I enlisted in '62 expecting our regiment would be ordered immediately to the Army of the Potomac, but within a week after the formation of the regiment, news was received of the Sioux outbreak on the frontier. We were ordered to report at once to St. Peter where we arrived August 24. Four days later we were hurried across country forty miles to Fort Ridgely which was then in a state of siege. After a sharp skirmish with the Indians, we drove them off on the second of September. We were ordered to Birch Cooley, sixteen miles away. Capt. Grant, with his command had been sent out to bury the victims of the Indian massacre, including twenty-seven men of Capt. Marsh's Fifth Minnesota troops. He had gone into camp at Birch Cooley when the Indians attacked him. The firing was heard across the plain at Fort Ridgely and we were sent to his relief. We arrived early in the morning and the command was halted to wait for daylight. With the break of day the Indians opened fire, but after a hard fight we drove them off and made our way into the camp. It was a sickening sight. Twenty-three men lay dead with fifty or sixty wounded. In the camp was a woman lying in a wagon. She had been picked up on the prairie where the Indians had left her for dead. After the Indians had gone she had managed to crawl to a rock which had a cleft in it, and there had fainted. One of our boys jumped up on this rock and noticing what seemed to be a bundle of rags lying in the opening, poked his gun into it. To his horror he found it was a woman's body. He called and another of the boys, Comrade Richardson, now living in Champlin, Minn., sprang up beside him and together they lifted her out and she was placed in a wagon. When the Indians attacked the camp, the wagons were drawn around in a circle with the camp inside and this poor woman laid there for thirty-six hours all through the fight. The wagon was riddled with bullets and she herself had been hit in the arm, though she was scarcely conscious of what was going on, having not yet rallied from her terrible experience in the massacre. I understand she afterwards recovered and lived in Minnesota.