The events thus far narrated cover a period of nine days, and, though forming the principal ones, were by no means the only events of that brief time. The contagion of murder, arson, and rapine spread over the whole area of country on which the Indians lived and roved, embracing a district one hundred miles in width by two hundred in length. Fort Abercrombie, situated at the upper end of this vast tract, was surrounded and besieged, as Fort Ridgely at the lower end had been. Throughout the intermediate region, scattering parties of the savages appeared in the isolated villages and settlements, spreading death and desolation. Local conditions exaggerated and heightened the horrors of the insurrection. The population of Minnesota, and particularly of these exposed regions, unlike that of the lower Western States, whose settlers, trained in border warfare, were familiar with savage craft and cruelty, and inherited the prowess and spirit of daring adventure which possessed Daniel Boone, was largely made up of foreign emigrants, Germans, French, Norwegians, and Swedes. They were unaccustomed to danger, and unused to arms. They had lived for years in confidence and daily intercourse with the Indians. Engaged in the absorbing labor of building and providing their new homes, they were without guns or other weapons of defence. Still worse, the war for the Union had called into its ranks a large proportion of their young, active, and able-bodied men, and left only the women and children to gather the harvest and guard the hearthstone. Upon their heads this storm burst suddenly, and with a terror which deprived them of all courage and resource to resist it. Emboldened by the feeble opposition they met, and maddened by the carnival of blood in which they rioted, the savages indulged in cruelties and barbarities too horrible to recount in detail. The Governor of Minnesota, in a special message to the Legislature of the State, thus paints them: 'Infants hewn into bloody chips of flesh, or nailed alive to door posts to linger out their little life in mortal agony, 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 their brutal ravishers, till death ended their shame and suffering; women held in captivity to undergo the horrors of a living death; whole families burned alive; and as if their devilish fury could not glut itself with outrages on the living, its last efforts exhausted in mutilating the bodies of the dead; such are the spectacles, and a thousand nameless horrors besides, which their first experience of Indian war has burned into the brains and hearts of our frontier people.'....