Fort Johnson — Zachary Taylor's Retreat and the Lost Upper River
Near Nauvoo, Missouri
On a bluff above what is now Warsaw, Illinois, just across the river from Missouri, a young Major named Zachary Taylor threw up a hastily built fort in September of eighteen fourteen and then abandoned it within weeks. The episode was brief but revealing: for a critical stretch of the War of eighteen twelve, the United States effectively lost control of the upper Mississippi River.
The story began upstream. Fort Madison, established in eighteen oh eight as the first permanent American military position on the upper Mississippi, had been under siege and harassment from Sauk and British-allied warriors for years. In September of eighteen thirteen, the garrison was finally forced to burn and abandon it, slipping away at night under cover of darkness. The fort was never reoccupied.
A year later, the Americans tried again. Taylor, who would eventually become the twelfth President of the United States, led troops upriver in an attempt to reassert American authority. They clashed with Sauk warriors and their British allies at Credit Island, near present-day Davenport, and were driven back. On the retreat south, Taylor's men stopped at the bluff near present-day Warsaw and built Fort Johnson as a replacement for the lost Fort Madison.
The fort was flimsy, the provisions ran out, and word of resupply never came. Within weeks, Taylor's garrison abandoned Fort Johnson as well and continued downriver to Cap au Gris in Missouri Territory. The upper river, the stretch above Saint Louis, remained effectively under Sauk and British influence until the war ended in eighteen fifteen.
It was a humbling chapter in American military history: a future president and his army, driven from the river by Indigenous warriors who knew the terrain far better than the army sent to claim it. The bluff at Warsaw saw no glory, no monument, only a retreat that illustrated how provisional the American grip on the upper Mississippi still was in the final months of the War of eighteen twelve.
