APPENDIX NO. 2.
Jefferson Davis in the Black Hawk War.
In the year 1832, when the State of Illinois was but fourteen years of age, there was to be found on the south bank of Rock River, sixty-five miles above its mouth, a frontier post called Dixon’s Ferry. It was an unpretentious affair, consisting of a solitary tenement laid east and west, in three sections, and built of logs–a cozy but rambling affair ninety feet in length.
At this point the great “Kellogg’s trail,” run by O.W. Kellogg in the year 1827, crossed the river, and John Dixon, from whom the ferry derived its name and its existence, had lived here with his family since early in the year 1830, entertaining travelers, operating the ferry and trading with the “suckers” who journeyed to and from the mining district and Indians. This famous old trail was then the route pursued by the argonauts of all the southern country in search of sudden wealth in the mines. It was the great thoroughfare from Peoria, then more commonly referred to as Fort Clark, to Galena, sought by those from the St. Louis country on the southwest and the old Vincennes country to the southeast, and followed on northwesterly past Dixon’s Ferry to Galena, where the crowds dispersed and scattered for the “diggings” over northwestern Illinois and southwestern Wisconsin, then a part of Michigan Territory. Later the Government mail route changed the old trail to a straighter course between Galena and Dixon’s Ferry, thence leaving it for an easterly direction through DeKalb, Kane, DuPage and Cook counties the route continued to Chicago.
Famous old days were those in the West and famous men traveled that trail in those old days! From the miner and prospector to the merchant; from the mail carrier to the soldier; from the circuit preacher to the circuit law rider following a peripatetic court. From Peter Cartwright, the energetic Methodist preacher, who swam swollen streams and rivers to keep his word, and who, if rumor be true, brought in more than one obstreperous recruit with a flogging, to Col. James M. Strode, the then noted but erratic criminal lawyer of Galena; from Lieut.-Col. Zachary Taylor, who afterward became President of the United States, and Gen. Winfield Scott, who wanted to be, to Lieut. Jefferson Davis, who was President of the Southern Confederacy, and Capt. Abraham Lincoln, who dissolved it, we find them all associated with the old trail and eating and lodging with mine host Dixon, singly and together; those who were later to become Cabinet Ministers, United States Senators, Representatives, Governors, and soldiers and statesmen without number.
LIEUT. JEFFERSON DAVIS.
White men and Indians alike made their pilgrimages along that trail, stopping over with Mr. Dixon to strengthen the inner man and replenish their stock of supplies. With the Indians he was particularly popular, insomuch that he became their counselor and arbitrator, and likewise their banker. In turn, as a recognition of his many and kindly offices, the Winnebagoes adopted him into their tribe, naming him Na-chu-sa (long hair white). This affection for the old patriarch was equally manifested by the whites, and when the time came to bespeak it there was left no uncertainty respecting the judgment. His silent influence became so potent that in the year 1840, with Galena the political and commercial power of the Northwest, he took from her to his own town the United States Land Office.
When the subject of removal was first broached it appeared so ridiculously impossible that nothing in Galena but laughter protested, but John Dixon’s tavern was stronger than the politics and commercial prestige of the giant philistine, and her haughty pride was humbled. Singly he journeyed on to Washington, and for the simple asking, the office, the most potential factor in the politics of that day, was ordered removed to Dixon–the miracle of the century in Illinois politics.
The man’s venerable personality, his charming sweetness of disposition, his rugged honesty, and possibly his little account book, were altogether too powerful for the antagonists of those rugged days, and before passing that same little account book it may be well to run hastily over its pages.