Indian Creek Massacre and Captivity of Hall Girls / Complete history of the massacre of sixteen whites on Indian creek, near Ottawa, Ill., and Sylvia Hall and Rachel Hall as captives in Illinois and Wisconsin during the Black Hawk war, 1832

by Charles Martin Scanlan

CHAPTER III.
THE DAVIS SETTLEMENT.

The father of our heroines, William Hall, who was born in Georgia, migrated to Kentucky where he married Mary J. Wilburs, and in 1825 emigrated to Mackinaw, about fifteen miles south of Peoria, Illinois, where he opened a farm. Shortly afterwards he moved to the lead mines near Galena where he staid three years, and then returned to Lamoille, Bureau County, Illinois. In the spring of 1832 he sold out his mining claim and settled upon a homestead about two miles east of the farm of William Davis. Prior to that time his oldest daughter, Temperance, had been married to Peter Cartwright, but the other members of his family, consisting of his wife, three daughters—Sylvia, aged 19, Rachel, aged 17, and Elizabeth, aged 8 years, and two boys, were living with him. Some time prior to the massacre, two Indians named Co-mee and To-qua-mee, who had been frequent visitors at the Hall home and treated kindly by Mr. Hall’s daughters, endeavored, after the custom of the Indians, to purchase Sylvia and Rachel from their father.[10]

[10] “The Black Hawk War,” Stevens, 149.

MRS. DUNAVAN, AGED 16, LIKENESS OF SYLVIA HALL.

The Halls were noted for their hospitality. Judge Edwin Jerome of Detroit relates that he was the guest of the family one night in April 1832.[11]

[11] 1 “Michigan Pioneers”, Jerome, 49.

William Pettigrew, also from Kentucky, who had just migrated to the Davis Settlement and had not yet established a home for himself, with his wife and two children, was temporarily stopping at the home of Mr. Davis at the time of the massacre.

In 1830, John H. Henderson emigrated from Tennessee to Indian Creek and settled on a homestead adjoining the land of Davis on the south. Subsequently the Hendersons became prominent politicians, both in Illinois and Iowa.

In the spring of 1830, William Davis, a Kentuckian, and a blacksmith by trade, settled on a land claim on Big Indian Creek, twelve miles north of Ottawa, in the northern part of La Salle County, Illinois. He was the first white settler at that place.