Edge of the Wilderness - By Stephanie Grace Whitson Page 0,35

to the cabin, he turned to introduce her. “My wife, Marjorie.”

Marjorie blushed furiously when Daniel and Robert introduced themselves. “You men just set yourselves down there in the yard,” she said, waving toward a rough-hewn bench alongside the house. “I’ll be right out with that pie.” She disappeared inside the cabin.

Jeb reached into his pocket and handed their papers to the two men. “Guess you better keep these,” he said.

Marjorie emerged from the cabin with the pie in one hand and plates in the other. Resting the pie on the edge of the Grants’ new well, she dished up one-fourth of the pie to each of the men. Just as Daniel took the last bite of pie, she lumbered to the cabin and returned with a loaf of bread in an old sack. “You men take this, now,” she insisted, then smiled at Robert. “And if you have a wife, bring her down for a visit. It gets mighty lonely here.”

Robert and Daniel picked up the trail of the unknown Indians just across an open piece of ground opposite Jeb’s cornfield. They followed it up a hill and turned to look back toward the farm. “He put the well in a good place,” Robert commented as they surveyed the valley.

Daniel nodded, looking across the valley to the ridge where his own farm had been. “I wonder if Mrs. Grant would have served us pie if she had known she baked it in Nancy’s stove,” he said.

Robert shrugged. Together they rode back to where the grieving Dakota had left a dead child. Daniel climbed the tree and lowered the body to Robert’s waiting arms. Together, they dug a grave and laid the child to rest beneath the earth.

When he was first sent to guard Indian prisoners in Mankato, Minnesota, Brady Jensen had thought his military career was at an all-time low. He was wrong. Three weeks after he marched out of Minnesota with General Sibley’s troops, he was ordered to Crow Creek Reservation where he was given a wagonload of squaws to deliver to various scouts’ camps along the frontier. He would end up right where he had started his career in the West—Fort Ridgely.

Like many of his comrades in arms, Jensen had taken to referring to the Indians as “Mr. Lo.” It was a bad joke on the sympathetic whites and their constantly calling attention to “Lo, the poor Indian.” He could hardly believe his ears when he was called in and told that for as long as the Dakota scouts’ services were needed, it had been decided to let their families join them as an incentive to encourage faithful service. Family ties were strong among the Dakota, Jensen’s commander explained, and if the men had their wives with them, the army wouldn’t have to worry about deserters. “There’s another reason for sending the wives out. After the men hear about conditions at Crow Creek,” the commander had said with a wry smile, “they’ll be more than happy to do their best on behalf of the army just so they can stay in service and keep from having to go there.”

Whatever the reasoning behind the plan to take the scouts’ families to them, Jensen wanted no part of transporting “the poor Indian.” He was sick of getting the worst assignments available because of one mistake in one battle over a year ago, and by the time he crossed the river at Redwood Ferry and climbed the hill past the sutler’s house and a few stores, he didn’t care who knew how he felt. When he pulled his team up in front of the U-shaped stone building that served as a combination surgeon’s residence and headquarters at Fort Ridgely, he ignored the two ragged squaws sitting behind him in the wagon and headed immediately inside, leaving the squaws to themselves.

The women looked at each other nervously. They surveyed the fort. Nancy nodded toward the dozen or so new buildings. “Little Crow must have burned the old ones,” she muttered under her breath to her companion. The two women were aware that their arrival had been noticed by several soldiers standing at the corner of the two-story barracks building on the opposite side of the parade ground. They hunkered down in the wagon, afraid to move.

But then two riders approached from the south. One of, the squaws watched their approach. Her hand went to her throat. She nudged her companion. And then, as the two riders came closer, she leaped out of