The senseless panic had seized upon all settlers in the country because of the Ghost dance and the Wounded Knee fight. This is illustrated by Mooney’s concluding description of the first part of the fight.
“As they drove they passed near a house, from which several other shots were fired at the flying mother, when her husband again rode up and kept off the whole party until the wagon could get ahead. Finally, as the ponies were tired out, this heroic man abandoned the wagon and put the two children on one of the spare ponies and his wounded wife and himself upon another and continued to retreat until the Whites gave up the pursuit. He finally reached the agency with the wife and children.”
To give readers an adequate conception of what has too frequently occurred in the West, I desire to state that while One Feather and his family escaped, wounded, the wife of the other Indian, Few Tails, was shot twice, and lay helpless on the ground all night. In the morning she found one of the ponies alive, and mounted it and reached a settler’s house fifteen miles away.
“Instead of meeting help and sympathy, however, she was driven off by the two men there with loaded rifles, and leaving her horse in her fright, she hurried away as well as she could with a bullet in her leg and another in her breast, passing by the trail of One Feather’s wagon with the tracks of his pursuers fresh behind it, until she came near a trader’s store about twenty miles farther south. Afraid to go near it on account of her last experience, the poor woman circled around it, and continued, wounded, cold, and starving as she was, to travel by night and hide by day until she reached the Bad Lands. The rest may be told in her own words:
“‘After that I traveled every night, resting daytime, until I got here at the beef corral. Then I was very tired, and was near the military camp, and early in the morning a soldier came out and he shouted something back, and in a few minutes fifty men were there, and they got a blanket and took me to a tent. I had no blanket and my feet were swelled, and I was about ready to die. After I got to the tent a doctor came in—a soldier doctor, because he had straps on his shoulders—and washed me and treated me well.”