be the accumulation of wealth and fair prospects for a rising family.
Milton is situated on Wood river (a very small stream opposite the mouth
of the Missouri river and within one and a half miles of the
Mississippi). It is a flourishing little village only one and a half
years old. Near this place lands command from $5 to $10 an acre.
Milton, together with all the American bottom, is subject to bilious and
intermittent fevers during the warm months. The banks of Wood river
during the last war were often scoured by the Indians, and became the
theater of some savage and barbarous deeds. A narrative hangs yet on the
lips of the inhabitants, which has seldom found its parallel in the most
remote desert by the most ferocious or bloodthirsty. Seven warriors
attacked and murdered a female and her four little children almost in
sight of her own dwelling. She and the little innocents had spent an
evening at a friend's house, and were returning home. The shrieks of
this unfortunate family brought the husband to the scalped and lifeless
corpse of a beloved wife, and a tender and affectionate father to his
four little children bleeding in death, the suckling child with a
tomahawk sticking in its head. None but a husband and father can feel
the deep agony which must arise from so bloody a transaction. Those
warriors, whose companion was cruelty and whose happiness was in murder,
were pursued by some resolute and spirited volunteers from the
neighborhood. They were overtaken and every man put to death. Not long
after this butchery another party fell upon a defenseless family in the
same neighborhood. They shot an old man in his door, scalped a young
female in the house and threw her in the fire, tomahawked and scalped
two little children, whilst two boys made their escape--one 6 and the
other 8 years old. These little children wandered about the fields and
woods for three days without nourishment except the berries and roots
which they were able to collect from the fields. Three times did they
get in sight of the murderers, and as often hid themselves in the
leaves, and finally found their way to a house and communicated the
dreadful intelligence of the massacre. The hand that governs and
protects all was outstretched to save these children in a manner
unusual. I am now in sight of the death spot of those unfortunates, and
expect to travel 100 miles farther, where but a short time since no
track or trace was to be seen except that of