We ran to La Crosse with our pieces of chimneys, which the artisans at the Fort had helped our engineers to piece together so that the smoke would clear the pilot house. It did not give the best of draught; but we were going downstream on a flood, and we might have drifted five miles an hour without any steam at all. We delivered the battery at La Crosse, and immediately went into dry dock, where a hundred men made short work of the repairs. The United States paid our owners, the Minnesota Packet Company, eight thousand dollars for the week's work. The officers and crew who earned the money for the company were not invited to assist in its division. It was the hardest week's work that most of us had ever known—certainly the hardest I had ever experienced up to that time. A year or so later I got into work fully as hard, and it lacked the pleasant accessories of good food and a soft bed, that accompanied the strenuous days and nights spent on the Fort Ridgeley excursion.
An incident remotely connected with this trip, offers an excellent opportunity to philosophize on the smallness of the planet we inhabit, and the impossibility of escaping from, or avoiding people whom we may once have met. At a meeting of Congregationalists held in a city far removed from the fort that stood guard on the bluffs overhanging the Minnesota River in 1861, the writer was introduced to Mr. Henry Standing Bear, secretary of the Young Men's Christian Association of Pine Ridge, South Dakota. Standing Bear is a graduate of Carlisle College, an educated and intelligent and a full-blood Sioux Indian. In conversation with him it transpired that he was one of the children who stared open-eyed at the steamboat lying at the landing place below the fort in 1861, and that he was an interested spectator of the embarkation of Sherman's Battery. He there listened to the talk of the braves who were already planning what they would do when the soldiers should all be withdrawn to fight the "white man's war" in the South. Standing Bear's own father took part in the "massacre", as we called it. Standing Bear says they themselves called it a war. Indians may go about their killings with somewhat more of ferocity and cruelty than do we whites, but it is their way of making war. In either case it is "hell", as "Old [217] [218] Tecump" said, and the distinctions that we draw after all make little difference in the results. We do not have to seek very far through the pages of history to find instances where white men have massacred helpless Indian women and children.
A talk with Henry Standing Bear, or any other educated Indian born amid surroundings such as his, will throw new light and new coloring upon the Indian situation as it existed in 1861. They saw the whites steadily encroaching upon their hunting grounds, appropriating the best to their own use, ravishing their women, killing their men, and poisoning whole tribes with their "fire-water". Against their wills they were driven from their ancient homes—"removed", was the word—after having been tricked into signing treaties that they did not understand, couched in legal terms that they could not comprehend, receiving in exchange for their lands a lot of worthless bric-a-brac that vanished in a week.[8] If they protested or resisted, they were shot down like so many wolves, and with as little mercy. What man is there among the whites who would not fight under such circumstances? Our forefathers fought under less provocation and their cause has been adjudged a righteous cause.
This is the Indian's view-point as stated by a civilized tribesman. His fathers fought, and are dead. He was adopted by the nation, educated, and started upon a higher plane of living, as he is free to confess; but it is doubtful if he can be started upon a higher plane of thinking than that upon which his blanketed forbears lived, in spite of the cruelties to which they were born and educated. While I am no sentimentalist on the Indian question, when I fall into the hands of a Standing Bear I am almost persuaded that the Indian, within his lights, is as much of a patriot as many of his bleached brethren. As to his manhood there is no question. In the long struggle that has taken place between himself and the white invaders, he has always backed his convictions with his life, if need be; and such men, if white, we call "patriots."
Bad Axe (now Genoa), Wisconsin. Scene of the last battle between the United States forces and the Indians under Chief Black Hawk, August 21, 1832. The Steamer "Warrior," Captain Joseph Throckmorton, with soldiers and artillery from Fort Crawford, Prairie du Chien, took an active and important part in this battle.
Chapter XXVIII
Improving the River
It was not until commerce on the upper river was practically a thing of the past, that any effort was made to improve the channel for purposes of navigation. A number of interests united to bring about this good work when it did come—some meritorious, others purely selfish. The steamboatmen, what was left of them, entertained the fallacious idea that if the river were straightened, deepened, lighted, and freed from snags and other hindrances to navigation, there would still be some profit in running their boats, despite the railroad competition that had so nearly ruined their business. This was a mistaken supposition, and they were disabused of the idea only by experience.