Page:History of Iowa From the Earliest Times to the Beginning of the Twentieth Century Volume 1.djvu/169



the leadership of Ko-ko-wah, made an incursion into the “Neutral Grounds,” and camped near Clear Lake. Learning that a party of Sioux were hunting on the east fork of the Des Moines River, six miles north of the present town of Algona, Ko-ko-wah with sixty warriors started out to attack the enemy. The Musquakies reached the river bank in the night a mile above the Sioux camp. Secreting themselves in the underbrush, they watched the enemy until most of the warriors had started off in the morning for a hunt. Ko-ko-wah then led his band silently into the Sioux camp, taking it by surprise. But the handful of warriors rallied and made a most desperate defense, the women seizing weapons and fighting fiercely for their homes and children. One squaw killed a noted Fox warrior named Pa-tak-a-py with an arrow at a distance of twenty rods. The Sioux had sixteen slain while the Musquakies lost but four of their number. This was the last battle between the Sioux and Foxes in Iowa.

A band of Sioux, under Si-dom-i-na-do-ta, engaged in two battles with the Pottawattamies in northwestern Iowa. One was fought near Twin Lakes in Calhoun County and the other on the South Lizard in Webster County. The Sioux were both times the victors. These were the last Indian battles in Iowa as the various tribes soon after left the State for their western reservations. The Sioux were the most warlike and treacherous of all of the tribes which have at any time had homes in this State. It was a band of Sioux who massacred nearly the entire settlement at Spirit Lake, Okoboji and Springfield in March, 1857. It was an uprising of the Sioux that in 1862 murdered nearly two thousand unarmed men, women and children in Minnesota. The cruelties perpetrated by the Sioux upon helpless women and children in this greatest of all Indian massacres, were never surpassed in atrocity by savages in any period of the world's history.

The tribes here mentioned are the principal ones that are known to have had a bona fide residence in the limits