The depth of the water is 3.8 feet

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I’ve been to Mankato; I’m not exactly sure where that site is. Some say it’s there where that Holiday Inn is, and I’ve stayed there. It was kind of odd when I stayed there; I took some students there one time on a tour and I was telling them that from that foyer upstairs, there’s a swimming pool down there and they had to enter the swimming pool. They say that’s where the gallows was. And it’s kind of odd that when you looked at the Inn and the swimming pool, the depth of the water is 3.8 feet. But from the distance, all you can see is the thirty-eight. And I was pointing that out to them and I said, “If you guys have bad dreams tonight, then you’ll remember where you’re staying.” None of them had any bad dreams, because I asked them. But I did. I had such a terrible dream; I’d never seen so much blood in my life as I did that time in that dream. And I couldn’t wake out of it. So I just thought, well, maybe something did happen there, you know......It was a massacre, people were being killed. And the only thing about some of the dreams I had, they say a dream sometimes is a reflection on something, either a deep fear, or something that you saw happen. And I’ve never seen anything like that. I couldn’t have imagined that, I couldn’t have conjured that up in my mind, I couldn’t have drawn a picture of that. But it was there. I probably could now. I don’t know; that’s the way dreams are.

Oral History- Interview | Narrator Elden Lawrence Interviewer Deborah Locke made in New Ulm, MN | Tuesday, April 12, 2011

Citation: Minnesota Historical Society. U.S. - Dakota War of 1862. The depth of the water is 3.8 feet March 19, 2024. http://www.usdakotawar.org/node/1300

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