Andrew Myrick


Andrew J. Myrick, was a trader who, with his Dakota wife, operated stores in southwest Minnesota at two Indian agencies serving the Dakota near the Minnesota River.
In the summer of 1862, when the Dakota were starving because of failed crops and delayed annuity payments, Myrick is noted as refusing to sell them food on credit, allegedly saying, "Let them eat grass," although the validity of that alleged quotation has come into dispute.

Background

In the summer of 1862, eastern bands of the Dakota people were living in a small reservation along the southern bank of the Minnesota River. Their crops had failed and the area had been overhunted, and they were starving. In a meeting at the Upper Sioux Agency on August 4, US Indian Agent Thomas Galbraith directed that only some food be released to the Dakota from the warehouse, as annuity supplies and payments had been delayed by the American Civil War and a government preoccupied with the Northern Virginia Campaign, which threatened the safety of the capital, Washington D.C.
Andrew Myrick had stores at both Yellow Medicine and Redwood. After Galbraith decided against issuing more of the annuity food, he turned to the store owners and workers and asked them what they were intending to do. Myrick had been told that the "traders paper", which allowed the traders to be paid directly from the annuity allotments for what they were owed on credit by Native Americans, was not going to be allowed this time.

Death

On August 18, 1862 Chief Little Crow led his warriors against U.S. settlements, beginning the Dakota War. Myrick was killed on the first day at the Battle of Lower Sioux Agency, where Dakota warriors took revenge at the agency for its failure to give them food. When his body was found days later, "his body was mutilated, his head being severed from the body and the mouth filled with grass."