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Black Hawk War
Outnumbered and harried through trackless swamps, Black Hawk's starving band of Sauk Indians made a desperate stand along the Mississippi.
By Robert B. Smith The militia surgeon was terrified. All around him the night flickered and danced with muzzle flashes, and the darkness rang with terrifying war whoops and screams of terror. Desperately he kneed his rearing horse, but could not pull away from the grim, dark form holding tightly to his mount. He leaned forward into the gloom and held out his sword.
"Please, Mr. Indian," he pleaded, "I surrender. Please accept my sword."
Only after his captor failed to take the sword, or move at all, did the petrified doctor realize that he was talking to a stump, one to which he had tied his horse. Slashing the tether, the surgeon fled madly into the night.
For 25 miles, he and hundreds of his militia comrades galloped through brush and trees, crazy with fear, more than a little drunk, and certain that every bush and log was a Sauk warrior with a tomahawk thirsting for white man's blood. Few of them ever actually saw an Indian or fired at anything other than shadows.
These Illinois militiamen had been spooked by a couple of dozen Sauk warriors, who were as surprised as anybody at the panicked rout. The militia officers, with few exceptions, were in the van of the retreat, led by a colonel named Strode, notable, until then, chiefly for a large mouth and a bellicose air.
Thus the Battle of Old Man's Creek, ever after to bear the unfelicitous name of Stillman's Run, was appropriately christened for the overall commander of the frightened rabble, Cavalry Major Isaiah Stillman. The defeat was more humiliating than serious: only 12 militiamen had been killed, although a good many more had deserted for good. The Sauk had lost three braves, one a prisoner murdered as the fight began.
Later, there would be a good deal of pious bragging and invention about a gallant defense against hundreds of Indians. But the militia knew it had been whipped, whipped badly and nearly frightened to death. In later days, most of the men didn't talk a lot about being at Stillman's Run. One officer spoke for most of them in a letter to his wife: "I will make you one promise, I will stay with you in future, for this thing of being a soldier is not so comfortable as it might be."
Indeed it wasn't. What had started as a wonderful, drunken Indian-killing party was getting serious and, what was worse, downright dangerous. But the war would go on. It was mid May of 1832, and a fundamental question still had to be decided that spring. Was the Sauk and Fox nation to be allowed to return to its ancestral lands near Rock Island, east of the Mississippi, or was it to be forever confined to its new home west of that river, to which it had been exiled by a scandalous treaty signed in 1804?
The Indian signatories to the treaty had had no authority to speak for the entire tribe. Only one was a legitimate chief, and even he was a noted alcoholic. The Indians' compensation was pitiful; one historian called it a collection of "wet groceries and gewgaws." As young West Pointer George McCall put it, the fact that the white men had simply stolen the Sauks' land "was apparent to the most obtuse."
Even this farcical treaty had given the Sauk and Fox the right to hunt and plant on their old ground until the land was surveyed and opened for settlement. But hordes of settlers had promptly squatted on the land, making the treaty unenforceable. It was too much for proud men to bear.
And so, in the spring of 1831, a band of Sauk crossed the Mississippi and moved into the ancient tribal territories around Rock Island. Their hearts were there, and so was their chief village, a well-laid-out town called Saukenuk. The Indian invasion produced a small amount of bloodshed--and unmitigated panic on the part of the squatters, who promptly appealed to the government for help.
Major General Edmund Gaines, Western Department commander, sent the 6th United States Infantry and part of the 3rd, and asked the Illinois governor for added militia assistance. War was averted when still another treaty was thrashed out with the Sauk, who promised never again to cross to the east bank of the Mississippi without the consent of both the U.S. president and the governor of Illinois.
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