Many of the unpleasant incidents in frontier life from 1836 to 1857 in Minnesota and Iowa were directly chargeable to these Bedouins of the prairies who tarried at a “trading house but a few minutes and in seeming fear and dread hurried away.” The first exploit officially credited to the band was the massacre of Wamundiyakapi, a Wahpekuta chief, along with seventeen warriors on the headwaters of the Des Moines in Murray County, Minnesota, in 1849. Prior to 1850 they had broken up, plundered, and driven away two parties of United States surveyors. The cabins of numerous settlers in the upper Des Moines country had also been wantonly destroyed and they had been driven from the country--in face of the fact that it was well known what band was at work and where its usual rendezvous was located.[126] Settlers along the Boyer River had also suffered outrages at its hands as late as 1852. Major William Williams stated it as his opinion that a general attack upon the frontier was planned to occur about 1855; but the plans failed for some unknown reason. Inkpaduta seems to have been much displeased thereat and attempted to take upon himself the execution of the original plan.[127] The unusually strenuous life which had been led by the band was having a telling effect upon its membership: by 1852 there were evidences of a near dispersion. It seems that even to a criminal Indian compulsory exile from his race was distasteful, and one by one the followers of Inkpaduta were slipping away. To stimulate an interest in his band, Inkpaduta appears to have settled upon a plan of making concerted attacks upon the northwestern frontier of settlements; and he was successful in creating in the minds of some the belief that he had general control of no less than five or six hundred warriors operating along the frontier in isolated bands of fifteen or twenty Indians each. It is now positively known that such was not the case and that at the time of its greatest prosperity the Inkpaduta band did not number more than fifty or sixty souls. By the autumn of 1856 the group had become so diminished in numbers that it was upon the eve of dispersion.