With Sully into the Sioux Land Part 1

With Sully into the Sioux Land.

by Joseph Mills Hanson.

CHAPTER I

THE SCOURGE OF THE BORDER

"Papa is coming, mama! Papa is coming!"

Tommy Briscoe, br.i.m.m.i.n.g over with excitement, ran, shouting, across the yard and darted into the kitchen, leaving a half emptied pail of milk standing on the ground before the stable, where a small red calf he had been feeding promptly upset it. In a moment he reappeared in the doorway, his mother and little sister Annie behind him. Mrs. Briscoe, a woman still evidently under middle age but whose sweet, serious face showed plainly the lines which the patient endurance of hards.h.i.+ps draw upon the faces of most frontier women, looked down the faintly marked road running away to the southward, surprise and perplexity in her eyes. Along the road and still some distance away, a horseman was galloping toward them furiously. The road led only to the Briscoe cabin, which was distant a number of miles from its nearest neighbors. The rider could hardly be any other than Mr. Briscoe; moreover, even at that distance his wife could recognize the color and the short, jerking gallop of the horse he was riding.

"It is certainly Chick," she said, half to herself and half to the children. "But what can bring Tom home so soon? He did not expect to be back before four or five o'clock and now it is hardly past noon. He must have left Fort Ridgely almost as soon as he reached there. I hope nothing is wrong."

"I hope he got the calico for my dolly's dress," exclaimed Annie, dancing up and down in antic.i.p.ation of the gift her father had promised to bring her when he rode away in the morning.

"And I hope he got my coyote trap," added Tommy. "The coyotes will carry off all our chickens, first thing we know."

He raised the short bow he was carrying and sent a little iron-tipped arrow whizzing accurately into a tree-trunk fifty feet away. He had been going out to the meadow in a few minutes, and he never went anywhere without his bow and arrows, for he was sufficiently expert with them to bring down now and then a squirrel or a quail and sometimes even a prairie chicken.

The two children, unconscious of any cause for uneasiness in their father's early return, followed Mrs. Briscoe as she stepped from the door and walked a few paces down the road to meet the approaching rider, who came on without slacking pace until he drew up beside them. His horse, a small animal, was dripping with sweat and trembling with exertion, for it was a hot August day and his rider was a large man. Mr.

Briscoe, for he it was, stepped down from the saddle rather stiffly. His face was very grave as he kissed his wife and children.

"Did you get my coyote trap, papa?" cried the little boy, almost before his father's foot had touched the ground.

"Did you bring my calico, papa?" chimed in Annie.

"No, my dears, I hadn't time. You had better run away a minute." He glanced at his wife significantly.

"Oh, I'm sorry!" exclaimed Tommy. "But let me unsaddle Chick." He caught the stirrup leather and swung himself nimbly into the saddle.

"Go and finish feeding the calf, Annie," said Mrs. Briscoe.

The little girl, with disappointed face, walked obediently toward the stable, into which Tommy had already ridden.

"What has happened, Thomas?" exclaimed Mrs. Briscoe, her voice quivering with anxiety, as soon as the children were beyond hearing.

Her husband laid his strong hand rea.s.suringly on her arm.

"Don't be frightened, Mary," he said, "we shall doubtless get out of it all right, but we must hurry. The Indians broke out at the Lower Agency this morning; you know they have been becoming more and more restless for a good while past. When I reached Fort Ridgely, about eleven, Captain Marsh had already started for the Agency with about fifty men.

He may have the disturbance crushed by this time. I saw Lieutenant Geer, who is left in command with forty men. Lieutenant Sheehan marched for Fort Ripley yesterday with fifty men. Geer would have sent an escort with me while I came for you but of course he could not spare a man from the handful he has. I think it would not be really dangerous to stay here, but to be on the safe side and not expose you and the children to any risk we had perhaps better pack what we can on the wagon and go to the fort for a few days till the trouble blows over. Where is Al?"

Mr. Briscoe was slapping the dust from his coat and hat as he talked. He tried to speak in as rea.s.suring terms and as confident a tone as possible, but his wife intuitively knew that he was not telling her all that was in his mind.

"Al just went up to the meadow to turn the wind-rows," she said. "Tommy was going to help him as soon as he finished feeding the calf. Shall he go for Al?"

"Yes."

Mrs. Briscoe called to the boy, who dashed away toward the meadow, which lay only a short distance north, beyond a thicket of bushes and small trees. Then she turned to her husband, who was walking into the stable.

"You have had no dinner, Tom," she said.

"No, but I want none."

"Were any white people killed at the Agency?" she asked, as Mr. Briscoe came out with a halter and started toward the pasture lot where their other horse was grazing. He seemed to want to avoid questions, but he answered:

"They say there were."

"Many?"

Her husband paused. He was not accustomed to conceal things from his wife.

"Why," he replied, hesitatingly, "it is reported that all of them were killed; but that is probably exaggerated, and very likely it will prove there were none."

Mrs. Briscoe's face paled a little but she retained her composure. She asked no more questions, for now she knew all that was necessary for the present of the gravity of the situation. Moreover, she had supreme confidence in her husband's judgment. He started again toward the pasture, saying, as he glanced toward the lumber wagon standing near the kitchen door:

"You had better begin putting things in the wagon, Mary. You know what to take; only the most necessary and valuable things, for we shall doubtless be back in a few days."

Indeed, Mrs. Briscoe knew well by hard experience what to take. Once before during the brief year they had spent in the wild valley of the Minnesota River, they had fled to Fort Ridgely, about twenty miles south of their claim, at the alarm of an Indian uprising, which, however, in that instance had fortunately proved false. That was in the Spring of 1862; it was now August of the same year. When they moved into the country during the previous August, bringing the few possessions which remained to them from the wreck of their fortunes in Missouri, their nearest neighbor lived fourteen miles away. Now there were three pioneer families within a radius of ten miles of them, and, in comparison with the earlier isolation of their new home, they felt that the country was becoming quite densely peopled. But away to the southwest and west of them, not more than twenty-five miles distant, swarmed a host of neighbors whose presence there always oppressed their imaginations like the sight of a low, black bank of thunder clouds when they looked toward that quarter of the horizon. For southwest, at Red Wood Falls, was the Lower Agency, the a.s.sembling place of the M'dewakanton and the Wakpekute Indians, and west was the Upper Agency, on the Yellow Medicine River, where lived or congregated several thousand Sissetons and Wahpetons.

Still further west and extending away to Big Stone Lake, nearly one hundred miles distant, were some other agencies and missions, where greater or less bodies of Indians of the above tribes made their headquarters. The Sissetons and Wahpetons on the Yellow Medicine were not greatly to be feared. Many of them had become Christians under the wise and kindly training of such heroic missionaries as Thomas L. Riggs and Thomas S. Williamson, who with their families had for years lived and maintained schools among them. a.s.sisted by the United States Government, many of these Indians had come into the possession of good homes and farms and were rapidly becoming prosperous and accustomed to the ways of civilization.

But the M'dewakantons and Wakpekutes at the Lower Agency were of a different character. Few of them had ever shown a disposition to settle down to industry, and generally they spent their time out on the limitless western prairies of the then newly erected Territory of Dakota, living the wild, free life of their ancestors and coming to the Agency only when one of the annual payments was due them for the lands in Minnesota which they had sold to the Government several years before.

At such times they were usually accompanied to the Agency by many turbulent spirits from the Sioux tribes living further west, who came to share in the Government's bounty and the feasting and celebrating which commonly followed its distribution.

In the month of August, 1862, the distribution of the Government payment, for various reasons, had been long delayed, and the wild Indians, waiting in idleness for it to come instead of being, as they should have been, out on the prairies hunting buffalo, became constantly more restless, suspicious and arrogant as time went on. The idea gained strength among them that the Government intended to cheat them of the payment. Moreover, they had heard many rumors of the great civil war in which the United States was engaged, and many white people among them did not hesitate to make them believe that the Nation was about to be overthrown, which, indeed, did not seem improbable in 1862 in view of the many reverses which the Union armies were suffering. Such reports, coupled with the fact that most of the United States troops along the Minnesota frontier had been sent to the South and that those remaining were few and scattered, caused the leaders of the hostile element among the Minnesota Indians to believe that the time had come when the whites might be driven back beyond the Mississippi, leaving the Indians again in possession of all their old territories west of that stream. At the time the Briscoe family had come into the country this feeling did not yet exist among the Indians, but during the Spring and Summer of 1862 many exciting incidents had occurred at the Agencies and elsewhere, in which the growing arrogance and self-confidence of the hostiles had been made plain. Of these incidents Mr. Briscoe had been made aware through his occasional trips to Fort Ridgely after supplies, and, having had some previous experience of the ways of Indians in the Southwest, he had been disquieted and apprehensive for the future. But he had kept his misgivings to himself as far as possible, not caring to alarm his family needlessly.

He knew that, early in August, Little Crow, the hereditary chief of the M'dewakantons, had been deposed from the chieftains.h.i.+p by his fellow tribesmen because of his att.i.tude on an unpopular treaty made sometime before, and that the crafty old chief was eager to find some means of recovering his lost honors. He knew that Inkpaduta, the most cruel and bloodthirsty leader of all the Sioux Nation, together with a throng of his outlawed followers who had partic.i.p.ated with him in the atrocious ma.s.sacre of the white settlers at Spirit Lake, Iowa, in 1857, was hovering about the Lower Agency and mingling with the four or five thousand dissatisfied Indians who were gathered there, waiting with increasing impatience for the arrival of the annuity, and in a mood to listen eagerly to any suggestions of ma.s.sacre and pillage which might be poured into their ears by Inkpaduta and his villainous companions. But what he did not know until he rode into Fort Ridgely on that terrible morning of August 18, 1862, was that on the previous day a wandering party of young M'dewakanton braves had murdered three white men and two white women near the hamlet of Acton, forty miles north of Fort Ridgely and about twenty from his own claim; that the young a.s.sa.s.sins had then ridden post-haste to the Lower Agency and with their news of bloodshed, which was like a match in a powder magazine, had set the whole savage horde a.s.sembled there into a frenzy for the blood of the whites; that Little Crow, seeing in a flash the opportunity for regaining the chief control of his tribe and, indeed, of the whole Sioux Nation, by leading them in a triumphant war, had given the word to the Indians--who had instinctively turned to him in the crisis--for a general uprising and ma.s.sacre of all the whites; and that, in accordance with his orders and the mad impulse of the crowd, they had swarmed over the Agency, slaughtering every white person whom they could find,--store-keepers, Government employees, men, women, and children.

All these things Mr. Briscoe knew, though in a confused and imperfect way, when he met his wife after his swift homeward journey from Fort Ridgely. But, being a brave man and one who had served his country with honor and courage during the Mexican War, he faced the situation with coolness and at the same time began preparing swiftly for the instant flight of his family to the fort. He realized that this was imperative if they were to escape destruction.

When her husband, as previously mentioned, started for the pasture, Mrs.

Briscoe reentered the house, a log building of three rooms, quite capacious for the region and the time, and pulling a trunk from the corner of each of the bedrooms, began hastily filling them with the family clothing and a few books, standard works, much worn but of good editions and carefully kept. From a locked cupboard drawer in the kitchen she brought a small box containing a few pieces of handsome silver ware, some of recent pattern but most of it old, into which she looked carefully before depositing it in one of the trunks. Two small oil paintings in frames she packed carefully, and when these had been disposed of in the trunks little remained in the slenderly furnished house except its rude furniture, largely homemade, the bedding and the pots and pans and crockery dishes in the kitchen. She had just begun taking these down and arranging them in a large box when a boy of about fifteen years, straight and tall for his age, with light complexion, light hair, and keen gray eyes, bounded into the kitchen from outside, closely followed by Tommy, who was merely a smaller, eight-year-old edition of himself. The elder lad stopped short, regarding Mrs.

Briscoe's preparations for departure with startled eyes.

"What's the matter, mother?" he exclaimed. "What are you going to do?"

"Your father has just come back from the fort, Al. Haven't you seen him?"

"No, mother."

"He has gone to the pasture for Monty. We must drive to the fort at once, this afternoon. The Indians have broken out at the Lower Agency and the report at Fort Ridgely is that they have killed many white people."

"Whew-w!" whistled Al. "That's bad, isn't it? What will become of the hay?"

"Let's stay here and fight 'em!" cried Tommy, his head thrown back and his eyes flas.h.i.+ng. "Why should we run away from a lot of bad Indians?

They won't dare hurt us with papa here."