that would be the pots and pans, the hatchets, the iron, the metal, the things that were beginning to make Dakota life livable in the late 1700s or early 1800s.

- [Bret] The British competed with the French for the fur trade and eventually dominated.

Historian John Grenier is writing a book about British Commander Robert Rogers, who commissioned cartographer, Jonathan Carver to map the region.

- Rogers had a grand vision for discovering the northwest passage across the North American continent.

(energized music continues) (bright spirited music) Carver travels in the fall of 1766, gets all the way up to the falls of St. Anthony and his guides tell him that they're not gonna go any farther.

They're gonna return down to the Wisconsin River and winter there.

He meets a band of Dakotas, and the Dakotas say, they invite him, essentially, to come out to Lac Qui Parle, which is their wintering grounds.

It was not a large segment of the Dakota Nation.

Small family groups.

And he spends the winter of 1766, 1767 at Lac Qui Parle.

While he's here, he is the first Anglo American, or the first Englishman to learn the Dakota dialect, which is a pretty profound accomplishment.

It's one of the great coincidences of early American contact with the Dakota people that Carver learns to speak Dakota at the place called Lac Qui Parle, the lake that talks.

And the Dakota's treated him incredibly well, generously shared their resources and their expertise and their community with him.

(bright spirited music continues) (curious music) - [Bret] After wintering and Lac Qui Parle, Carver went back to the falls of St. Anthony.

He waited for Rogers to send him supplies and an expedition crew, which never arrived.

- Robert Rogers often played loose and fast with the facts, and he would promise people things that he knew he could not deliver.

So he promised Carver eight shillings a day, plus food and material for the expedition.

(indistinct shouting) (gavel banging) The British government never honored carver's expenses.

So Carver died in poverty in the late 1770s in England.

As he went back, after he went back to parliament and submitted his request for refunds of all his expenses.

(curious music continues) (dramatic music) - Shortly after he leaves, that's the beginning of the real ferment in the United States that leads to the Revolutionary War.

That then is beginning to shift then the relationship of all the major players in what's now the United States or North America in terms of the relationships between the tribes, the various Native nations and the various foreign powers.

During the Revolutionary War, the Dakota people are aligned with the British and dramatically so, and it becomes even more obvious that alignment in the next war, the war of 1812.

The choice becomes between that next group of fur traders who were British because they had taken over the operation of the fur trade from the French.

The fur traders just left.

They didn't want to be American citizens then.

My great-great-great-Grandma was married to one of those British fur traders then who refused to become an American citizen after 1812.

- [Bret] The fur trader moved to Canada and left his wife and daughter behind.

- And then eventually sends for my great-great grandma to give her an education in Canada.

And that's how she meets the Robertson guy and then comes back to Minnesota.

So that's (stammers), that era of the fur trade and that transition in the Dakota alignment with the British is played out in my family history.

- [Bret] By 1852, the fur trading era was over, and American homesteaders were settling the land.

1850 treaties relegated the Dakotas to narrow strips of land along the Minnesota in exchange for goods, services and money.

Tensions over late payments, corrupt agents and no hunting woods erupted into the US Dakota War of 1862.

38 Dakota were hung, and the rest marched to Fort Snelling, then South Dakota, hundreds died along the way.

(bright music) When the US government agreed to put former Indian lands into federal trust status as a lower Sioux agency, Dakota started to return home and eventually became a self-supporting community.

The Upper Sioux Agency was established as a state park in 1963, and 60 years later, the land was transferred back to the original Dakota community.

(bright music continues) - As we continue to go forward as a total American culture or United States culture, society, is that if we are going to make change, if we are going to be able to create a future, that part of what's going to have to, in my opinion, going to have to be recovered, is the spirit, that the Dakota, or the understanding that the Dakota people had, the Ojibwe people had, Iowa people had, everybody had that lived in North America, is that this that we're standing on is what we are.

And unless we know what we're standing on, then we can't know who we are.

(bright music continues) (gentle energized music) (soft music) - [Announcer] Funding for Prairie Sportsmen is provided by, the Minnesota Environment and Natural Resources Trust Fund, as recommended by the Legislative Citizen Commission on Minnesota Resources.

Mark and Margaret Yackel-Juleen on behalf of Shalom Hill Farm, a retreat and conference center in a prairie setting near Windham, Minnesota on the at "shalomhillfarm.org."

Live Wide Open, Western Minnesota Prairie Waters and the members of Pioneer PBS.