ZACHARY TAYLOR.
At the breaking out of the Black Hawk War, Zachary Taylor, afterwards general in the Mexican War, and finally President of the United States, was colonel of the First Infantry. He joined Atkinson at the beginning of the war, and was in active service until the end of the campaign.
“The few houses on the road that usually accommodated the travel were all standing, but vacant, as we went. On our return we found them burned by the Indians. On my return to the Illinois River I reported to General Atkinson, saying that, from all we could learn, the Indians were aiming to escape by going north, with the intention of crossing the Mississippi River above Galena. The new troops had just arrived and were being mustered into service. My company had only been organized for twenty days, and as the time had now expired, the men were mustered out. All but myself again volunteered for the third time.”
LINCOLN AND HIS COMPANY ENTER MICHIGAN TERRITORY.
On June 20th Lincoln was mustered in again, by Major Anderson, as a member of an independent company under Captain Jacob M. Early. His arms were valued this time at only fifteen dollars, his horse and equipment at eighty-five dollars.[[16]]
BLACK HAWK WAR RELICS.
From a photograph made for this work. This group of relics of the Black Hawk War was selected for us from the collection in the museum of the Wisconsin Historical Society by the secretary, Mr. Reuben G. Thwaites. The coat and chapeau belonged to General Dodge, an important leader in the war. The Indian relics are a tomahawk, a Winnebago pipe, a Winnebago flute, and a knife. The powder-horn and the flint-lock rifle are the only volunteer articles. One of the survivors of the war, Mr. Elijah Herring of Stockton, Illinois, says of the flint-lock rifles used by the Illinois volunteers: “They were constructed like the old-fashioned rifle, only in place of a nipple for a cap they had a pan in which was fixed an oil flint which the hammer struck when it came down, instead of the modern cap. The pan was filled with powder grains, enough to catch the spark and communicate it to the load in the gun. These guns were all right, and rarely missed fire on a dry, clear day; but unless they were covered well, the dews of evening would dampen the powder, and very often we were compelled to withdraw the charge and load them over again. We had a gunsmith with us, whose business it was to look after the guns for the whole regiment; and when a gun was found to be damp, it was his duty to get his tools and ‘draw’ the load. At that time the Cramer lock and triggers had just been put on the market, and my rifle was equipped with these improvements, a fact of which I was very proud. Instead of one trigger my rifle had two, one set behind the other—the hind one to cock the gun, and the front one to shoot it. The man Cramer sold his lock and triggers in St. Louis, and I was one of the first to use them.”
The army moved up Rock River soon after the middle of June. Black Hawk was overrunning the country, and scattering death wherever he went. The settlers were wild with fear, and most of the settlements were abandoned. At a sudden sound, at the merest rumor, men, women, and children fled. “I well remember those troublesome times,” says one old Illinois woman. “We often left our bread-dough unbaked, to rush to the Indian fort near by.” When Mr. John Bryant, a brother of William Cullen Bryant, visited the colony in Princeton, in 1832, he found it nearly broken up on account of the war. Everywhere the crops were neglected, for the able-bodied men were volunteering. William Cullen Bryant, who, in June, 1834, travelled on horseback from Petersburg to near Pekin, and back, wrote home: “Every few miles on our way we fell in with bodies of Illinois militia proceeding to the American camp, or saw where they had encamped for the night. They generally stationed themselves near a stream or a spring in the edge of a wood, and turned their horses to graze on the prairie. Their way was barked or girdled, and the roads through the uninhabited country were as much beaten and as dusty as the highways on New York Island. Some of the settlers complained that they made war upon the pigs and chickens. They were a hard-looking set of men, unkempt and unshaved, wearing shirts of dark calico, and sometimes calico capotes.”
Soon after the army moved up the Rock River, the independent spy company, of which Lincoln was a member, was sent with a brigade to the northwest, near Galena, in pursuit of the Hawk. The nearest Lincoln came to an actual engagement in the war was here. The skirmish of Kellogg’s Grove took place on June 25th; Lincoln’s company came up soon after it was over, and helped bury the five men killed. It was probably to this experience that he referred when he told a friend once of coming on a camp of white scouts one morning just as the sun was rising. The Indians had surprised the camp, and had killed and scalped every man.
“I remember just how those men looked,” said Lincoln, “as we rode up the little hill where their camp was. The red light of the morning sun was streaming upon them as they lay heads towards us on the ground. And every man had a round red spot on the top of his head, about as big as a dollar, where the redskins had taken his scalp. It was frightful, but it was grotesque; and the red sunlight seemed to paint everything all over.” Lincoln paused, as if recalling the vivid picture, and added, somewhat irrelevantly, “I remember that one man had buckskin breeches on.”