and Cheyenne, at both of which points there were Indian villages. About the same time another party, under Jo Laframboise, a bois brule, who had served a long apprenticeship to the company along the headwaters of the Mississippi, and had been present in Washington at the signing of the famous treaty with the Sioux on the 29th of September, 1837, which had made possible the creation of Minnesota Territory, had landed on the left bank" about four miles above Fort Pierre, opposite Lost Island, where there was a small village of Oahes, and put up a trading house, which soon became known as Fort Laframboise." But on the whole, the fur trade east of the Rockies was nearing its end. The government had extended its paternal hand over the red man; the Indian bureau was sending him calicoes and blankets, groceries and trinkets; was driving to him beef cattle by the thousands, and even supplying him with firearms, with which he afterwards fought the government, and with fire-water, which furnished him the courage and incentive to raid the settlements. But all this was in the future; for the present there was nothing. but peace and tranquility from the Big Sioux to the Yellow stone. All the same the world was moving. Fort Pierre and its entourage, which at first was a part of the great Northwest Territory, had changed their allegiance from Louisiana to Missouri, from Missouri to Nebraska, and from Nebraska to Dakota. An act of congress of May 31, 1854, had authorized the erection in midcontinent of two huge territories, and permitted their inhabitants to decide for themselves whether slavery should or should not exist within their limits. This apparently harmless legislation had formed the occasion for one of the greatest political struggles the world has ever seen. While the upper Missouri was enjoying a monotonous peace, its lower banks were noisy with the strife of an irrepressible conflict. The peaceful days that had marked the existence of the garrisons at Pierre and Ridgeley and Randall had ended; the controversy that began at Lecompton and Lawrence was to end only at Appomattox. The breaking out of the war of the Rebellion found these five companies of the Fourth Artillery still at Fort Randall, and it was quite a little advanced before it was found convenient to relieve all of them. In May, Companies E, I and L had been sent to the east to be mounted as light batteries, leaving H and M under the command of Captain John A. Brown, a native of Maryland, and counted to be loyal to the union. About all the other officers had either been ordered east, or on various pretexts had managed to get there. It is said that Captain Brown was induced by his wife-an estimable lady of southern birth— against his own inclinations, to cast his fortunes with the Confederacy; the facts are, that he left his post without permission and was not heard from for several months, or until his resignation reached the war department from a southern city some time in July, 1861. This left the command of the post to the only commissioned officer who remained, Second Lieutenant T. R. Tannatt, and for the following six months this officer and his brave little garrison of something less than one hundred men remained alone and apparently forgotten at this outpost of civilization, surrounded by Indians, whose friendship, at all times doubtful, was made more so by the importunities of Confederate agents, and exposed to dangers far greater than their comrades in the field. It was not until the middle of December, when three companies of the Fourteenth Iowa Volunteers, under the command of Captain Bradley Mahana, from Iowa City and its neighborhood, came up the river from Sioux City and made camp on the river bottom, that relief came. These two artillery companies were then sent to Louisville, Ky., where they were united to form a light battery, and as such performed most valiant and distinguished service in the Army of the Cumberland during the greater part of the war. Another Fort Pierre ཀ་ The demolition of old Fort Pierre, while it removed a prominent landmark, had little or no effect upon the perpetuation of the name as a point of rendezvous. Men journeying from opposite ends of the continent still appointed Fort Pierre as a place of meeting; trappers, traders, emigrants, red men and white men of every degree, continued to talk and write and sing of it as though it were still the busy scene on which George Catlin had looked down on that May morning of 1832, when six thousand friendly Sioux were welcoming old Pierre Chouteau at the landing place; even the government, which had itself issued the mandate that had leveled the walls of the old fort, and had transported its materials to build Fort Randall, one hundred miles away," 68_1 continued to regard it as an absolute and undisturbed substantiality, making it the scene of present and prospective conferences and rendezvous and meetings, and always and everywhere disregarding its non-existence. All this to the confusion of the present historian, no less than to those who have preceded him. But the truth is that, in the parlance of the prairies, the words "Fort Pierre" were in themselves a phrase. They included anything and everything from the Great Bend to the Cheyenne, and between the Jim river and the Black Hills. A recognition of this fact will explain many otherwise contradictory passages in the history of the plains. "I left St. Louis on the 10th of May, 1862," reports Mr. Latta, the agent for the upper Missouri tribes, "in charge of the annuity goods on board the steamer Spread Eagle. We arrived at Fort Pierre on the 27th, where I found from two to three thousand Indians, portions of the several bands of Sioux, awaiting my arrival. In the morning their goods were placed on the shore in seven parcels, conforming as nearly as possible to the population of each; the Brules, Blackfeet, Sans-Arc, Minnicongies, Unc-pa-pas, Two Kettles and Yanktonias, all being Dakota Sioux." Then ensued a consultation, which because of the event that followed is now historical. "They stated that they regretted to see me without a military force to protect them from that portion of their several bands who were hostile to the government, and that they were friends to the white men, and desired to live on friendly relations with the government and fulfill their treaty obligations. That General Harney, at Pierre, in 1856, had promised them aid; that they were greatly in the minority; that that portion of their people opposed to the government were more hostile than ever before; that they had, year after year, been promised the fulfillment of this pledge, but since none had come, they must now break off their friendly relations with the government and rejoin their respective bands, as they could hold out no longer; that their lives and property were threatened in case they accepted any more goods from the government; that the small amount of annuities given them did not give satisfaction; it created discord rather than harmony, nor would it justify them to come in so far to receive them; that they had been friends to the government and all white men; had lived up to the pledges made at Laramie in 1857, as far as it was possible under the circumstances, and still wished to do so, but must henceforth be excused unless their Great Father would aid them. "They requested me to bring no more goods under the Laramie treaty, nor would they receive those present. The same views were expressed by all the speakers, but after a long parley Bear's Rib, a chief of the Sioux nation appointed by General Harney, a brave and good man, rose and said in the most touching manner, that for eleven years he had been the friend of the white man and the government; that for years he had relied upon promises made by General Harney and former agents to send him assistance, yet none had come; that if he received those presents sent his people by his Great Father, he not only endangered his own life, but the lives of all present; yet he loved his Great Father and would this once more receive for his people the goods present, but closed by requesting me to bring no more unless they could have assistance. A few days after this delivery, and after I had left, that portion of the SansArc band opposed to any intercourse with the government came in from the prairies, assaulted and killed, within the gates of Fort Pierre, this true man," the best friend the white man had in the Sioux nation. Several others were killed in the affray. Bear's Rib was chief of the Unc-pa-pas, and that portion of his band friendly to the government who were present, numbering some 250, are now wandering outcasts in the country." The scene of this murder, which Mr. Latta locates at Fort Pierre, was actually at the trading post on the left bank, about three miles above the site of old Fort Pierre, which had been established by Jo Laframboise in 1857 or 1858, and had been known for a time as Fort Laframboise." It was built on the bluff on the edge of the river, with neither timber nor grass within a mile, and had been selected merely on account of there being a good landing place at that point. It included a store, store-keeper's dwelling, a barrack for the employes, and two smaller houses, all of logs, and the whole surrounded by a stockade of cottonwood pickets, fifteen feet in height with bastions at diagonal corners. This small establishment soon became known as Fort Pierre, though it was a most unworthy and insignificant successor to the original; many of the first settlers in that section never knew any other. To confuse the situation, the island in the river opposite old Fort Pierre is known to this day as |