We bought water by the pailful which was carted up from the Lake and placed in a barrel in the kitchen and often on a cold winter morning, we were obliged to chop it out and melt it in the tea kettle. The windows in our house were always covered with half an inch of frost. I remember on one very cold night I was awakened by a fire bell. The windows were red with light from some burning dwelling near and I rushed from window to window trying in vain to see out and locate the fire.
ST. PAUL CHAPTER
MISS K. MAUDE CLUM
Mrs. Martin Jay Clum.
I accompanied my husband, Martin Jay Clum, a member of Company "D," Second Minnesota Volunteers to Fort Ridgely in 1862. There were left at the fort but few men to guard it, as the greater number of them had been ordered to the frontier to quell the Indian outbreaks.
My daughter, Victoria Maria, nine months old, was ill, getting her teeth and although the night was hot and sultry the windows of our quarters had to be kept closed on account of the mosquitoes. It was impossible to obtain any mosquito bar so I walked the floor nearly all night with her on my arm fanning her constantly as the heat was almost unbearable.
Toward morning, I paused for a few seconds to look out of the window and as I did so, fancied I saw tiny dark objects moving around a huge straw stack some distance away. You can scarcely imagine my horror as the dawn disclosed the truth of my fears.
I put down my dear baby—rushed outside—called to a herder to go at once and find out what those objects were, moving about the stack. Hastily mounting a mule he made a detour of the straw stack and reported. "If there's one Indian there, there's fifty with their ponies buried in and around the stack." He at once gave the alarm but before the guard reached the stack there was not an Indian to be seen. Interpreter Quinn soon sent his son, Tom, to warn me not to leave the garrison as I had been in the habit of taking walks with my baby in her carriage.
Later in the day, the pickets and scouts came in and reported a large camp of over four hundred Indians on the opposite bank of the river, waiting, no doubt, as Interpreter Quinn said, a chance to make a raid, capture and maybe massacre everyone of us. He also told me that while the Indians might not perhaps harm me they would be likely to take my baby and it would be as bad to be frightened to death as to be scalped.