The suddenness with which the outbreak had occurred and the extraordinary rapidity with which it spread, driving the defenseless settlers from their homes and causing desolation and ruin on every side, rendered it necessary for the governor to call an extra session of the legislature for the purpose of devising means to arm and equip volunteers, and assist the homeless refugees in procuring places of shelter where they would be safe from molestation by these dusky warriors. Could anything be more terrible than Gov. Ramsey's picture of the ravages of these outlaws in his message to the legislature? "Nothing which the brutal lust and wanton cruelty of these savages could wreak upon their helpless and innocent victims was omitted from the category of their crimes," said the governor. "Helplessness and innocence, indeed, which would inspire pity in any heart but theirs, seemed to inspire them only with a more fiendish rage. Infants hewn into bloody chips of flesh or torn untimely from the womb of the murdered mother, and in cruel mockery cast in fragments on her pulseless and bleeding breast; rape joined to murder in one awful tragedy; young girls, even children of tender years, outraged by these brutal ravishers till death ended their shame; women held into captivity to undergo the horrors of a living death; whole families burned alive; and, as if their devilish fancy could not glut itself with outrages on the living, the last efforts exhausted in mutilating the bodies of the dead. Such are the spectacles, and a thousand nameless horrors besides which this first experience of Indian warfare has burned into the minds and hearts of our frontier people; and such the enemy with whom we have to deal." * * * * *