tlers were wild with fear, and most
of the settlements were abandoned. At a sudden sound, at the
merest rumor, men, women, and children fled. "I well remember these
troublesome times," says one old Illinois woman. "We often left our
bread dough unbaked to rush to the Indian fort near by." When Mr.
John Bryant, a brother of William Cullen Bryant, visited the colony in
Princeton in 1832, he found it nearly broken up on account of the
war. Everywhere the crops were neglected, for the able-bodied men were
volunteering. William Cullen Bryant, who travelled on horseback in
June from Petersburg to near Pekin and back, wrote home: "Every few
miles on our way we fell in with bodies of Illinois militia proceeding
to the American camp, or saw where they had encamped for the night.
They generally stationed themselves near a stream or a spring in the
edge of a wood, and turned their horses to graze on the prairie.
Their way was barked or girdled, and the roads through the uninhabited
country were as much beaten and as dusty as the highways on New York
Island. Some of the settlers complained that they made war upon the
pigs and chickens. They were a hard-looking set of men, unkempt and
unshaved, wearing shirts of dark calico and sometimes calico capotes."

Soon after the army moved up the Rock River, the independent spy
company, of which Lincoln was a member, was sent with a brigade to the
northwest, near Galena, in pursuit of the Hawk. The nearest Lincoln
came to an actual engagement in the war was here. The skirmish of
Kellogg's Grove took place on June 25th; Lincoln's company came up
soon after it was over, and helped bury the five men killed. It was
probably to this experience that he referred when he told a friend
once of coming on a camp of white scouts one morning just as the sun
was rising. The Indians had surprised the camp, and had killed and
scalped every man.

"I remember just how those men looked," said Lincoln, "as we rode up
the little hill where their camp was. The red light of the morning sun
was streaming upon them as they lay heads towards us on the ground.
And every man had a round red spot on the top of his head about as big
as a dollar, where the redskins had taken his scalp. It was frightful,
but it was grotesque; and the red sunlight seemed to paint everything
all over." Lincoln paused, as if recalling the vivid picture, and
added, somewhat irrelevantly, "I remember that one man had buckskin
breeches on."[E]