Apple River Fort: Black Hawk's Last Attack

Near the town of Elizabeth in far northwestern Illinois, a reconstructed stockade marks the site of Apple River Fort, the only garrisoned position Black Hawk and his British Band ever directly assaulted during the war that bears his name.

The Black Hawk War of eighteen thirty-two began that April when the Sauk leader Black Hawk led a combined band of Sauk, Meskwaki, and Kickapoo men, women, and children back across the Mississippi River into Illinois, territory they had been forced to cede under a disputed treaty. American militia and federal troops pursued them across northern Illinois and southern Wisconsin, and tensions on the frontier ran extremely high.

On the twenty-fourth of June, eighteen thirty-two, Black Hawk's warriors stumbled across a group of American messengers near the Apple River settlement. The encounter escalated into a full siege of the hastily constructed fort nearby. Some two hundred warriors surrounded a stockade defended by roughly thirty men and boys, along with about forty women, children, and infants sheltering inside.

The defenders held. Captain Clack Stone organized the militia, and a woman named Elizabeth Armstrong became particularly notable for rallying the fort's settlers, motivating others to keep the fight going. The fight lasted about an hour. When it ended, one defender was dead and two were wounded. Black Hawk's force withdrew without breaking through.

The fort itself was little more than a rough stockade. It had been built in days as frontier alarm spread that spring. But its successful defense was one of the few genuine victories American settlers could claim in a war that otherwise went badly for both sides, ending in the catastrophic slaughter of Black Hawk's people at the Battle of Bad Axe in August of that year.

A replica of the fort opened near this site in the late nineteen nineties, preserving the outline of the original stockade and telling the story of a morning when a handful of frontier settlers turned away a force ten times their number.