taken up to Fort
Snelling. This was an opening wedge, for when the steamboat returned
1700 were ready to move. The total journey of three hundred and ten
miles from the old to the new home occupied the time from June 8th to
July 30th, 1848.[97]

By the next summer they were ready to return--anywhere, but especially
to Wisconsin, their earliest home.[98] In July the whole tribe,
stimulated by whiskey, started; but Governor Ramsey called on Colonel
Loomis of Fort Snelling for aid, and a force under Captain Monroe
proceeded to the north where their presence aided in quieting the
disturbers. Again, on September 9th about a hundred had approached
within sixteen miles of St. Paul, when Captain Page and forty men from
Fort Snelling frightened them so much that they fled into the swamps and
returned home quietly. Smaller parties were captured on the river and
sent back under a military guard.[99] Not all the efforts, however, were
successful. It was reported that one evening in November over a hundred
red men floated down quietly under the very guns of Fort Snelling, and
two weeks later the newspaper accounts tell of three hundred Winnebagoes
in camp near the mouth of the Black River.[100] The need for a company
of dragoons at Fort Snelling was imperative. The next summer it was
obtained, and in 1851 this military force was described as being
"an indispensable and invaluable auxiliary."[101] Not until 1855 was the
Winnebago spirit of migration broken, and then only after a new
reservation had been obtained for them at the mouth of the Blue Earth
River.[102]

In his report of November 25, 1844, the Commissioner of Indian Affairs
called attention to the fact that no longer was there any need of
entertaining fears on account of the visits made by American Indians to
the Canadian posts, as these pilgrimages were indulged in only by a few
"worthless vagrants". But an evil of a different character was imminent.
Twice a year hundreds of Red River half-breeds--_bois brules_--left
their homes on the British side of the international boundary to hunt
buffalo on the American plains which bordered on the Missouri River.
Here they came into contact with Indians who naturally resented this
intrusion upon their hunting grounds. During the summer of 1844 a
half-breed had been killed by a party of Yankton Sioux, and the invaders
had retaliated by killing eight Sioux of another band. This so inflamed
the Indians that they went upon the war pa