A Brief History of South Dakota/Chapter 22
CHAPTER XXII
A DAKOTA PAUL REVERE
There were four bands of the Santee Sioux, two of whom, known as the Medewakantans and the Wakpekutas, were the leaders in the outbreak. The other two bands, the Wahpetons and the Sissetons, were opposed to the outbreak and as a rule did all that they could to protect and assist the whites. When the government sent the troops against the Santees, most of the able-bodied Sissetons enlisted in the government service as scouts. The hostiles who fled into Dakota were constantly organizing raiding parties and sending them down to the Minnesota settlements to secure provisions, steal horses, and occasionally kill settlers. To prevent this the Sisseton scouts were divided up into small parties and located in camps, at frequent intervals, from the neighborhood of Devils Lake in North Dakota down to the central portion of South Dakota.
Among these friendlies was a mixed-blood Sisseton named Samuel J. Brown, who was then a boy about nineteen years of age, educated, intelligent, and influential. In the last years of the war he was made chief of scouts, with headquarters at Fort Sisseton, whence he looked after the Indian scouting camps above mentioned. In the month of April, 1866, at sundown one bright evening, an Indian runner came to Brown, with information that moccasin tracks had been found at a crossing of the James River, near Lamoure, in North Dakota, and that the indications were that a hostile party had gone down
Samuel J. Brown
toward the settlements.
Brown wrote a dispatch, stating the facts, to the commandant at Fort Abercrombie, on the Red River, which was to be sent there the following morning; then, mounting his pony, he set out across the prairie directly west, to reach a scouting camp fifty-five miles distant, on the site of the village of Ordway, in Brown County. He reached this scouting camp at midnight, and was informed that the moccasin tracks which had caused the alarm were made by a party of friendly Indians who were going out to the Missouri River to meet the peace commissioners, that the peace treaties made the previous fall had been ratified by the government and the Indians, and that the war was over.
Fearing that the dispatch which he had written to be sent to Fort Abercrombie would create unnecessary trouble and alarm, Brown at once mounted another pony and started back to Fort Sisseton, hoping to reach it before the messenger left for Abercrombie in the morning. When he had crossed the James River and was galloping rapidly across the broad, flat bottom, he was overtaken by one of those severe spring storms which sometimes sweep over Dakota, a genuine furious, blinding winter blizzard. It came from the northwest and he believed he could make his way before it. In fact, on the bare, unprotected prairie there was nothing else to do; so he forced his way along, doing his best to keep in the direct course to Fort Sisseton.
When daylight came, however, he found that he had drifted far out of his way, and was down in the vicinity of the Waubay Lakes, twenty-five miles south of the fort. He turned his little pony in the face of the storm, which was increasing in severity, and fought his way to Sisseton, where he arrived before nine o'clock in the morning,—having since sundown the previous evening traveled a distance of more than one hundred and fifty miles. He fell from his pony exhausted and paralyzed, but he had accomplished his purpose in the line of his duty.
Mr. Brown, in 1905, was still living, a respected citizen of the town which bears his name, Brown Valley, Minnesota, between Lakes Traverse and Big Stone. He never recovered from the evil effects of his awful exertion, and was never able to take a natural step from that day. Mr. Brown was born in South Dakota, but a few miles from his present home. His ride merits a place in history beside those famous ones which have been preserved in the songs and stories of the people.