r accordingly sent a message to the agent at St. Louis,
that Black Hawk, and his whole band, could be removed for the sum of six
thousand dollars, but the answer was, that nothing would be given, and
that if they did not remove immediately, an armed force would be sent to
compel them.

The squaws had now planted their corn, and it was beginning to grow,
when the whites again commenced ploughing it up. Black Hawk at last
determined to put a stop to these aggressions upon his people, and
accordingly gave notice to those who were perpetrating them, that they
must remove, forthwith, from his village. In the mean time, after the
return of the Indians, which took place in April, eight of the white
settlers united in a memorial to the Executive of the state of Illinois,
in which they set forth that the Sac Indians of Rock river had
"threatened to kill them; that they had acted in a most outrageous
manner; threw down their fences, turned horses into their corn-fields,
stole their potatoes, saying _the land was theirs and that they had not
sold it_,--although said deponents had purchased the land of the United
States' government: levelled deadly weapons at the citizens, and on some
occasions hurt said citizens for attempting to prevent the destruction
of their property," &c. &c. The memorial concludes with the still more
startling outrage, that the said Indians went "to a house, rolled out a
barrel of whiskey and destroyed it." One of these eight afflicted
memorialists, swore the other seven to the truth of their statements,
and with an earnest prayer for immediate relief, it was placed before
his Excellency, on the 19th of May.

This long catalogue of outrages, backed by other memorials, and divers
rumors of border depredations, committed by "General Black Hawk" and his
"British Band," called into immediate action the patriotism and official
power of the Governor. Under date of Bellville, May 26, 1831, he writes
to the superintendent of Indian affairs, General William Clark, at St.
Louis, that in order to protect the citizens of Illinois, which he
considered in a state of "actual invasion," he had called out seven
hundred militia to remove a band of Sac Indians, then residing at Rock
river, and he pledges himself to the superintendent, that in fifteen
days he will have a force in the field, sufficient to "remove them
_dead_ or _alive_, over to the west side of the Mississippi." But to
save all this disagreeable business, his E