He couldn’t let the dog bark, so he had to drown his dog

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Mr. Schumacher talks about his family's experience in 1862.

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DL: You said your Grandfather Charles told you some family history from 1862. What stories do you remember him telling you?

SS: The one he told was there were two men going to New Ulm. They were down in the woods and all at once they saw Indians in the background. So one of them crawled up in a tree, and the other one had his dog along, so he couldn’t go up in the tree because his dog would be there. He saw a slough over there, so he went with his dog [to the slough] and he watched from there.

He said they [the Indians] had seen the two of them and they seen this guy go up in the tree, so they came and they shot him out of the tree and killed him. Then they came over to where he was and he had his dog, and the dog started to bark. He couldn’t let the dog bark, so he had to drown his dog. He saw them getting close to the slough. He found a reed that he could breathe through. So he went under [water] and he breathed through the reed until he could not last any longer, and when he come up they had left, and then he made it to New Ulm.

Then another story he told about this one family where they saw the Indians coming and they had two little children. They didn’t know where to hide them so they put them underneath one of those great big soup kettles like they used to have, those real large ones, they put them under there and said to be real quiet. And they [the Indians] killed the whole family. Then somebody else came and heard the kids hollering. There them two were, safe under the soup kettle.

Charles Schneider, the son of John, was supposed to catch some fish. He would get a couple sandwiches and he would go and give them to the Indian boys and then they would go down and catch fish for him. The [Indian boys] didn’t have no fish line or nothing, but they knew how to either catch them by hand, or they would take this stick when they saw a fish, and they could flip them right out of the water. They got to be really good friends with the Indians because the Cottonwood River was right next and they wanted to have some river area [near by] anyway, where they could go to. So when the Indian Uprising [took place], the Indians came and warned them and told them that they should leave immediately because the Indians were on the warpath. So they packed up the wagons and they got to New Ulm before the Uprising took place, because they warned them way ahead of time. And they’re the only ones that I can find in the Leavenworth history that were settled in Leavenworth and came back to Leavenworth after the Uprising.

Oral History- Interview | Narrator Sylvan Schumacher Interviewer Deborah Locke made in New Ulm, MN | Wednesday, August 10, 2011

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Citation: Minnesota Historical Society. U.S. - Dakota War of 1862. He couldn’t let the dog bark, so he had to drown his dog March 27, 2025. http://www.usdakotawar.org/node/1117

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