Justina Bolter had been in her new home for barely two months when the Sioux rose against the white settlers of Minnesota. She had come from Prussia in 1854, leaving her aging parents behind in Posen, and after a time near Buffalo, New York, she had settled in Wisconsin, where in 1856, at twenty-two, she married John Bolter. In June of 1862, she, her husband, and their three children moved west to Renville County, Minnesota, claiming 160 acres under the Homestead Act on Beaver Creek, about ten miles from the Lower Sioux Agency. They had built a comfortable log house, fenced a garden, and gathered a few cows, an ox team, and the ordinary furnishings of settlers in a new country.
To Justina, it seemed a paradise, and she was grateful for the life she had found. That peace was shattered on the morning of August 18, 1862. As the family sat at breakfast, a Sioux woman entered the house, seemed strangely pleased, and left almost immediately, leaving an axe outside the door. Justina, puzzled by the woman’s manner, followed her a short distance to watch.
The woman joined several other squaws who appeared to be moving away. Then Justina heard five gunshots in the direction of a neighbor’s house, the home of Eusebius Reif. She hurried back and told her husband what she had seen and heard. John went out to round up the cattle, hoping to keep them from being frightened off by the Indians.
Left alone with the children, Justina watched as the squaws returned, this time accompanied by four Indians. They came to the house and asked for water, and she gave it to them. Two Indians and three squaws left, but the remaining two came inside, took her husband’s gun from the wall, examined it to see if it was loaded, and hung it back. Then they too left, walking around Reif’s house, studying it closely, and disappearing down a slope.
Just then, her brother-in-law, Michael Bolter, came running from the direction of Reif’s in great haste. “The report is that the Indians are killing the whites,” he said, and asked after John. He went down to the bottom to warn his father, who was making hay, but found no one. It was later learned that both Michael’s father and father-in-law had already been killed.
Justina, already frightened, took her three children and started toward Reif’s house. On the way, she met Michael coming back in great haste. His manner alone told her everything; he did not need to speak. She saw the Indians killing Mrs.
Reif and her children, and heard Mrs. Reif cry out only once before all was silent. Michael seized her baby, and Justina took the two older children, telling him to call John. But Michael was already running toward Fort Ridgely, carrying the infant.
Burdened with two children, Justina soon found she could not keep pace. She turned instead toward the timber along the Minnesota River. Behind her, the Indians followed for a short distance, then for reasons she never understood, they turned back. She never saw or heard from her husband again after he left that morning to look after the cattle.
She hid in a thicket with her children all that day and night, listening as Indians passed her hiding place on their way to their teepees on the opposite bank of the river. She slept none that first night. Toward daylight, the Indians grew silent, then one voice rose in what seemed to be a speech, and then all was still again. Throughout Tuesday, she heard nothing more; the Indians appeared to have left their camp.
That forenoon, her eldest child fell sick. Justina went to Beaver Creek and bathed the child’s head with water, which seemed to help. But the child grew hungry and wanted to go home. Gathering her courage, Justina led the children back to her deserted house.
She found it plundered of everything. Feathers from the beds lay scattered inside and out. The only clothing left was an old dress, and the only food was raw potatoes. She took both and found a new hiding place half a mile away, on her brother-in-law’s land.
There she remained until Friday, eating nothing herself while the children ate the raw potatoes. On Friday, she went to her brother-in-law’s house and looked inside. Her mother-in-law lay dead on the floor, her head severed from her body. The premises had been plundered, feathers strewn about the yard.
She fled in shock, not even noticing the bodies of her brother-in-law’s children, which soldiers would later find near the fence. She hastily pulled up some potatoes and gathered a few cucumbers, then returned to the woods. She stayed there for a week and a half, living on the potatoes and cucumbers while the children ate the potatoes raw, which her stomach rejected. She herself subsisted almost entirely on rainwater, and the baby had been taken from her by Michael.
The next eldest child, just over two years old, had begun nursing on the day after they left the house. At the end of five weeks, the elder of her two children died of starvation, and Justina had grown too weak to move about except with great difficulty. The night before the child died, it asked piteously for water, but it was dark and Justina was too weak to fetch any. She told the child to wait until morning.
But the little one never saw the morning. It died during a dark, rainy, dismal night, with no fire, and only the thin clothing they had worn when they fled to cover them. It rained for four days without pause. Justina was barefoot, and so were the children.
She stayed by the body of her dead child, too weak to bury it or to leave it. When the body became offensive, she crawled some ten feet away. From Friday until Sunday, she ate the leaves of grapevines, which she had learned by trial could sustain life. Her milk failed at the same time her eldest child died, and she began feeding her remaining child the grape leaves as well.
A heavy frost then killed the grape leaves. Her hopes seemed to fall with them. She searched all day for leaves that might have escaped the frost and found only a few. On her way back, she lost her living child, and searched from morning until midday before finding it.
When all the green leaves were gone, she left the child in the woods and crawled to her brother-in-law’s field a quarter of a mile away, where she found a few potatoes and a small pumpkin. Unable to carry both at once, she carried the potatoes a short distance, returned for the pumpkin, and by alternating efforts brought them both back to the child. Then came another affliction. Snakes came to her in the woods, large and small, crawling around her in every form.
When one company left, another came. But they did her no harm, and in her lonely condition their company became almost agreeable. “They were serpents in name,” she would later say, “but angels beside the savages I had escaped. ”
One Sunday, she heard gunfire near Reif’s house and supposed the Indians had returned, and nearly gave up all hope.
She remained another week, but the cold grew so intense she could endure it no longer. She decided to return to her own house, and if she must die, to die at home. Taking up her child and using a stick as a cane, she reached her house after an absence of nine weeks. She gathered the scattered feathers into a bed on the floor and laid the child down, as white as alabaster, as near dead as alive.
That Saturday night she slept in her own house for the first time since August. On Sunday morning she went into the yard and found three young turnips that had grown from seeds scattered by the Indians when they plundered the house. That was all she found to eat. As the sun rose bright and pleasant, she began to think of returning to the woods.
Among the rubbish of the plundered house, she found a mutilated copy of the Bible she had been accustomed to read. It seemed an old friend, and she read its consoling truths and felt comforted. While she was reading, two soldiers came to the door and pushed it open. She crawled toward them, certain they were Indians come to kill her.
Her sight had almost entirely failed, but her hearing had become extraordinarily acute. She took one of them by the hands and begged him not to kill her. Looking up, she saw tears running down the faces of both men. She knew then that they were white men, soldiers, and she was overjoyed.
A number of soldiers came up. They did not speak but all shed tears. Justina could not shed tears; she could not. She told them she had a child alive in the house, and that another had died of starvation in the woods.
One soldier went to find and bury the dead child but could not locate the body. Another went to a neighbor’s house and found a chicken. Using an old kettle and a damaged stove that remained in the house, the soldiers made a weak chicken soup. Justina ate about a coffee cupful, and the child took a small portion.
The food relieved her stomach but caused her limbs to cramp. She was carried out to a wagon, one soldier pulling off his coat and wrapping it around her to keep her warm. She and her child were taken to Colonel Sibley’s camp at Yellow Medicine, some fifty miles from Fort Ridgely. There she remained about a week.
It had been nine weeks from the day she left her house until the soldiers rescued her. She began to suffer great pain in her limbs from cramping, losing the use of one hand and both feet. At Yellow Medicine, she was reported to be a mere skeleton, speaking only just above a whisper from extreme weakness. Her surviving child, nearly three years old, was with her and looked quite hearty.
Her baby, carried away by Michael Bolter at the start of the massacre, had been passed from Fort Ridgely to Saint Peter to Saint Paul, and finally, believing the mother dead, taken to Wisconsin, where it was doing well. Justina had not yet seen it. Before the Sioux Commission at Saint Peter in May 1863, Justina gave her testimony with the survivor at her side, still suffering occasional paroxysms of pain in one hand. The 1864 account estimated that nearly two thousand settlers were killed in the massacre, a figure far higher than modern counts, though the authors of the time insisted that many of the dead were never found, their bodies consumed by prairie fires before they could be discovered.
As for her husband John, he had gone out that morning to find the cattle, and the account of his death holds that he and others working in the field were approached by Indians. When John reached out his hand to greet them, he was killed. His widow, Justina, married his brother Michael on September 13, 1863. Michael had carried her baby to safety but had also outrun her in the flight from Reif’s house; his own wife and five young children were killed that first day.
Justina and Michael would have seven more children between 1864 and 1877.
