According to tradition, a famous Sisseton Sioux singer lived in this then wilderness area, where the tribe's chief village stood on the east bank of Lake Sisseton. Renowned throughout the Sioux nation, he sang of the adventures of chiefs and warriors, but after befriending a three-year-old captive white child, he composed new songs about the child of the pale moon that often disparaged war and bloodshed and provoked the ill-will of the chiefs. When a fatal epidemic struck, the wisemen decreed that the child's presence displeased the Great Spirit and that she must die. After songs eloquently pleading for her life, the singer was condemned to burn with the child bound to his back and his hands fastened to the limb of a large oak. Above the flames, his voice mingled with the child's cries in a death chant portraying war and bloodshed as hateful to the Great Spirit, and his heroic death so moved his people that they never again engaged in massacre. The Indians firmly believed that at dusk the singer's voice and the child's cries could be heard from the great oak. The complete legend was first published in the Martin County Sentinel on April 22, 1895. Early settlers and strangers also reported hearing wailing sounds from the oak, and Major Arthur M. Nelson, after visiting the spot alone on a calm evening, wrote that he heard what sounded like a man wildly singing mingled with the agonizing cries of a child and came away convinced that natural causes could not explain it. The mighty Singing Oak was destroyed by fire of mysterious origin in June, 1908.