Abbie's Story -- ii

When their guests returned sometime later, they demanded flour. When Abbie’s father turned to get what little they had, one of them shot him through the heart. Her mother attempted to push a rifle barrel away and was clubbed, then dragged outside and killed “in the most cruel and shocking manner,” Abbie says. Abbie was little more than a child. In a few moments, both her parents lay dead.

That left her alone with three children. Two were her brothers, the other belonged to an older married sister who happened to be away. The Wahpakutes grabbed the children, dragged them outside, and clubbed all three to death:

After ransacking the house, and taking whatever they thought might be serviceable, such as provisions, bedding, arms and ammunition; and after the bloody scalping knife had done its terrible work; I was dragged from the never-to-be-forgotten scene. No language can ever suggest, much less adequately portray, my feelings as I passed that door. 

When Inkpaduta and his warriors left, the cabin was in flames.

What happened at the Gardner cabin was the first terrible act of a string of atrocities along the lakeshore, a string that, a day later, extended into the town we know today as Jackson, Minnesota.

The night before that attack, Abbie remembers seeing the same warriors dress once again for battle, her own family’s killers. They might have murdered all the residents had there not been a warning. Even so, Inkpaduta’s men plundered what they could and killed seven more settlers, including another eight-year-old boy. To say those victims were murdered unmercifully seems redundant, but consider it understatement.

In all, Inkpaduta’s band killed as many as 40 settlers in the three-day rampage and took four women captives, including young Abbie Gardner.

Memorial at Lake Okoboji

Any telling of the story cannot deny that the Wahpekutes had cause, as their descendants will explain; the existence of the tribe and their freedom as a people were at stake. From an indigenous point of view, what Inkpaduta accomplished was what they had set out to do: clear the area of white settlers, the illegal immigrants. That, they did—for a time.

Even before the massacre, Inkpaduta, the “chief” of the Wahpekute band, was considered dark as sin itself by white settlers—and for good reason. He’d committed his band to the area of the Little Sioux River, where he had managed to make few friends among the settlers. But the level of hideous carnage the band had reached that late winter day was new and beyond imagination.

The old man in this photograph is reputed to be the Dakota headman Inkpaduta. It is the only such photograph of the man