After settlers were killed at Lake Shetek or at the slough on August 20, 1862, their bodies lay untended where they died until October 16, 1862, when a military burial detail collected the remains and buried them in a shallow grave by the edge of the slough. There they remained for another year. On October 31, 1863, a military burial detail commanded by Captain Starkey and assisted by William Duley, Captain of Scouts, with the aid of Thomas Ireland, Charlie Hatch, and Henry Watson Smith, reburied the remains at this site. Fourteen people lie here in a mass grave ten feet long, four feet wide, and four feet deep, their remains placed in seven wooden coffins in family groups and buried side by side. They were six adults and eight children killed either at Lake Shetek or at the slough. The body of Isabelle Duley was not among the victims first buried at the slough because she had been taken captive there and later killed near the Wright cabin; her father found and identified her body during the 1863 burial expedition. The State of Minnesota commissioned construction of the monument in 1924, and it was completed and dedicated in 1925 to the memory of those slain at Lake Shetek in 1862 and to the privations, hardships, and heroic deeds of the surviving settlers of Murray County.