The Plum River Raid

The summer of eighteen thirty-two was the last summer the Sauk and Fox nations would fight to hold their homeland in northwestern Illinois. Black Hawk, the Sauk war leader, had crossed the Mississippi River in April with about one thousand warriors and non-combatants, believing that the British and neighboring tribes had promised support. No support came. Stranded on the wrong side of the river, his people short on food and diplomacy exhausted, Black Hawk tried to turn back, but the militia attacked a peace delegation he sent forward, and the killing began.

What followed was a campaign of skirmishes, ambushes, and brutal frontier violence across the rock-and-river country where Illinois meets Wisconsin meets Iowa. On May twenty-first, eighteen thirty-two, a small party of Sauk warriors reached a tiny settlement near the mouth of the Plum River at what is now Savanna, Illinois. Most of the settlers had already fled east toward Galena. Only six men remained, and they pulled back to a blockhouse as the warriors arrived.

A firefight lasted about an hour. No one was killed on either side. The Sauk withdrew. By the standards of the Black Hawk War, the Plum River raid was minor, a brief exchange without fatalities, noted in dispatches mainly because it triggered Colonel James Strode to send militia reinforcements westward.

But the war's end was anything but minor. On August second, eighteen thirty-two, militia and U.S. Army soldiers caught Black Hawk's band trying to cross back into Iowa at the Bad Axe River in Wisconsin. The army opened fire. Warriors, women, children, and elders were killed in the river and on the bank. Some who made it across were killed by Dakota warriors on the other side. Somewhere between one hundred fifty and five hundred Sauk died at Bad Axe. Black Hawk surrendered three weeks later.

The Black Hawk War ended Indigenous resistance east of the Mississippi. Within years, the treaty lands were stripped, and the frontier of European settlement pushed dramatically west. The Plum River skirmish was a small moment in that larger catastrophe, but it was fought on the banks of the Mississippi in a landscape that had been Sauk homeland for generations.