Henry Hastings Sibley

Divided Heart Author Rhoda Gilman Minnesota Historical Society Press (April 12, 2004) The first full-scale biography of Henry Hastings Sibley, congressman, army general, and Minnesota’s first governor. Description 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 controvers