In June, 1848, the company of infantry stationed at Fort Snelling received an urgent call to come to Wabasha's Prairie--near Winona, Minnesota. The Winnebago Indians were being transferred from their former home in the Turkey Valley region in Iowa to a new reservation obtained for them from the Chippewas. But when the Prairie was reached, the Winnebagoes visited with Wabasha and he sold it to them for a home. When Captain Seth Eastman arrived from Fort Snelling he was put in charge of the military forces which had been hastily brought together to force the Winnebagoes to continue their march. There were volunteers from Crawford County, Wisconsin, dragoons from Fort Atkinson, Iowa, and the infantry from Fort Snelling, besides sixty armed teamsters. These military forces lay encamped, separated from the Indians by a slough. In the morning a deputation of Indians came to ask the meaning of the martial appearance of the whites when all _they_ desired was a council. This suggestion of a council was quickly assented to, but the Indians approached with such a rush and with such blood-curdling yells that the cannon were loaded and the soldiers stood ready to fire. During the council the Winnebagoes refused to move until one small band gave in to the entreaties of the agent and were taken up to Fort Snelling. This was an opening wedge, for when the steamboat returned 1700 were ready to move. The total journey of three hundred and ten miles from the old to the new home occupied the time from June 8th to July 30th, 1848.[97] By the next summer they were ready to return--anywhere, but especially to Wisconsin, their earliest home.[98] In July the whole tribe, stimulated by whiskey, started; but Governor Ramsey called on Colonel Loomis of Fort Snelling for aid, and a force under Captain Monroe proceeded to the north where their presence aided in quieting the disturbers. Again, on September 9th about a hundred had approached within sixteen miles of St. Paul, when Captain Page and forty men from Fort Snelling frightened them so much that they fled into the swamps and returned home quietly. Smaller parties were captured on the river and sent back under a military guard.[99] Not all the efforts, however, were successful. It was reported that one evening in November over a hundred red men floated down quietly under the very guns of Fort Snelling, and two weeks later the newspaper accounts tell of three hundred Winnebagoes in camp near the mouth of the Black River.[100] The need for a company of dragoons at Fort Snelling was imperative. The next summer it was obtained, and in 1851 this military force was described as being "an indispensable and invaluable auxiliary."[101] Not until 1855 was the Winnebago spirit of migration broken, and then only after a new reservation had been obtained for them at the mouth of the Blue Earth River.[102]