PREFACE.

In presenting this pamphlet to the public, I have given merely a plain, unvarnished statement of all the facts that came under my own observation, during the dreadful massacre of the settlers of Minnesota. Mine only was a single case among hundreds of similar instances. It is only from explicit and minute accounts from the pen of the sufferers themselves, that people living at this distance from the scene of those atrocities can arrive at any just and adequate conception of the fiendishness of the Indian character, or the extremities of pain, terror and distress endured by the victims. It can hardly be decided which were least unfortunate, those who met an immediate death at the hands of the savages, or the survivors who, after enduring tortures worse than death, from hunger, fear, fatigue, and wounds, at last escaped barely with life.

My object in publishing my story is two-fold: I wish to inform the public as to the extent of the wrongs inflicted upon the innocent Minnesotians; and I also hope and expect to realize from the proceeds of its sale sufficient pecuniary aid to enable me to return from my temporary home in Grant County, Wisconsin, to my desolate home in Minnesota—to the region where I left the bodies of my husband and three children, on the bloody sod where they fell.

MRS. L. EASTLICK.

Platteville, Wis., April 1, 1864.