There they passed an anxious night. After midnight a trader’s employee came in mortally wounded. At daylight a bookkeeper of another was killed and a clerk painfully wounded. The upper Indians were keener for plunder than for blood. Collecting wagons for the women and children and the wounded, the party left their shelter, forded the river, and under the faithful guidance of Other Day made their way across country to Hutchinson. Friendly warning given late on Monday to the missionaries, Williamson and Riggs, residing a few miles above the agency, enabled them to escape with their families and assistants, forty-five in number, to safe hiding in the river-bottom, from which they began the next day their journey to Henderson. Sporadic killing, plunder, and devastation in the regions adjacent to the agencies mostly ceased by Tuesday night. Small parties of savages, however, escaping from the control of the chiefs, spread themselves to distant settlements to revel in carnage and fire. Within a week there were murder and pillage in Meeker County, forty miles to the northwest of the agencies, in Murray County, fifty miles to the southwest. Two persons were killed at Sioux Falls, one hundred miles away, and four near Breckenridge, one hundred and sixty miles as the crow flies. Fort Ridgely, Hutchinson, Forest City, Glencoe, and even St. Peter were threatened, but not attacked. These forays had their natural and intended effect. As the tidings of Indian butchery spread, the settlers loaded what furniture and provisions they could in their wagons, and driving their stock before them, made their way to the “river towns.” An area two hundred miles long from north to south and fifty miles in breadth was depopulated, while the harvest awaited the reapers. Their flight was all the more precipitate because of rumors that the Winnebagoes had broken out along with the Sioux, and that the Chippeways were to close in from the north. No small number of persons went back to their former homes in other states. The occasional appearance of small parties of Indians out for cattle-stealing and other robberies for a month after the outbreak justified all the fears of the fugitives. On September 22 two children were killed within fifteen miles of St. Cloud, and the little village of Paynesville was fired. A small number of persons ignorant of the country, and not way-wise, wandered about for weeks before finding settlements. Hundreds of settlers in the Missouri valley went to Sioux City and other towns. To what extent the upper Indians participated in these raids and in the several battles it is difficult to determine. They were quite as much exasperated and were more turbulent than the lower bands. That some of their leading chiefs and braves sympathized is known to be a fact, and it cannot be doubted that many individual members participated in the murders and the war which ensued. CHAPTER XII