In the spring of 1862, the Schwandt family moved to this place to begin a new life, building a rough two-room log cabin for Johan and Christina Schwandt, Karoline Schwandt Walz and her husband John Walz, Mary, August, Frederick, Christian, and family friend John Frass. On August 18, 1862, Dakota Indians, frustrated by broken treaty promises and threats to their way of life, decided to take back their treaty land, and the attacks that followed killed all of the Schwandts there except Mary and August. Mary was away working for the Reynolds family, then was taken captive with two other young women to Little Crow's village, where a Dakota woman, Snasna'win, who had just lost her seven-year-old daughter, traded a pony for her and, with her husband Wakin'yanwas'te' (Andrew Good Thunder), kept her safe for six weeks until she was turned over to Sibley's troops at Camp Release in late September. August, though injured, reached Fort Ridgely across the prairie, and he and Mary were later reunited and sent to live with an uncle in Wisconsin. After General Sibley recovered white and mixed-blood captives at Camp Release, the Dakota were confined at Fort Snelling for the winter of 1862, where illness and death spread in the crowded enclosure, and Snasna'win and Wakin'yanwas'te' lost their two remaining children, leaving only two survivors in that family as well. In later years, after Mary wrote about her experiences, Snasna'win found her, and the two women continued to write and visit through the rest of their lives.