Gender and Vigilantism on the Minnesota Frontier,

Due to this, Swisshelm did not keep up with the Indian conflicts because of the fear of scaring people away from Stearns County. When the US-Dakota Conflict of 1862 arose, Swisshelm had a duty to report it, and now that she had to write about atrocities committed by the Dakotas, her hate for them increased. In her mind, the Dakota attacks were sudden and unnecessary. This seemed sudden because she was not reporting the news from before, so when the conflict began it seemed very sudden because previous events had not been taken into account. .
             The most interesting point in changing Swisshelm's view on the Dakotas was that she was a woman. When Swisshelm first came west she wanted to live with the Native Americans of the region and become their friend and mediator with the whites. Instead, Swisshelm moved in with her sister in the town of St. Cloud where she got the job as newspaper editor. Swisshelm was able to get the job as the editor in the paper because of the lack of workers in the frontier. During this time women were idealized as having higher values than men and therefore should try to teach morals. This was the reason for the compassion in her early writings in her paper. She wrote about toleration towards the Dakotas due to their need to be civilized. This preaching also showed in the way she advocated vigilantism for the extermination of the Dakotas. She used morals to try to convince people to attack and kill Dakotas. One way she used morals was to criticize the Dakota's actions of killing white people. She insisted that murders throughout the country were hanged, so death should be the action towards the Dakotas. To try and get federal support, Swisshelm made a trip to Washington DC. Swisshelm was a member of the Republican Party and had used her position as editor to do many favors for her political friends. When Swisshelm spoke in Washington DC, she was ignored because she was a woman.