“He’s sure a goner,” remarked one of the men, as he cut the traces of Old Harmony, the biggest mule of the battery. The neck of the mule was caught between two trees and his tongue was hanging out of his mouth full length. However, no sooner was he released, than he got up, shook himself, scrambled up the bluff and did not stop until he reached the corral, where he uttered one of those bugle-calls which had earned him the name of Old Harmony. But soldiers are accustomed to accidents of this kind, and within half an hour, Old Harmony’s Six were once more hitched to the big army-wagon. Both drivers and mules were a little more careful to keep the road and, by the light of glaring and smoking torches and blazing bonfires, the loading of the boat was rapidly finished.
When reveille sounded at daybreak, the men marched into the mess-hall at Fort Ridgely for their last breakfast in Minnesota.
There had been little sleep at the post during the night. Had a painter like Catlin been present, he could have left us some fine dramatic canvases.
Opposite the side of the fort which faced the open prairie away from the river, some six or seven hundred Sioux Indians were encamped. Only the squaws and the little children rolled up in their blankets in the tepees that night. Some of the men sat smoking around their camp-fires, but most of them sat on the river bank watching the boatmen and the soldiers working in the red glare of the torches and bonfires. They had heard that the white people were having a war amongst themselves. Now they knew that the story was true. The soldiers were going away on the steamer, and with the soldiers were going most of the big guns, against whose terrible thunder, balls, and canister no Indian braves have ever been able to keep up their courage.
“If the soldiers go away and take the big guns, we can get back the land along our river. We have been cheated out of it, and the Whites have never paid us for it,” a middle-aged warrior remarked.
“We can do more,” added a fierce-looking young man, known as the Boaster; “we can drive all the Whites out of Minnesota. But we shall keep their horses and their squaws and we shall make big feasts of their oxen. The Winnebagoes will help us. We shall make peace with the Chippewas and they will help us.
“We shall have our villages again at Kaposia and at Wabasha, on the Great River, and the Whites will have to stay on the other side of the Great River. This is our country and Manitou will send back the buffalo and the elk, and the deer will become numerous again. We shall have plenty of meat and skins as in the days of our fathers before the Whites had poisoned the land with their plows, for the black soil which the plows turn up is bad medicine for buffalo and elk and deer.”
When the shadows of the trees began to be reflected on the grayish current, the last morning blast of the Fanny Harris echoed over the flooded valley. The three howitzers left at the fort fired a salute, the few remaining men cheered their departing comrades and the soldiers on board replied with a ringing hurrah for Abe Lincoln and Fort Ridgely. Then the pilot rang a bell, the hawsers were drawn on board, the big stern-wheel churned the water to a white foam, the heavily-laden steamer backed into the current, turned around slowly, and headed down stream for Fort Snelling near St. Paul.
On board, besides the soldiers, were Bill and Tim Ferguson, Sam Baker, a trapper, and Black Buffalo, an Indian scout.
The Ferguson brothers were Southern boys from Vicksburg, who had come North with a man they called Cousin Hicks, and with whom they lived in a squatter’s cabin a few miles below Fort Ridgely. Hicks, about whose business in the Indian country there were many conflicting rumors afloat, had been away for a week visiting the Indians on the upper Minnesota, and in his absence Baker and Black Buffalo had invited the Ferguson boys to go with them to Fort Snelling and St. Paul.