Note 29 — Chapter XVII · RED CLOUD. THE GREATEST INDIAN OF MODERN TIMES

From the Minnesota Historical Collections, page 434, volume 9, we learn than on Sunday, August 17, 1862, a small party of Sioux, belonging to Little Crow’s band, while out ostensibly hunting and fishing at Acton, Meeker county, Minnesota, obtained from a white man some spirituous liquor, became intoxicated, and murdered a white man and part of his family, and this act precipitated the Sioux war. Little Crow said that since blood had been spilled the war would have to go on, and he summoned warriors from Montana and what is now North and South Dakota. The war began August 18 and lasted about twelve days. The number of white people killed was about 500. The whole or a large part of some fifteen or twenty counties was fearfully desolated, and for a time almost entirely depopulated. In one of the engagements between the Indians and a company of regular troops, twenty-three soldiers were killed and about sixty wounded, and also ninety-two horses were killed. Chief Big Eagle makes a statement of the causes which led up to the trouble. The Whites were constantly urging the Indians to live like the white man. Some were willing, but others were not and could not—the Indians were annoyed, and wanted to do as they pleased. “Then,” he says, “some of the white men abused the Indian women in a certain way and disgraced them, and surely there was no excuse for that.”