A gravestone inscription leads the author on a search through early Minnesota history, and then U.S. and Civil War history. He discovers that four siblings orphaned by the Dakota War commissioned that inscription in memory of their parents and younger sister, and that their many descendants now live all around him. Those quiet descendants have kept many wonderful family records, and in those letters and photographs he learns that those four brave orphans lived lives of tolerance and gratitude, lives that answered President Lincoln's hopes in that Second Inaugural Address.