[1] The intensity of the conflict in the specific region to be later known as Minneapolis and its surrounding areas was one of the many factors leading to the creation of Fort Snelling at the confluence of the Minnesota and the Mississippi rivers in 1825.

[2] The aforementioned settler-colonist immigration, reliance on the fur trade, and the founding of the Minnesota Territory on March 3, 1849, further intensified the two tribes' competition for resources.

By the late 1850s, treaties with the United States government had confined the Dakota tribe to a reservation straddling the upper Minnesota River, and the Ojibwe to lands further north and east.

However, this nominal separation did not prevent Ojibwe-Dakota tensions from turning violent again in 1858; Minnesota entered the Union as the 32nd state on May 11 of that year, just over two weeks before the Battle of Shakopee.

[1] Sometime between 4:30 and 5:00 am, ten men from the Ojibwe party opened fire, fatally wounding a young Dakota man fishing from a canoe along the south side of the river.

Dakota chief Wau-ma-nuag cut out Noon Day's heart and drank the blood from it, scalped and decapitated the corpse, and carried it on a pole back to Shakopee.

[5][4] Daniel Buck, Supreme Court justice of Minnesota, remarked that the Dakota appeared "demoralized" after the battle, "with their blankets shot and torn, and carrying their wounded home toward their reservation.

They had the hand of a[n Ojibwe man] fastened to a long pole, and danced around it..."[7] Eyewitness Phillip Collins, who had witnessed the mutilation of Chief Noon Day's body, retrieved a pouch containing the pipe, kinnickinnkh and more personal effects of a fallen Dakota warrior, a crude map on birch bark that bore, besides the localities of hills, lakes and rivers of that vicinity, several mysterious characters, among them figures representing cows, foxes, and more.

[4] After the fighting ceased, the Shakopee community speculated that the Ojibwe make another attempt on the Dakota tribe, as the long history of conflict between the two nations had shown a pattern of attacks and counter-attacks.

Governor Henry Hastings Sibley decided that separating them was the only way to prevent this, and on June 2, he demanded that the Dakota still in the valley pack up their belongings and return to their reservation land.