Page:History of Iowa From the Earliest Times to the Beginning of the Twentieth Century Volume 1.djvu/475



hurled her into the river. With wonderful strength and courage she swam in the icy current until she reached and clung to a fallen tree on the shore. Some of the savages beat her off with clubs and with their tent poles pushed her back into the swift current. Again the brave woman swam for the opposite shore, when the merciless wretches beat her back into the rapids. As she was carried along by the current, the savages ran along the shore throwing clubs and stones at the exhausted and drowning woman, until one of the warriors raised his rifle and shot her as she clung to a ledge of driftwood. The annals of Indian cruelty nowhere record a more cowardly crime. She was but nineteen years of age, a lovely girl in the bloom of youth, who had come with her husband to make a home on the beautiful wooded shore of Okoboji. Mrs. Noble and Mrs. Thatcher had been intimate friends in their girlhood days. They had married cousins and together had moved to the distant frontier with bright anticipations of long, happy lives in each other’s society. Now, as Mrs. Noble closed her eyes to shut out the horror of the dying struggles of her dearest friend, and thought of her murdered husband, child, father, mother, brothers and sister, she felt that death alone could relieve her hopeless anguish. That night she begged Abbie and Mrs. Marble to go with her and end their sufferings beneath the dark waters of the river, where her last dear friend had perished. From that day Mrs. Noble seemed weary of life and anxious to end the horrors that every night brought to the captives.

When news of the massacre of the settlers at the lakes and the capture of four women reached the Indian Agency on Yellow Medicine River, the agent, Charles E. Flandreau, with S. E. Biggs and Dr. Thos. Williamson, missionaries, began to devise plans for the rescue of the captives. Two friendly Indians had visited the Sioux camp, had there seen the three captive women and at once opened negotiations for their purchase. They finally