Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: country. They concluded to go to war. They then called upon the Farmer Indians to assist them in fighting the whites and taking back their own country. They saw that their annuities had not yet come, and they told the Fanner Indians that their Great Father had lied to them—that he was starving tJtem, and keeping their money and goods and provisions for his white soldiers, that they were too weak and hungry to go back to their hunting grounds, that there were but two things they could do, one was to lie down and die, and the other to fight and take their country back ; that they had resolved in Council to try to do the latter, and they might as well die fighting as starving. The Farmer Indians refused over and over again to assist them, pointing to their houses and to their fields, showing what the Great Father had done for them. They said, "and now that the Great Father at Washington, the Great Spirit and their new Savior that they had learned so much about had been so kind to thorn, their hearts could not be hard enough to spill the blood of the children of the Great Father." The uncivilized Indians told them they would burn their houses over their heads if they would not fight. They replied " that they might, but they would not fight the white people." The uncivilized Indians then sent runners along the Minnesota valley for fifty miles, and burned all their houses and saw mills. Even when they saw their houses burned they refused to fight. The next threat was to kill their wives and children. This they could not stand. They knew it would be done and they consented to fight. But it proved in time that their going into the war resulted in the protection of our prisoners, women and children. They went so far in many cases as to put themselves between the prisoners and the men that ...