The CAIRNS director spent the day, along with cousins Harvey and Merle, cleaning, mowing and weed whipping the entire cemetery. The dark headstone over the center gates marks the graves of Amos and Lucy Ross, the G-G-Grandparents of today’s three workers. As a young boy, Amos was with his widowed mother when she was one of the Dakota women who cooked for the 303 Dakota men who were sentenced to death by the U.S. Army after the Dakota-Minnesota War of 1862. Thirty-eight of the men were hanged December 26, 1862. Amos and his mother, along with the other cooks and the remainder of the prisoners, were sent to Camp McClelland, Iowa, where they remained imprisoned until the fall of 1866, even though they were guilty of no crime.