Page:History of the Ojibway Nation.djvu/501

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BATTLE OF POKEGUMA.
491

CONFLICTS OF SIOUX AND OJIBWAYS CONTINUED.

During the summer of 1840, a Sioux and his wife were killed by Ojibways on the right bank of the Mississippi, near the mouth of the brook between Mendota and Saint Paul.

On the eighth of April, 1841, three Ojibways came down the Mississippi in a canoe, which they left between St. Anthony and Minnehaha Falls, and hid themselves during the night near a footpath on the bank of the Mississippi about a mile above Fort Snelling. As a Sioux chief was passing in the morning with his son, they fired, killing the boy and mortally wounding the father.

BATTLE OF POKEGUMA.

Pokeguma[1] is a beautiful lake four or five miles long, and about a mile wide, connected with Snake River, about twenty miles above its junction with the river St. Croix. In the year 1836, missionaries supported by the Presbyterian and Congregational churches established a mission here, and built a residence on the east side of the lake, while the Ojibway village was on an island.

The mission was for a time prosperous, and in a letter written in 1837, one of the missionaries writes: "The young women and girls now make, mend, wash, and iron after our manner. The men have learned to build log houses, drive team, plough, hoe, and handle an American axe."

In May 1841, Jeremiah Russel now living at Sauk Rapids, then Indian farmer at this point, sent two Ojibways accompanied by Elam Greeley of Stillwater to the Falls of St. Croix for supplies. They arrived there on Saturday the fifteenth of the month, and the next day a

  1. In the treaty of 1842 spelled Po-ke-gom-maw.