In the late summer of 1862, this land was part of the U.S.-Dakota War, a conflict rooted in decades of pressure on the Dakota nation after treaties signed between 1805 and 1858 ceded much of its land to the U.S. government. By 1862, Dakota people who had once lived throughout the Upper Midwest were confined to a narrow strip of reservation land along the Minnesota River, and as hunting and fishing lands diminished, many families depended on cash and goods promised by those treaties. Crop failures in 1861, followed by heavy snows, left them poor and hungry, while U.S. government agents believed that farming like Euro-American settlers would solve their problems. When some treaty provisions were not honored, long-building frustrations peaked and war broke out at the Lower Sioux Agency, spreading to battles at Redwood Ferry, New Ulm, Fort Ridgely, Birch Coulee, and Wood Lake. When the fighting ended, hundreds of people were dead. The events at Birch Coulee remain difficult to reconstruct with certainty because surviving accounts conflict, few Dakota stories endure from a tradition that relied on spoken rather than written history, and testimony from Dakota men tried after the war was often filtered through translators. Accounts by U.S. soldiers and civilians are also uncertain, since many were recorded during government investigations or written decades later, leaving the past open to interpretation. Francis J. Yellow, a member of the Lakota Cheyenne River Reservation in South Dakota, expressed in a 1995 painting his belief in the sacredness of humanity by depicting the clash of cultures that culminated in the U.S.-Dakota War; the scaffold in the upper right refers to the government's trial and execution of 40 Dakota men after the war.