Indian Creek massacre

Background

A conflict simmered between American settlers and a small Potawatomi settlement along Indian Creek in LaSalle County, Illinois, and this friction eventually erupted into what became known as the Indian Creek massacre. During the spring of 1832, William Davis, a blacksmith by trade, built a dam across the creek so his sawmill could operate. Meau-eus, who led the small Potawatomi community, raised objections with Davis, pointing out that the dam blocked fish from swimming upstream to his people. Davis paid no attention to these complaints and struck a Potawatomi man who attempted to tear the dam down. Anger spread among the villagers, who sought revenge for the assault, though chiefs Shabbona and Waubonsie talked them into a middle path instead, urging them simply to fish downstream of the obstruction.

Around the same period, a Sauk leader called Black Hawk had begun pushing to return to lands his people had given up to the United States under the contested 1804 Treaty of St. Louis, a movement he set in motion during February of that year. He believed the Potawatomi living in Illinois might rally behind this cause, given their own frustrations over American encroachment onto native lands.

Yet Potawatomi leadership grew wary, sensing that American military strength had grown far beyond what their people could realistically challenge. While chiefs pressed for neutrality as the looming conflict approached, their authority carried limits, since among the Potawatomi, as with many tribes, leaders lacked real power to enforce obedience. There was also fear that the entire tribe might face reprisal if even a few of their members chose to back Black Hawk. During a gathering held near Chicago on May 1, 1832, tribal leaders, Billy Caldwell among them, adopted a formal stance branding any Potawatomi who joined Black Hawk's cause a betrayer of his own people. By the middle of May, word reached Black Hawk directly that the Potawatomi would not stand with him.

Despite this, Black Hawk pressed forward, guiding a mixed force of Sauks, Meskwakis, and Kickapoos, together known as the "British Band", across the Mississippi from Iowa into Illinois territory. His true intentions remain unclear, though accounts suggest he hoped to avoid triggering violence.

Outbreak of violence

The Black Hawk War turned violent on May 14, 1832, when warriors under Black Hawk handed Illinois militiamen a decisive defeat at Stillman's Run. This outcome alarmed Potawatomi Chief Shabbona, who feared it might embolden other Native fighters to strike American settlements, leaving his own people blamed for the consequences. Not long after the fighting ended, Shabbona set out on horseback with his son and nephew to alert nearby settlers to the danger they faced. Word of the threat sent many fleeing toward the safety of Ottawa. William Davis, however, a Kentucky-born settler who had constructed the dam that stirred local controversy, persuaded several neighbors to stay put, insisting there was no real threat. As a result, twenty-three people, among them the Davis, Hall, and Pettigrew families along with a handful of other men, stayed behind at the Davis settlement.

Attack and massacre

As the afternoon light faded on May 21, 1832, somewhere between forty and eighty Potawatomis, joined by three Sauks from Black Hawk's band, closed in on the Davis cabin. They cleared the fence and charged toward their target. Settlers who had been laboring in the nearby fields and inside the blacksmith's shop tried to reach the safety of the house once the assault began, but they were cut down before they could escape. Six young men managed to break away and survive. In total, fifteen settlers lost their lives and were scalped in the attack. One man suffered the indignity of being scalped a second time, with his beard taken along with the hair from his head. Historian Kerry Trask described the carnage in stark terms, noting that the men and children had been hacked apart while the women's corpses were suspended upside down by their feet, their bodies disfigured in ways so horrific that witnesses at the time could not bring themselves to put the details into writing.

The identity of whoever commanded this assault remains murky in most contemporary scholarship. Historian Patrick Jung has claimed that leadership fell to the same Potawatomi man whom Davis had physically assaulted near the dam, though Jung stopped short of naming him. Kerry Trask and John Hall, for their part, named this assaulted individual as Keewassee, yet neither historian confirmed whether he actually took part in the raid or served as its commander. A different account from David Edmunds credits two Potawatomi fighters, Toquame and Comee, with leading the attack. Jung offered yet another version, describing Keewasse, Toquame, and Comee as Sauk warriors who simply rode alongside the Potawatomis rather than directing the assault themselves.

Back in 1872, an amateur historian named Nehemiah Matson put forward the claim that the raid had been orchestrated by Mike Girty, a man thought to be the mixed race offspring of Simon Girty. Doubts about Matson's reliability surfaced early, appearing as far back as 1903 in a work by Frank E. Stevens, who flatly stated that Matson's assertion linking Mike Girty to the Indian Creek massacre was mistaken. By 1960, scholars had grown further skeptical of Matson's writings, criticizing his tendency to blend historical fact with folklore without distinction. Present-day scholarly treatments of both the Black Hawk War and the Indian Creek massacre leave Mike Girty out of the narrative entirely.

Kidnapping

Not everyone at the settlement met a violent end that day. Sylvia Hall, nineteen, and her seventeen-year-old sister Rachel were left alive by the raiders and led away to the north. During the journey, Sylvia collapsed upon realizing that one of the warriors was carrying her own mother's scalp. Roughly eighty miles later, exhausted, the sisters reached Black Hawk's encampment, where they would remain captive for eleven days, most of that time spent under decent treatment among his people.

Years afterward, dictating his memoirs, Black Hawk maintained that it was the three Sauks traveling with the Potawatomis who had actually preserved the girls' lives. He described how the sisters were brought to the camp and how a messenger went out to the Winnebagoes, who held friendly ties with both sides, asking them to collect the captives and return them to the whites. Had the young men from his band not accompanied the Pottowittomies, he insisted, the two young squaws would have met the same end as their companions.

Release came through the efforts of White Crow, a Ho-Chunk chief who, like several other Ho-Chunks in the region, walked a careful line, appeasing American authorities while secretly assisting the British Band. The American Indian agent Henry Gratiot arranged the girls' freedom by handing over a ransom consisting of ten horses, wampum, and corn. On June 1, 1832, Sylvia and Rachel Hall were finally set free at Blue Mounds Fort.

Aftermath

Among all the publicized episodes of the Black Hawk War, none drew more attention than what happened at Indian Creek. News of the killings spread fear through settler communities, prompting many to abandon their homes for the safety of frontier posts, including Fort Dearborn in Chicago.

Around May 21 or 22, residents of Chicago, swelled by those who had already fled there, sent out a militia scouting party to investigate conditions along the trail connecting Chicago and Ottawa. Captain Jesse B. Brown led this detachment, and on May 22 his men discovered the mutilated bodies of the fifteen victims at Indian Creek. After burying the dead, they pressed on to Ottawa and delivered word of the horror they had found. Illinois militia leaders later used news of the killings to bolster enlistment numbers from both Illinois and Kentucky.

Once the conflict ended, authorities brought murder charges against three men connected to the Indian Creek killings. Warrants naming Keewasee, Toquame, and Comee were issued at the LaSalle County Courthouse, but the case collapsed when the Hall sisters proved unable to identify the men as participants in the attack. Recognizing the suffering the sisters had endured, the Illinois General Assembly in 1833 passed legislation awarding each of them 80 acres (320,000 m2) of land situated along the Illinois and Michigan Canal.

Decades later, in 1877, William Munson, husband of Rachel Hall, funded and built a monument marking the burial site of the massacre's victims, spending $700 on the project fourteen miles (23 km) north of Ottawa, Illinois. The site became Shabbona Park in 1902, when the state legislature set aside $5,000 to construct and maintain a replacement monument. That effort culminated on August 29, 1906, with the dedication of a sixteen-foot granite marker before a crowd of four thousand spectators. Today the site, known as Shabbona County Park, sits in the northern part of LaSalle County west of Illinois Route 23, distinct from Shabbona Lake State Park located in DeKalb County.