Buffalo Grove Ambush, Black Hawk War

On May nineteenth of eighteen thirty-two, a small party of six soldiers was ambushed right around this spot in a grove of trees. The men were carrying dispatches between American commanders during the Black Hawk War, a conflict that erupted after Sauk leader Black Hawk led his band back across the Mississippi to reclaim ancestral farmland in Illinois. Warriors concealed in the timber opened fire on the dispatch riders.

One man, William Durley, was killed. The others escaped. The attack was part of a broader guerrilla campaign as Black Hawk's people fought a desperate running resistance against a much larger American force.

The war ended that same summer at the Bad Axe Massacre in Wisconsin, where hundreds of Sauk and Fox men, women, and children were killed. Buffalo Grove remembers this skirmish as one of the early clashes of the war on Illinois soil.