St. Vrain massacre

A grim episode within the Black Hawk War unfolded at Kellogg's Grove, close to what is now Pearl City, Illinois, on May 24, 1832, when a party led by United States Indian Agent Felix St. Vrain met a violent end. The attackers were probably Ho-Chunk warriors acting outside Black Hawk's own band, and evidence suggests their nation had not approved the assault. St. Vrain died alongside three companions, and several accounts claim his corpse showed signs of mutilation.

The killings took place as St. Vrain and his men traveled from Dixon's Ferry, Illinois, known today as Dixon, toward Galena. General Henry Atkinson had tasked St. Vrain with carrying dispatches to Fort Armstrong, a mission cut short by the ambush. In the aftermath, Colonel Henry Dodge and his soldiers buried St. Vrain and the others who had fallen with him.

Prelude

Felix St. Vrain, serving as a United States Indian Agent, was accompanied on his journey by John Fowler, William Hale, and Aaron Hawley, along with Thomas Kenney, Aquilla Floyd, and Alexander Higginbotham. Accounts indicate that St. Vrain and these companions all lost their lives in the assault that followed.

The war party responsible for the killings had not yet joined Black Hawk's warriors, though they were making their way toward that band when the violence occurred. Historical accounts written in earlier eras identified the attackers as Sac warriors, while more recent scholarship links them instead to the Ho-Chunk nation. In his own autobiography, Black Hawk maintained that these attackers were Ho-Chunk and held no connection to his own forces.

Notably, the majority of the Ho-Chunk people actually stood with the United States throughout the conflict. The men who struck down St. Vrain's group did so without any sanction or direction from Ho-Chunk leadership. Yet as the fighting increasingly took on racial overtones, white settlers throughout the region largely failed to draw such distinctions between different bands. Consequently, suspicion and dread spread indiscriminately toward all Native peoples nearby, touching even those who remained allied with settler interests.

A telling instance of this confusion surfaced in the New Galenian on May 30, 1832. The newspaper's coverage of the killings went further than simply recounting events, linking the deaths of St. Vrain and his party to the Sauk and Fox under Keokuk's leadership.

The piece speculated that these Indians might belong to Keokuk's band, admitting outright that nothing certain was known. It conceded that Keokuk's band was generally regarded as friendly and received government corn rations, yet the writers confessed to harboring doubts about their loyalty nonetheless.

In truth, Keokuk and his followers were nowhere near the site of the killings when they took place. Far from posing any threat, they had offered their assistance to white settlers in resisting Black Hawk's warriors.

Massacre

Near what is now Pearl City, Illinois, in a spot called Kellogg's Grove, a violent episode unfolded that claimed the life of Felix St. Vrain, the federal Indian Agent assigned to the Sauk and Fox tribes. Before his death, St. Vrain had been stationed at Dixon's Ferry, Illinois, serving under General Henry Atkinson's command.

Meanwhile, four men, Aaron Hawley, John Fowler, Thomas Kenney, and Alexander Higginbotham, had traveled to Sangamon County, Illinois to buy cattle when word reached them of unrest involving Black Hawk's band. Without delay they resolved to head back north to safeguard their homes, setting out from Dixon's Ferry toward Galena, Illinois on May 22, 1832. Along the way, at Buffalo Grove, they came upon the corpse of William Durley, a victim of the earlier Buffalo Grove massacre. Shaken by the discovery, they turned back to Dixon's Ferry to spread word of what they had found and stayed there through the night.

When General Atkinson arrived back at Dixon's Ferry the next day carrying dispatches bound for Fort Armstrong, he instructed St. Vrain to accompany Hawley's group and see the dispatches delivered. Heading north once more, the party returned to Buffalo Grove long enough to bury Durley's remains before pressing on roughly ten more miles in the direction of Fort Hamilton, where they made camp for the night.

On the morning of May 24, the group resumed its journey, halting for breakfast after covering about three miles. Just as they were finishing their meal, roughly thirty warriors closed in on them. The men attempted to flee, but four never made it out alive. Along with St. Vrain, John Fowler, William Hale, and Aaron Hawley also fell. According to a description given by General George Wallace Jones, St. Vrain's brother-in-law who later identified the body, the attackers scalped all the dead, and in St. Vrain's case went further still, severing his hands, head, and feet and cutting out his heart. Pieces of the heart were said to have been distributed among the warriors to eat, and one account claims the mutilation started while St. Vrain still clung to life.

Three others in the party, Thomas Kenney, Aquilla Floyd, and Alexander Higginbotham, managed to break free of the ambush. Slipping past their attackers, they made it safely to Galena, Illinois three days afterward. As for Aaron Hawley, it is said he first got away from the immediate danger but was ultimately overtaken and killed during his flight.

'The Little Bear' incident

In his 1903 account of the conflict, The Black Hawk War, Frank Stevens claimed that Sauk warriors carried out the attack under a chief named Little Bear, who had supposedly taken Felix St. Vrain in as a "blood brother." Stevens seems to have drawn this detail from a version published by Thomas Ford, once governor of Illinois, who had served in the war himself, though not in this particular engagement. According to the tale, once St. Vrain recognized Little Bear among the group, he told those with him they had nothing to worry about. Nehemiah Matson repeated these same details in his 1887 work, Memories of Shaubena, adding that St. Vrain had supposedly begged Little Bear to spare his life. Between Matson, Stevens, and John H. Kinzie, all three named the Sac as the ones responsible for killing St. Vrain.

Perry A. Armstrong took a different view in his own 1887 history, rejecting outright the notion that The Little Bear had ever adopted St. Vrain in this way. He argued that no such person as Little Bear had ever led either the Sauk or the Fox, and found it absurd to imagine any Sauk chief embracing St. Vrain as kin.

Aftermath

The New Galenian recounted that three survivors of the attack on the St. Vrain party, namely Floyd, Higgenbotham and Kenney, reached Galena at seven in the morning on May 26, 1832, having slipped past the war party that struck their companions. The paper printed their own account of what had happened, drawn from their testimony.

Yet confusion has lingered over Floyd's fate. Some accounts claim he perished in the massacre and that his bones rest among the other dead at the public park within Kellogg's Grove, near what is now Kent, Illinois. Military and public documentation tells a different story: Aquilla Floyd left militia service on August 20, 1832, and made his way back home to Warren County, Kentucky, living out his years there until he died of old age in neighboring Edmonson County in November 1879. He was never buried at the monument alongside the others, and the inscription bearing his name resulted from an error made when the memorial went up in 1886. The likely explanation is that, once no trace of him could be found in Iowa after his discharge sent him home to Kentucky, people simply assumed he had died in the fighting.

In the massacre's wake, a detachment under Colonel Henry Dodge undertook the grim task of burying St. Vrain and several other casualties. While Dodge's men managed to recover St. Vrain's remains along with those of Hale and Fowler, Aaron Hawley's body was never found.