[Illustration:
MUNSON MONUMENT. PLACE OF MASSACRE. STATE MONUMENT.]
INDIAN CREEK MASSACRE
and
CAPTIVITY OF HALL GIRLS
COMPLETE HISTORY
of the
MASSACRE OF SIXTEEN WHITES
on
INDIAN CREEK, NEAR OTTAWA, ILL.
and
SYLVIA HALL AND RACHEL HALL
As Captives in Illinois and Wisconsin
during
THE BLACK HAWK WAR, 1832
BY
CHARLES M. SCANLAN
Author of
“Scanlan’s Rules of Order,” “The Law of Church and Grave,”
“Law of Hotels” Etc.
SECOND EDITION
REIC PUBLISHING COMPANY
421 Matthews Building
Milwaukee, Wis.
COPYRIGHT, 1915.
BY
CHARLES M. SCANLAN
PREFACE.
No one is satisfied with an incomplete story. The very meagre and
inconsistent accounts of the adventures of Sylvia and Rachel Hall
(familiarly known as the “Hall girls”) heretofore published, merely
excited one’s curiosity to know the whole story. The ladies’ statements
that have been published, gave only an outline of the facts as far
as they knew them personally. To obtain all the facts, required
much investigation of books and a great deal of correspondence with
historical societies, editors of newspapers and the War and the
Interior Department of the United States. Also, the writer has had
personal interviews with relatives of the Misses Hall, and has traveled
over the ground and examined all the evidence that now appears from
the location of the little cottage on Indian Creek to Galena where the
girls took a boat for St. Louis.
Mrs. A. Miranda Dunavan, a daughter of Mrs. Rachel Hall Munson (the
younger captive), gave me the family history of her mother; and Miss
Sylvia E. Horn of Lincoln, Nebraska, and Mr. C. L. Horn of Mackinaw,
Illinois. grand-children of Mrs. Sylvia Hall Horn (the elder captive),
contributed the history of the Horn family. Thus every fact in the
following pages is stated upon the best evidence.
To gather all the traditions that still linger along the course over
which the Indians traveled with their captives, the writer enlisted the
services of his nieces, Miss Gertrude Scanlan of Fennimore, Wisconsin,
and Miss Marian Scanlan of Prairie du Chien, whose grandfathers
were pioneers in the lead regions. However, no fact has been stated
on tradition without the clues being verified by land records or
government documents.
Of course every lady wants to know how the girls looked. Unfortunately,
there is no picture of either of them prior to middle life. Mrs.
Dunavan lent to me a very rare daguerreotype picture of her mother,
Mrs. Munson, taken at the age of about forty-two years, and a
photograph of her aunt, Mrs. Sylvia Hall Horn, taken when she was
over sixty years of age. Also, I borrowed from Mrs. Dunavan a tintype
picture of herself when she was sixteen, which is said to be a very
good likeness of her aunt Sylvia at the time that she was taken
captive. These pictures are reproduced herein. The tradition of the
neighborhood is that the girls were unusually handsome in both figure
and face and of captivating kind dispositions. They were born in
Kentucky and carried with them to Illinois the southern culture which
has won for the ladies of the South considerable fame in story and song.
“She was bred in old Kentucky,
Where the meadow grass grows blue,
There’s the sunshine of the country,
In her face and manner too.”--Braisted.
Milwaukee, Wis.
July 15, 1915.
CHARLES M. SCANLAN.
CONTENTS
PAGE
Preface, 3
I. Description of the Country, 9
II. Indian Davis Troubles, 13
III. The Davis Settlement, 23
IV. The Massacre, 31
V. The Captivity, 38
VI. To the Rescue, 48
VII. Military Movements, 51
VIII. Reward Offered, 54
IX. The Captive Girls, 59
X. Ransomed, 66
XI. Royally Welcomed, 81
XII. Homeward Bound, 90
XIII. Romance and History, 95
XIV. Shabona, 106
XV. Comee and Toquamee, 111
CHAPTER I.
DESCRIPTION OF THE COUNTRY.
In its natural condition, perhaps no more attractive country ever laid
before the eyes of man than that in which occurred the incidents of the
following narrative. On the south it is bordered by the Illinois river,
with its historical events beginning with the old Kaskaskia Mission
established by Father Marquette in 1673 amidst the most beautiful
scenery in the whole state of Illinois, which is now included in
Starved Rock State Park.
What memories cluster around old Kaskaskia! As the first capital of
Illinois, it was visited by Gen. La Fayette and Presidents Jackson,
Lincoln, Taylor and Harrison; by Jefferson Davis, Gen. Albert Sidney
Johnson, and by nearly every other man who was prominent in United
States history prior to 1837, when Springfield became the state capital.
On the east for more than one hundred miles the Fox river, with its
source in a beautiful lake near Waukesha, Wisconsin, flows south into
the Illinois at Ottawa. Westward the great prairie stretches off to and
beyond the Rock river which has eroded a narrow valley through that
otherwise flat plain. Besides Rock river the only important streams
that lay in the course of travel of the Hall girls as prisoners, were
the Sycamore (South Kishwaukee) and the Kishwaukee in Illinois, and
Turtle Creek, the Bark River and the Oconomowoc in Wisconsin.
We are told by geologists that during the quaternary age of the world,
a great ice-berg, moving down from the north, crushed all the trees
and vegetation in its path, leveled most of the hills and filled most
of the valleys as far south as the Ohio River. When that body of ice
melted it formed lakes in the depressions which were not filled with
till. Drumlins, eskers and kames, here and there, remain to indicate
either the resistance of the prior formation or that quantities of
earth filled the uneven under surface of the ice at the time of its
dissolution.
By the action of the atmosphere, rains and dew, as centuries rolled
on, vegetation sprang up all over that great plain, and springs to
supply the greatest necessity of living things, broke forth and flowed
in streams that united into rivers as they rolled on to the sea. Along
the streams were forests of trees--including many species of the oak,
ash, sycamore, elm, sugar maple, locust, hickory, walnut, butternut,
linden, cherry, buckeye, blackberry and many other familiar varieties.
Also, here and there stood groves that escaped the terrible prairie
fires that almost every year swept over that vast plain.
[Illustration: A PRAIRIE FIRE--MC KENNEY.]
Game of many kinds, from the monstrous buffalo and timid deer down
to the rabbit, the turkey, the prairie chicken, and the quail, was
abundant.
Last, and by no means least, was the beautiful flora of that country
which was known as “The Paradise of the West.”[1] A traveler who saw
it in its natural condition, describes it as follows: “Above all
countries, this is the land of flowers. In the season, every prairie is
an immense flower garden. In the early stages of spring flowers, the
prevalent tint is peach bluish; the next is a deeper red; then succeeds
the yellow; and to the latest period of autumn the prairies exhibit a
brilliant golden, scarlet and blue carpet, mingled with the green and
brown ripened grass.”[2]
“Sweet waves the sea of summer flowers
Around our wayside cot so coy,
Where Eileen sings away the hours
That light my task in Illinois.”--McGee.
[1] 6 Wis. Hist. Col., 421; 10 Wis. Hist. Col., 246-7.
[2] “Western Portraiture,” Colton, 221.