“I say, Captain Lincoln,” he spoke up, “the Pottawattomee has a military pass. He’s an army scout.”
“What’s that, lad?” cried Abe. “Jimmy, I never thought of that. Of course, he would have.”
And when the pass was produced, duly signed by Major Whistler, commander at Fort Dearborn, the crest-fallen Jeb Whipple and his hard-bitten cronies lost little time in taking their leave; while big Abe Lincoln and the three boys quickly escorted the lucky Bright Star to the safety of the troopers’ tents.
By this time it was near sundown; so the horses were put out to grass. Then the troopers and scouts ate bread and fried salt pork and drank strong tea. A short hour after dark, they were ready for sleep. The evening was warm and humid, and many of the soldiers, deserting the stuffy tents, spread their blankets on the open prairie, where the grass was soft and thick.
Silence had barely descended on the slumbering encampment, when two army couriers, racing their ponies up the trail from the east, sped into view. They failed to heed the summons of the frightened sentinel, who had Indians very much on his mind. In his alarm, his musket fell from his nerveless grasp and discharged, cracking out on the quiet night air like a peal of thunder.
Suddenly the whole camp was in a bedlam. There was a scattering of gun-fire. Drums and fifes sounded; hoots and yells came from all sides. The picketed horses reared and struggled. Many broke away in terror, dashing helter-skelter through the tents, snorting and cavorting, stepping on the soldiers stretched out for the night’s rest. Company commanders ran wildly about, trying to form battle lines. Volunteers sprang dazedly to their feet, clutching their guns in drowsy terror. But nothing happened. The cause of the sudden alarm was soon found out. And the grumbling militia again settled down to sleep.
The two army couriers had come from Fort Dearborn, with dispatches for General Whiteside. The news they brought was not favorable.
General Winfield Scott, “Old Fuss and Feathers,” had set out from Fortress Monroe, in far-away Virginia, with nine companies of regulars and picked up a number of newly commissioned officers of the cadet class of 1832 at West Point. By way of the Hudson River and the Erie Canal, the detachment had then advanced to Buffalo on Lake Erie. Here the general leased four steamboats, among the first of that type of boat to appear on the Great Lakes. These new-fangled ships were the Sheldon Thompson, the Henry Clay, the William Penn and the Superior.
Scott put troops on the Thompson and the Clay, and supplies on the others, and put out up the lakes. Unluckily, cholera, a dread disease common at that early day, broke out on Scott’s ship, the Henry Clay. Making the port of Detroit, the General transferred his staff to the Sheldon Thompson and sent the West Pointers back home. A lot of desperately sick men had to be landed, while others, fearful of the deadly cholera, took the opportunity to desert into the neighboring forests. Two officers and fifty-three privates had already died of the malady. Scott messaged that he was forced to delay at Detroit until the cholera subsided, and he could secure replacements from the east.
To balance the loss of Scott’s troops, the Secretary of War at Washington ordered Colonel Zachery Taylor, later a Mexican War hero and President of the United States, to proceed north from St. Louis with a small force of regulars. These were to be supplemented by a fresh levy of Illinois volunteers, which Governor Reynolds was hastily assembling.