The piteous screams of the women and children were terrifying. The Indians stuck them with spears and hacked them with tomahawks without feeling or mercy, and as they fell each victim’s scalp was cut off with a big knife.
An Indian grabbed Pettigrew’s baby by the legs, rushed out doors, swung the child over his head, and dashed its brains out against a stump in the yard. There, also, an Indian on each side held the youngest Davis boy by his hands, the little lad standing pale and silent, and a third Indian shot him dead. As his limp body fell, an Indian scalped him.
In a few moments all the whites in the house excepting Sylvia and Rachel Hall, namely: Mrs. Wm. Hall, aged forty-five years, her daughter Elizabeth, aged eight years, Wm. Pettigrew, his wife and two children, and Mrs. Wm. Davis and her five children, were killed.
The sudden appearance of the Indians bewildered the men who were in the blacksmith shop, as they were cut off from their guns and ammunition. Young Davis slipped behind the shop and thence escaped down the creek. The others rushed towards the house and were met by a volley of shots. William Hall, whose breast was pierced by two bullets, with a prayer on his lips, fell dead at his son John’s feet. Davis called out to John Hall to “Take care!” and then tried to escape to the woods. Notwithstanding his prowess and that he made a desperate fight for his life by using his unloaded gun as a club, he was in a short time so overcome by Indian warriors with their spears and tomahawks that with innumerable wounds he sank dead in his yard. John Hall was so paralyzed by the awful carnage, that for a moment he did not move from where his father lay. He watched the Indians reloading their guns, then as a man awakening from a night-mare he jumped down the high bank and a volley of bullets passed over his head. By hugging closely to the bank next the Indians, he scrambled hastily down the stream and then ran as he never ran before, thus escaping. Norris and George slid down the bank and attempted to cross the creek, but a volley of bullets from the Indians killed one of them as he was climbing the bank, his body falling back into the creek, and the other fell on the green sward above.
John W. Henderson, two sons of Wm. Davis and two sons of Wm. Hall, who were at work in the cornfield when the Indians made the attack upon the Davis cottage, comprehending the situation, hastily fled to Ottawa. They had sped only about two miles when John W. Hall overtook them. By reason of his scudding from death in the great heat and his excited condition, John’s account of the massacre was incoherently told with uncontrolled emotions of grief and rage. Believing that the Indians were pursuing, he did not check his speed, but urged the others to extra efforts until they reached the fort.
Sylvia and Rachel Hall were each seized by two Indians who dragged them out of the cottage to the yard where the final acts of the massacre were taking place.
In their fiendish desire for revenge for Stillman’s treachery and to terrify the whites, the Indians cut out the hearts of some of the slain and otherwise mutilated their bodies. Of all the whites none but Rachel and Sylvia Hall remained alive to witness the closing act of the horrible tragedy. As they saw scattered in the yard the bodies of their murdered parents, their sister, and their neighbors—sixteen in all, the girls were stupefied with horror. The wonder is that the shock did not kill both of them.
The massacre has been described so often, and is so sickening in its particulars, that we drop the curtain on the tragic scene.[15]
[15] 3 Smith’s “History of Wisconsin”, 187; “History of La Salle County,” Baldwin, 95; “The Black Hawk War,” Stevens, 150; “Memories of Shabona,” Matson, 145-155; Ottawa Journal, Aug. 30, 1906; 12 Transactions Ill. State Hist. Soc., 332; Ford’s History of Illinois, 122.