Page:History of Iowa From the Earliest Times to the Beginning of the Twentieth Century Volume 1.djvu/450



. They flung her aside and searched the body of their victim, taking from it a belt containing $1,000 in gold. This was the little fortune the young couple had brought with them to improve and stock the beautiful farm they had selected on the banks of the lake. The Indians then plundered the house, took Mrs. Marble’s gold watch and placed her upon a pony. In one brief hour the young wife had lost husband and home, and was a captive, reserved for a fate worse than death.

The Indians returned with their plunder to the main body, and here Mrs. Marble found the other three captive women and from them learned the terrible fate that had overtaken the entire settlement. They realized now that none were left to attempt their rescue, and torturing visions of the slaughter of fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers, husbands and children were stamped on their memory in a hideous intensity that paralyzed them. They prayed for death to end it all and save them from a fate too awful to be contemplated. The captive women were soon separated, each being taken to a different lodge, where their hair was braided and their faces painted, after the manner of the Sioux squaws. They were held as slaves and suffered treatment as brutal as has ever befallen helpless women in the hands of savages. Before leaving Marble’s Grove, the Indians pealed the bark from a large tree, and on the white surface pictured in signs the record of their horrid deeds. This ghastly record was visible for several years, and was seen by many of the early settlers.

Thus did Ink-pa-du-tah bide his time, and after the lapse of more than three years, wreak a terrible vengeance upon innocent white families, for the massacre of his nearest relatives by Henry Lott and his son. Not a person was left in the entire colony at the lakes to carry the news of the great tragedy to the nearest settlement. But it so happened that the discovery was made on the day on which the Howe, Noble and Thatcher families were slaughtered.

Morris Markham, who lived at Noble’s, had started for