In August 1862, Justina Bolter was sitting down to breakfast with her family on their homestead near Beaver Creek in Renville County, Minnesota, about ten miles from the Lower Sioux Agency. Just minutes later, she was fleeing for her life into the timber along the Minnesota River, beginning an ordeal that would last nine weeks and cost the life of one of her children. Justina, born in Prussia in 1834, had come to America in 1854 and settled in Marquette County, Wisconsin, where she married John Bolter in 1856. The couple moved with their three children to Minnesota in June 1862, filing a homestead claim on 160 acres under the Homestead Law.
They had built a log house, fenced a garden, and were building what seemed a promising new life. That promise collapsed on the morning of August 18, 1862, when Sioux warriors under Little Crow launched a coordinated attack on white settlements across the Minnesota River valley. Early that morning, a Sioux woman entered the Bolter home and left an axe outside the door. Justina heard five gunshots from the direction of their neighbor’s house, and soon her brother-in-law Michael Bolter arrived in great haste, saying the Indians were killing the whites.
Michael caught up Justina’s baby and headed toward Fort Ridgely, but, burdened with her two older children, she could not keep up with him. She turned instead toward the timber on the Minnesota River, unaware that Michael had her infant. She never saw her husband John again after he left that morning to gather the cattle. It was later determined that John, his father, and a sister-in-law were working in the field when Indians approached; when John extended his hand in greeting, he and the others were killed.
For the first three days, Justina hid with her two children in thickets along the river, sleeping little while hearing Indians passing nearby. On Tuesday she crept back to her plundered home, finding feather bedding strewn everywhere, an old dress, and raw potatoes. She moved to another hiding place, then to her brother-in-law’s land, where on Friday she discovered the body of her mother-in-law, decapitated on the floor of her home. The bodies of her brother-in-law’s children were later found by soldiers near the fence.
Living on raw potatoes, cucumbers, rainwater, and later grape leaves, Justina saw her health fail steadily. After five weeks, her eldest child, just over two years old, died of starvation. The night before the child died, she begged for water, but in the darkness and her weakened condition, Justina could not get it for her. The child died that night.
For four days it rained continuously; barefoot and thinly clothed, Justina stayed near the body, too weak to move it or bury it. Her milk failed, and she began feeding her remaining child grape leaves. When a heavy frost killed the grape leaves, she searched desperately for any that remained, once losing track of her child and searching from morning until midday before finding her. When all the green leaves were gone, she sought food in her brother-in-law’s field, finding a few potatoes and a small pumpkin that she carried back piece by piece.
She also encountered a large number of snakes, which she came to regard as agreeable companions compared with the savages she had escaped. Hearing gunfire near the neighbor’s house, she assumed Indians were near and nearly gave up hope. But as the cold became unbearable, she decided to return to her own home, to die there if she must. She gathered scattered feathers into a bed on the floor and laid down her nearly lifeless child.
It was Saturday night, nine weeks after she had fled. The next morning she found three young turnips that had grown from seeds scattered when the Indians ransacked the house. She also found a mutilated copy of the Bible amid the rubbish, which gave her great consolation. While reading it, two soldiers appeared at the door.
She crawled toward them, believing they were Indians come to kill her. She could barely see, but her hearing had grown acute; she heard them clap their hands together in horror at the sight of her. She took one by the hand and begged him not to kill her. Looking up, she saw tears running down the faces of both men and realized they were soldiers.
They told her she had a child alive in the house, made her chicken soup from a chicken found at the neighbor’s house, and wrapped her in a coat. She was taken to Colonel Sibley’s camp at Yellow Medicine, about fifty miles from Fort Ridgely. Soldiers who found her buried 47 bodies and left 17 more unburied in the surrounding area. Justina suffered severe cramping that left her without the use of one hand and both feet, and she still experienced spasms in one hand when testifying before the Sioux Commission in Saint Peter in May 1863.
At that time, her youngest child, the baby Michael had carried to safety, was living with relatives in Wisconsin, having been taken there after the mother was presumed dead. Justina had not yet seen the baby but expected to do so soon. According to later records, Justina married her brother-in-law Michael Bolter on September 13, 1863. Michael had lost his wife and five young children in the massacre.
The couple would go on to have seven more children between 1864 and 1877. It is believed that John Bolter’s body was buried by soldiers on his claim, close to where he fell. The 1864 book from which this narrative is drawn, “A History of the Great Massacre by the Sioux Indians in Minnesota,” suggested that nearly 2,000 settlers were killed in the uprising. Modern sources give significantly lower figures, with most estimates placing civilian deaths in the hundreds.
Whatever the final count, the massacre remains one of the deadliest attacks on settlers in American frontier history, and Justina Bolter’s account stands as one of its most harrowing personal testimonies.