One day in June, Red Bird, a friend named Wekau, and two other Winnebagoes, appeared at the door of a log cabin owned by Registre Gagnier, a French settler living on the edge of Prairie du Chien village. Gagnier was an old friend of Red Bird, and invited the four Indians in to take dinner with him and his family. For several hours the guests stayed, eating and smoking in apparent good humor, until at last their chance came. Gagnier and his serving man, Lipcap, were instantly shot down; an infant of eighteen months was torn from the arms of Madame Gagnier, stabbed and scalped before her eyes, and thrown to the floor as dead; but the woman herself with her little boy, ten years of age, escaped to the woods and gave the alarm to the neighbors. The Indians slunk into the forest and disappeared. The villagers buried Gagnier and Lipcap, and, finding the infant girl alive, restored her to her mother. Curiously enough, the scalped child recovered and grew to robust womanhood. According to the Winnebago code, four white scalps must be taken in return for the two Indians supposed to have been killed at Fort Snelling. Red Bird had now secured three, those of Gagnier, Lipcap, and the infant; a fourth was necessary before he could properly return to his people in the capacity of an avenger, the proudest title which an Indian can bear. How he obtained these scalps was, to the mind of his race, unimportant; the one idea was to get them. On the afternoon of the third day after the massacre, Red Bird and his friends were visiting at a camp of their people, near the mouth of the Bad Ax River, some forty miles north of Prairie du Chien. A drunken feast was in progress, in honor of the scalp taking, when two keel boats appeared on their way down the Mississippi from Fort Snelling to St. Louis. The Sioux, at what is now Winona, had threatened the crews, but had not attempted to harm them. The Winnebagoes now appeared on the bank and raised the war whoop, but the crew of the foremost boat thought it only bluster, so in a spirit of bravado ran their craft toward shore. When it was within thirty yards of the bank, the Indians, led by Red Bird, poured a volley of rifle balls into the boat. The crew were well armed, and, rushing below, answered by shooting through the portholes. The boat ran on a bar, and a sharp fire lasted through three hours, until dusk, when the craft was finally worked off the bar, and dropped downstream in the dark. Although seven hundred bullets penetrated the hull, only two of the crew were killed outright, two others dying later from wounds, and two others were slightly wounded. The Indians lost seven killed and fourteen wounded.