including twenty-seven men of Capt. Marsh's Fifth Minnesota troops. He
had gone into camp at Birch Cooley when the Indians attacked him. The
firing was heard across the plain at Fort Ridgely and we were sent to
his relief. We arrived early in the morning and the command was halted
to wait for daylight. With the break of day the Indians opened fire, but
after a hard fight we drove them off and made our way into the camp. It
was a sickening sight. Twenty-three men lay dead with fifty or sixty
wounded. In the camp was a woman lying in a wagon. She had been picked
up on the prairie where the Indians had left her for dead. After the
Indians had gone she had managed to crawl to a rock which had a cleft in
it, and there had fainted. One of our boys jumped up on this rock and
noticing what seemed to be a bundle of rags lying in the opening, poked
his gun into it. To his horror he found it was a woman's body. He called
and another of the boys, Comrade Richardson, now living in Champlin,
Minn., sprang up beside him and together they lifted her out and she was
placed in a wagon. When the Indians attacked the camp, the wagons were
drawn around in a circle with the camp inside and this poor woman laid
there for thirty-six hours all through the fight. The wagon was riddled
with bullets and she herself had been hit in the arm, though she was
scarcely conscious of what was going on, having not yet rallied from her
terrible experience in the massacre. I understand she afterwards
recovered and lived in Minnesota.

At Wood Lake, I also helped to bury the dead, among them sixteen Indians
killed in the fight there. At Camp Release situated on the west side of
the Mississippi river opposite where Montevideo is now located, we
surrounded an Indian camp and compelled them to give up over one hundred
captive women and children. We were also sent out with a small squad
and surrounded and captured another camp of hostile Indians, bringing
them in to our camp. Col. Crooks, of our regiment, was appointed Judge
Advocate and I was present at the trial of over one hundred of these
Indians. All were found guilty and sentenced to be hung. President
Lincoln commuted the sentence of all but thirty-nine, the rest being
sent to the government prison at Rock Island where they were kept as
prisoners of war. At that time my wife who was then Olive Branch, was
attending High School in Moline, and she went with some friends to see
these Indians in the Rock Isla