Chapter III

A PATHETIC CHAPTER--CAPTAIN CHITTENDEN'S MINNEHAHA.

In August, 1862, what do we see? Homes, beautiful prairie homes of yesterday, to-day have sunken out of sight, buried in their own ashes; the wife of an early love has been overtaken and compelled to submit to the unholy passion of her cruel captor; the prattling tongues of the innocents have been silenced in sudden death, and reason dethroned. A most pathetic case was that of Charles Nelson, a Swede. The day previous, his dwelling had been burned to the ground, his daughter outraged, the head of his wife, Lela, cleft by the tomahawk, and while seeking to save himself, he saw, for a moment, his two sons, Hans and Otto, rushing through the corn-field with the Indians in swift pursuit. Returning with the troops under Colonel McPhail, and passing by the ruins of his home, he gazed about him wildly, and closing the gate of the garden, asked: "When will it be safe to return?" His reason was gone!

This pathetic scene witnessed by so many who yet live to remember it, was made a chapter entitled, "The Maniac," in a work from the pen of Mrs. Harriet E. McConkey, published soon after it occurred.

Minne-ha-ha Falls Before the White Man Ever Saw It.]

Captain Chittenden, of Colonel McPhail's command, while sitting a few days after, under the Falls of Minnehaha, embodied in verse this wonderful tragedy, giving to the world the following lines:

Minne-ha-ha, laughing water,
Cease thy laughing now for aye,
Savage hands are red with slaughter
Of the innocent to-day.

Ill accords thy sportive humor
With their last despairing wail;
While thou'rt dancing in the sunbeam,
Mangled corpses strew the vale.

Change thy note, gay Minne-ha-ha;
Let some sadder strain prevail--
Listen, while a maniac wanderer
Sighs to thee his woeful tale;

"Give me back my Lela's tresses,
Let me kiss them once again!
She, who blest me with caresses
Lies unburied on the plain!

"See yon smoke? there was my dwelling;
That is all I have of home!
Hark! I hear their fiendish yelling,
As I, houseless, childless, roam!

"Have they killed my Hans and Otto?
Did they find them in the corn?
Go and tell that savage monster
Not to slay my youngest born.

"Yonder is my new-bought reaper,
Standing mid the ripened grain;
E'en my cow asks why I leave her
Wand'ring, unmilked, o'er the plain.

"Soldiers, bury here my Lela;
Place _me_ also 'neath the sod;
Long we lived and wrought together--
Let me die with her--O God!

"Faithful Fido, you they've left me,
Can you tell me, Fido, why
God at once has thus bereft me?
All I ask is here to die.

"O, my daughter Jennie, darling!
Worse than death is Jennie's fate!"

* * * * *

Nelson, as our troops were leaving
Turned and shut his garden gate.

Father Hennepin Raised the Cross of His Church on the Bank of the Mississippi River near where Fort Snelling now Stands in 1618.]