Several hours before Sarah Wakefield and George Gleason left the Upper Agency, a procession of one hundred or more Dakota warriors on foot had approached the Lower Agency along the same government road. Observers reported that a man on a white horse, Little Crow or another village chief, crossed and recrossed in front of the advancing walkers. The war party, unprecedented in size for the Dakota, first arrived at the trader’s grounds, a small collection of stores and houses a half mile north of the agency, and here they positioned themselves in silence, several men at the door of each building. Inside Andrew Myrick’s establishment, a trader named James Lynd greeted a lone Dakota, who raised his gun and said, “Now I will kill the dog who would not give me credit.” Lynd, who had unsuccessfully sought the position of Indian agent and was known for his many careless liaisons with young Dakota women, died of a single shot that also served as a signal to the other warriors to open fire. It was not yet seven o’clock.
The next target was the man hiding upstairs who made a habit of telling the Dakota to eat grass. As the Dakota prepared to burn his store, Myrick dropped out of a window onto a low roof on the north side of the building. One more leap and he was on the ground, running for the brush and the cottonwoods and the river trail beyond. When Myrick’s body was found later, within sight of his establishment, it was disfigured with multiple bullet holes, protruding arrows, and a scythe wound. One observer noted that a quantity of grass had been stuffed in his mouth. Other traders and their clerks were shot in their front halls, or in their yards, or some ways away as they tried the same dash Myrick had attempted. Half a mile down the government road was the agency proper and its larger white population, all of whom would have heard the gunfire by now, but instead of pushing on with their attack, many of the Dakota surged into the traders’ stores, loading up on flour, meat, sugar, coffee, clothing, and whatever other supplies they might carry or hoist into wagons before setting fire to the buildings on the way out.
This delay was long enough that when Little Crow entered the agency grounds, most of the whites and mixed-bloods living there had begun to flee. The most obvious route of escape was the Minnesota River ferry, two hundred feet below the bluff and served by a pair of roads that made two halves of a single loop, one short and steep along the southern arc and the other longer, wider, and gradual enough to accommodate loaded wagons. A third path to the ferry existed, but dashing straight downhill through the mix of cottonwoods, grapevines, prickly ash, and gooseberry was only for the hardiest of the escapees. All routes converged in the bottomlands of the river valley, a narrow flat fringe of land dotted with small stone buildings for the blacksmith, ferry operator, and warehouse clerk. The Minnesota River bent sharply here and was perhaps fifty feet across, sometimes deep but rarely swift, a possible swim for the unencumbered. Across the river and up the valley wall, a military road ran east to Fort Ridgely.
A second avenue of escape was the government road south of the river that continued toward the large township of New Ulm thirty miles distant. Many who chose that route were cut down within a mile or two of the agency, but the ferry proved luckier, thanks to its anonymous operator, who poled back and forth for more than an hour after the first shots were heard, saving dozens of lives in the shadow of smoke, screams, and panic, until he too was finally shot dead.
Later reports, most made by disoriented whites, would not agree about all of Little Crow’s actions on the afternoon of the first attack. But from the outset he had to contend with the gap between his own instructions and the wishes of the wartime tiyotipi, wishes that sometimes seemed to evolve minute by minute and individual by individual as the killing commenced. Whatever role he had foreseen for himself, Little Crow was most remembered for his decisions to preserve or condemn lives. One observer heard him bark out an impatient command to kill a group of men trying to hold back the agency’s horses, but amid the flash and chaos of the attack Little Crow also took pains to spare several women, including the agency’s Episcopal schoolteacher, and at least three men. He ordered that the mixed-blood trader Jack Frazer, a boon companion of Little Crow’s peripatetic youth, not be harmed. When Samuel Hinman, the agency’s Episcopal missionary, shouted out from a doorway, desperate for an explanation, Little Crow only gave him a warning look and moved on. Philander Prescott got more than a look; the father of six mixed-blood children, all recently baptized into the Episcopal church, Prescott had lived for three decades among the Dakota as a trader and translator and was known as an honest and trustworthy kinsman. When he stepped outside to demand answers, Little Crow told him to stay in his house and show his face for no one, an order that Prescott would too soon disobey, with fatal consequences.
The next step, Little Crow knew, was to confront whatever reinforcements would soon be arriving from Fort Ridgely. And indeed, at ten o’clock that morning, John Marsh, commander of the fort and the same man who had overseen the opening of the Upper Agency warehouse at the beginning of the month, learned from a fleeing boardinghouse proprietor that something horrific had erupted. Captain Marsh left a teenager in charge, gathered forty-seven men, and headed for the ferry crossing, marching at first and then riding in wagons. Along the road they met a stream of fleeing settlers and agency employees who stopped only long enough to tell confused and panicked stories of the attack on the agency. The soldiers also met up with the Episcopal missionary Samuel Hinman, now safely across the river and hurrying toward the fort, who implored Marsh not to take on the Dakota with his meager force. Marsh’s men were green, without the training or experience to understand what they were facing, and their captain did them no favors by pushing on to the edge of the river valley’s northern ridge, where smoke and fire were visible across the water. Descending to the ferry landing on foot, they found a scattering of bullet- and arrow-riddled bodies near the river. They also found themselves exposed to the hill behind them, the bluff ahead of them, and the thickly treed banks stretching around the bend in both directions.
As Marsh took in the carnage at the ferry crossing, a lone man with a tomahawk and a painted face called out to them from the opposite bank. This was White Dog, a “cut-hair” Dakota familiar to some of the men, who encouraged the soldiers to cross in order to hold a council. With the recent change of Indian agent, White Dog had lost the position of farmer chief and may have been nursing a grudge, but the evidence doesn’t indicate whether his trap was laid willingly or under duress. Seconds later, just as the soldiers reached the water’s edge, the trees all around them and across the river flashed with gunfire. Standing in rank on the northern landing, the men made easy targets for dozens of armed Dakota warriors, and thirteen of them, including the interpreter, were shot dead before they could take more than a few steps.
Marsh and the remnants of his force scrambled downstream through the undergrowth, making good progress along the bottomlands and avoiding the Dakota for a mile or two, until their cover ran out and they decided to ford the river rather than risk showing themselves in the open. A confident waterman, Marsh led the way, holding a sword and pistol over his head, but somewhere in the middle of the river he faltered. Whether from a cramp, fatigue, or a sudden swift current, he went under, never to reappear. Scrambling back up the ridge, his terrified men made their way back to Fort Ridgely, keeping an eye out for Dakotas and coming to realize that much more than a single attack on the Indian agency had taken place. As they neared their destination, they found the roads and fields thick with other fleeing whites. No one stopped to talk or turned to fight. All order was lost in the pursuit of a single objective: away, away from the advancing Indians.
When Chaska and Hapa brought Sarah Wakefield and her children back up the government road that evening, after commandeering George Gleason’s wagon and leaving his body to bake on the prairie, they were not alone. Little Crow’s village, once an equal among many, was now the center of the Dakota universe, receiving people like a prairie basin filling with flood rains. White women and children arrived bloodied and frightened numb, trailed by warriors bearing shotguns and tomahawks, possessive of their individual charges. Captives who entered the village in multifamily groups were soon separated and removed to different tepees. As Sarah was led into the growing mass of people, she recognized Indians she’d known in Shakopee, some that her husband had helped years earlier. Some of the Dakota women cried as they helped Sarah off the wagon.
Little Crow’s house, sparsely outfitted with a table, a few chairs, a kettle, and a raised platform for sleeping, had once been a symbol of his willingness to explore white lifeways. Now it served as a command post, with as many as one hundred tepees pitched on all sides and more going up every hour, while an endless procession of warriors and captives went in and out of his front door. Almost all of those abducted were women and children. Many had seen their brothers, husbands, or fathers killed. With each set of shocked and disoriented settlers brought in, with each returning group of warriors, the agitation increased.
Amid this frenzy, Chaska began to take extraordinary steps to keep Sarah out of the hands of the most violent Dakota warriors. The first night held the greatest peril. The camp was full of returning men, many drunk, celebrating their victory and boasting of greater ones to come, dining on plundered food and all the while playing on the fears of their white captives. No protocols were in place, no allegiances clear, no guarantee of safety offered, so Chaska kept Sarah on the move, walking her in and out of the woods on the river side of the village for over an hour in the hopes of finding an out-of-the-way place to rest for the night. She had left her trunk in the wagon, and she held Nellie in her arms all the while as James walked beside her. “I kept up with him,” Sarah wrote, “and tried to talk of the heavy dew which was falling, not letting him know I was frightened.”
Chaska finally stopped at a tepee sheltering one German-speaking woman and a group of Dakota warriors who were going through a pile of George Gleason’s things, including his clothing and watch, which was still running beneath a broken crystal. “The Indians were having great sport over his empty pockets,” Sarah wrote. “He had no pistol. He had deceived me. It was not safe at any time to go without firearms, and I many times wonder why he did such an unwise thing.” It seems that this stop was designed to show her off as a prisoner before spiriting her to a less conspicuous bark house, a semipermanent Mdewakanton summer lodge, where she found another German woman and a set of unexpected comforts: a well-tended fire, candles at the ready, and a bed of dried grass. Chaska instructed Sarah to stay the night there with her children, adding that she should go immediately the next morning to his mother’s tent to ask for a “squaw dress.”
With that, Chaska left. “No one can imagine the confusion of an Indian camp when the braves come home victorious; it is like Bedlam broken loose,” Sarah wrote. “Hour after hour we sat listening to every footstep, expecting death every minute. Guns were firing in all directions, women were mourning over their dead, and the conjurors were at work over the sick and wounded, all tending to increase the confusion.” Several Dakota women and children were also sleeping in the bark house. Sarah’s white companion spoke little English, but she found comfort in her presence as they listened to the clamor outside, sounds that faded away only in the morning light.
The next day, Tuesday, August 19, broke bright and hot. The camp was quiet as Little Crow and most of the Dakota warriors began to file down the road to stage an attack on Fort Ridgely, eleven miles away. Sarah and several of the Dakota women with her went to find Chaska’s mother, who took Sarah in for the morning hours and did as she asked, providing her a Dakota dress and braiding her hair to make her appear more “rugged.” The order had gone out the night before, from Little Crow or one of his head warriors, or perhaps direct from the tiyotipi, that all white and mixed-blood women were to be given “squaw suits”; at the same time, the Dakota leaders had ordered that none of their own people should continue to wear white-style clothing or stay in white-style houses, Little Crow’s excepted. Several Dakota women rubbed dirt into Sarah’s skin and she did the same to her children, worrying all the while that James’s bright blond hair would render his disguise useless.
Again her Dakota wardens kept Sarah and her children on the move in response to rumor after rumor that the warriors were coming back from the fort to kill the captives. As the heat mounted, Sarah feared sunstroke, and her mind, already agitated, began to unhinge. How far it unhinged and how far she was predisposed to erratic or melodramatic behavior is impossible to say, but among the many tales of captivity hers contains some of the most jarring and disturbing scenes, ones she would later spend much of her time trying to play down or explain away. Just as some of the Dakota women shielded white women, others took pleasure in taunting them. When an “old squaw” named Lightfoot suggested that she would be killed and her children kept for ransom, Sarah set out to murder Nellie and James rather than let that happen. “I ran to a squaw,” she wrote, “begged her knife, caught up my little girl, and in a moment would have cut her throat, when a squaw said it was false.”
All through the hot day flashing clouds moved down the valley from the northwest, harbinger of an angry prairie storm and another long night for Sarah and her children. Late in the afternoon, yet another stray rumor reached her ears that men were moving through the camp and killing captives. Chaska’s mother quickly gathered a bag of crackers and a cup and shooed the three Wakefields into a small ravine amid the cottonwoods well below the bluff line. “It was very steep, and the banks were like the roof of a house,” wrote Sarah, but the rudimentary feeling of shelter would not last. As the weather moved in, the embankment began to erode on top of the trio of hideaways, showering them with mud and water, while Sarah relied on one threadbare blanket and a small bottle of brandy in her efforts to keep her children warm.
She spent the night with one foot in a stream of rainwater, hushing her children and starting at the sound of muskrats that seemed to her wolves come to devour them. Assuming her husband dead, she turned to heaven for solace. “I never knew how to pray before,” she wrote, “but I had no one to call upon but God.” The following morning, Sarah waited for deliverance, fearing that daylight would betray them to any warrior who wandered nearby as she nursed Nellie, fed her children the last of the crackers, and silently painted mental panoramas of starvation or death by mosquitoes made ravenous by the rain. When Chaska’s mother finally appeared many hours after sunrise, Sarah wrote, the two “laughed, cried, and, I really think I kissed her.” After extracting Sarah from her contorted position and rubbing the circulation back into her limbs, Chaska’s mother returned with them to her bark-skin lodge and provided coffee and painkilling medicines.
Sarah and her children were next taken north along the Minnesota River and across the Redwood River to catch up with the encampment, more than six hundred people in all, moving a step away from the population centers of Minnesota. Sarah and all of the captives understood that Little Crow was shifting his location only so that he could consolidate his people and be better positioned to launch a series of attacks on Fort Ridgely and what few settlers still huddled in the towns along the Minnesota River. The whites in camp were not to be killed yet; that much was slowly becoming clear. Sarah and the other captives knew from the start that Little Crow would be their warden and, in the end, their executioner or deliverer. Wherever Little Crow went, whatever acts of war or negotiation he might initiate, day by day and mile by mile, her fate was now bound to his.