The movement of General Sully resulted in overtaking the Sioux who had recrossed the Missouri and were hunting in Dickey County, North Dakota. His attack upon them at White Stone Hill, resulting in considerable slaughter and destruction of immense booty, cannot be here related. The results of the operation of 1863 against the Sioux were negative. Nor were those of the following year much more effective. In this campaign General Sully led an expedition from Fort Rice on the Missouri to Fort Union on the Yellowstone, the whole march covering 1625 miles. His column included a Minnesota brigade made up of six companies of the Eighth mounted on Indian ponies, the Second Minnesota cavalry, a new regiment recruited to take the place of the First Mounted Rangers, two sections of the Third Minnesota Battery of Light Artillery, and a company of scouts. Brackett’s battalion of three companies of Minnesota cavalry was attached to another brigade. On July 28 the considerable battle of Killdeer Mountain on the Little Missouri River took place. Countless herds of buffalo were met with on this march. As long as these survived, and the Indians could supply themselves with horses and ammunition, no white man’s army could surround and destroy them.
To disabuse the reader of the possible impression that the people of Minnesota were more frightened than they had reason to be, he is asked to recur to the season of 1863. To guard the frontier from attacks of marauding parties of Indians, General Sibley left in the state the Eighth Infantry, which had already been distributed in a line of posts to cover the settlements. Despite its vigilant patrols, parties of savages broke through at various points. In April there were three murders in Watonwan County, household goods and provisions were seized, and cattle and horses run off. In June a squad of Company A of the Eighth chased a horse-stealing gang out of Meeker County, one of whom shot Captain John S. Cody, causing instant death. In the course of the summer the Eighth Minnesota lost more men killed and wounded than Sibley’s troops in all his battles. On the 29th of June the most atrocious murder of the season was committed within thirty miles of Minneapolis, near Watertown, Carver County. Amos Dustin, traveling by wagon with his family, was waylaid, and he and his aged mother instantly shot to death by arrows. His wife and one child were fearfully wounded. A girl of six, hiding under a seat, was not discovered. Her clothing was soaked with her father’s blood. To aid the troops in protecting life and property, Governor Swift organized a company of volunteer scouts and put them under the command of Captain James Sturgis of Wright County. In addition to their promised pay, the sum of one hundred dollars was offered to any scout bringing in a Sioux scalp. This command scouted the big woods from Sauk Center to the Minnesota River so effectively that people who had abandoned their homes and farms took heart and ventured back.
On the 3d of July, 1863, a citizen of Hutchinson, Nathan Sampson, was hunting some five miles to the north of that village, accompanied by his son Chauncey. Espying an Indian picking berries, he fired. Though wounded, the Indian returned the fire, and hit Mr. Sampson in the left shoulder. A shot from the young man’s rifle proved fatal to the savage. That Indian was believed to be Little Crow, and a certain deformity of the wrists from a gunshot in early life was probably sufficient evidence of his identity. A half-starved Indian boy was picked up by a detachment of Sibley’s army in North Dakota on July 28, who gave his name as Wo-i-non-pa; he said that he was a son of Little Crow, and that he was with his father when he was killed. The errand of the chief, according to the boy, was to capture horses enough to mount the small remnant of his warriors and ride away to Canada.
The Seventh, Ninth, and Tenth regiments were dispatched to the South in the fall of 1863; the Sixth and Eighth being held till the following season to keep watch and ward against possible and much-feared savage forays.
CHAPTER XIV
HONORS OF WAR
The reader who desires to follow the marches and battles of the Minnesota regiments and battalions is advised to resort to the two large octavos published by the state in 1891. It would, however, be unjust to him and to Minnesota not to give some account, even in a compend of her history, of certain splendid passages in the careers of some of them favored above others in opportunity.
Marching with Gibbon’s Division of the Second (Hancock’s) Army Corps, the First Minnesota arrived on the field of Gettysburg early in the morning of July 2, 1863, and was placed in reserve near general headquarters. Company L (sharpshooters) was sent to support a battery and did not rejoin till after the battle. In the afternoon a staff officer came and led the command off to the south, along the well-known crest on which Sickles’s men had formed and from which they had made their ill-advised advance. On a salient of the ridge near the middle of Sickles’s original formation the regiment was placed in support of a regular battery. Company F was sent out to skirmish toward the left front, and Company C was absent on provost guard duty. Eight companies were in line, with two hundred and sixty-two officers and men. From their position they watched at leisure the vain struggles of Sickles’s brigades, exposed to enfilading fires. Near sundown the shattered battalions straggled to the rear, passing through the ranks of the Minnesota regiment. They were followed by Anderson’s division of A. P. Hill’s Confederate corps, moving with rapid pace to what seemed certain victory. Sickles was severely wounded and Hancock had command.
He had ordered reserve troops to man the undefended crest, but they did not arrive. The Confederate line was striding on, and in ten minutes would swarm over the ridge. It was not more than four hundred yards away when Hancock espied the little bunch of men in blue near the battery. Riding up to Colonel William Colville at his post near the centre, he asked, “What regiment is this?” “The First Minnesota,” was the reply. “Charge those lines,” ordered the corps commander, pointing to the rebel front. Without delay Colville put his line in motion, down the slope of an old pasture field at the bottom of which was a dried up ditch or “run.” It moved at the double-quick till near the foot of the slope, when Colville ordered, “Charge bayonets!” On a full run, the Minnesota men struck the Confederates as they were reforming on the hither side of the run. The shock halted them and the fire poured in gave them good reason for no further acquaintance with the men in blue. They sought cover behind an accommodating swell of land and retired from the field. Brigadier-General Wilcox of the Confederate army in his report says: “A line of infantry descended the slope in our front at double-quick. Without support my men were withdrawn to prevent their entire destruction or capture.”
Of the men who joined in that fatal but necessary charge but forty-seven answered to roll-call at retreat; two hundred and fifteen lay dead, dying, or wounded. A high authority declares this to be the heaviest loss known in the records of modern war. But that charge saved Cemetery Ridge, and in all probability the Gettysburg field.
“The Second Minnesota Veteran Volunteer Infantry occupied this position, Sunday, September 26, 1863, from 2:30 P. M. to 7:30 P. M.” Such is the inscription on the monument of bronze and granite erected at the state’s expense on the “Snodgrass ridge” in the National Park at Chickamauga, Tennessee. It marks the spot occupied by that regiment as part of the force with which Thomas, “The Rock of Chickamauga,” held at bay Longstreet’s elated divisions, while Rosecrans’s army, broken and shattered, was in disorderly retreat on Chattanooga. The Second lost 35 killed and 113 wounded out of a total for duty of 384; not a single man was missing.