Page:History of Iowa From the Earliest Times to the Beginning of the Twentieth Century Volume 2.djvu/115

 sides; and it was nearly a month before the Indians were thoroughly beaten by General Sibley’s command at the Battle of Wood Lake. Here he captured a large number of prisoners and liberated two hundred and fifty captive women and children. Of the Indian warriors captured, four hundred and twenty-five were tried by a military commission, of which three hundred and twenty-one were proved to have been engaged in the massacres of the settlers; three hundred and three were sentenced to death, thirty-nine only were executed. A great outcry was raised in some parts of the East against the execution of the death penalty on the perpetrators of the brutal massacres; influence was brought to bear upon President Lincoln to withhold his approval of the sentence of the military commission and all but thirty-nine were, after a short imprisonment at Davenport, Iowa, sent up the Missouri River and set at liberty. The Government afterward paid a fearful price for this leniency in the long wars waged by the Sioux Indians instigated by these liberated murderers. The campaigns against them by General Sully’s army cost millions of dollars, and the Custer massacre of 1876 was planned by some of these surviving Sioux, who assisted in that bloody drama.

On the 29th of August, Governor Kirkwood sent Colonel S. R. Ingham, of Des Moines, to northwestern Iowa to take such measures for the defense of that section against the Indians as the situation demanded. Colonel Ingham visited the most exposed settlements, and conferred with the citizens, after which he authorized a military company to be raised in the counties of Palo Alto, Kossuth and Emmet. Before Colonel Ingham’s report was made, Governor Kirkwood and called an extra session of the Legislature.

The summer and autumn of 1862 were the darkest days of the war. The Army of the Potomac, which had been organized and drilled for nine months under General McClellan in vicinity of Washington, numbering more