s,
Germans, French, Norwegians, and Swedes. They were unaccustomed to
danger, and unused to arms. They had lived for years in confidence and
daily intercourse with the Indians. Engaged in the absorbing labor of
building and providing their new homes, they were without guns or other
weapons of defence. Still worse, the war for the Union had called into
its ranks a large proportion of their young, active, and able-bodied
men, and left only the women and children to gather the harvest and
guard the hearthstone. Upon their heads this storm burst suddenly, and
with a terror which deprived them of all courage and resource to resist
it. Emboldened by the feeble opposition they met, and maddened by the
carnival of blood in which they rioted, the savages indulged in
cruelties and barbarities too horrible to recount in detail. The
Governor of Minnesota, in a special message to the Legislature of the
State, thus paints them:

'Infants hewn into bloody chips of flesh, or nailed alive to door
posts to linger out their little life in mortal agony, or torn
untimely from the womb of the murdered mother, and in cruel mockery
cast in fragments on her pulseless and bleeding breast; rape
joined to murder in one awful tragedy; young girls, even children
of tender years, outraged by their brutal ravishers, till death
ended their shame and suffering; women held in captivity to undergo
the horrors of a living death; whole families burned alive; and as
if their devilish fury could not glut itself with outrages on the
living, its last efforts exhausted in mutilating the bodies of the
dead; such are the spectacles, and a thousand nameless horrors
besides, which their first experience of Indian war has burned into
the brains and hearts of our frontier people.'....

A wild panic ensued. Those who escaped the tomahawk and scalping knife
fled in consternation and dismay, abandoning their little earthly all,
leaving their cattle astray on the prairies, and their crops uncut and
ungathered in the fields; some fleeing with such precipitation as to
leave their food untouched on the table, where but a moment before it
had been spread for the daily repast. Women and children wandered for
days in the woods, subsisting on nuts and berries. Every road was lined
with fugitives, and all the villages were crowded with their surrounding
population. The refugees poured by hundreds into the city of S