Everything taken except one horse they kept in the brush

By spring 1863 five counties were ordered to move into fortified towns or leave. Belinda traded somehow for oxen and took the children out.

Almost nothing was left to take. Raiders had swapped the girls' hats for their own — the girls carried the substitutes to the woodpile and chopped them up. When they came for a new shawl, small quiet Sarah took hold of it and said "This is mine! You can't have it." And they didn't take it.

They were three weeks on the road, about two hundred and fifty miles. Dan was five and owned one shirt. They met Nicholas on the way, his enlistment run out, and went on to Hardin County, Iowa, where Belinda's brothers had already settled. They farmed there ten years, and four more children were born — including Mettie, in 1870, who would write all of this down.