Chapter 3
As you’ve noticed I’m telling this story through the mind and hand of a person who hovers near the edge of old age but seems rational enough to work with. When errors in fact or judgment find their way into his writing, we work together to correct them. I know he has this philosophy about storytelling that when you don’t remember facts, you let your imagination run wild, but so far I’ve mostly kept his fancies in check. Now I’m ready to continue reminiscing.
To this point I’ve related a bit of how I’d spent my life in the forests of Minnesota where I never thought much about distant horizons. Contentment prevailed in that secure world where I could mingle with the plants and animals that lived in its shelter. I was comfortable there, that is until the uprising occurred, and then I became suspicious of anything that moved in the shadows and I started to feel confined. When my husband David Faribault received an offer to work as a scout on the Dakota prairie, I was ready to follow.
You may ask what is this scout business? As the West began to attract an ever growing stream of outsiders, the same thing began to happen as it did in Minnesota. Indians thought these people were trespassing on their land and realized the term “Dakota Territory” meant nothing except the name written on a map. In such an unsettled time before western forts were built to house troops who could range out to prevent sneak attacks on Minnesota settlements, a scout brigade was made up of Indians and mixed-bloods to serve as a warning system.
It also served as a sort of goodwill payback for those Indians who did not participate in the uprising. About 250 were hired, and luckily, families of scouts were permitted to accompany the men. Gabriel Renville received the appointment from General Sibley to serve as the first scout leader in Dakota Territory. While Fort Wadsworth became our headquarters, he chose Lake Tewaukon for the first scout camp.
We experienced a few years of moving around to different scout camps, and I became acquainted with such places as Bear’s Den, Bone Hill, and Surrender. I remember those remarkable views after climbing some of those hills like Standing Rock and Dead Colt Hillock and thinking how I could see forever up there. Forest people never experienced such emotions in their lives.
The first time I entered the vastness of the area, one sight stood out. A recent prairie fire had blackened a large area and heavy rain the night before I arrived had washed clean a scene I could never imagine. Glistening in the sunlight, bleached white bones from thousands of skeletons were lying about in such thick order that my horse couldn’t walk a straight line as we passed through their field of death.
For the most part these were the remains of buffalo, and their bones seemed thicker near wallows hollowed in the earth. Some were fairly recent since the barrel of their chests remained rounded, while others had been picked clean and scattered about the area. Injured and aged animals had found their way to the water here for rest and water, never to rise again and travel on with the herds as they grazed on.
Burnt prairie ceased being remarkable because I soon discovered that it was the way of the plains. When lightning danced and played in the sky it sometimes stabbed the dry grass and became a roaring inferno. It didn’t take long to realize why trees didn’t grow in forests like those in Minnesota did. Whenever the tip of a little oak tree poked through the dirt, its tender shoot was ground down by countless split-hooves passing over it or burned to nothing in the heat and flames of a passing prairie fire.
In June of 1867 our lives changed again when my husband found employment as a scout under Major George Crossman who was charged with constructing Fort Ransom. He marched a battalion of the 10th U.S. Infantry from Fort Wadsworth to the chosen site and began building with the stout oak logs cut from the river valley. There were quite a number of buildings and we’ll talk about them next time.
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