It was six days before the enactment of the Emancipation Proclamation, and five weeks before Sam Clemens began to call himself Mark Twain. The hanging was carried out on December 26th in Mankato, Minnesota. In December 1862, in the wake of a mass uprising of starving Dakota Indians in Minnesota, President Abraham Lincoln ordered the execution of thirty-nine Dakota Sioux – one of whom was reprieved afterward. He says, “I killed thirty-eight persons during the first two weeks-all of them on account of ancient grudges.” Clemens provides no narrative context for this mysterious number of victims, but I suspect that the number of victims, thirty-eight, echoes the tragic consequence of the US-Dakota War of 1862. I’d like to put special emphasis on the following fact: the narrator starts off his “Carnival of Crime” with a vengeful act of mass murder in Connecticut, the native land that was acquired by Yankees.
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