Outside a shanty sits an old man, his back leaning against the door; he looks comfortable, as if enjoying his afternoon siesta. But he cannot be awakened, he has been scalped, and both arms have been cut off and laid in a cross before the dead. He sits as if he were dreaming pleasant dreams beside his lost limbs.
Face down, across the threshold, lies a man’s naked body. On a hook above the door hang the man’s testicles.
The heat is intense, the smell of decaying flesh follows, pursues William; this odor will soon contaminate the air in all this region.
Crushed, shot, scalped, maimed — the entire way from Red Wood Ferry to Fort Ridgely he had seen only one living individual. From inside a hollow oak came a pitiful complaint as from a hurt animal. It was a child’s cry. He went over to the oak: A little girl crept out of a hole in the trunk. She whined, wept with dry eyes, hiccupped for breath, stammered, but could not reply to his questions. She seemed to have lost her power of speech through fear. He spoke reassuringly to her for a while, and then she began to tell her story.
Her father and mother had been in the field, she alone inside with her older sister. Then some strangers came, they had feathers in their hair, and their faces were painted red. Four of them. They had tied the hands of her sister, torn off her clothes, and laid her on her back on the floor. Then each man in turn had lain down on her stomach and laughed terribly. But her sister only cried and asked them to stop. She herself had at first hidden behind a bed but when one of the redskins looked at her, she had jumped out through the window and run through the bushes until she found the oak with the hole in it. She had stayed in this hiding place the whole night and hardly dared move, she was so afraid the Indians who had treated her sister so badly would find her.
In the whole region — from Red Wood to the fort — he had found only a single human being alive, a ten-year-old girl, saved in a hollow oak.
He took the girl with him to the fort, and when they were almost there they met a woman with wild eyes and flying hair who kept screaming: Where is the haystack? Where are my children? The woman seemed to have lost her mind, but by and by he managed to calm her and learned that she had hidden her children in a haystack when she heard the Indians were coming; one child was only six months old. She herself had hidden in a well and thus saved her life. But when she crawled up again she couldn’t find the haystack where she had hidden the children. There were so many haystacks and she had looked in every one without finding the little ones. She had forgotten to observe which stack she hid them in; she had been so excited, she had pushed them into the first one she saw.
Perhaps the Indians had found her children and killed them?
Where is the haystack? Where are my children?
Private William had left the mother without being able to help her. But her screams he would hear forever.
He had seen it all, with these very eyes which now tried to penetrate the darkness as he rode toward St. Paul. He felt those sights would be with him always, he could never shake them off, they proved to him man’s powerlessness when such forces were let loose.
Private William J. Sturgis rode through Minnesota and spread his alarm through its settlements, shouted to the mothers: Hide your children! Hide them in haystacks and hollow trees!
He knew the danger he was warning them against.
— 2—
At three o’clock in the morning Sturgis reached St. Peter, where he changed horses. And twelve hours later, at three o’clock on Tuesday afternoon, he rode into Fort Snelling, where he at once delivered his message to Governor Alexander Ramsey.
Through a country primarily without roads, the courier from Fort Ridgely had covered a distance of 120 miles in fifteen hours. He had made the fastest ride known to anyone in Minnesota.
Private William J. Sturgis, one of the eight survivors of the Red Wood Ferry massacre, was himself granted a long life. Fate allowed him to see a new century — he died in 1907, on his farm near the Rocky Mountains. During the many years after it happened, he had had the opportunity to tell his neighbors, over and over again, about his fast ride from beleaguered Fort Ridgely to St. Paul on August 19, 1862. It was his life’s great accomplishment: He had warned the people about the Sioux uprising and in so doing saved thousands of lives.
Because of his ride Private Sturgis has found a place in the history of Minnesota.
The Panic:
— 1—
Above the shores of Lake Chisago the sandstone Indian head rose like a guardtower over the St. Croix Valley. A wreath of greenish bushes decorated the Indian head this summer as in other summers. His broad stone forehead was turned toward the east, and from his elevated position his black cave eyes surveyed the land the white intruders had taken from his kinfolk. The stone Indian at Lake Ki-Chi-Saga had watched as the whites came in endless droves to build their houses on his people’s hunting grounds, he watched them open roads through his forefathers’ graves, watched them change the beautiful, good land between the rivers. The intruders had spread, until those born in these regions had to withdraw. All around the great water where he had seen hundreds of campfires, lit by his people, the stone Indian could now see only a lamplight here and there.
The proud, free hunter people were being degraded to beggars. “As the white man comes the Indian must go.”
The settlers around Lake Chisago were aware of this sandstone cliff, the Indian head, and to them it was a monument to the natives’ savagery and unfetteredness. They saw before them a constant reminder of the people who before them had possessed this valley. Now they had become masters of this land, but back there the Indian still stretched his defiant neck against the sky and threw his dark shadow over the lake’s water. The stone Indian seemed to them an ever remaining threat. There he stood and there he would remain. The high sand cliff was a fortress no one could conquer. It would never fall. The redskins could be conquered, obliterated, but this cliff could not be moved or obliterated: The Indians could be banished — but not The Indian!
The stone Indian would remain long after those now living — the final victor.
— 2—
When news of the great Sioux rising to the west reached the St. Croix Valley, panic spread among the people.
Ever since their arrival the immigrants had feared the country’s old inhabitants. To the settlers the Indians were a wild, savage people, and they looked upon them as treacherous, unreliable, and cruel. Yet the Chippewa of the St. Croix Valley had been peaceful, and hardly anything could be remembered that indicated cruelty and bloodthirstiness in the redskins. But as long as the Indians remained they would be a constant cause of apprehension among the whites; their camps in the vicinity of white settlements were always felt as a danger: No one knew what they might have in mind or when they might attack. Time and time again rumors of uprising spread: The Indians were on the warpath! Each time fright seized the settlers. Through repeated false alarms the Indian fear was sustained over the years.
During those few days in August the Indian scare spread rapidly across the St. Croix Valley. All the old fear that had accumulated in their minds rose to the surface; they remembered all the old stories of Indian cruelty in war, the way of all savages, merciless, relentless warfare. They killed everyone, regardless of sex or age, they spared not even the unborn children in the mothers’ wombs. They treated human beings in the same way they treated fallen prey during a hunt — as carcasses to slaughter.