The militia surgeon was terrified. All around him the night flickered and danced with muzzle flashes, and the darkness rang with terrifying war whoops and screams of terror. Desperately he kneed his rearing horse, but could not pull away from the grim, dark form holding tightly to his mount. He leaned forward into the gloom and held out his sword.

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‘Please Mr. Indian’ he pleased, ‘I surrender. Please accept my sword.’

Only after his captor failed to take the sword, or move at all, did the petrified doctor realize that he was talking to a stump — the very one to which had had tied his horse. Slashing the tether, the surgeon fled madly into the night.

For 25 miles, he and hundreds of his militia comrades galloped through brush and trees, crazy with fear, more than a little drunk, and certain that every bush and log was a Sauk warrior with a tomahawk thirsting for white man’s blood. Few of them ever actually saw an Indian or fired at anything other than shadows. Their officers, with few exceptions, were in the van of the retreat, led by Colonel James Strode, commander of the 27th Illinois Regiment, notable, until then, for a large mouth and a bellicose air.

The general rout had begun on May 14, 1832, when 275 Illinois militiamen, commanded by Major Isaiah Stillman, were spooked by about 40 Sauk warriors, who were as surprised as anybody at the chaotic panic they created. Thus the Battle of Old Man’s Creek was ever after to be better known by the unfelicitous name of Stillman’s Run. The defeat was more humiliating than serious, though the Indians mutilated the bodies of the 12 white men they killed and a good many more militiamen subsequently deserted for good. The Sauk had lost three braves, one of whom had been murdered before the fight began, as he had tried to negotiate for peace.

Later there would be a good deal of pious bragging and invention about a gallant defense against as many as 2,000 Indians. But the militia knew it had been whipped — whipped badly and nearly frightened to death. In later days, most of the men didn’t talk a lot about being at Stillman’s Run. One officer spoke for most of them in a letter to his wife: ‘I will make you one promise, I will stay with you in future, for this thing of being a soldier is not so comfortable as it might be.’

Indeed it wasn’t. What had started as a wonderful, drunken Indian-killing party was getting serious and, what was worse, downright dangerous. But the war would go on. It was mid-May 1832, and a fundamental question still had to be decided that spring. Was the Sauk and Fox nation to be allowed to return to its ancestral lands near Rock Island, east of the Mississippi River, or was it to be forever confined to its new home west of that river, to which it had been exiled by a scandalous treaty signed in 1804?

The Indian signatories to the treaty had had no authority to speak for the entire tribe. Only one was a legitimate chief, and even he was a noted alcoholic. The Indians’ compensation was pitiful; one historian called it a collection of ‘wet groceries and geegaws.’ As young George McCall, a recent graduate of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, put it, the fact that the white men had simply stolen the Sauks’ land ‘was apparent to the most obtuse.’

Even that farcical treaty had given the Sauk and Fox the right to hunt and plant on their old ground until the land was surveyed and opened for settlement. But hordes of settlers had promptly squatted on the land, making the treaty unenforceable. It was too much for proud men to bear.

And so, in the spring of 1831, a band of Sauk crossed the Mississippi and moved into the ancient tribal territories around Rock Island. Their hearts were there, and so was their chief village, a well-laid-out town called Saukenuk. The Indian invasion produced a small amount of bloodshed — and a large amount of unmitigated panic on the part of the squatters, who promptly appealed to the United States Government for help.

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