‘A tissue of blunders, miserably managed’ said Colonel Zachary Taylor, destined for well-deserved fame in the Mexican War and ultimately the White House. ‘An affair of fatigue, filth, petty jealousy, bickering [and] boredom’ wrote a junior officer — and future Confederate general — named Albert Sidney Johnston.

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The militiamen showed up at Rock Island in droves, a couple of thousand of them by early May. These uncouth Illinois men rejoiced in their local nickname of ‘Suckers’ in memory of one of their chief foods, the unlovely bottom-feeding fish of the same name. The men were furnished food, equipment and arms by the government, and produced prodigious quantities of both hot air and whiskey, without which no movement apparently could be attempted.

The Suckers poked fun at the regular troops they saw, in part because the regulars had to walk. The militia could ride in some comport, and pursue its Indian quarry with much greater dispatch. As it turned out, it was also better able to run away from a fight, a thing it was to do often. Militiamen would kill many horses during the campaign, galloping madly away from danger, real or imagined. Most of them would kill nothing else.

Still, the militiamen were loud and boastful, singularly dedicated to their constant companion John Barleycorn and wholly without discipline. The only response to Lincoln’s first command was the loud advice to ‘go to hell!’ Apparently, the future president’s experience was not unusual. Part of this chronic indiscipline was frontier orneriness, part of it, maybe most, was whiskey. One soldier wrote of hearing officers shout at their men: ‘Fall in, men — fall in! Gentlemen, will you please some away from that damned whiskey barrel!’

The regulars, in turn, were not pleased with their new allies. They rightly considered them buffoons, ill-disciplined, noisy and all too likely to desert the battlefield. For their part, the militia made fun of the regulars, calling them ‘hot-house lettuces’ given to taking tea with the ladies and ‘eating yellow-legged chickens’ an apparently pejorative frontier term that loses something in modern translation.

Reynolds’ militia had its chance almost immediately, and the result was the absurd debacle at Old Man’s Creek on May 14. The evening before, the Suckers had decided to abandon their supply wagons and each man took what he needed — especially whiskey. ‘Everybody offered everybody a drink’ said one participant, and the column straggled on toward Old Man’s Creek. By sundown the Sucker horde was ‘corned pretty heavily.’

Meanwhile, Black Hawk had led his band to the Winnebago village of Prophet’s Town, only to see his appeal for an alliance rejected. Although he flew a British flag wherever he camped, he eventually learned that reports and rumors he had heard of British support for his enterprise being forthcoming were utterly false. On the morning of May 14, he was at a council with Potawatomi chiefs, which was also to prove unproductive. When word reached him that the 275 militiamen of Major Stillman’s command were nearby, Black Hawk decided to abandon his hopes of returning to his traditional homeland. He sent three messengers under a white flag of truce to request a parley, with the intention of peacefully leading his band back across the Mississippi. He also sent five warriors to back up his envoys and observe how they were received.

What followed was a tragicomic farce. None of Black Hawk’s messengers could speak English and none of the militia could speak Sauk. While the parties tried to communicate, a militiaman noticed the five warriors watching the proceedings from a ridge and assumed that they were being drawn into a trap. A militiaman shot one of the Sauk negotiators dead on the spot and others rode off in pursuit of the fleeing braves, killing two of them. At least one reached Black Hawk, however, and the enraged war chief assembled 40 braves — all he had available, since the others were foraging for food and organized a skirmish line. Those 40 men were angry and aggressive, not at all what the Suckers were used to, and upon running headlong into that war party they promptly dashed back toward camp as fast as they had come.

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