By this time the authorities were preparing to counterattack. Governor Ramsey had appointed as Colonel of militia, Henry Hastings Sibley, a fur trader by occupation, who took over command of all available forces. He collected four newly formed companies of the 6th Minnesota, and on August 20th set off for the relief of Fort Ridgely. He was short of virtually everything; weapons, stores and wagons, and his guns had the wrong calibre of ammunition. Not surprisingly, he moved deliberately, but was steadily reinforced by six more companies of the 6th Minnesota, and various other volunteers.

Sibley reached Fort Ridgely on August 27th, and on the 31st sent out Major Joseph R. Brown and Captain Hiram P. Grant with A Company of the 6th , 50 volunteers and a fatigue party to scout and bury massacre victims. On the night of September Ist, Brown circled his wagons and made camp 16 miles northwest of Fort Ridgely at the head of Birch Coulee, a long wooded ravine. The disadvantage of this site was that it would allow any attackers to approach undetected, but Brown seems to have been lulled into a false sense of security by the fact that no Sioux had so far been sighted.

But a party of hostiles, under Grey Bird, Red Legs and Mankato crept up during the night, surrounded the camp and attacked at dawn. Many of the sleeping Minnesotans were killed before they could seize their weapons, but the survivors took cover behind wagons and rocks and drove the Indians back with their fire. At Fort Ridgely, on receiving news of the battle, Sibley sent out companies B, D, and E, 50 mounted men and an artillery section, a total of 240 men, under Captain Sam McPhail. Before they reached the battlefield the relief force was intercepted by a party of Sioux, halted, and formed a defensive circle.

Sibley now sortied with the remainder of his force, as usual marching slowly. It was not until 11 a.m, on September 3rd, after driving off the Sioux with artillery fire, that he joined Brown and Grant, who had been isolated for 31 hours, their men subsisting on a quarter of hard cracker and an ounce of raw cabbage each, and had lost 19 dead.

Sibley learnt a number of lessons from his first engagement; his men needed more training and he needed more cavalry. Ramsey appealed for help to President LIncoln, including authorisation to purchase 500 horses. In response, Lincoln created the Military Department of the North-West, and appointed as its commander Major-General John Pope, fresh from his defeat at Second Manassas by Robert E. Lee. Pope took up his command on September 16th. Sibley had meanwhile been involved in indecisive negotiations with Little Crow, his main aim being to avoid any action which might jeopordise the lives of the many white prisoners in Sioux hands.

On September 19th Sibley set off north again, with about 1,600 men. He camped on the night of the 22nd on the eastern shore of a small lake a few miles south of the Sioux camp at the mouth of the Chippewa River. Little Crow managed to persuade about 700 of his followers to attack Sibley, and during the night set up an ambush in tall grass and a ravine along the route which the enemy column would pass next day. But the plan went wrong and the ambush was discovered when a several wagons left Sibley's camp early in the morning bound on an illicit potato-digging expedition. The drove directly into the Indians and "would have driven right over our men as they lay in the grass. At last they came so close that our men had to rise up and fire." As fighting began, more of men of the 3rd Minnesota came up, and soon the firce little action known as the Battle of Wood Lake was under way.

At first the Indians deployed in a wide semi-circle threatening Sibley's flanks and then attacked the 3rd Minnesota in the centre. The 3rd fell back, but were reinforced by Galbraith's Renville Rangers and made a stand on a plateau. Another party of Indians approached the American camp by way of the ravine, but were thrown back by canister from a 6 pdr and a countercharge by the 6th and 7th Minnesota. A further Indian attack was halted at the lake, and then the 3rd and parts of the 6th and 7th Minnesota launched a series of charges which drove the Indians out of the ravine.

After two hours, the battle was over; the Sioux had lost 25 dead and many wounded; Sibley 7 dead and 34 wounded. Though, because of shortage of cavalry, Sibley did not pursue, his victory had been decisive; the Indians scattered, some fleeing as far as Canada. The pro-peace chiefs now handed over some 250 white captives, at least one of whom greeted her "liberation" with some reluctance; one lady "had become so infatuated with the redskin who had taken her for a wife that she declared that were it not for her children she would not leave her dusky paramour."

Aftermath

The feelings of most Americans towards the Sioux were much less friendly; Sibley gradually rounded up about 2,000 Indians, of whom 307 were sentenced to death. Lincoln eventually cut this total to 38, of whom 3 were hanged by mistake. In March 1863, the U.S. Senate decreed that the Santee Sioux should be removed from Minnesota. About 1,300 of them, mostly women and children, were sent to Crow Creek, a bleak isolated spot in present-day South Dakota. About 2,000 Winnepago were resettled close by, and many died of starvation or disease or fled to Nebraska. It was not until 1866 that the Santee were given a slightly better location.

Sibley's victory did not end the Minnesota troubles. Rumours circulated that Little Crow was plotting new rebellion with the Yantona and Teton Sioux, and Pope launched a twopronged expedition of over 4,000 men northwards to counter the threat. They skirmished with various Indians who had not actually been involved in the uprising, and learnt that Little Crow had been killed and scalped by two farmers who caught him foraging for berries in a field.

Still the fighting sputtered on. In the spring of 1864 operations were resumed, and Brigadier- General Alfred Sidly defeated Sioux drawn from various clans at the Battle of Killdeer Mountain on July 28th. Hostilities continued into 1865, and gradually became merged with the wider conflict with the Western Indians known as Red Cloud's War.

More The Minnesota Uprising, 1862

Sioux Rebellion
Fort Ridgely
Counterattack

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