A passage from this book is an account of Rev. John Williamson at Crow Creek
by Edna Hong
At St. Joseph, Missouri, all 1300 Dakota were loaded on one boat, Florence, creating conditions John Williamson bluntley labeled reminiscent of the slave ships. Living on musty hardtack and briny pork with no opportunity to cook, and sleeping in shifts with no room for all to lie down, the families of the prisoners at Davenport arrived at the mouth of Crow Creek in Dakota Territory on June 1.
Gastric illnesses, a miserable starvation diet, and the shock of finding their new home to be a wilderness of dry and dessicated prairie streatching for hundreds of miles brought many of the Dakota, especially the very old and the very young, to their graves. In the three years at Crow Creek 300 of the original 1300 died. Sitting Bull, a Tetonwan Dakota, visited the Crow Creek encampment in the winter of 1863-64 and is said to have resolved then and there to fight the whites to the death, his or theirs.
Since conditions could not possibly improve, they only grew worse. Having arrived too late to plant (nothing would grow anyway) and forbidden weapons of any sort, the Dakota families at Crow Creek would all have died that winter if John Williamson had not persuaded Colonel Thompson, who had selected this site and was in charge of the exiles, to allow 800 of them to go on a buffalo hunt. In the middle of January, thinly clad, with threadbare tents, two ponies, and a half-dozen guns, the band started off in a northerly direction. They set up their winter camp near the present site of Redfield, South Dakota.
A week later they were eating their fill of buffalo, and the women were happily scraping and tanning hides for moccasins, leggings, and tents. After several weeks the Crow Creek exiles no longer looked sad and emaciated. The voices that joined in the prayers and hymns John Williamson led every morning and evening were strong and confident. When they returned to Crow Creek after six weeks' absence, they brought meat for those who had been too feeble to go on the hunt. In "A History of Minnesota" even the historian William Watts Folwell forsakes his scholarly objectivity momentarily and calls John Williamson the Dakota's "Saint John."
This passage was given to the Diversity Foundation by Jeff Williamson, a descendant of Rev. Williamson.
