In the late summer of 1862 -- while the Yankton stockade was being built -- two incidents took place several miles east of the town which added to the fear of Indian attack.

At the so-called Government or Greenway's Crossing just north of today's Old Highway 50 bridge over the Jim River, a small party of Santees (possibly joined by young renegade Yanktonais) fired several shots at J. B. Greenway -- and, fortunately, they missed.

The ferry operator shot back, later claiming to have killed one of the attackers and wounded another. Then -- according to pioneer recollections -- he and his wife came galloping into Yankton "behind foaming horses hitched to a lumber wagon loaded with furniture and a mattress. (It would seem that Greenway was ready for a quick exodus.)

Needless to say, their arrival at the stockade added more grist to the rumor mill!

Elsewhere, at the Stanage ferry crossing downstream around sharp bends in the river, another well-documented assault occurred, supposedly by the same Indians.

In the mud-chinked log cabin were John and Bridget (Murnan) Stanage with their daughter Mary and two sons, James and John, Jr. They were joined by Henry Bradley, his wife and brother John, their homesteading neighbors along the river.

Because of the persistent news of marauding bands spurred by the Santee uprising in Minnesota, the two families apparently planned to go to the Yankton stockade the following morning, Sept. 6.

On that particular day Henry Bradley had gone to the river for a pail of water, and on the way back to the cabin, he spotted the Indians lurking in the tall grass. He dropped his bucket and ran for the cabin, as once again the Indians fired -- and missed.

Both John Stanage and Bradley grabbed their muskets and stationed themselves at the cabin's two windows. Without a gun, John Bradley armed himself with a pitchfork and stood by the door in case the Indians tried to break it down.

In an account written some years later, John Stanage, Jr., recalled:

"My mother put Mary, Jimmy and myself under the bed [after which she] dropped on her knees and begged God to protect us all. Then mother and Mrs. Bradley prepared to fight to the death. ... I think one took an axe and the other a butcher knife."

The elder Stanage -- a native of Ireland who had first come to Dakota in 1856 with the 2nd U. S. Infantry stationed at Fort Pierre -- worried that the Indians would set fire to the cabin's hay-covered roof. Then, as he and the Bradleys anxiously stood guard, the sound of approaching horses could be heard, and it was feared that additional Indians were joining their fellow braves.

Fortunately, the horsemen were members of the Dakota cavalry under Sgt. Abner M. English (later to become mayor of Yankton). English advised Stanage to yoke up his oxen and be prepared to go to Yankton. Meanwhile, he and his men pursued the Indians to the Lakes (as the Gayville area was then called), and -- after a brief exchange of fire with no reported casualties on either side -- they returned to accompany the Stanages and Bradleys to the safety of the stockade.

Once inside the fortification, John Stanage, who was a member of the first territorial legislature, joined William Bordeno -- later the county's third sheriff -- as the two-man crew of the bronze field gun guarding the south gate. The cannon was loaded with scrap metal rather than a single ball.

While 1862 ended with no additional Indian scares in the Yankton area, there was another episode -- also at Greenway's Crossing -- on May 6 the following year. That morning an unidentified band of marauders attacked J. A. Jacobson and Thomas W. Thompson as they slept in their wagon at the ferry landing. Jacobson was killed immediately, and Thompson was seriously wounded by an arrow in the back of the neck as he ran for the security of Greenway's cabin.

That incident finally brought a response for troop reinforcements from the federal government. On May 26 the Weekly Dakotian reported:

"Eight hundred soldiers have passed through Yankton within the past week. Four hundred go to Fort Pierre and four hundred to Randall. This has the appearance of business."

By this time, of course, the Yankton stockade was more of a detriment to the growing town than the haven of safety it had been intended to be. Strangely enough, there is little record of its eventual dismantling, but a panoramic photograph of the town in 1866 showed no apparent evidence of its existence just four years earlier.

There were at least two interesting sidebar stories to come out of the 1862 stockade chapter. One had to do with a courageous woman in the fort who had armed herself with a giant but nonfunctioning cavalry pistol. During a middle-of-the-night alert when all men were expected to be at the walls to ward off a possible assault, she noted that some had not responded to the call to duty.

So, brandishing her pistol, she went from room to room in the Ash Hotel, ordering all malingering males to the ramparts. Like a prairie Barbara Fritchie, she brightened the morale of the ladies and lifted the spirits of the men -- the ones without the red faces, that is.

By late September, Moses K. Armstrong -- he of the acid-dipped pen -- was able to report a problem of another kind:

"Nearly all the farmers in this county have left the fortification and removed back on their premises, and they now complain, not so much of the Indians, as of the depredations of the roaming squads of cavalry scouts committed on their fields and gardens, and pigs and chickens and fences. Rails are used for firewood; chickens are bagged by the sackfull; corn, potatoes and vegetables are confiscated for Uncle Sam's use as freely as though the Dakota farmers were considered rebels against the government.

"There are some true and plucky soldiers here, but many of them are very courageous where no courage is needed; and the farmers have taken advantage of this ... whenever they now wish to frighten the soldiers out of their cornfields and gardens, they mount upon some adjacent hilltop, give the red man's warwhoop and shake an Indian blanket; and in less than ten minutes there is not a cavalryman left on the premises."

Pioneering Yanktonians -- many of them young entrepreneurs seeking frontier fortunes of one kind or another -- had more to think about than Indians and a far-away Civil War. They had a town to build, political plums to harvest, and hopefully some lucrative profits to be made by getting in on the ground floor.

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Originally published May 9, 1994