feared. Many of them had become Christians under the wise and kindly training of such heroic missionaries as Thomas L. Riggs and Thomas S. Williamson, who with their families had for years lived and maintained schools among them. Assisted by the United States Government, many of these Indians had come into the possession of good homes and farms and were rapidly becoming prosperous and accustomed to the ways of civilization.

But the M'dewakantons and Wakpekutes at the Lower Agency were of a different character. Few of them had ever shown a disposition to settle down to industry, and generally they spent their time out on the limitless western prairies of the then newly erected Territory of Dakota, living the wild, free life of their ancestors and coming to the Agency only when one of the annual payments was due them for the lands in Minnesota which they had sold to the Government several years before. At such times they were usually accompanied to the Agency by many turbulent spirits from the Sioux tribes living further west, who came to share in the Government's bounty and the feasting and celebrating which commonly followed its distribution.

In the month of August, 1862, the distribution of the Government payment, for various reasons, had been long delayed, and the wild Indians, waiting in idleness for it to come instead of being, as they should have been, out on the prairies hunting buffalo, became constantly more restless, suspicious and arrogant as time went on. The idea gained strength among them that the Government intended to cheat them of the payment. Moreover, they had heard many rumors of the great civil war in which the United States was engaged, and many white people among them did not hesitate to make them believe that the Nation was about to be overthrown, which, indeed, did not seem improbable in 1862 in view of the many reverses which the Union armies were suffering. Such reports, coupled with the fact that most of the United States troops along the Minnesota frontier had been sent to the South and that those remaining were few and scattered, caused the leaders of the hostile element among the Minnesota Indians to believe that the time had come when the whites might be driven back beyond the Mississippi, leaving the Indians again in possession of all their old territories west of that stream. At the time the Briscoe family had come into the country this feeling did not yet exist among the Indians, but during the Spring and Summer of 1862 many exciting incidents had occurred at the Agencies and elsewhere, in which the growing arrogance and self-confidence of the hostiles had been made plain. Of these incidents Mr. Briscoe had been made aware through his occasional trips to Fort Ridgely after supplies, and, having had some previous experience of the ways of Indians in the Southwest, he had been disquieted and apprehensive for the future. But he had kept his misgivings to himself as far as possible, not caring to alarm his family needlessly.

He knew that, early in August, Little Crow, the hereditary chief of the M'dewakantons, had been deposed from the chieftainship by his fellow tribesmen because of his attitude on an unpopular treaty made sometime before, and that the crafty old chief was eager to find some means of recovering his lost honors. He knew that Inkpaduta, the most cruel and bloodthirsty leader of all the Sioux Nation, together with a throng of his outlawed followers who had participated with him in the atrocious massacre of the white settlers at Spirit Lake, Iowa, in 1857, was hovering about the Lower Agency and mingling with the four or five thousand dissatisfied Indians who were gathered there, waiting with increasing impatience for the arrival of the annuity, and in a mood to listen eagerly to any suggestions of massacre and pillage which might be poured into their ears by Inkpaduta and his villainous companions. But what he did not know until he rode into Fort Ridgely on that terrible morning of August 18, 1862, was that on the previous day a wandering party of young M'dewakanton braves had murdered three white men and two white women near the hamlet of Acton, forty miles north of Fort Ridgely and about twenty from his own claim; that the young assassins had then ridden post-haste to the Lower Agency and with their news of bloodshed, which was like a match in a powder magazine, had set the whole savage horde assembled there into a frenzy for the blood of the whites; that Little Crow, seeing in a flash the opportunity for regaining the chief control of his tribe and, indeed, of the whole Sioux Nation, by leading them in a triumphant war, had given the word to the Indians—who had instinctively turned to him in the crisis—for a general uprising and massacre of all the whites; and that, in accordance with his orders and the mad impulse of the crowd, they had swarmed over the Agency, slaughtering every white person whom they could find,—store-keepers, Government employees, men, women, and children.

All these things Mr. Briscoe knew, though in a confused and imperfect way, when he met his wife after his swift homeward journey from Fort Ridgely. But, being a brave man and one who had served his country with honor and courage during the Mexican War, he faced the situation with coolness and at the same time began preparing swiftly for the instant flight of his family to the fort. He realized that this was imperative if they were to escape destruction.

When her husband, as previously mentioned, started for the pasture, Mrs. Briscoe reëntered the house, a log building of three rooms, quite capacious for the region and the time, and pulling a trunk from the corner of each of the bedrooms, began hastily filling them with the family clothing and a few books, standard works, much worn but of good editions and carefully kept. From a locked cupboard drawer in the kitchen she brought a small box containing a few pieces of handsome silver ware, some of recent pattern but most of it old, into which she looked carefully before depositing it in one of the trunks. Two small oil paintings in frames she packed carefully, and when these had been disposed of in the trunks little remained in the slenderly furnished house except its rude furniture, largely homemade, the bedding and the pots and pans and crockery dishes in the kitchen. She had just begun taking these down and arranging them in a large box when a boy of about fifteen years, straight and tall for his age, with light complexion, light hair, and keen gray eyes, bounded into the kitchen from outside, closely followed by Tommy, who was merely a smaller, eight-year-old edition of himself. The elder lad stopped short, regarding Mrs. Briscoe's preparations for departure with startled eyes.

"What's the matter, mother?" he exclaimed. "What are you going to do?"

"Your father has just come back from the fort, Al. Haven't you seen him?"

"No, mother."

"He has gone to the pasture for Monty. We must drive to the fort at once, this afternoon. The Indians have broken out at the Lower Agency and the report at Fort Ridgely is that they have killed many white people."

"Whew-w!" whistled Al. "That's bad, isn't it? What will become of the hay?"

"Let's stay here and fight 'em!" cried Tommy, his head thrown back and his eyes flashing. "Why should we run away from a lot of bad Indians? They won't dare hurt us with papa here."

"Hush, Tommy," said his mother, yet not without a glance of pride at the fearless little fellow, so like his father. "There are a great many of them and we are far away from help."

"I don't care," persisted Tommy. "We could block up the