ny emergency; but on this
occasion his ambition ran away with his judgment, and led him to fatal
results. With all these influences at work, it took but a spark to fire
the magazine, and that spark was struck on the seventeenth day of
August, 1862.

A small party of Indians were at Acton, on August 17th, and got into a
petty controversy about some eggs with a settler, which created a
difference of opinion among them as to what they should do, some
advocating one course and some another. The controversy led to one
Indian saying that the other was afraid of the white man, to resent
which, and to prove his bravery, he killed the settler, and the whole
family was massacred. When these Indians reached the agency, and related
their bloody work, those who wanted trouble seized upon the opportunity,
and insisted that the only way out of the difficulty was to kill all the
whites, and on the morning of the 18th of August the bloody work began.

It is proper to say here that some of the Indians who were connected
with the missionaries, conspicuously An-pay-tu-tok-a-cha, or John
Otherday, and Paul Ma-za-ku-ta-ma-ni, the president of the Hazelwood
Republic, of which I have spoken, having learned of the intention of the
Indians, informed the missionaries on the night of the 17th, who, to
the number of about sixty, fled eastward to Hutchinson, in McLeod
county, and escaped. The next morning, being the 18th of August, the
Indians commenced the massacre of the whites, and made clean work of all
at the agencies. They then separated into small squads of from five to
ten and spread over the country to the south, east and southeast,
attacking the settlers in detail at their homes and continued this work
during all of the 18th and part of the 19th of August, until they had
murdered in cold blood quite one thousand people--men, women and
children. The way the work was conducted, was as follows: The party of
Indians would call at the house, and, being well known, would cause no
alarm. They would await a good opportunity, and shoot the man of the
family; then butcher the women and children, and, after carrying off
everything that they thought valuable to them, they would burn the house
and proceed to the next homestead and repeat the performance.
Occasionally some one would escape, and spread the news of the massacre
to the neighbors, and all who could would escape to some place of
refuge.

The news of the outbreak reached Fort Ridgely (whic