Redwood Falls is a city in Redwood County, located along the Redwood River near its confluence with the Minnesota River, in the U.S. state of Minnesota. The population was 5,102 at the 2020 census. It is the county seat.

As the immigrant and the Euro-American population of the North American east coast region grew, population pressures affected people far inland. People moved west to find new homes as more and more land was used by farmers. The Minnesota area is the ancestral homeland of the several Dakota peoples, who consisted of the loosely confederated Oceti sakowin (Seven Council Fires). By 1700, Ojibwe, who spoke an Anishinaabe language, had also come to what is now Minnesota from the further east around the Great Lakes. At times they came into conflict with the Dakota over land and resources and began to push them to the west.

By the mid-19th century, the traditional Dakota yearly cycle of farming, hunting, fishing, and gathering wild rice had been disrupted by cultural changes. Permanent farms were established by European-American settlers, changing habitat. In addition, they removed forests in eastern Minnesota for timber and to develop farmland. Wild game such as bison, elk, whitetail deer, and bear had been hunted so intensively that populations were much reduced compared to the centuries before Euro-American settlement. Dakota people relied on the sale of valuable furs to American traders to earn cash needed to buy necessities.

To encourage the Dakota to bring in more furs, traders offered merchandise on credit. It is not clear that the Dakota well understood the concept of credit, but they grew to depend on trade goods for metal tools and other items.

Pressure from traders who wanted to be paid and concern from government officials about the ability of the Dakota to earn the money they needed, led to the 1851 Treaty of Traverse des Sioux. The federal government wanted to extinguish Native American land title to tracts of land and offered the people annuities of money and goods in exchange. The Dakota agreed to live on a twenty-mile-wide reservation centered on a 75-mile stretch of the upper Minnesota River. Annuity payments for the Dakota were late in the summer of 1862, an example of a pattern of poor delivery of payments and supplies to them.

The site of the future town of Redwood Falls was within the Dakota reservation area along the lower Minnesota River. The war of 1862 was a small segment in Sioux history of conflict with European Americans. Corruption and malfeasance by the Bureau of Indian Affairs resulted in delays of payments of annuities and supplies of promised supplies, causing great hardships for the Dakota. In addition, they struggled with the effects of the relocation and inability to adjust to settled subsistence farming.

An August 4, 1862 confrontation between soldiers and Dakota men led the Indian Agency near Granite Falls to distribute provisions to the tribe on credit to avoid violence. At the Lower Agency at Redwood, however, things were handled differently. At an August 15, 1862 meeting attended by Dakota representatives, Indian Agent Thomas Galbraith, and representatives of the traders, the traders resisted pleas to distributing provisions held in agency warehouses to starving Dakota until the annuity payments arrived. In 1862, U.S. officials in Minnesota were distracted by the U.S. Civil War, payments did not arrive, and the suffering of the Dakota was severe. Some young Dakota took action to claim what they were owed, killing several people in the process. This began the Dakota War of 1862.

As a result of the war, the U.S. government hanged 38 participants and attempted to expel the Dakota people from Minnesota altogether. However, it ended up maintaining the Lower Sioux Indian Reservation in Redwood County. Over time, the Dakota lost control of much of the land first set aside in 1851.