“Here we remained a week or ten days. Then bidding those kind friends adieu on board the steamer Winnebago, we glided down Fever River to the Mississippi, and down that stream to St. Louis, Mo., and stopped at the Honorable William Clark’s mansion (governor of Missouri), where we met and enjoyed the company of his kind family. Here we remained about one week, and were made as comfortable and happy as his family and friends could make us. “We received presents and money, an account of which has been given by my sisters in their statement, and here I wish to express my thanks to those kind friends for their hospitality, sympathy and love, for I feel that we have been brought under lasting obligations to them. “Leaving here, we took a steamer for Beardstown, on the Illinois River, in Cass County, near to which we had an uncle Scott living. Arriving safely at Beardstown, we were conveyed to our uncle’s, five miles out, where we remained a few days, and, leaving my sisters here, I went up the Illinois River to Bureau County and lived in a camp until I could build me a house. This county adjoins LaSalle on the west. The Indians, having received a dreadful scourging, had become peaceable, and in the fall I returned to Cass County and took my sisters and returned to Bureau County again, where we tried to make ourselves as comfortable as possible. This fall I married, and my sisters lived with me through the winter and in the spring, after which they both married, and now I am at the house of the eldest, Sylvia Horn, and dictated the above lines, while my brother-in-law, W.S. Horn, committed them to paper. “September, 1867. “J.W. Hall.” In presence of: “W.S. Horn, “Sylvia Horn.” Late in the afternoon of the 20th, while Capt. George McFadden, Wilbur Walker and others who had been to ask Governor Reynolds and General Atkinson for the four companies ordered by them to go under Colonel Johnson were passing this point, some two miles distant, on their return trip, the shots of that frightful massacre were heard, but in their haste to reach their own settlements they did not pause to investigate the cause.