On May 13 the mail or a private hand brought from La Crosse, Wisconsin, the telegraphic news of the admission of the state to the Union on the previous day. The documentary evidence came some days later, and on the 24th the state officers elected in October, 1857, took their oaths and proceeded to their duties. It lacked one week of nine years since Governor Ramsey proclaimed the beginning of the territorial government. Three days after the state officers took up their duties there took place within an easy day’s drive of the capital the last serious encounter of the Sioux and Chippeways on Minnesota soil. The lower Sioux, who late in 1853 reluctantly retired to their reservations on the upper Minnesota, were wont to return in summer weather in straggling companies to their old homes. They were generally harmless, and the merchants got a little profit on their trade. Shakopee and his band of one hundred and fifty had early in the summer of 1858 come down and gone into camp near the town which bears his name. One of his braves, fishing in the river (the Minnesota) at an early hour, was fired upon. Shakopee’s men instantly recognized the sound as coming from a Chippeway gun. They gathered at Murphy’s Ferry and, presuming that the hostile shot came from one of some very small party, they let their women put thirty or forty of them across. They did not suspect that back on the timbered bluff a mile distant there lay in hiding one hundred and fifty or more Chippeway warriors who had sneaked down from Mille Lacs through the big woods east of Minnetonka. They were wary, however, and placed themselves in ambush in a narrow space between two lakelets. The Chippeways, out for scalps, with a boldness unusual among Indians, charged down from the bluff twice or more, without dislodging the Sioux. The day was not old when they gave up the effort and departed in haste for their homes, carrying their wounded and perhaps some dead. Four of their corpses were left to the cruel mercies of the Sioux, who scalped, beheaded, and otherwise mutilated them. Such was the so-called “Battle of Shakopee,” May 27, 1858. CHAPTER IX THE STRUGGLE FOR RAILROADS