At dawn on August 18, 1862, Captain John Marsh of the 15th Minnesota Infantry led his men into the waters of the Minnesota River, hoping to escape the hail of bullets and arrows cutting through the air around them. The Dakota warriors who had ambushed them at the Redwood Ferry crossing now swarmed the riverbanks, and Marsh, a confident swimmer, urged his exhausted soldiers toward the opposite shore. Then his head slipped beneath the current. He reappeared briefly, in visible distress, and vanished again.
His men never saw him again. Only hours earlier, the situation had seemed manageable. Around ten in the morning, word had reached Fort Ridgely that the Lower Sioux Agency had come under attack. J.
C. Dickinson, manager of the agency’s boarding house, had arrived with his young family in a buckboard wagon, reporting that the Dakota were laying waste to the agency and nearby settlements. More frightened settlers soon appeared at the fort’s gates begging for protection. By half past ten, Marsh had assembled forty-seven men and marched out toward the agency, brushing past dozens of wounded refugees fleeing in the opposite direction.
Despite warnings that an ambush likely waited at the river crossing, Marsh pressed forward, certain his force was adequate to the task. The Dakota had reason for fury. Under the Treaty of Mendota in 1851, they had agreed to adopt anglicized farming practices, relying on the Lower Sioux Agency for seeds, tools, and training. But in recent years those supplies had slowed to a trickle, and the treaty had confined them to a narrow strip of land along the Minnesota River, where hunting was nearly impossible.
With crops failing and rations from the federal government delayed or cancelled altogether—especially after the Civil War consumed the nation’s attention—the Dakota were starving. The violence of August 18 was the direct result of that desperation. As Marsh’s column neared the ferry, the soldiers found the ferry operator’s body, headless and mutilated, lying near the crossing. When they reached the riverbank, an eerie stillness hung in the air.
The ferry itself sat untouched, tethered to its usual spot, a detail the soldiers found deeply unsettling. Marsh dismissed their fears and ordered his men to prepare to cross. Then a Dakota chief appeared on the western bank. Many accounts identified him as White Dog, a respected and well-liked leader.
His body painted red, he carried a tomahawk, but he signaled peace through Marsh’s interpreter, Peter Quinn, insisting he had brought his weapon only to smoke and parley. Such hollowed-out tomahawk handles were commonly used as pipes among the plains tribes, and Marsh, despite his suspicion, agreed to talk. Before they could reach the ferry, one of Marsh’s men spotted a Dakota warrior hidden in the brush. Another cry followed, then another.
Dozens of warriors rose from the reeds, closing in from all sides. The peace overtures had been a ruse to buy time for the warriors to take position. Trapped between the river and the horde, Marsh ordered his men to a small thicket, the only cover available. It offered brief shelter, but the Dakota would soon push through.
The only escape was the fast-moving river. Of the forty-seven soldiers who had marched out of Fort Ridgely that morning, only twenty-three made it to the far bank. They scattered into the woods in two separated groups, unarmed, soaked, and stranded in enemy territory. Nineteen-year-old Sergeant John F.
Bishop took command of one group of fifteen, five of them grievously wounded, and led them cautiously back to the fort, arriving well after nightfall. The second group of eight infantrymen straggled in the next day. The twenty-fourth survivor, the badly wounded William Sutherland, crawled through the fort’s gates on August 20 after a harrowing two-day trek through the wilderness alone. The Battle of Redwood Ferry marked the opening of the U.
S. -Dakota War of 1862, a conflict often overshadowed by the Civil War raging to the east. Over the next five weeks, more than five hundred soldiers and settlers would be killed, along with hundreds of Dakota. The attacks spread quickly.
On the same day the last survivors reached Fort Ridgely, another contingent of warriors struck the town of New Ulm, Minnesota, and returned days later for a second assault. On August 20, the Dakota attacked Fort Ridgely itself. Though the first attack was driven off, a larger, more organized force returned. The raiding continued until mid-September, when most Dakota warriors were driven west or forced to surrender.
More than three hundred captured warriors were tried by hastily assembled military tribunals and sentenced to death. President Abraham Lincoln reviewed the sentences, pardoning the vast majority but approving the execution of thirty-nine. One additional warrior was pardoned, leaving thirty-eight to face the gallows on December 26, 1862. It was the largest mass execution in American history.
The government hoped the spectacle would discourage future uprisings, but it backfired badly. Instead of cowing the northern plains tribes, the hangings hardened their resolve and poisoned their willingness to negotiate with the United States for decades to come. The war that began at Redwood Ferry signaled the beginning of the end for the tribes of the Sioux nation, though the broader conflict with the U. S.
Army would drag on for many years. But the Battle of Redwood Ferry was only one chapter in a violent season along the American frontier. On January 29, 1863, Chief Sagwitch of the Shoshoni shook off the cold of a Utah winter morning in southeastern Idaho, where his people had camped as they had for generations. He spotted a low cloud of fog on the horizon, then realized it was moving—the approach of a large group of men and horses heading straight for his village.
He raised the alarm and gathered his warriors in his lodge. The soldiers’ arrival was no accident. In early January, a group of ten miners traveling the Montana Trail had been murdered, allegedly by Shoshoni raiders. Another group had been robbed on the road to Salt Lake City, and a local rancher named John H.
Smith had been shot dead in an argument with natives he accused of cattle theft. A Salt Lake City judge issued warrants, and orders fell to Colonel Patrick E. Connor, commander of roughly three hundred infantry and cavalry from the Third Regiment California Volunteer Infantry. His men, stationed far from the Civil War’s battlefields, were frustrated regulars bitter at missing the nation’s greatest conflict.
Charged with apprehending the guilty Shoshoni—or any Shoshoni—they marched north. Roughly fifty warriors had already fled Sagwitch’s village, but most stayed with their chief. He counseled caution, reminding his men that bloodshed was not inevitable and that their priority was protecting their families. The Shoshoni knew they lacked the firepower to match the army, but they had chosen their camp well: accessible by a single path, shielded by fences of woven willow, with firing pits dug behind them.
The army, however, was also suffering. Temperatures had plunged as low as twenty below zero, and a third of Connor’s force had been left behind with frostbite and other cold-related ailments. The mountain howitzers had stalled in the deep snow, stripping the attack of its artillery. Still, the soldiers pushed on, arriving around dawn.
Within seconds of forming a battle line, the soldiers opened fire. Shoshoni men, women, and children began falling. Any hope of negotiation vanished. Connor ordered a charge into the village, but the warriors mounted a stiff defense from their firing pits, driving the cavalry back.
Connor regrouped, sending infantry to block escape routes while cavalry flanked both sides. For roughly two hours the Shoshoni held, but their ammunition ran low. Some accounts claim warriors attempted to melt and pour lead bullets during the battle itself. As the fire slackened, Connor ordered another charge.
Vicious hand-to-hand fighting broke out along the banks of the Bear River as families fled toward the icy water, most shot down before they could cross. By mid-morning it was over. Connor reported 224 Shoshoni killed and roughly 160 women and children captured. His men burned the village’s seventy lodges and the stockpiled winter food, and seized 170 horses.
The victory came at cost: fourteen soldiers dead, forty-nine wounded, seven of them mortally. The survivors, both soldier and prisoner, endured a brutal trek back to camp near Franklin, Utah, where townspeople brought blankets and dog-sled drivers hauled the wounded to Salt Lake City. Chief Sagwitch survived, shot twice in the hand. He and his people had hidden in the icy river until the soldiers left, many faking death among the bodies.
His son, Bishop Timboy, had been shot several times but lived. The survivors fled to nearby hot springs to warm themselves and tend their wounds. The Bear River Massacre became the deadliest single attack on Native peoples by U. S.
government forces. Estimates of Shoshoni dead range from 250 to 350. Farmers in the area reported the ground so littered with bones it was difficult to plow. Though the Indian Wars would continue for decades—through the Fetterman Massacre, the Battle of the Rosebud, the Battle of the Little Bighorn, and other atrocities like Sand Creek and Wounded Knee—the brutality at Bear River would stand unsurpassed.
Years earlier, on May 6, 1850, in Northern California, a village of roughly two hundred Pomo men, women, and children slept on a small island near the southeastern shore of Clear Lake. Before sunrise, U. S. Army soldiers under Captain Nathaniel Lyon took positions around it.
As the first villagers stirred, rifle fire and cannon blasts from the far shore tore through the camp. The attack was no random act. The Pomo had killed two local ranchers, Andrew Kelsey and Charles Stone, whose mutilated bodies had been found on their ranch. The killings were payback for years of abuse under a de facto slavery system that had intensified with the Gold Rush, and Kelsey and Stone had been among the most brutal of employers, forcing the Pomo into unpaid labor and assaulting both men and women.
When the Pomo killed them, panic spread through Lake, Napa, and Sonoma counties, and reports of hostile Indians reached the army at Benicia. Lyon, a West Point graduate and Mexican-American War veteran with a reputation for ruthlessness, received orders to punish the guilty. He marched his men north, adding local militia to his column. The Pomo, anticipating retaliation, gathered on the island of Bo-no-po-ti, roughly translated as small hill in the water, believing the shallow waters would make defense easier.
Lyon split his forces, attacking from the north and south, with field cannons providing artillery support from the south. The soldiers fired indiscriminately into lodges full of men, women, and children. Those who fled into the shallows were cut down in the muddy water. The lake around the island turned red with blood.
Some escaped by diving underwater and breathing through hollow reeds, but most did not. Lyon’s men found no survivors to take prisoner. The Pomo lost their homelands permanently. Within months, American settlers flooded the area, and the indentured labor system grew harsher.
The soldiers faced no retribution. Lyon was praised by his superiors, rose to brigadier general in 1861, and was killed in action at the Battle of Wilson’s Creek that August—the first general officer killed in the Civil War. Today, a simple historical marker sits on the former island site, now part of the mainland, south of the town of Nice, commemorating the Bloody Island Massacre, one of the darkest and least-known events in American history. The violence of the frontier took many forms, including desperate small-unit actions that produced extraordinary heroism.
On April 25, 1875, near Eagle Pass, Texas, four men—Lieutenant John Lapham Bullis, Sergeant John Ward, Private Pompey Factor, and Private Isaac Payne—found themselves pinned down by dozens of Comanche warriors. They were scouts, a mixed-race contingent attached to the Buffalo Soldiers: black soldiers who had enlisted after the Civil War, and Seminole scouts, descendants of escaped slaves who had assimilated into the Seminole tribe, endured the Trail of Tears, and later migrated to northern Mexico before returning to serve the U. S. Army.
They were renowned as unmatched trackers and fighters, capable of covering incredible distances on half-rations. Lieutenant Bullis, a respected Civil War veteran, had forged deep bonds with his men, treating them more like family than subordinates. The four had been pursuing a Comanche raiding party pushing stolen horses across the Rio Grande. They dismounted, crept within seventy-five yards, and opened fire, killing three Comanche and wounding another.
The warriors initially believed they faced a much larger force, but once they realized only four scouts opposed them, they charged with their Winchester rifles blazing. Ward’s rifle stock was shattered by a bullet, and the scouts decided to retreat to their horses. Factor, Ward, and Payne mounted quickly, but Bullis’s horse, frenzied by the chaos, refused to let him saddle up. He had also taken a bullet to his lower right leg.
The three scouts wheeled around and charged back into a force that outnumbered them roughly eight to one, reaching the lieutenant just before they were surrounded. For nearly two hours, the four men fought off charge after charge, clubbing and stabbing warriors who rode within range, emptying their rifles until the mechanisms were useless. Finally sensing a lull, they made a dash north, Bullis riding behind Ward. They traveled for nearly a day and a night toward Fort Clark, sixty miles away, scanning the countryside for more Comanche.
All four made it. Bullis publicly credited his men with saving his hair, and immediately recommended each for the Medal of Honor. On May 28, 1875, Ward, Factor, and Payne received the nation’s highest award for bravery, becoming three of eighteen Buffalo Soldier recipients. Bullis served until 1898, retiring as brigadier general, then moved to San Antonio, where he worked as the deputy U.
S. treasurer until his death in 1911. Factor farmed in northern Mexico before settling in Brackettville, Texas, where he died in 1928 and was buried in the Seminole Indian Scout Cemetery. Payne also took up farming in northern Mexico, died in 1904, and was later reinterred at the same cemetery.
Ward served twenty-four years in the army, retired to Brackettville, farmed, and died in 1911. All three lie in the cemetery today, their stories of grit and survival standing alongside the countless other accounts of violence, sacrifice, and determination that defined the American frontier.