{"id":382,"slug":"birch-coulee-battlefield-morton-minnesota","story":[{"heading":null,"paragraphs":["Birch Coulee is the battle that went wrong from the campsite — the September 2, 1862 fight where a burial detail of 170 men under Major Joseph Brown, sent out from Fort Ridgely to bury settlers killed in the U.S.-Dakota War, picked a tactically hopeless piece of open ground away from the water and let two hundred Dakota warriors surround them in the dark.","The attack at dawn was the Dakota's best fight of the war: thirty-six hours of siege, thirteen soldiers and ninety horses dead, more than fifty wounded, against two recorded Dakota deaths. Henry Sibley's column with artillery finally broke it on the morning of September 3. It was the war's longest battle and the Army's worst defeat in it — a fact the monument on the quiet prairie doesn't shout.","The file keeps Birch Coulee: the burial party's bad camp, the thirty-six hours, the 13-versus-2 casualty count, and the battlefield where the war's imbalance briefly reversed.","Birch Coulee is the archive's ambush file — the burial detail, the dawn attack, and the Army's worst day of the 1862 war."]},{"heading":"Why this file matters","paragraphs":["Birch Coulee is the archive's ambush file — the 1862 siege, the exposed camp, and the Dakota victory that was the war's exception.","A battlefield won by the surrounded keeps its prairie — the file's suggestion being that Birch Coulee's hold is the reversal: the strongest Army position in the war was the weakest ground, and the Dakota made it cost."]}],"name":"Birch Coulee Battlefield","aliases":[],"type":"BATTLEFIELD","type_label":"Battlefield","cats":["DARK_HISTORY","BATTLEFIELD"],"groups":["dark-history"],"desc":"Battlefield associated with documented cultural history.","full_desc":"Birch Coulee Battlefield is a battlefield in Morton, Minnesota. Battlefield associated with documented cultural history. It sits in the archive under dark history and battlefields. The dossier holds 1 documented fact — the record is history-forward, no paranormal claims on file. The site is open to visitors. The dossier keeps the place and the story in the same record — which is what the archive is for.","address":"Junction of Renville County Highways 2 and 18","city":"Morton","county":"Renville","state":"Minnesota","postal":"56270","region":"Midwest","lat":44.553268,"lon":-94.984321,"coord_kind":"CITY","status":"HISTORIC_SITE","access":"PUBLIC","access_notes":null,"ownership":null,"website":null,"phone":null,"year_built":null,"year_opened":null,"year_closed":null,"year_demolished":null,"designation":null,"current_use":null,"research_notes":"No haunting inferred from battlefield history. Managed by Renville County Historical Society.","stage":"SOURCE_RESEARCH","quality":{"level":"MEDIUM","score":62.1,"dims":{"location_confidence":0.75,"identity_confidence":0.65,"historical_confidence":0.8,"source_quality":0.8,"paranormal_claim_provenance":null,"coordinate_confidence":0,"current_access_confidence":0.7,"freshness":0.65}},"claims":[],"history":[{"description":"Site of a major battle in the U.S.–Dakota War; interpretive trails present Dakota and U.S. soldiers’ perspectives. A fort with documented casualties writes its own foundation — the lore comes after. It's verified history: the dossier's load-bearing detail. The record appears in 'Birch Coulee Battlefield'. The entry's timeline holds it; the lore holds the rest.","evidence":"HISTORICALLY_VERIFIED","date_start":null,"date_end":null,"confidence":null,"source":{"name":"Birch Coulee Battlefield","url":"https://www.mnhs.org/birchcoulee","publisher":"Minnesota Historical Society","type":"HISTORICAL_SOCIETY","authority":2}}],"legends":[],"entities":[],"events":[],"investigations":[],"encounters":[],"media":[],"persons":[],"visitor":{"admission_fee":"Free","tour_availability":"Self-guided interpretive trails.","last_verified_at":"2026-09-14T10:36:19+00:00","source":{"name":"Birch Coulee Battlefield","url":"https://www.mnhs.org/birchcoulee","publisher":"Minnesota Historical Society","type":"HISTORICAL_SOCIETY","authority":2}},"sources":[{"name":"Birch Coulee Battlefield","url":"https://www.mnhs.org/birchcoulee","publisher":"Minnesota Historical Society","type":"HISTORICAL_SOCIETY","authority":2}],"conflicts":[],"wiki":{"title":"Birch Coulee Battlefield","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birch_Coulee_Battlefield","desc":"United States historic place","extract":"Birch Coulee Battlefield in Renville County, Minnesota, United States, was the site of the Battle of Birch Coulee, the costliest military engagement for U.S. forces during the Dakota War of 1862. It is now a historic site with self-guided trails and markers interpreting the battle from both sides. Birch Coulee was nominated to the National Register of Historic Places for having state-level significance in military history, and was listed in 1973.","img":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/ef/Birch_Coulee_Battlefield_monument.JPG/330px-Birch_Coulee_Battlefield_monument.JPG?utm_source=en.wikipedia.org&utm_campaign=api&utm_content=thumbnail","score":93,"lat":44.57611111,"lon":-94.97638889},"counts":{"claims":0,"history":1,"legends":0,"entities":0,"sources":1}}