[809] Ibid., XII, 232-34.
Meanwhile Black Hawk had learned in a council with the Pottawatomies that while Big Foot and some others were hot for war, the bands of Shabbona and Wabansia were determined to remain at peace with the whites. The news of Black Hawk's incursion spread rapidly among the scattered settlements, carrying in its train confusion and panic. Many of the settlers abandoned their homes and fled for protection to the larger settlements; some left the country never to return; others gathered for mutual protection within rude stockade forts, which were hastily improvised. On May 14 an advance division of the pursuing army under Major Stillman encountered Black Hawk and a small number of his warriors, and in the engagement that ensued the whites sustained a disgraceful defeat.[810] The raw Illinois militiamen, filled with zeal for the killing of Indians, rushed headlong into the contest, regardless of the efforts of their officers to restrain them. Although they outnumbered the Indians in the proportion of eight or ten to one,[811] their flight, upon receiving the first fire of the latter, was no less precipitate. For all but a handful, who fell fighting bravely to cover the retreat, the flight continued to Dixon's Ferry, twenty-five miles away, and many did not pause even here, but pressed madly on to their homes.
[810] On the battle of Stillman's Run see ibid., XII, 236-30; Stevens, op. cit., chap, xix.
[811] Stillman's force numbered three hundred and forty-one men; Black Hawk stated that he had forty followers, and Reynolds credited him with not to exceed fifty or sixty (Wisconsin Historical Collections, XII, 235, 237).
In comparison with the panic which ensued upon the news of Stillman's overthrow, the earlier panic of the settlers, from which they had already recovered in a measure, seemed trivial.[812] The terror excited by the exaggerated stories of the militia spread consternation, not only throughout the frontier immediately affected, but eastward into Indiana and southern Michigan.[813] Rumor multiplied many fold the number of Black Hawk's followers. From Dixon's Ferry, on the day after the defeat of Stillman, Governor Reynolds "by the light of a solitary candle" penned a call for two thousand more volunteers.[814] Shabbona and his friends, at the risk of their own lives, set forth to warn the settlers of their danger.[815] Most of them fled to cover. At Chicago, where the citizens had organized a militia company early in May, the whole surrounding population gathered within Fort Dearborn, with two hundred armed men on guard. Yet in the terror of the first panic an appeal was dispatched to the acting governor of Michigan for assistance.[816]
[812] Ibid., XII, 238-40; Beggs, Early History of the West and Northwest, 97 ff.
[813] For a semi-humorous account of the panic in southwestern Michigan see Henry Little, "A History of the Black Hawk War in 1832," in Michigan Pioneer Collections, V, 152 ff. On the scare in Indiana see, e.g., [Banta] History of Johnson County, Indiana, 126 ff.
[814] Stevens, op. cit., 139.
[815] Ibid., 148; Wisconsin Historical Collections, XII, 39; Matson. Memories of Shaubena, 114 ff.
[816] The muster-roll of the Chicago company is printed in Wentworth, Early Chicago, 64-65. For the appeal to the acting governor of Michigan for assistance see letter of Thomas Owen, Indian agent at Chicago, May 21, 1832, printed in the New York Mercury, June 6, 1832.