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Reflections
The Black Hawk War: Massacre at Indian Creek : Reflections : Oswego Ledger-Sentinel : Hometown Newspaper for Oswego and Montgomery, IllinoisThe Black Hawk War: Massacre at Indian Creek
| by Roger Matile
| 5/31/2007
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After Isiah Stillman’s decisive defeat at the hands of Black Hawk and a few dozen determined, angry Indians on May 14, 1832, the frontier in northern Illinois literally exploded, at least for a few weeks. While U.S. Army Gen. Henry Atkinson tried to calm everyone down and get a military campaign organized, Indians in northern Illinois, feeling they had been backed into a corner, went to war.
South of the present boundary of Kendall County in LaSalle County, on Big Indian Creek, events in May of 1832 moved towards a bloody climax. In 1830, William Davis and his family had moved to Illinois from West Virginia. With him had come his wife and six children.
Davis settled on the northerly bank of Big Indian Creek in the southwest quarter of Section 2, Freedom Township (Township 35 north, Range 3 east), of LaSalle County.
Davis and his family were among the first, if not actually the first, whites to settle along Big Indian Creek, where he built a cabin and a blacksmith shop. By 1832, he had completed a dam across the creek and a sawmill to service the settlers who were moving into the area along the Fox River.
A Potowatomi village was located about six miles upstream from Davis’s new dam and sawmill. The Indians living there depended upon netting fish from the creek for a substantial proportion of their diet. The new dam cut off the upper portion of the creek from the fish in the Fox River, therefore damaging the spawning cycle of the fish, and eliminating a critically large portion of the Indians’ food supply.
When the Indians complained to Davis about the problem caused by his dam, they were contemptuously dismissed. In early May, 1832, Davis caught Keewassee, a leading warrior from the Potowatomi village, trying to dismantle the dam. The powerful Davis severely beat the Indian, and Keewassee began plotting revenge against the white settlers.
As soon as word got around about Stillman’s defeat by Black Hawk, many private quarrels between Indians and whites provided the pretext for settling scores, including the conflict between Keewassee and William Davis.
Feeling there was safety in numbers, a number of people had gathered at the Davis claim for mutual defense during those first two weeks of May. There was Davis, his wife, and his six children; Mr. and Mrs. William Hall and their six children; Mr. and Mrs. William Pettygrew and their two children; John H. Henderson; William Norris; and Henry George. Despite being urged to take refuge in Ottawa, the group elected to stick it out at the Davis claim until the Indian trouble cleared up.
Late in the afternoon of May 21, most of the settlers were in or around the Davis cabin. Henderson and a number of the older boys were working in the fields, while Norris was working in Davis’s blacksmith shop. At about 4:30 p.m., the settlers were shocked to see 20 Indians, painted for war and heavily armed, vault the fence about 10 yards from the house and sprint to the attack.
Wrote 17 year-old Rachel Hall, “Mr. Pettygrew made an effort to shut the door of the house but was shot down in the act of doing so, and indiscriminate murder of all the persons in the house consisting of one man, to wit, Mr. Pettygrew, four women Mrs. Davis, Mrs. Pettygrew, Mrs. Hall (my mother) and Miss Davis about fifteen years of age and six children four girls and two boys, and four men killed out of the house, Viz, Mr. Davis, Mr. Hall, William Norris and Henry George, in all fifteen persons, the whole scene transpired within ten minutes as I think.”
John Henderson, three of the Hall boys, and two Davis boys escaped and headed for Ottawa. Rachel Hall and her sister Sylvia, 19, were taken captive by the war party. While the thoroughly frightened man and boys made their way overland to Ottawa, the Indians took the two girls to Black Hawk’s band, in spite of the fact that only three of the raiding party were Sauks, the rest being local Potowatomis.
As soon as word about the attack reached the authorities, action was taken to secure the return of the girls, including dispatching Chief Waubonsee on a mission to gain their release. His mission came to naught, however, as the girls had already been ransomed by the Winnebagoes, who were desperately trying to stay on the good side of the Americans.
Shortly after the end of the Black Hawk war, warrants were issued at the LaSalle County Courthouse in Ottawa for the arrest of Keewassee and two other Potowatomi warriors, Ta-quawee and Comee, for the murder of the settlers at the Davis cabin.
Interestingly enough. charges were dropped against all three in 1834 because Sylvia and Rachel Hall could not positively identify the members of the war party. Apparently, the war paint the warriors used during the attack was enough to disguise their features so that the two girls could not make a positive identification of the perpetrators.
The story of the legal issues surrounding the Indian Creek Massacre tends to show that frontier justice was not always as rough and ready as we might be led to believe by watching television.
But that was all in the future in the spring of 1832. The defeat of the militia at Stillman’s Run and the eye-witness reports of the aftermath of the Indian Creek Massacre meant the Black Hawk War had begun in earnest, as we’ll see next week.
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