GOV. SIBLEY APPOINTED COMMANDER. While these scenes which I have related were being enacted in the upper country excitement ran high at St. Paul, and for a time the great struggle then going on in the South was forgotten. The news of the outbreak soon reached St. Paul, and couriers, with horses covered with foam, kept coming in one after another, until the officers at Fort Snelling were ordered by Governor Ramsey to be in readiness with their men to move at a moment's notice, and we did not have long to wait. The Sixth Minnesota, of which I was a member, had just organized, and was assigned to Hancock corps, Army of the Potomac, but the events transpiring in the Indian country made it necessary for all available troops to go there. When I say that the whole country was seething with excitement it is no exaggeration. The towns, big and little, were filled with frightened refugees; the rumors that came in were of the most frightful nature, and the whole state was clamorous for protection. Governor Ramsey, in his desire to protect the panic-stricken people and liberate the captives, cast about for a suitable commander for this important work. Of all the men in and about St. Paul who seemed eminently qualified for this position, Governor Henry H. Sibley, who at that time was living in quietude in his home in Mendota, just across the river from the fort, was his choice. Governor Henry Hastings Sibley, the hero of these Indian campaigns, was born in the city of Detroit February 20, 1811. His sire was Chief Justice Solomon Sibley, of Detroit, and his mother was Sarah Whipple Sproat, whose father, Colonel Ebenezer Sproat, was an accomplished officer of the Continental army, and the granddaughter of Commodore Abraham Whipple, an illustrious commander in the Continental navy. He came from a long line of illustrious ancestry on both sides, of good Puritan stock, and dating his lineage back to the Sibleys of William the Conqueror of England in the fifteenth century.