Page:History of the Ojibway Nation.djvu/357

Rh Many times outnumbered by their enemies, the few surviving warriors of the Ojibways were finally forced to take shelter near their wigwams, but the Dakotas entirely surrounded them. After a brave, but hopeless, defence, their guns were silenced forever, and their scalps graced the belts of their victorious enemies. After annihilating the men, the Dakotas rushed into the perforated wigwams, and massacred the women and children who had escaped their bullets. Some few children were spared, who were afterwards adopted into the families of their captors. Some have since returned to their people and are still living, who speak the Dakota tongue with great fluency. A grandson of the chief Bi-aus-wah was captured on this occasion, and he is said to be still living amongst his captors, at an advanced age, and much respected by them.

The narrative of this bloody event was related to the writer by an aged woman, who is now the mother and grandmother of a large and respectable family of half-breed children. She was a young maiden at the time of the massacre, and being present, she witnessed all its terrible incidents. She escaped the fate of her fellows by climbing into a pine tree, the thick foliage of which effectually screened her from the eyes of the bloody Dakotas. After they had finished the work of scalping and mutilating the dead, and setting the wigwams on fire, they left their bloody work, and returned homeward, singing songs of triumph. The young woman descended from her perch in the pine tree, and vividly she describes the scene which presented itself to her eyes as she walked about the encampment, weeping bitter tears for her murdered relatives. The defence had been so long and desperate, that not a lodge pole, or shrub about the late encampment, but what had the marks of bullets or arrows.