Minor attacks of the Black Hawk War

Once fighting erupted at Stillman's Run in May 1832, marking the start of the Black Hawk War, a string of smaller clashes and raids continued to punctuate the broader struggle. This conflict pitted white settlers across Illinois and what would become Wisconsin against Black Hawk, chief of the Sauk. Rather than concentrated in one place, these lesser confrontations spread out across the region, and many were the work of native bands having no connection to Black Hawk's British Band.

At some point that May, a Methodist minister and his wife vanished, later found bound to a tree and burned to death by a group of Potawatomi warriors. That same month brought further violence: an assault at Holderman's Grove claimed the life of another clergyman, Adam Payne, while a raid at Hollenbeck's Grove forced a large number of residents to flee their homes. Shortly before the fighting at Horseshoe Bend, Kickapoo warriors ambushed and killed a German immigrant named Henry Apple. Near what is now Bureau County, Illinois, settler Elijah Phillips lost his life in an attack at Ament's Cabin. These episodes, alongside other incidents throughout the war, deepened the sense of dread that gripped the region during this period.

Prelude

Once the militia suffered defeat at Stillman's Run, frontier settlements across Illinois and Michigan Territory saw a rise in raids and attacks by Native Americans. Rather than reflecting any coordinated campaign, most of these incidents were scattered and driven by opportunity. In fact, a great many of the assaults came from bands with no connection to Black Hawk's British Band.

Buffalo Grove

When conflict erupted across northern Illinois in the spring of 1832, word of Black Hawk's triumph at Stillman's Run reached the families living at Buffalo Grove, and they were told to abandon the area at once. The bulk of these settlers made their way to Peoria, where they stayed until hostilities finally ended. Then, on May 19, 1832, a handful of men received orders to ferry dispatches on behalf of Colonel James M. Strode, stationed in Galena, over to General Henry Atkinson, who waited at Dixon's Ferry, the location known today as Dixon, Illinois. It was near this modest, unincorporated community of Buffalo Grove, now part of Ogle County, that an ambush struck the messengers. The following day, May 20, Sergeant Fred Stahl made it back to Dixon's Ferry alongside four others who had lived through the assault, and he gave an account of how the group had been set upon by Native Americans the previous evening at the grove's outer edge. Durley, he explained, had died instantly in the attack, his body scalped and abandoned where he fell.

Execution of Lucy and James Sample

Nehemiah Matson, an amateur historian writing in 1872, recounted how Potawatomis put a couple named James and Lucy Sample to death. His version held that the pair were tied to a tree before being set alight. Matson attributed the killings to the direction of a figure called Mike Girty, said to be Simon Girty's mixed race son.

Yet a profile of Matson published in 1960 cautioned that his habit of blending fact with legend led scholars to treat his books with skepticism as reliable sources. Despite this, other writers kept the tale alive across subsequent decades, reproducing it in their own accounts. Present day scholarship on the Black Hawk War, however, is silent on the matter entirely, offering no corroboration either for the incident itself or for the existence of anyone named Mike Girty.

Holderman's Grove

A hulking, imposing figure of a man, Adam Payne worked as a wandering preacher who had come from Pennsylvania. Two days after the massacre at Indian Creek on May 21, he set out on horseback along a path that would later serve as the Frank & Walker stagecoach line connecting Chicago and Ottawa. Payne belonged to a religious group called the Dunkers and served as one of their ministers. His route carried him through Holderman's Grove, then Lisbon, then the settlement of Plainfield, Illinois. It was in Plainfield that he crossed paths with an acquaintance named Johnathan Wilson, who cautioned him about the risks facing lone travelers on the Illinois frontier at that time. Heeding this warning, Payne initially reversed course and started back toward Chicago.

But somewhere along that return path, he reconsidered, cast aside Wilson's caution, and once again pointed himself toward Ottawa. Nothing troubled his ride until he neared Holderman's Grove. Roughly midway between Plainfield and Ottawa, a band of Native Americans lying in wait sprang their ambush on him there. Gunfire erupted immediately, and a shot tore through Payne's chest. He wheeled his horse around in an attempt to escape, but the animal had also taken a wound, and after carrying him some fourteen or fifteen miles, it finally collapsed and died beneath him. Left without a weapon, Payne could not outrun his pursuers, who caught him and, according to common belief, cut off his head. Yet one person who saw the body afterward claimed otherwise, stating that Payne had merely been scalped and that his head was still attached when he was found. Kerry A. Trask, in the index of his 2006 volume Black Hawk: The Battle for the Heart of America, labels this episode the Holderman's Grove raid.

Aftermath

Taken together, these incidents cast a shadow of dread across the whole region, with the terror especially acute in the northeastern corner of Illinois near the site of the Indian Creek massacre, where residents lived under a genuine wave of alarm. Even the lead mining district around Galena, Illinois did not escape the unease, as fresh assaults and unpredictable reports of Black Hawk's whereabouts kept nerves on edge. Once Adam Payne turned up dead, hardly a white settler in the vicinity believed himself safe any longer.

The string of raids that unfolded through May, coming on the heels of Stillman's Run, only deepened this climate of fear and pushed many families to abandon the surrounding area altogether. When Henry Apple was killed, the aftermath took the shape of an actual engagement, one that ended up shifting how the militia viewed itself and how much the public trusted the force. The strike at Ament's Cabin prompted a brief pursuit of those responsible, though it yielded no real result, and afterward the remains of Elijah Phillips were carried back to Hennepin, Illinois, where he was laid to rest.