PREFACE

During the month of January 1903, this story was published in serial form in The Buffalo Lake News. From the demand made for copies of The News, containing the story, and from the suggestion of several of my friends, I have been actuated to publish it in book form. It is needless to say that I claim no literary merit for the book. I have simply related the facts as they occurred to me, - without attempting to add thereto any polish or embellishment. I have no doubt but what the desultory manner in which it is written will be the cause of criticism, but if the little book only serves to instill in the minds of its readers a true appreciation of the pioneers of the Minnesota Valley, and a like appreciation for the manifold comforts and advantages which are ours to enjoy at present but which were not thought of by our ancestors forty years ago, then I shall feel that this story has not been written in vain.

Minnie Buce Carrigan

FORTY YEARS AGO
From the Buffalo Lake News

The story relating to the capture by the Indians of Mrs. Minnie Buce Carrigan, of Buffalo Lake, has been perused with great interest by hundreds of News readers throughout this section of the country. The pioneers of the Minnesota Valley and the survivors of those dark days of '62, when morning dawned upon a torn and dismembered community and the ruins of once happy homes, have found in this story something which recalled many incidents of sweetest and saddest memory and that caused them to live over again those turbulent times.

The experience of Mrs. Carrigan has been the experience of hundreds of others, whom ambition drove from their homes in the East to brave the dangers of frontier life amid the savage scenes of the West. Fortified by an indomitable courage and preserving energy, they shrank not from the dangers and hardships of pioneer life, but resolutely set to work to build homes for themselves and their children in what is now the rich and beautiful county of Renville. Living at peace with the world and enjoying a certain measure of contentment, they little dreamed that the peaceful community in which they resided was soon to become the theater in which was staged one of the greatest tragedies the nation has ever seen. Forty years ago, this county, now peopled with happy and prosperous farmers and dotted with thriving villages, was the hunting ground of the Indian and the home of the buffalo and deer. The settlement of the country by the whites was regarded from an Indian standpoint as an encroachment upon their rights, and acting upon the theory that the nation was weak because of the Civil War, the Indians determined to reclaim their land by murdering the whites. A compact was formed between the Sioux and Chippewa, and those two tribes, the ancient enemies of each other, smoked the pipe of peace as they prepared for the outbreak which proved to be their Waterloo. In the loss of life and sacrifice of property, no Indian conflict in the country has equaled this massacre. The burning, pillaging, murdering and torturing that went on are awful to contemplate. One writer alludes to it thusly:

"An all-seeing eye looking down from above could have seen this avalanche of 30,000 human beings of all ages and in all conditions, their rear ranks maimed and bleeding, and faint from starvation and loss of blood, continually falling into the hands of inhuman savages keen and fierce upon the trail of the white man. And angels from the realm of peace, touched by human woe over such a scene, might have shed tears of blood, and passing the empyreal sphere one might there behold the Creator lament and draw a cloud of mourning round His throne."