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Indians Come to Pioneer Home of John Kumro on August 17, 1862
A Brief Story of the Outbreak as Related by William Kumro to His
Daughter, Geneva
Sunday, August 17, 1862, a group of Indians came to the John Kumro
homestead near the Minnesota river. They wanted something to eat and Mrs.
Kumro gave them bread and carried water for them to drink. They lay
around the yard smoking and talking and one old squaw came to the white
woman and said, "War, go 'way." She repeated this in an [earnest] manner
but Mrs. Kumro thought the Indians were were afraid of war with the
Cherokee tribe and did not attach any importance to the warning.
Minnesota was wild in those days, sparsely settled and overrun by Sioux
Indians. Settlers took up homesteads and often they were without any
neighbors for miles around. Houses were built of logs. The one on the
Kumro homestead was built into the side of a hill, the back dug out into
the hill, the front made of logs and a shake roof made of split slabs of
trees completed the house.
John Kumro had threshed his grain with a flail; then he had to take it
to New Ulm, the nearest town. Sunday he walked to a homestead near
Beaver to see a man named Shepard who he heard had an ox team and wagon he
might be able to borrow, All the early settlers were always willing to
help each other and he found the man would lend him his team and wagon
although he had never seen him before.
Monday he started out with two teams of oxen hitched to a wagon load of
grain for New Ulm. He had only gone about a half mile when he met two
men who told him to go home and get his family as the Indians were
massacring everyone.
He gave them the wagon and told them to drive it to Fort Ridgely and he
started back home on foot.
After reachng home and telling the news, their first thought was of
their relatives, the George Buery family. Mrs. Kumro and Mrs. Buery were
sisters. Mrs. Kumro wrapped some bread in a shawl to take with her, they
went to warn them.
They found them in the field getting a load of hay unaware that a
terrible massacre was taking place for miles around. They hastily threw off
the hay and prepared to go to Fort Ridgely which was about 18 miles
away.
They had not gone very far when they were halted by a band of Indians
and made to get out of the wagon. George Buery, Jr., a young boy of
three, clung to the wagon and began to cry and an Indian raised his
tomahawk to kill him when John Kumro grabbed the boy away. The leader of the
Indians told them to go to the fort and so they started, marvelling at
their escape. As they hastened away they saw the Indians stop the next
wagon load of people and kill them.
Further on they saw the body of a trader lying where he had been
scalped.
They had nothing with them to eat and already the little children were
crying for food. John Kumro said he was going back to ask the Indians
for some bread in the wagon. He went back and asked the leader for some
bread and was given two loaves and again allowed to go unmolested.
Kindness to the Indians had always been a rule with Mrs. Kumro and the
leader of that party was one they had often fed so he repaid them that
day.
Afraid to follow the beaten track to Fort Ridgely they took to the
swamps hiding themselves as best they could. The mosquitoes were terrible
and the little children had to be carried except one, a boy of four, who
walked all the way to the fort barefooted. It was a weary, bedraggled
group that at last reached the fort.
There was scant protection at the fort; it is well that the Indians did
not know the weakness of Fort Ridgely. Nearly all the soldiers there
but ten or eleven had gone out with Capt. Marsh to quell the outbreak.
Everyone knows how that expedition ended, but one man escaped with his
life. The fort had one small howitzer (a cannon) which they kept firing.
That is really what saved Fort Ridgely for the Indians were afraid of
the big gun.
The women and children were sent to the upstairs room, little more than
an attic, while the men stayed below to defend the fort.
Bullets were spattering against the stones of the fort all the time and
William Kumro and his cousin, George Buery, slipped outside to pick up
some of the bullets. Then they took them upstairs to play with, little
knowing they had come near death.
The Indian wife of Louis La Croix was at the fort and she became
violently angry at another woman and fought with her. Then she attempted to
leave the fort and go to the Indians but was stopped and brought back.
To get water they had to go to a spring some little distance from the
fort and the Indians fired on every party endeavoring to get water. John
Kumro was one of a party made up to go for water and his small son
seeing him leave the fort ran after him in an effort to go too.
The men did not see the boy and he followed them. When they had to run
back he was locked outside the gate and he set up a loud cry. The man
on guard heard him, opened the gate and dragged him in and gave him a
good spanking. So once again he narrowly escaped death.
For eleven days the people were shut up in the fort with nothing but
coffee and crackers to eat and very little of that. Then they were
relieved by General Sibley and his soldiers. After the outbeak had beem
quelled the pioneers who survived found a dreary prospect when they went
back to their homes. Most of the houses had been burned, all the cattle
driven off and what little machinery they had was stolen. Many families
had been killed and the ones who had escaped were suffering bitterly
from a knowledge of the cruel fate that had been [dealt] their loved ones.
It took real courage to go back and start again after anything like
that and in a country that was as full of hardships as Minnesota was in
the early days. The early settlers knew cold like we do not experience
now, blizzards that were man killers, grasshoppers, mosquitoes in
swarms that nearly ate up the cattle, were often without enough to eat.
Of unceasing toil and such steadfast courage our state was built on.
Morton Enterprise (Morton, Renville County, Minnesota), 27 February
1936, page 11, columns 1 and 2; Minnesota Historical Society, St. Paul.
[The Indian Uprising of 1862 — or the Dakota Conflict, as it is called
nowdays — swept across southwestern Minnesota. Over 500 whites and
untold numbers of Indians died before troops and militia restored order to
the new state.]
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