Sibley's Sioux Expedition

 

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Civil War Harper's Weekly, September 12, 1863

Reading original Harper's Weekly newspapers published during the Civil War is one of the best ways of gaining a deeper understanding of the War. We have made our entire collection of papers available online to allow you to read detailed reports of the key events in the war.

(Scroll Down to See Entire Page, or Newspaper Thumbnails below will take you to the page of interest)

 

Sioux Battle

Sioux Battle

British Affairs

British Affairs

Monitor's at Charleston

Ironclad Monitors at Charleston

Rebel Torpedo

Quincy Gilmore

Quincy Gilmore

Sioux Expedition

Sioux Expedition

Independence Day

Independence Day

Beauregard Cartoon

Beauregard Cartoon

Sibley Expedition

Sibley's Sioux Expedition

Chattanooga, Tennessee

Chattanooga, Tennessee

Fort Sumter after Bombardment

Fort Sumter After the Bombardment

James Island

James Island, South Carolina

Charleston Campaign

Charleston Campaign

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

SEPTEMBER 12, 1863.]

HARPER'S WEEKLY.

587

superintendent felt quite sure that the villain was not dead; nor in danger of it."

"Oh, bless him! bless him! for saying so."

"And that he will turn up in London before very long; not in this neighborhood; he says he must have known the writer of the letter, and his taking his luggage with him shows he has gone off deliberately. My poor little Ju, now do try and look at it as he does, and every body else does; try and see it as you would if you were a by-stander."

She laid her soft hand on his shoulder as if to support herself floating in her sea of doubt: "I do see I am a poor credulous girl; but how can my Alfred be false to me? Am I to doubt the Bible? am I to doubt the sun? Is nothing true in heaven or earth? Oh, if I could only have died as I was dressing for church—died while he seemed true! He is true; the wicked creature has cast some spell on him: he has gone in a moment of delirium; he will regret what he has done, perhaps regrets it now. I am ungrateful to you, Edward, and to the good policeman, for saying he is not dead. What more do I require? he is dead to me. Edward, let us leave this place. We were going: let us go to-day; this very day; oh, take me and hide me where no one that knows me can ever see me again." A flood of tears came to her relief: and she went along sobbing and kissing her brother's hand every now and then.

But, as they drew near the gate of Albion Villa, twilight began to usher in the dawn. Julia shuddered at even that faint light, and fled like a guilty thing, and hid herself sobbing in her own bedroom.

Musgrove Cottage.

Mr. Richard Hardie slept better, since his return from Yorkshire, than he had done for some time past, and therefore woke more refreshed and in better spirits. He knew an honest family was miserable a few doors off; but he did not care. He got up and shaved with a mind at ease. Only, when he had removed the lather from one half his face, he happened to look out of window, and saw on the wall opposite—a placard: a large placard to this effect:

"ONE HUNDRED GUINEAS REWARD!

Whereas on the 11th instant Mr. Alfred Hardie disappeared mysteriously from his lodgings in 15 Mill Street under circumstances suggesting a suspicion of foul play, know all men that the above reward will be paid to any person or persons who shall first inform the undersigned where the said Alfred Hardie is to be found, and what person or persons, if any, have been concerned in his disappearance.

ALEXANDER SAMPSON

39 Pope Street

Napoleon Square

London."

At sight of this, Mr. Hardie was seized with a tremor that suspended the razor in mid-air; he opened the window, and glared at the doctor's notice.

At this moment he himself was a picture: not unlike those half-cleaned portraits the picture-restorers hang out as specimens of their art.

"Insolent interfering fool," he muttered, and began to walk the room in agitation. After a while he made a strong effort, shaved the other half, and dressed slowly, thinking hard all the time. The result was, he went out before breakfast (which he had not done for years) and visited the "White Lion." One of Sampson's posters had just been stuck up near the inn; he quietly pulled it down and then entered the yard; and had a serious talk with the squinting hostler.

On his return, Jane was waiting breakfast. The first word to him was: "Papa, have you seen?"

"What, the Reward?" said he, indifferently. "Yes, I noticed it at our door as I came home."

Jane said it was a very improper and most indelicate interference in their affairs. And went on to say with heightened color: "I have just told Peggy to take it down."

"Not for the world!" cried Mr. Hardie, losing all his calmness real or feigned; and he rang the bell hastily. On Peggy's appearing, he said, anxiously, "I do not wish that Notice interfered with."

"I shouldn't think of touching it without your orders, Sir," said she, quietly, and shot him a feline glance from under her pale lashes.

Jane colored, and looked a little mortified: but on Peggy's retiring Mr. Hardie explained that, whether judicious or not, it was a friendly act of Dr. Sampson's; and to pull down his notice would look like siding with the boy against those he had injured: "Besides," said he, "why should you and I burls inquiry? Ill as he has used me, I am his father, and not altogether without anxiety. Suppose those doctors should be right about him, you know?"

Jane had for some time been longing to call at Albion Villa and sympathize with her friend; and now curiosity was superadded; she burned to know whether the Dodds knew of, or approved this placard. She asked her father whether he thought she could go there with propriety. "Why not?" said he, cheerfully, and with assumed carelessness.

In reality it was essential to him that Jane should visit the Dodds. Surrounded by pitfalls, threatened with a new and mysterious assailant in the eccentric, but keen and resolute Sampson, this artful man, who had now become a very Machiavel — constant danger and deceit had so sharpened and deepened his great natural abilities—was preparing among other defenses a shield; and that shield was a sieve; and that sieve was his daughter. In fact, ever since his return, he had acted and spoken at the Dodds through Jane, but with a masterly appearance of simplicity and mere confidential intercourse. At least I think this is the true clew to all his recent remarks.

Jane, a truthful, unsuspicious girl, was all the

fitter instrument of the cunning monster. She went and called at Albion Villa, and was received by Edward, Mrs. Dodd being up stairs with Julia, and in five minutes she had told him what her father, she owned, had said to her in confidence. "But," said she, "the reason I repeat these things is to make peace, and that you may not fancy there is any one in our house so cruel, so unchristian, as to approve Alfred's perfidy. Oh, and papa said candidly he disliked the match, but then he disliked this way of ending it far more."

Mrs. Dodd came down in due course, and kissed her; but told her Julia could not see even her at present. "I think, dear," said she, "in a day or two she will see you; but no one else: and for her sake we shall now hurry our departure from this place, where she was once so happy."

Mrs. Dodd did not like to begin about Alfred; but Jane had no such scruples: she inveighed warmly against his conduct, and, ere she left the house, had quite done away with the faint suspicion Sampson had engendered, and brought both Mrs. Dodd and Edward back to their original opinion, that the elder Hardie had nothing on earth to do with the perfidy of the younger.

Just before dinner a gentleman called on Edward, and proved to be a policeman in plain clothes. He had been sent from the office to sound the hostler at the "White Lion," and, if necessary, to threaten him. The police knew, though nobody else in Barkington did, that this hostler had been in what rogues call trouble twice, and, as the police can starve a man of the kind by blowing on him, and can reward him by keeping dark, he knows better than withhold information from them.

However, on looking for this hostler, he had left his place that very morning; had decamped with mysterious suddenness.

Here was a puzzle.

Had the man gone without noticing the reward? Had somebody outbid the reward? or was it a strange coincidence, and did he after all know nothing?

The police thought it was no coincidence, and he did know something; so they had telegraphed the London office to mark him down.

Edward thanked his visitor; but, on his retiring, told his mother he could make neither head nor tail of it; and she only said, "We seem surrounded by mystery."

Meantime, unknown to these bewildered ones, Greek was meeting Greek only a few yards off.

Mr. Hardie was being undermined by a man of his own calibre, one too cautious to communicate with the Dodds, or any one else, till his work looked ripe.

The game began thus: a decent mechanic, who lodged hard by, lounging with his pipe near the gate of Musgrove Cottage, offered to converse with old Betty: she gave him a rough answer; but with a touch of ineradicable vanity must ask Peggy if she wanted a sweet-heart, because there was a hungry one at the gate: "Why he wanted to begin on an old woman like me." Peggy inquired what he had said to her.

"Oh, he begun where most of them ends, if they get so far at all: axed me was I comfortable here; if not, he knew a young man wanted a nice tidy body to keep house for him."

Peggy pricked up her ears; and, in less than a quarter of an hour, went for a box of lucifers in a new bonnet and clean collar. She tripped past the able mechanic very accidentally, and he bestowed an admiring smile on her, but said nothing, only smoked. However, on her return, he contrived to detain her, and paid her a good many compliments, which she took laughingly and with no great appearance of believing them. However, there is no going by that: compliments sink: and within forty-eight hours the able mechanic had become a hot wooer of Peggy Black, always on the look-out for her day and night, and telling her all about the lump of money he had saved, and how he could double his income, if he had but a counter, and tidy wife behind it. Peggy gossiped in turn, and let out among the rest that she had been turned off once, just for answering a little sharply; and now it was the other way: her master was a trifle too civil at times.

"Who could help it?" said the able mechanic, rapturously; and offered a pressing civility; which Peggy fought off.

"Not so free, young man," said she. "Kissing is the prologue to sin."

"How do you know that?" inquired the able mechanic, with the sly humor of his class.

"It is a saying," replied Peggy, demurely.

At last, one night, Mr. Green, the Detective, for he it was, put his arm round his new sweet- heart's waist, and approached the subject nearest his heart. He told her he had just found out there was money enough to be made in one day to set them up for life in a nice little shop; and she could help in it.

After this inviting preamble he crept toward the £14,000 by artful questions; and soon elicited that there had been high words between Master and Mr. Alfred about that very sum; she had listened at the door and heard. Taking care to combine close courtship with cunning interrogatories, he was soon enabled to write to Dr. Sampson, and say that a servant of Mr. Hardie's was down on him, and reported that he carried a large pocket-book in his breast-pocket by day; and she had found the dent of it under his pillow at night; a stroke of observation very creditable in an unprofessional female: on this he had made it his business to meet Mr. Hardie in broad day, and sure enough the pocket-book was always there. He added that the said Hardie's face were an expression, which he had seen more than once when respectable parties went in for felony: and altogether thought

they might now take out a warrant and proceed in the regular way.

Sampson received this news with great satisfaction: but was crippled by the interwoven relations of the parties.

To arrest Mr. Hardie on a warrant would entail a prosecution for felony, and separate Jane and Edward forever.

He telegraphed Green to meet him at the station; and reached Barkington at eight that very evening. Green and he proceeded to Albion Villa, and there they held a long and earnest consultation with Edward; and at last, on certain conditions, Mr. Green and Edward consented to act on Sampson's plan. Green, by this time, knew all Mr. Hardie's out-of-door habits; and assured them that at ten o'clock he would walk up. and down the road for at least half an hour, the night being dry. It wanted about a quarter to ten when Mrs. Dodd came down and proposed supper to the travelers. Sampson declined it for the present; and said they had work to do at eleven. Then, making the others a signal not to disclose any thing at present, he drew her aside and asked after Julia.

Mrs. Dodd sighed:—"She goes from one thing to another, but always returns to one idea —that he is a victim, not a traitor."

"Well, tell her in one hour the money shall be in the house."

"The money! What does she care?"

"Well, say we shall know all about Alfred by eleven o'clock."

"My dear friend, be prudent," said Mrs. Dodd. "I feel alarmed; you were speaking almost in a whisper when I came in."

"Y' are very obsairvant: but doant be uneasy; we are three to one. Just go and comfort Miss Julee with my message."

"Ah, that I will," she said.

She was no sooner gone than they all stole out into the night, and a pitch-dark night it was; but Green had a powerful dark lantern to use if necessary.

They waited, Green at the gate of Musgrove Cottage, the other two a little way up the road.

Ten o'clock struck. Some minutes passed without the expected signal from Green; and Edward and Sampson began to shiver. For it was very cold and dark, and in the next place they were honest men going to take the law into their own hands, and the law sometimes calls that breaking the law. "Confound him!" muttered Sampson: "if he does not soon come I shall run away. It is bitterly cold."

Presently footsteps were heard approaching; but no signal: it proved to be only a fellow in a smock frock rolling home from the public house.

Just as his footsteps died away a low hoot like a plaintive owl was heard, and they knew their game was afoot.

Presently, tramp, tramp, came the slow and stately march of him they had hunted down.

He came very slowly, like one lost in meditation: and these amateur policemen's hearts beat louder and louder as he drew nearer and nearer.

At last in the blackness of the night a shadowy outline was visible: another tramp or two, it was upon them.

Now the cautious Mr. Green had stipulated that the pocket-book should first be felt for, and if not there the matter should go no farther. So Edward made a stumble and fell against Mr. Hardie and felt his left breast: the pocket-book was there. "Yes," he whispered: and Mr. Hardie, in the act of remonstrating at his clumsiness, was pinned behind, and his arms strapped with wonderful rapidity and dexterity. Then first he seemed to awake to his danger, and uttered a stentorian cry of terror, that rang through the night and made two of his three captors tremble.

"Cut that," said Green, sternly, "or you'll get into trouble."

Mr. Hardie lowered his voice directly. "Do not kill me, do not hurt me," he murmured; "I'm but a poor man now. Take my little money; it is in my waistcoat pocket; but spare my life. You see I don't resist."

"Come, stash your gab, my lad," said Green, contemptuously, addressing him just as he would any other of the birds he was accustomed to capture. "It's not your stiff that is wanted, but Captain Dodd's."

"Captain Dodd's?" cried the prisoner, with a wonderful assumption of innocence.

"Ay, the pocket-book," said Green: "here, this! this!" He tapped on the pocket-book, and instantly the prisoner uttered a cry of agony, and sprang into the road with an agility no one would have thought possible; but Edward and Green soon caught him, and, the Doctor joining, they held him, and Green tore his coat open.

The pocket-book was not there. He tore open his waistcoat; it was not in the waistcoat: but it was sewed tightly to his very shirt on the outside.

Green wrenched it away, and bidding the other two go behind the prisoner and look over his shoulder, unseen themselves, slipped the shade of his lantern.

Mr. Hardie had now ceased to struggle and to exclaim; he stood sullen, mute, desperate; while an agitated face peered eagerly over each of his shoulders at the open pocket-book in Green's hands, on which the lantern now poured a narrow but vivid stream of light.

THE SIBLEY EXPEDITION.

A CORRESPONDENT who writes from "Camp in Dacotah, August 15," furnishes us with sketches of events in General Sibley's Expedition against the Sioux. He says, "The sketch of the MURDER OF LIEUTENANT BEEVER is a truthful one, so far as could be gathered from the examination of those who visited the scene immediately after." He was a wealthy Englishman, who had served through

the Crimean campaigns, and finally came to this country in search of adventures. He was about thirty years old. He left behind him in New York a fine yacht in which he had once sailed on a pleasure trip to the West Indies. Being on General Sibley's staff, he had been sent with a dispatch to Colonel Crooks, who was skirmishing with the Indians. He fell into an ambush and was murdered. One side of his face was hacked off with a hatchet while he was still alive.—The illustrations on page 580 represent two incidents in the history of this Expedition. The first shows the TRAIN CROSSING THE JAMES RIVER on the 20th of July. The locality is about 600 miles west of St. Paul, and 100 east of the Missouri, which was the destination of the Expedition. Up to this time the Indians had kept out of sight. But two days after they were massed to the number of 4000 in front of the Expedition. The James River is nearly as black as ink, and the crossing of by four hundred wagons occupied nearly four hours. There is but one clear stream in Dacotah Territory—the Cheyenne. The Expedition, on its return a fortnight after, crossed the river at a different point.—The other illustration represents THE SIOUX AFTER THE BATTLE OF BIG WOODS, on the 24th of July. The savages, on being attacked, retreated from hill to hill of the Coteau du Missouri, and were finally pursued into a valley where they had recently been encamped. The entire train of the fugitives at last came in sight, and good work was done upon them by our shell and shot. Had not General Sibley's forces been exhausted by a long day's march, by the subsequent fight and pursuit, the whole Sioux force might have been captured. As it was, they succeeded in escaping across the Missouri, which was not fordable by our train. The illustration shows the savages fleeing in confusion between the lakes, with Sibley and his staff upon a hill in the fore-ground.

CHATTANOOGA.

ON page 581 is a view of CHATTANOOGA, from the north side of the Tennessee River. "Chattanooga," says our artist, "is one of the strong points of the Confederacy. It lies in the mountains, has the Tennessee and the Cumberland Mountains in its front. Here, as I write, are Bragg's head-quarters, the army being encamped within ten miles. The pontoon-bridge, lately at Kelly's Ferry, has been brought up, and thrown over the river, which is here about 1200 feet wide. Lookout Mountain, two and a half miles from the town, is 1500 feet high. All these features appear in the sketch. The place was formerly one of resort for Southerners. The climate is very pleasant, and the country is abundantly supplied with fine springs."

GENERAL Q. A. GILMORE.

ON page 584 we give a new portrait of GENERAL GILMORE, the commander of our army before Charleston, whose demolition of Fort Sumter, at a distance from his batteries of from 3330, to 4240 yards (say 2 to 2 1/2 miles) and an effective fire upon Charleston from a distance of 5 or 6 miles, have inaugurated a new feature in war. Had Gilmore, with his present artillery, been in command before Sebastopol the Russian strong-hold would have been demolished in a week. We hope soon to be able to add to the brief biographical sketch in our number for August 15 further details of the General, whom we may now safely set down as the foremost military engineer in history. If he captures Charleston, he will have achieved the greatest work of its kind ever accomplished. Should he fail, he has already revolutionized the whole system of defensive warfare.

FORT SUMTER.

ON page 585 we give an illustration, from a sketch by an eye-witness, of the appearance of FORT SUMTER after a week's bombardment. The mass of ruins which appears is all that remains of a fortress which two years ago was thought impregnable to all the artillery of the world.—On pages 588 and 589 are views of the rebel intrenchments on James Island, and of various scenes connected with the attack upon the Charleston forts. These are furnished by our Army and Navy correspondents; they explain themselves.

"MORE LIGHT!"

"MORE light! more light!" when sunset hues are steeping

All heaven and earth in waves of living light,

And Silence, o'er creation calmly creeping,

With lifted finger whispers her good-night.

"More light! more light!" when dawn's soft golden tresses,

Blown through the sky, proclaim the vigil o'er,

And rosy, to the zephyr's sweet caresses,

Aurora smiles through heaven's half-open door.

"More light ! more light!" when doubt, with iron fingers,

Has fastened on the ardent living soul.

"More light!" to cheer the heart where love yet lingers,

And point the way, that faith may find the goal.

"More light!" when, from the rugged road of duty,

The tempter with his lures would lead astray.

"More light!" to sweep the mask of joy and beauty

From promises which wile but to betray.

"More light!" when from the heart the hope most cherished

Goes out in deepest darkness and despair.

"More light!" to live when life's desire has perished,

And heaven seems to close against our prayer.

"More light!" upon the page so full of wonder,

Which God's great gracious love to man has given;

That through the veil which Christ has rent asunder

The light may stream to show the path to heaven.

"More light!" for dying eyes when sunlight fails them,

And all creation quivers to the sight.

"More light!"—O God! Thy light alone avails them,

And Thou wilt give it, for Thou art the Light.


 

 

 

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