Re: Wygles, Mathers
GARDNER, SHARP, WYGLE, MATHER
Posted By: MomVsWild (email) In Response To: Wygles, Mathers (Forrest Lindsey)
Date: 3/28/2011 at 20:21:03
Alfred "Fred" Wygle (son of Robert Wygle & Luella Mather) married Bonita Sharp. Bonita was the grandaughter of Abigail Gardner Sharp, the sole survivor of the Spirit Lake Massacre. Abigail wrote a famous book of her account & founded a historical site at the location of the massacre.
by David L. Bristow
This article first appeared in The Iowan.
Inside the small cabin, the rifle blast must have been deafening. Shot in the back, Rowland Gardner fell and died without a struggle. Within minutes, Gardner’s wife, daughter, son, and two grandchildren were dead—beaten to death with rifle butts and pieces of stove-wood.
Thirteen-year-old Abbie Gardner saw it happen. Sitting in a chair, holding her sister’s baby, she watched silently as her mother and sister were dragged outside, as the cabin was ransacked around her, as her little brother, her nephew, and her infant niece were one by one torn away from her. “All this time I was both speechless and tearless,” she wrote later, “But now left alone, I begged them to kill me.”
Instead, Abbie was taken captive by the murderers, a renegade band of Sioux Indians under a chief named Inkpaduta. They would not kill Abbie, but they would kill others. Many others.
March 8, 1857 was the first day of the Spirit Lake Massacre, the most notorious crime in Iowa’s history. When it was over, 38 victims lay dead...
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