Amidon Graves Mystery

Amidon Graves Mystery. . About 200 yards southwest of this marker is the location long supposed by historians to be the burial site of Judge Joseph Amidon and his son William, ambushed and killed by Santee Sioux warriors on August 25, 1862. The Sioux war party was under orders to clear all settlers from the Big Sioux River valley., For decades the belief was held by many that the Amidons had been interred near where they fell. A linear earthen mound, about 30 feet long, eight feet wide, and four feet high, strewn with rocks and large boulders, was understood to mark their gravesites., In 1991 the Augustana College Archeology Lab was employed to excavate the presumed burial mound. A crew led by archeologists Dr. L. Adrien Hannus and Peter Winham methodically extracted nine soil core samples, dug four one-meter square excavations, and cut a 21-foot long backhoe trench. No evidence of human interments was found; only debris piled up by farmers for almost a century was uncovered. The location of the Amidon graves remains a mystery.