A body of about three hundred and forty rangers, not of the regular army, under Major Stillman, asked to go ahead as scouts, to look for a body of Indians under Black Hawk, rumored to be about twelve miles away. The permission was given, and on the night of the 14th of May Stillman and his men went into camp. Black Hawk heard of their presence. By this time the poor old chief had discovered that the promises of aid from the Indian tribes and the British were false, and, dismayed, he had resolved to recross the Mississippi. When he heard of the whites near he sent three braves with a white flag to ask for a parley and permission to descend the river. Behind them he sent five men to watch proceedings. Stillman's rangers were in camp when the bearers of the flag of truce appeared. The men were many of them half drunk, and when they saw the Indian truce-bearers, they rushed out in a wild mob, and ran them into camp. Then catching sight of the five spies, they started after them, killing two. The three who reached Black Hawk reported that the truce-bearers had been killed as well as their two companions. Furious at this violation of faith, Black Hawk "raised a yell," and declared to the forty braves, all he had with him, that they must have revenge. The Indians immediately sallied forth, and met Stillman's band of over three hundred men, who by this time were out in search of the Indians. Black Hawk, too maddened to think of the difference of numbers, attacked the whites. To his surprise the enemy turned, and fled in a wild riot. Nor did they stop at their camp, which from its position was almost impregnable; they fled in complete panic, sauve qui peut, through their camp, across prairie and rivers and swamps, to Dixon, twelve miles away, where by midnight they began to arrive. The first arrival reported that two thousand savages had swept down on Stillman's camp and slaughtered all but himself. Before the next night all but eleven of the band had arrived.
Stillman's defeat, as this disgraceful affair is called, put all notion of peace out of Black Hawk's mind, and he started out in earnest on the warpath. Governor Reynolds, excited by the reports of the first arrivals from the Stillman stampede, made out that night, "by candle-light," a call for more volunteers, and by the morning of the 15th had messengers out and his army in pursuit of Black Hawk. But it was like pursuing a shadow. The Indians purposely confused their trail. Sometimes it was a broad path, then it suddenly radiated to all points. The whites broke their bands, and pursued the savages here and there, never overtaking them, though now and then coming suddenly on some terrible evidences of their presence—a frontier home deserted and burned, slaughtered cattle, scalps suspended where the army could not fail to see them.
This fruitless warfare exasperated the volunteers; they threatened to leave, and their officers had great difficulty in making them obey orders. On reaching a point in the Rock River, beyond which lay the Indian country, a company under Colonel Zachary Taylor refused to cross, and held a public indignation meeting, urging that they had volunteered to defend the State, and had the right, as independent American citizens, to refuse to go out of its borders. Taylor heard them to the end, and then said: "I feel that all gentlemen here are my equals; in reality, I am persuaded that many of them will, in a few years, be my superiors, and perhaps, in the capacity of members of Congress, arbiters of the fortunes and reputation of humble servants of the republic, like myself. I expect then to obey them as interpreters of the will of the people; and the best proof that I will obey them is now to observe the orders of those whom the people have already put in the place of authority to which many gentlemen around me justly aspire. In plain English, gentlemen and fellow-citizens, the word has been passed on to me from Washington to follow Black Hawk and to take you with me as soldiers. I mean to do both. There are the flatboats drawn up on the shore, and here are Uncle Sam's men drawn up behind you on the prairie." The volunteers were quick-witted men, and knew true grit when they met it. They dissolved their meeting and crossed the river without Uncle Sam's men being called into action.
A FACSIMILE OF AN ELECTION RETURN WRITTEN BY LINCOLN AS CLERK IN 1832. NOW FIRST PUBLISHED.
From the original now on file in the County Clerk's office, Springfield, Illinois. The first civil office Lincoln ever held was that of election clerk, and the return made by him, of which a facsimile is here presented, was his first official document. The New Salem election of September 20, 1832, has the added interest of having been held at "the house of John McNeil," the young merchant who was then already in love with Ann Rutledge, the young girl to whom Lincoln afterwards became engaged. All the men whose names appear on this election return are now dead except William McNeely, now residing at Petersburg. John Clary lived at Clary's Grove; John R. Herndon was "Row" Herndon, whose store Berry and Lincoln purchased, and at whose house Lincoln for a time boarded; Baxter Berry was a relative of Lincoln's partner in the grocery business, and Edmund Greer was a school-teacher, and afterward a justice of the peace and a surveyor. James Rutledge was the keeper of the Rutledge tavern and the father of Ann Rutledge; Hugh Armstrong was the head of the numerous Armstrong family; "Uncle Jimmy" White lived on a farm five miles from New Salem, and died about thirty years ago in the eightieth year of his age; William Green (spelled by the later members of the family with a final "e") was the father of William G. Greene, Lincoln's associate in Offutt's store; and as to Bowling Green, more is said elsewhere. In the following three or four years, very few elections were held at which Lincoln was not a clerk. It is a somewhat singular fact that Lincoln, though clerk of this election, is not recorded as voting.—J. McCan Davis.
The march in pursuit of the Indians led the army to Ottawa, where the volunteers became so dissatisfied that on May 27th and 28th Governor Reynolds mustered them out. But a force in the field was essential until a new levy was raised; and a few of the men were patriotic enough to offer their services, among them Lincoln, who on May 29th was mustered in at the mouth of the Fox River by a man in whom, thirty years later, he was to have a keen interest—General Robert Anderson, commander at Fort Sumter in 1861. Lincoln became a private in Captain Elijah Iles's company of Independent Rangers, not brigaded—a company made up, says Captain Iles in his "Footsteps and Wanderings," of "generals, colonels, captains, and distinguished men from the disbanded army." General Anderson says that at this muster Lincoln's arms were valued at forty dollars, his horse and equipment at one hundred and twenty dollars. The Independent Rangers were a favored body, used to carry messages and to spy on the enemy. They had no camp duties, and "drew rations as often as they pleased." So that as a private Lincoln was really better off than as a captain.[3]
With the exception of a scouting trip to Galena and back, fruitful of nothing more than Indian scares, Major Iles's company remained quietly in the neighborhood of the Rapids of the Illinois until June 16th, when Major Anderson mustered it out. Four days later, June 20th, at the same place, he mustered Lincoln in again 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.[4] 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 these 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 travelled on horseback in June 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."