Wood River Massacre, July Eighteen Fourteen

On July tenth, eighteen fourteen, a party of Native warriors attacked a group of settlers along Wood River, just north of where it meets the Mississippi. The victims were overwhelmingly children. Among those killed were William Moore, about fifteen, John Moore, about nine, and Betsey Moore, about eleven.

Rebecca Regan, about fourteen, Polly Regan, about twelve, and Joel Regan, about eight, were also killed. The attack came during the War of eighteen twelve, when frontier Illinois was a contested borderland and the alliance between some Native nations and Britain made settlements like this one acutely vulnerable. The dead settlers were part of a thin line of American families pushing into land still deeply contested.

The monument here was placed to remember those who died, most of them too young to have understood the war they had been born into.