Andrew Myrick
Andrew J. Myrick was a trader, who with his Dakota wife, operated stores in southwest Minnesota at two Native American 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 when they were starving and being described on that account as the "most hated of the traders". He was alleged to have said of the Dakota, "Let them eat grass." The validity of that quotation is now disputed.
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 tried to broker a deal with the bands of the Dakota in which the traders were to be paid directly with the federal annuity payments, once those delayed payments arrived, in exchange for the traders extending credit to the Dakota.