Page:History of Iowa From the Earliest Times to the Beginning of the Twentieth Century Volume 1.djvu/429



toward their own cabin, but as soon as the old chief was out of sight, they skulked back, hiding in the tall grass, and as the chief returned from the hunt they shot him dead as he rode by on his pony. They then stripped him and, disguising themselves as Indians, waited until night, when, returning to the Indian tepees, they gave the war cry and as the Indian women and children came out in alarm, butchered them one by one. The victims were the aged mother, wife and children of Si-dom-i-na-do-tah and two orphans living with them. One little girl hid in the grass and escaped, and one little boy, terribly wounded and left for dead, recovered. The murderers then plundered the camp of every article of value and left the mutilated bodies of their victims to be devoured by wolves. Returning to their own cabin, they burnt it, to throw suspicion on the Indians, loaded a wagon with plunder and fled down the river. Ink-pa-du-tah, a brother of the murdered chief, was encamped with another band of Sioux Indians a few miles from the scene of the massacre. A few days later he discovered the dead and mangled bodies of his mother, brother and his entire family.

A careful examination by Major Williams, of Fort Dodge, and Ink-pa-du-tah, led to the discovery of facts which left no doubt that Lott was the perpetrator of the murders. His heavily loaded team was tracked down the river on the ice to the mouth of the Boone. Lott stated that he had been driven from his claim by the Indians, and he here sold to the settlers the pony, gun, furs and other property belonging to his victims. Lott hurried on his flight down the river, leaving one of his children at T. S. White’s, six miles below Fort Dodge, and his two little girls at Dr. Hull's in Boone County.

Major Williams, with several of the Indians, followed rapidly on the trail of Lott and his son, hoping to overtake and arrest them. But Lott having several days the start, left the Des Moines River, struck out westward upon the unsettled prairie, crossed the Missouri River