Note 68 — Chapter XXXI · THE ARMY ON THE MISSOURI.

“I saw, while at Sioux City, Captain La Barge, who had just returned with his boat from the upper Missouri. Captain La Barge has been in the American Fur Company employment for twenty-five years, and says that never before this trip have the Indians been unusually hostile. He says that now the whole Sioux nation is bound for a war of extermination against the frontier, ... and that the British government, through the Hudson Bay Company, are in his opinion instigating all the Indians to attack the whites. He says British rum from Red River comes over to the Missouri, and British traders are among them [the Indians] continually. I have great confidence in his judgment and opinion.”—H. C. Nutt, Lieutenant Colonel Iowa State Militia, to Hon. S. J. Kirkwood, Iowa City, dated Council Bluffs, September 15, 1862.