Page:History of Iowa From the Earliest Times to the Beginning of the Twentieth Century Volume 1.djvu/481



can be traced back to Henry Lett’s fearful crime, the primary cause leading to the bloody retribution visited upon the innocent, as the attack was led by surviving relatives of Si-dom-i-na-do-tah. Forty-one innocent men, women and children were the direct victims, while the suffering of the captives, relatives and members of the Belief Expedition make up a record of horror and misery seldom surpassed.

It can never be known how many of the Indians were killed but the soldiers and friendly Indians, under Major Flandreau and Lieutenant Murray, killed Roaring Cloud, the murderer of Mrs. Noble and three other members of Ink-pa-du-tah’s band. It is probable that several were killed by Dr. Herriott, Snyder and Mattocks and two or three in the battle at the Thomas house. Ink-pa-du-tah’s party was among the most ferocious of the butchers in the Minnesota massacres of 1862 and it is not unlikely that some of them were among the Indians who were killed, or the thirty who were hung at Mankato. Ink-pa-du-tah was last heard of among the Sioux who fled to the far West pursued by General Sibley ’s army in 1863. On the 12th of April, 1857, Major Williams made a lengthy report to Governor Grimes of the Belief Expedition under his command from which the following extracts are made:

“Being called upon by the frontier settlers for aid in checking the horrible outrages committed upon the citizens living on the Little Sioux River at the Spirit Lake settlements, and in Emmet County, by the Sioux Indians, by authority you invested in me, I raised, organized and armed three companies of thirty men each, which were as we proceeded increased to thirty-seven men each. By forced marches through snowdrifts from fifteen to twenty feet deep, and swollen streams, we made our way up to the State line. Never was harder service rendered by any body of men than by the one hundred and ten volunteers under my command. We had to ford streams breast deep every few miles, and often to drag by band with ropes our wagons, horses and oxen through deep ravines drifted even fall of snow. Wet all day to our waists, we had to lie out on the open prairie without tents, wrapped in blankets in the snow. Eighty miles out