TO THE NORTHWEST FRONTIER. The Black Hawk War of 1832 merits further study. Today's post is a discovery I made while on a quest of a different kind. On the outskirts of Elizabeth, Illinois, not far from the grade of the Chicago Great Western Railroad, is the Apple River Fort.

The original fort was put together in a big hurry after word reached settlers in the area of the defeat of Stillman's Regiment to the southeast. The settlers quickly built a stockade around a cabin. The reconstruction includes manufactured goods characteristic of the early 1830s, although I suspect there is a bit more stuff in here than a mining family would have owned. (Nearby Galena is named for a lead-bearing ore, and Wisconsin's original Badgers were lead miners, not predatory mammals.)


The stockade included this fortified barracks building. The officers' quarters are on the ground floor, and 20 enlisted men slept upstairs.


This elevated firing point is aligned in the general direction of Stillman Valley.


The Black Hawk War is instructive in a number of ways. It could have been avoided. The U.S. government had a dispute with the Sauk tribe over who had the right to grow corn east of the Mississippi River. I'll have to do some more reading on this dimension of the story. At least twice during the war, U.S. regulars or Illinois militia fired on Sauk parties displaying a flag of truce. The U.S. government entered into alliances of convenience with inter alia the Winnebago and Sioux tribes who had disagreements of their own with the Sauk (are our counterinsurgency specialists studying these records?) Although in the State Line, Abraham Lincoln is the most frequently mentioned Distinguished Person to have fought in the campaign, you might recognize Jefferson Davis, Winfield Scott, and Zachary Taylor, who also participated.

The fort did what it was intended to do. Black Hawk's unit attacked with superior numbers, but the women inside, several of whom were named Elizabeth, assisted the men by reloading spare muskets and casting shot. (We're talking about nineteenth-century flintlock muzzle-loaders.) The defenders were able to maintain a firing rate that persuaded Black Hawk his unit was attacking a much larger force, and he broke off the attack to pilfer foodstuffs from the cabins outside the stockade.

The original fort was dismantled shortly after the campaign ended near Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin. This reconstruction dates to the late 1990s, based on archaeological exploration of the fort site.