Major General Edmund Gaines, Western Department commander, sent the 6th U.S. Infantry and part of the 3rd, and asked the Illinois governor for added militia assistance. War was averted when still another treaty was thrashed out with the Sauk, who promised never again to cross to the east bank of the Mississippi without the consent of both the U.S. president and the governor of Illinois.

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Within four months, however, a Sauk band was back across the river, and was said to have killed a couple of dozen Menominee Indians, their hereditary enemies. The panic-stricken squatters again appealed for government aid. It was, after all, less than 20 years since the horrors of the War of 1812, when most of the northwestern Indians had joined the British. Many Indians still fondly remembered those days, times of victory over the Americans. One of them spoke for all: ‘I had not discovered one good trait in the character of the Americans. They made fair promises, but never fulfilled them! Whilst the British made but few — but we could always rely upon their word!’

The man who spoke those words was 65 at that time, but still a power among the Sauk. He was not a great chief, but a respected warrior who had killed his first man when he was 15 and was credited with 30 by the time he was 45. He was also a consummate tactician. His name, Ma-ka-tai-me-she-kia-kiak, roughly translates as Black Sparrow Hawk, but he was more widely known simply as Black Hawk.

On April 1, 1832, some 300 regulars of the 6th Infantry left Jefferson Barracks, St. Louis, by boat. They moved smoothly upriver in the burgeoning spring, under the command of bumbling Brig. Gen. Henry Atkinson, and arrived at Rock Island on the 8th. There they learned that Black Hawk’s band — called the ‘British Band’ for their undying allegiance to their old friends to the north — with some local Sauk and some Kickapoo had crossed the Mississippi at Yellow Banks and moved up the Rock River. There were said to be 600 to 800 well-armed braves, more than half of them mounted. And, because they intended to reoccupy their old lands, many of them had brought their families with them.

Atkinson sensibly decided he needed cavalry to catch a mounted enemy. The regular army had no mounted troops because a cheese-paring Congress would not appropriate enough money for it. Infantrymen were cheaper, and dollars were far more important on Capital Hill than military preparedness. Any mounted men would have to come from the local militia, and Atkinson asked Illinois Governor John Reynolds for help.

Reynolds, a pompous bumpkin, jumped at the chance. ‘Generally speaking’ as one historian neatly put it, ‘history has been kind to the governor by not mentioning him at all.’ Reynolds, an intellectual pygmy, was nevertheless alert to the political advantage to be gained form taking the offensive against the Indians — any Indians. Based on some early and undistinguished service in the War of 1812, Reynolds had conferred upon himself the sobriquet of ‘the Old Ranger.’ Now he would add to his self-developed luster by personally leading the militia to chastise the heathen.

Militia troops had long been the bane of the regular U.S. Army. Although they had fought well at times, they had also done a shameful amount of running away. Major General ‘Mad Anthony’ Wayne, who knew something about soldiering, thought he would do well to get two volleys out of the militia before they fled the battlefield. It was not so long since the Bladensburg Races, that dismal day in August 1814 outside Washington when a whole army of militia had skedaddled before a thin line of British bayonets and the whooshing of wildly inaccurate Congreve rockets.

The ensuing war would bring nobody glory, except maybe the Indians. A raw-boned former militia captain named Abraham Lincoln would seldom mention his participation except to comment drolly on the size of the mosquitoes that preyed on him and his men. Other participants — especially officers of the regular army — bluntly called the campaign what it was.

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