For a quarter century before 1862 and the War of the Indian Outbreak in Minnesota, Santee Sioux had been accepting Christianity. After a truculent minority killed over 500 whites, the government hanged 38, imprisoned over 300 at Davenport, and in May 1863 transported the remaining 1,300 old men, women and children by steamboat to the bleak, drought-stricken Crow Creek Agency at Ft. Thompson. Despite relief expeditions from Minnesota, over 300 Santees died of malnutrition and exposure at Ft. Thompson in the winter of 1863-64, and over 100 died at Davenport. In 1866, the Ft. Thompson and Davenport groups were reunited at Santee Agency at the mouth of the Niobrara. The one-third who were Christians had constant difficulty with non-Christian brethren, and in 1869 twenty-five families gave up tribal rights, annuities, and everything else to become citizens and acquire homesteads along the Sioux at Flandreau. They soon built a little Presbyterian church in what was to become Flandreau, and that fall 15 additional families joined them. Among those making this break with tradition were Old Flute, All Over Red, Iron Dog, Big Eagle, signers of the 1868 Treaty, and Iron Old Man, their acting pastor, who perished in a blizzard en route from Santee to Flandreau. John P. Williamson of a missionary family of teachers and preachers was their early guide, counsellor and protector at Ft. Thompson and Flandreau. The church built in 1873 became one of the oldest continuously used churches in South Dakota, and the graveyard memorializes many of the early Christian names who shared in this migration from Mankaton, Ft. Snelling, Ft. Thompson, and Santee Agency to Flandreau.