Stillman's Run: Lincoln Buries the Dead

Near this spot in May of eighteen thirty-two, Illinois militia volunteers clashed with Black Hawk and his Sauk warriors in what became known as Stillman's Run. The militiamen panicked and fled, leaving about a dozen of their own dead on the field. Among those who returned to bury the fallen was a young captain named Abraham Lincoln, then twenty-three years old and newly elected by his company.

He later recalled that seeing the scalped and mutilated bodies was one of the most sobering experiences of his life. The skirmish helped trigger a wider frontier conflict and showed the bloody cost of the forced removal of Native peoples from their lands. Lincoln returned here not as a fighter but as a witness, helping lay to rest men who had died in a war that history would judge poorly.