Stories of the Badger State

by Reuben Gold Thwaites

Nobody on the frontier, the following winter, seemed to pay the slightest attention to the terms of the treaty. The Sioux, who lived west of the Mississippi, the Winnebagoes in southern and western Wisconsin, and the Chippewas in the north, quarreled with one another and scalped one another as freely as ever; while French traders, in British employ, stirred up the red men, and told them that Great Britain would soon have the whole country back again. The Winnebagoes, in particular, were irritated because two of their braves had been imprisoned for thieving, at Fort Crawford, in Prairie du Chien. They held numerous councils in the woods, and resolved to stand by the British when the war should break out. In the midst of this uneasiness, the troops at Fort Crawford were suddenly withdrawn to Fort Snelling, on the Upper Mississippi River, near where St. Paul now is. This was supposed by the Indians to mean that the American soldiers were afraid of them.

The spring of 1827 arrived. A half-breed named Methode was making maple sugar upon the Yellow River, in Iowa, a dozen miles north of Prairie du Chien. With him were his wife and five children; all were set upon by some Winnebagoes and killed, scalped, and burned. Naturally there was an uproar all along the Upper Mississippi. Excitement was at its height, when word was brought in by Sioux visitors to the village of Red Bird, a petty Winnebago chief, that the two men of his tribe who had been imprisoned in Fort Crawford had been hung when the troops reached Fort Snelling. The wily Sioux suggested vengeance. The Winnebago code was two lives for one. Inflamed with rage, Red Bird set out at once upon the warpath to take four white scalps.

Meanwhile the clouds were gathering for a general storm. The American Indian agent at Prairie du Chien, with singular indiscretion, was not treating his Winnebago visitors with kindness. English and French fur traders were, on behalf of Great Britain, making liberal promises for the future. Winnebagoes were being brutally driven from the lead mines by the white miners, who were now swarming into southwest Wisconsin. The Sioux along the west bank of the Mississippi, in Minnesota, were encouraging the Winnebagoes to revolt; and were displaying a bad temper toward Americans, whom they thought cowardly because apparently unwilling to use military force to keep the Indians in order.

One day in June, Red Bird, a friend named Wekau, and two other Winnebagoes, appeared at the door of a log cabin owned by Registre Gagnier, a French settler living on the edge of Prairie du Chien village. Gagnier was an old friend of Red Bird, and invited the four Indians in to take dinner with him and his family. For several hours the guests stayed, eating and smoking in apparent good humor, until at last their chance came. Gagnier and his serving man, Lipcap, were instantly shot down; an infant of eighteen months was torn from the arms of Madame Gagnier, stabbed and scalped before her eyes, and thrown to the floor as dead; but the woman herself with her little boy, ten years of age, escaped to the woods and gave the alarm to the neighbors. The Indians slunk into the forest and disappeared. The villagers buried Gagnier and Lipcap, and, finding the infant girl alive, restored her to her mother. Curiously enough, the scalped child recovered and grew to robust womanhood.

According to the Winnebago code, four white scalps must be taken in return for the two Indians supposed to have been killed at Fort Snelling. Red Bird had now secured three, those of Gagnier, Lipcap, and the infant; a fourth was necessary before he could properly return to his people in the capacity of an avenger, the proudest title which an Indian can bear. How he obtained these scalps was, to the mind of his race, unimportant; the one idea was to get them.

On the afternoon of the third day after the massacre, Red Bird and his friends were visiting at a camp of their people, near the mouth of the Bad Ax River, some forty miles north of Prairie du Chien. A drunken feast was in progress, in honor of the scalp taking, when two keel boats appeared on their way down the Mississippi from Fort Snelling to St. Louis. The Sioux, at what is now Winona, had threatened the crews, but had not attempted to harm them. The Winnebagoes now appeared on the bank and raised the war whoop, but the crew of the foremost boat thought it only bluster, so in a spirit of bravado ran their craft toward shore. When it was within thirty yards of the bank, the Indians, led by Red Bird, poured a volley of rifle balls into the boat. The crew were well armed, and, rushing below, answered by shooting through the portholes. The boat ran on a bar, and a sharp fire lasted through three hours, until dusk, when the craft was finally worked off the bar, and dropped downstream in the dark. Although seven hundred bullets penetrated the hull, only two of the crew were killed outright, two others dying later from wounds, and two others were slightly wounded. The Indians lost seven killed and fourteen wounded.

The "battle of the keel boats" was the signal for military activity. In July a battalion of troops from Fort Snelling came down to Prairie du Chien; and a little later a full regiment from St. Louis followed. General Henry Atkinson was in command, and early in August he ordered Major William Whistler, then in charge of Fort Howard, to proceed up Fox River with a company of troops, in search of the fugitives Red Bird and Wekau. At a council held with the Winnebagoes, at Butte des Morts, the chiefs were notified that nothing short of the surrender of the leaders of the disturbance would satisfy the government for the attack on the boats; were they not delivered up, the entire tribe should be hunted like wild animals.

Great consternation prevailed among the tribesmen, as the runners sent out from the Butte des Morts council carried the terrible threat to all the camps of the Winnebagoes, in the deep forests, in the pleasant oak groves, and upon the broad prairies throughout southern Wisconsin. Whistler had reached the ridge flanking the old portage trail between the Fox and Wisconsin rivers, but had not fully completed the arrangements of his camp when an Indian runner appeared in hot haste, saying that Red Bird and Wekau would surrender themselves at three o'clock in the afternoon of the following day, that the tribe might be saved.

Whistler and his officers, as true soldiers, were prompt to appreciate bravery. They were broad enough to judge these savages by the standards of savagery, not by those of a civilization from which the Indian is removed by centuries of human progress. They knew full well that the culprits were but carrying out the law of their race in seeking white scalps in vengeance for the Winnebagoes supposed to have been slain at Fort Snelling. Whistler knew that the Indians considered Red Bird and Wekau as heroes, and could feel no pangs of conscience, because treachery toward enemies was the customary method of Indian warfare. Realizing these facts, the American officers recognized that it required a fine type of heroism on the part of these simple natives thus to offer themselves up to probable death, to redeem their tribe from destruction.