Surrender at Camp Release

In the nights that followed, a growing number of Mdewakanton warriors who had participated in battle quietly joined the "friendly" Dakotas at Camp Release; many were persuaded by Sibley's earlier promise to punish only those who had killed settlers.

[4] On September 23, 1862, during the Battle of Wood Lake, Gabriel Renville, Solomon Two Stars and other "friendly" soldiers had gathered in a ravine to avoid participating in the attack on Sibley's troops.

Little Crow refused, arguing that doing so would result in more civilian deaths as well as a tribal civil war with his full- and mixed-blood relatives, and instructed his followers to pack up and flee instead.

As he prepared to retreat to the northern Great Plains, he asked to see Antoine Joseph Campbell, a mixed-blood interpreter who had worked at the Redwood Agency and had accompanied him to battle and served as his secretary during his correspondence with Sibley.

[7] On September 25, 1862, Colonel Sibley's troops left Lone Tree Lake and marched at a slow and cautious pace about ten miles to the Hazelwood mission, near Granite Falls, Minnesota.

[2] Historian Gary Clayton Anderson writes, "It was a devilish plot: he wholly intended to capture as many of these Indians as possible, believing most to be guilty of killing civilians.