Henry Hastings Sibley: Divided Heart

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 nineteenth 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.

Gilman sets the controversial but altogether human Sibley against the tapestry of trade, politics, frontier expansion, and intercultural relations in the Upper Mississippi valley, and reminds us that throughout his life Sibley was poised to become a national figure but always chose to remain in the place he loved and had helped to name “Minnesota.”