Free The Indifferent Stars Above by Daniel James Brown Page B

children—had crossed the Mississippi and entered Illinois bent on returning to their ancestral lands, territory that they regarded as sacred but had lost in a disputed treaty in 1804. A sixty-five-year-old Sauk warrior named Ma-Ka-Tai-Me-She-Kia-Kiak, or Black Hawk, led them. Black Hawk had hoped to avoid conflict, but his entry into Illinois set off widespread panic among the white settlers. Within days a makeshift assemblage of U.S. Army troops, Illinois volunteer militiamen, and Sioux and Menominee mercenaries was pursuing him. The militia, called out by the governor of Illinois, consisted of virtually all the healthy adult white males in Illinois. Throughout April and May of that year, small, detached bands of Native Americans, some of them only loosely allied with Black Hawk, fought a series of battles and skirmishes against the whites and their Native American allies.
    On the afternoon of May 20, things got truly ugly. A group of seventy to eighty Pottawatomie warriors, apparently not attached to Black Hawk at all, attacked a white settlement of three families at a place called Indian Creek. The whites were quickly overwhelmed, and the results were horrific. A Native American witness later recounted what transpired.
    The women squeaked like geese when they were run through the body with spears or felt the sharp tomahawk entering their heads. All of the victims were carefully scalped; their bodies were mutilated and many of the children were chopped to pieces with axes; and the women tied up by the heels to the walls of the house; their clothes falling over their heads,…their naked persons exposed to the public gaze.
    Fifteen settlers were killed. Fifteen-year-old Rachel Hall and her seventeen-year-old sister, Sylvia, crawled into a bed and tried to conceal themselves but were discovered and taken away as prisoners. That night they watched in horror as their mother’s scalp, among others, was scraped and stretched on a willow hoop to cure.
    That same day, in Lacon, Franklin Graves answered the governor’scall and joined the militia. His neighbor John Strawn had the previous year been named a Colonel of Militia. Now Strawn, attired in a full regimental dress uniform replete with gold epaulets and a plumed helmet, stood on an open piece of ground, formed Franklin Graves and the other men of the neighborhood into a line, and addressed them with a flourish. “Ye sons of thunder! Our country is in danger, and the call is ‘To arms.’ Those willing to enroll yourselves among her defenders will step three paces forward.” Franklin Graves stepped forward and enrolled as a noncommissioned officer, the outfit’s drum major. For the next month, he and the other members of the newly constituted Fortieth Regiment of Mounted Volunteers drilled and marched up and down the Illinois River searching for hostile Indians but finding none.
    As the men marched and searched, the women back home grew increasingly nervous. The first night after the men’s departure, a group of women in nearby Richland Township came together at Nancy Dever’s house to discuss how best to defend themselves if attacked. The women were not at all happy that when the men had strutted off to war, they had taken with them nearly every household gun in the township. The women decided that if they were to make it appear as if the Dever house had already been attacked and ransacked, any marauding Indians might pass it by. So they scattered an assortment of furniture and linens and other household goods haphazardly about in the yard. Then they took some food and bedding up into the cabin’s loft and lay low.
    Later that evening, at dusk, more neighborhood ladies arrived at the cabin. Seeing the shambles in the yard, they concluded that the Devers had been massacred and let out ear-piercing screams of lamentation. The women in the loft, hearing the screams, took them for Indian war cries and, believing they were about to be