much too cunning to kill the goose that laid
the golden egg. The tribe do not object to the conversion of
individuals. Saying prayers does not interfere with their ideas of their
own importance. Preachers do not labor with their hands, and Indians can
join the clerical order or get religion, without losing caste, for labor
to them is pollution.

Two wagon loads of arms and ammunition _en route_ for Hole-in-the-day,
were intercepted during the massacre, and for want of them he was
induced to keep quiet. For being such a good Indian, he had a triumphal
trip to Washington at government expense, got ten thousand dollars, and
a seventh wife.

CHAPTER L.

A MISSIVE AND A MISSION.

Soon after the people had returned to such homes as were left them, I
received a letter from General Lowrie, who was then in an insane asylum
in Cincinnati. I caught his humor and answered as carefully as if he had
been a sick brother, gave an extract in the _Democrat_, accompanied by a
notice, and sent him a copy; after which he wrote frequently, and I
tried earnestly to soothe him. In one of his letters was this passage:

"Your quarrel and mine was all wrong. There was no one in that upper
country capable of understanding you but me, no one capable of
understanding me, but you. We should have been friends, and would have
been, if we had not each had a self which we were all too anxious to
defend."

After the Sioux had finished their work of horror, Minnesota men, aided
by volunteers from Iowa and Wisconsin, pursued and captured the
murderers of one thousand men, women and children; tried them, found
them guilty, and proposed to hang them just as if they had been white
murderers. But when the general government interfered and took the
prisoners out of the hands of the State authorities, and when it became
evident that Eastern people endorsed the massacre and condemned the
victims as sinners who deserved their fate, one of the State officers
proposed that I should go East, try to counteract the vicious public
sentiment, and aid our Congressional delegation in their effort to
induce the Administration either to hang the Sioux murderers, or hold
them as hostages during the war.

To me this was a providential call, for I had been planning to make a
home in the East, that our daughter, then old enough to live without me,
might spend a portion of her time with her father.

With letters from all our State officers, I left my Minnesota home