The Black Hawk War: A conflict of deadly folly and miscalculation

Got a question after last week’s post about place names here in Kendall County, particularly one that a reader heard involved an Indian attack. As it turned out, there was such a thing and the reader’s question was about the Black Hawk War of 1832.

I’ve frequently written about the war over the years in my newspaper columns, but, as a quick search surprisingly showed, I’ve never done one about the war here at History on the Fox. Which is a bit odd, since the Black Hawk War was a truly pivotal event here in northern Illinois, one that ended up introducing the region–especially the Fox River Valley–to hundreds of people who eventually decided to join the rush to settle the prairies round hereabouts.

Black Hawk, though not a chief of the Sauk Tribe, was a respected military leader who had successfully fought U.S. troops during the War of 1812.

If World War I was “The War to End All Wars,” then the Black Hawk War of 1832, the last war fought inside the bounds of Illinois, could fairly be characterized as “The Miscalculation Conflict.” Black Hawk, an elderly warrior of the Sauk Tribe, miscalculated when he thought he could lead more than 1,000 men, women, and children of his tribe across the Mississippi to live peacefully once again in Illinois. U.S. Army Gen. Henry Atkinson miscalculated his ability to control the impetuous Illinois governor, John Reynolds. Reynolds miscalculated when he thought he could stage a major coup by quickly attacking Black Hawk and ending the war to his own political advantage. And Illinois Militia Major Isaiah Stillman gravely miscalculated the military ability of his poorly organized and undisciplined troops to overawe, much less subdue, even a small group of armed Indians who knew what they were about.

The most immediate result of these miscalculations was the short, bloody Battle of Stillman’s Run on May 14, 1832 on what was then named Old Man’s Creek in western Illinois. After being attacked despite attempting to parlay under a flag of truce, about two dozen Sauk and Fox warriors under Black Hawk routed Stillman’s 240-man mounted militia battalion, killing 11 and sending the rest fleeing the battlefield in total panic. Maj. Stillman fled faster than most of his men, and the routed force spread panic all over frontier Illinois. In coming years, the name of Old Man’s Creek would be changed to Stillman’s Run in an ironic tip of the hat to Stillman’s tactics that day.

Waubonsee, chief of the Prairie Potawatomi in the Fox and Illinois River valleys, refused to join the war against American settlers prompted by Black Hawk’s move back into Illinois from Iowa.

While the battle had a bit of comic opera flavor, the aftermath did not. Following the battle, the U.S. Army and the state militia decided they faced all-out war. Meanwhile, Black Hawk and the other head men of his band decided that retreat back to the west bank of the Mississippi was the only sensible course open to them. Their supposed Indian allies—local Winnebago, Potawatomi, Ottawa, and Chippewa tribal bands—and the British in Canada all made it plain they would not participate in a war against the might of the U.S. Government and the State of Illinois. Chief Waubonsee, principal war chief of the Potawatomi in northern Illinois flatly told Black Hawk that his people would not fight the whites no matter what.

Even so, Black Hawk’s stunning defeat of Stillman’s militia force did embolden some local Indians who used the confusion to settle personal scores. Waubonsee and Chief Shabbona both realized the dangers the situation created. Shabbona, an experienced military leader who had been a chief aide of the great Chief Tecumseh, decided he had to warn as many local settlers as he could to flee to somewhere safe. The old chief and his young nephew spread the alarm to the isolated settlements and homesteads that had begun springing up and down the Fox Valley.

Settlers during that era in what is now Kendall County (it was then part of LaSalle County) were not the hard-bitten frontiersmen normally associated with pioneer life. U.S. Army Gen. Edmund Gaines wrote of his surprise at how unprepared for widespread armed violence settlers of northern Illinois were in a letter to the Secretary of War. “These settlements are even more sparse and feebler than I had anticipated,” Gaines wrote after doing a personal assessment. “Few of the inhabitants are supplied, as our border men used to be, with good rifles, or other means of defense.”

In fact, the settlers’ best mode of defense was to run away, which they did as quickly as possible. Settlers in the northern part of Kendall County fled to Walker’s Grove (now Plainfield), while those farther south got to Ottawa as quickly as possible.

Late in his life, Ansel Reed, who in 1832 was a young hired hand of Big Grove Township pioneer Moses Booth, recalled the fear and confusion the outbreak of war caused:

“In going to work in the afternoon I met two Frenchmen, halfbreeds, riding each a mare with a colt following. They said they lived in Kankakee and were going north for seed corn….They talked a little while longer, and passed on toward Newark….Mr. Booth came out and had made two or three turns to furrowing [plowing] out the potato land when the Frenchmen returned in a great fright and told Mr. Booth what they had seen. He sent them on to alarm Anthony Litsey and beckoned to me to hurry, saying as I came near, ‘I don’t know but we shall all be killed.'”

The Booth family joined with several others after arriving at the Rev. Stephen Beggs’ home, where they tore down some buildings and quickly threw up a rickety fortification they dubbed Fort Beggs. Some 125 thoroughly frightened settlers crowded into the improvised fort. Rev. Beggs later confirmed Gen. Gaines’ estimate of the pioneers’ defensive capabilities when wrote that the settlers had only four firearms among them and that “some of them” didn’t work.The settlers huddled in Fort Beggs eventually were escorted to Chicago by militia troops.

The Indian Creek Massacre monument in Shabbona County Park near the Kendall-LaSalle County line, marks the deaths of 15 men, women, and children at the hands of Native Americans during the Black Hawk War of 1832.

On May 19, a group of men, among whom was Kendall County resident Daniel Kellogg, wrote from Ottawa to General Atkinson seeking immediate help: “To the commander in chief at Rock River we the undersigned having been Eye Witness to burning of houses destruction of property but as yet there has been no lives taken that we know, but there is some missing but where they are we don’t know. Therefore we wish to send to our relief two or Three Hundred men as soon as possible to Rendevous at Ottawa the mouth of Fox River Rapids Illinois Ottaway. “P.S. The above destruction of property and depredations were committed by the Indians but to what tribe they belong is uncertain. There has also been some men fired on and Chaced for Miles.”

South of the present boundary of Kendall County in LaSalle County, on Big Indian Creek, events of late May of 1832 moved towards the kind of bloody climax Kellogg and his frightened neighbors and friends predicted.

In 1830, William Davis and his family had moved to Illinois from West Virginia. With him had come his wife and six children. Davis settled on the north-northeast bank of Big Indian Creek in the southwest quarter of Section 2, Freedom Township (Township 35 north, Range 3 east), of LaSalle County. Davis and his family were among the first, if not actually the first, whites to settle on Big Indian Creek. Davis, a blacksmith, arrived on the creek in the spring of 1830, and built a cabin and a blacksmith shop. By 1832, he had completed a dam across the creek and a sawmill to service the settlers who were moving into the area along the Fox River.

A Potawatomi village was located about six miles upstream from Davis’s new dam and sawmill. The Indians living there depended on netting fish from the creek for a large proportion of their diet. Davis’s new dam cut off the upper portion of the creek from the fish in the Fox River, therefore damaging the spawning cycle of the fish, and cutting off a large portion of the Indians’ food supply.

When the Indians complained to Davis of this problem, they were contemptuously dismissed. Then in early May 1832, Davis caught Keewassee, a leading warrior from the Potawatomi village, trying to dismantle the dam. Davis severely beat the Indian, and Keewassee began plotting revenge against the white settlers.

As soon as word got around, about Stillman’s defeat, many private quarrels between Indians and whites violently broke into the open, including that between Keewassee and William Davis.

Several people, feeling there was safety in numbers, had gathered at the Davis claim for mutual defense. There was Davis, his wife, and his six children; Mr. and Mrs. William Hall and their six children; Mr. and Mrs. William Pettygrew and their two children; John H. Henderson; William Norris; and Henry George. Despite being strongly urged to take refuge at Ottawa where a fort was being constructed, the group fatally elected to stay at the Davis claim until the Indian trouble cleared up.

Late in the afternoon of May 21, most of the settlers were in or around the Davis cabin. Henderson and a number of the older boys, on the other hand, were working in the fields, while Norris was working in Davis’s blacksmith shop. At about 4:30 p.m., the settlers were shocked to see 20 Indians, painted for war and heavily armed, vault the fence about 10 yards from the house and run to attack the frightened whites.

Wrote 17 year old Rachel Hall:

“Mr. Pettygrew made an effort to shut the door of the house but was shot down in the act of doing so, and indiscriminate murder of all the persons in the house consisting of one man, to wit, Mr. Pettygrew, four women Mrs. Davis, Mrs. Pettygrew, Mrs. Hall (my mother) and Miss Davis about fifteen years of age and six children, four girls and two boys, and four men killed out of the house, Viz, Mr. Davis, Mr. Hall, William Norris and Henry George, in all fifteen persons, the whole scene transpired within ten minutes as I think.”

John Henderson, three Hall boys, and two Davis boys working in the field escaped. Rachel Hall and her sister Sylvia, 19, were taken captive by the war party.

While Henderson and the Hall boys made a panic-stricken run overland to Ottawa, the Indians took the two girls to Black Hawk’s band, despite the fact that only three of the raiding party were Sauks, the rest being Potawatomis.

General Edmund P. Gaines commanded the Western Military Department–which included Illinois–during the Black Hawk War. Gaines was generally sympathetic to Native Americans and opposed President Andrew Jackson’s Indian removal policies. Gaines expressed surprise at how unprepared the Illinois settlers of the 1830s were to defend themselves when war broke out.

As soon as word about the attack reached the authorities, action was taken to secure the return of the girls, including dispatching Chief Waubonsee on a mission to gain their release. His mission came to naught, however, as the girls had already been ransomed by the Winnebagos, who were trying their best to stay on the good side of the Americans in the midst of the war.

In an fascinating sidelight, shortly after the end of the Black Hawk war, warrants were issued at the courthouse in Ottawa for the arrest of Keewassee and two other Potowatomi warriors, Ta-qua- wee and Comee, for the murder of the settlers at the Davis cabin. Interestingly enough, charges were dropped against all three in 1834 because Sylvia and Rachel Hall could not positively identify the members of the war party.

Marauding groups of Indians prowled the valley. At Georgetown (now Newark), they looted and burned George Hollenback’s trading post. Robert Beresford (considered the county’s first permanent settler) and one of his sons were killed by Indians near Ottawa.

But all was not so grim—the war didn’t prove to be the sort of brutal, scorched earth Indian war we have heard so much about in American history. For instance, when William and Emily Harris left their Fox Township cabin to escape, Emily’s elderly father, Mr. Combs, helpless with rheumatism, requested he be left behind, saying he would only slow the rest of the family down. Since, he said, he had lived a full life, if he was to die, he was content to do so. But when the Indians discovered him in the Harris cabin ready to face his fate, he was carried, in his bed, out of the cabin, which was then burned. Other tribesmen made sure he was supplied with food and water before they left.

After a few other brief but violent incidents, the settlers slowly returned to their Fox Valley homes, spurred on by a cholera outbreak in Chicago. The U.S. Army had dispatched troops west to help fight the war, but along the way they’d contracted the deadly cholera. By the time they arrived at Chicago, the war’s action had moved west and north into modern Wisconsin, so the settlers remaining at Chicago’s Fort Dearborn decided that while Indians might kill them, cholera certainly would. Most quickly left to head back to their homes.

The Black Hawk War itself eventually ended when the bedraggled and starving Indians were trapped and most were massacred as they tried to cross the Mississippi during the Battle of the Bad Axe River in Wisconsin. Ironically, the war would have ended much sooner had the army had interpreters with them—Black Hawk’s tribesmen attempted to surrender several times but none of the whites in the army could understand them.

While the war was a terrible tragedy for the Indians involved and for the small number of whites killed, it did give many militia volunteers a chance to see the rich lands in the Fox Valley, spurring a flood of settlement to northern Illinois in 1833. It also marked the beginning of the end of Indian occupation of the Fox Valley, and by 1836, virtually all the region’s Native Americans had been forcibly removed west of the Mississippi River.

 

 

How places in Kendall County got their names…

Last fall, the University of Illinois Press had a truly can’t miss sale on electronic books. For $5 you would download any ebook in their entire catalog, which gave me the push I needed to read some good Illinois history.

I chose three books on subjects that looked interesting to me: Illinois History: A Reader; edited by Mark Hubbard; Illinois in the War of 1812 by Gillum Ferguson; and Place Names of Illinois by Edward Callary.

I picked the Illinois history reader mostly because it had a piece by my good friend Ray Hauser, formerly on the history faculty at Waubonsee Community College. Ray is THE expert on the Illinois Confederacy, and is a good and entertaining writer to boot. I’d been interested when Ferguson’s volume came out back in 2012, and had actually corresponded with her, promising I’d buy a copy—better late than never, I guess. I was finally prompted to buy the book because last fall I’d bought a copy of The War of 1812 in Wisconsin: The Battle for Prairie du Chien by Mary Elise Antoine while we were visiting the fascinating Apostle Islands Booksellers up in Bayfield, and was interested to see how the stories in the two books meshed. Because, after all, during the War of 1812, Illinois Territory included all of what became the state of Wisconsin, so I figured it would be hard to separate the two stories.

I’ve been reading all three as the mood strikes me. Lately I’ve been concentrating on Place Names of Illinois, which is a fascinating read. And that prompted me to take another look at the place names right here in Kendall County. Given the explosive population growth during the past several years, lots of county residents probably have no idea why Oswego, Yorkville, or even Kendall County have the names they do. There is, of course, a story behind each one of them.

Almost everyone, I suppose, at one time or another, has looked at a map or a road sign and wondered, “Where did that name come from?” Kendall County has more than its own share of places with names that probably sound obscure to those newer residents noted above. I’ve no doubt some may even be puzzling to those who’ve lived here their entire lives.

Lewis B. Judson and his partner Levi F. Arnold, laid Oswego out early enough in 1835 that it is the oldest town in Kendall County. (Little White School Museum collection)

So let’s take a look at some of those names, starting right here at my home. Oswego Township and the village of Oswego both carry the Mohawk Indian name that literally means, “place of the flowing out,” or more familiarly, “the mouth of the stream.” The village was first named Hudson by the two men who laid it out back in 1835, Levi F. Arnold and Lewis B. Judson. Both were native New Yorkers, and picked a familiar name for their new town. When the village was awarded a post office in 1837, however, the government decided to call the post office Lodi. Two names for on the same town was clearly confusing, so later that same year, the four or five property owning male residents of the tiny village gathered and voted (no women allowed to vote back then, whether they owned property or not) on a permanent name, deciding on yet another familiar New York name, Oswego, by a margin of a single vote. When the Illinois General Assembly established townships in 1850, residents sensibly decided to name the township after the village.

Little Rock Township and the village of Little Rock are named after the creek over that direction. The City of Plano was laid out by early settler and businessman Lewis Steward, who told the CB&Q Railroad he’d establish a town if they’d run their line through his property. Which they did, and which he did. John Hollister, one of Stewrd’s associates gave the new town the Spanish word for plain, because, the town’s founders decided, it accurately described the new community’s site.

Bristol Township and the current village of Bristol are both named after early settler Lyman Bristol. In terms of area, Bristol is the smallest among Kendall County’s nine townships.

The modern village of Bristol was originally called Bristol Station because of the depot the CB&Q established there in the early 1850s when the railroad’s main line extended west of the Fox River. During that era, modern Yorkville was separated into two villages, Yorkville south of the Fox River and Bristol north of the river. The two communities finally merged into a single city in the late 1950s, and the “station” was finally dropped from today’s Bristol’s name.

Andrew Jackson’s political fixer and postmaster general, Amos Kendall, in an image created n 1844, just three years after Kendall County was established by the Illinois General Assembly.

Kendall Township, and the county as well, are named after Amos Kendall, journalist and political crony of Andrew Jackson. Kendall was Jackson’s primary political hatchetman and as Postmaster General, handled passing out thousands of postmaster patronage jobs throughout the nation. Jackson basically invented the spoils system, and made sure the postmaster in every town was his personal representative. We might cringe a bit at that today, but at least it gave the White House a direct line into every community, large and small, in the entire country.

Yorkville was named after the village in New York from which some of the early residents came. The north side of modern Yorkville, as noted above, was first known as Bristol and was a separate village until 1957 when Bristol and Yorkville merged.

Boulder Hill, the huge unincorporated subdivision between Oswego and Montgomery east of the Fox River, was named after the Boulder Hill Stock Farm owned by the Bereman Family. The Beremans were famed for their thoroughbred Percheron draft horses and prize cattle. Developer Don L. Dise bought the stock farm, which covered more than 700 acres, in the early 1950s to develop his new community. Bereman once owned more than 1,000 acres of land in Oswego Township. Bereman’s sprawling farm was merely a hobby; he made his fortune manufacturing and selling freckle cream, which was advertised to eliminate skin blemishes and give women smooth, white skin so prized during the Victorian era.

NaAuSay Township was given a made-up name that some of the earliest township residents insisted meant “headwaters of the AuSable.” If it means what they thought it meant, it’s a fitting name since at least one branch of AuSable Creek starts in the township before flowing to its mouth on the Illinois River. AuSable Creek carries a French name generally said to mean “Sandy Creek.” It was a major landmark from colonial times until the 19th Century and is mentioned in many 19th Century Indian treaties.

Big Grove Township was named after the large grove of trees in Sections 9, 10, 15, and 16 of that township when settlers arrived in the 1830s. Newark was first called Georgetown after its founder, George Hollenback when Hollenback laid it out in 1835. Because of a conflict with another Georgetown elsewhere in Illinois, the General Assembly approved renaming it Newark on Feb. 16, 1843, after Newark, Ohio, which had been named after Newark, New Jersey.

Daniel Platt built his second stagecoach in at Plattville from limestone he quarried himself a few miles away. It replaced his first log tavern (Little White School Museum collection)

Lisbon Township and the Village of Lisbon both carry the name of the city in Portugal. According to early histories, settlers wanted to give their new home a different name from any of the county’s other towns. Plattville was named after its founder, Daniel Platt. Platt hailed from Plattsburg, N.Y., which his ancestors also founded.

Waubonsie Creek is named for the well-known Pottawatomie war chief who lived in the area. Waubonsee also gave his name to Waubonsee Community College in Sugar Grove and Waubonsie Valley High School in Aurora. Note the different spellings—since the chief could neither read nor write English, feel free to spell it however you like. Waubonsie was also the name of a large reed marsh extending over some 350 acres near the intersection of U.S. Route 30 and U.S. Route 34 in Oswego and Montgomery. The marsh was drained in the early 1900s, but still reappears after heavy rains.

Morgan Creek is named for Ebenezer Morgan, an early Oswego Township settler and millwright. Hollenback Creek is named for the Hollenback family, early settlers and business leaders, noted above.

Bartlett Creek, also called Bartlett’s Run, which snakes through Oswego and crosses Main Street in downtown Oswego a block south of the old village hall, is named after the Bartlett family, early Oswego settlers. The small house on the west side of Main Street where it crosses the creek was built by the Bartletts when they came from New York in 1837, and may be the oldest house in Oswego.

Seward Township is named after New York Gov. William H. Seward, later U.S. Secretary of State under Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Johnson. The township was originally named Franklin, after Benjamin Franklin, but the name had to be changed after it was discovered another Illinois township already carried that name.

Fox Township is, of course, named after the Fox River. Millbrook is named for the mill that used to be there back in the 19th Century.

The Mo-Ah-Way Reserve in the far southwest corner of Oswego Township and the Waish-Kee-Shaw Reserve in the far southwest corner of Oswego Township and extreme northwest corner of NaAuSay Township as drawn on the original plat map of Oswego Township published in 1842 from a survey taken in 1838. (Little White School Museum collection)

In the Treaty of 1829 signed at Prairie du Chien in Wisconsin, the U.S. Government granted reserves of land to two Indians then living in Kendall County. The larger Waish Kee Shaw Reserve went to the Indian wife of fur trader and businessman David Laughton and to her son, Joseph. The other reserve was granted to an individual named Mo-Ah-Way, of whom little else is known. Reservation Road bisects the two reserves, thus the road’s name. And the Oswegoland Park District’s Waa Kee Sha Park was named after Waish Kee Shaw. There is no evidence either Waish Kee Shaw or Mo-Ah-Way ever lived on their reserves.

Montgomery, which now extends well into Kendall County, was originally named Graytown after its founder, Daniel Gray. But again, a name conflict required a change, so it was renamed Montgomery after the county in New York many settlers came from.

The names of roads, towns, and streams can be a sort of guide to the history of an area. In our own area, Indian, French, and early pioneer influences are all evident. Knowing the origin of local place names is one way to make local history come alive.

One of these days, I’ll take a look at the names of the rural post offices that used to dot the landscape until the U.S. Postal Service initiated Rural Free Delivery, because that’s another fascinating look at a time so far in the past nobody remembers it any more.

When Kendall County Guardsmen policed the southern Illinois mine wars

Taylorville, in south-central Illinois, was in the news this past week after it got hit by a powerful tornado. And hearing about Taylorville on the news reminded me about the town’s old connection with Kendall County.

That relationship, memorable though brief, goes back to the 1930s, when there were problems—big problems—in the Illinois coalfields that surround Taylorville in Christian County.

The nation’s economic conditions, and it slipped into the Great Depression just kept getting worse. And then, in the midst of all the economic turmoil on July 9, 1932, the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA), under the leadership of the pugnacious John L. Lewis, made a deal with the owners of coal mines around Taylorville and other nearby towns. Negotiations on a new four-year contract championed by Lewis had been dragging on since the spring, and the miners were anxious to get back to work. But when the union and the companies finally settled and the miners found out the details of the agreement, they were outraged.

Lewis had agreed to a cut in the basic daily wage from $6.10 a day to just $5. Lewis insisted it was the best deal the miners could get considering the economic shape the country was in. His argument was that the companies were in danger of going broke altogether. Not surprisingly, however, the members’ vote on the new contract went down by more than 2-1.

But Lewis was determined to force the contract through, and he ordered UMWA District 12 President John H. Walker to sell the new contract to his angry members, while Lewis traveled through safer areas of the state to lobby for acceptance of the pact. When Walker spoke to miners at Gillespie, physical violence nearly broke out.

A second vote on the contract was held Aug. 6, and Lewis and his union officers announced it had passed. But before the vote could be certified, the tally sheets were said to have been stolen. A couple days later, Lewis ordered District 12 miners to accept the new contract. But rebellion was in the air.

Local police and the state police were often hostile to organized labor during the southern Illinois mine wars. The Taylorville confrontations were unusual in that the United Mine Workers were allied with coal company owners against the new Progressive Miners of America. (minewar.org image)

On Aug. 14 in the Macoupin County mining community of Benld, miners met and voted to go to neighboring Taylorville and close down the Peabody Coal Company mine there—Taylorville’s miners had voted in favor of the contract and had gone back to work. By Aug. 19, a convoy of some 1,500 miners left for Taylorville where they successfully shut down the mine—the Christian County miners refused to cross their picket line.

Farther south in Illinois, the protests were not successful, resulting in the so-called “Battle of Mulkeytown,” in which five miners were injured by sheriff’s deputies.

In early September disaffected miners met at Gillespie and established a new union, the Progressive Miners of America, in direct opposition to Lewis’ UMWA. Christian County—and Taylorville—became the battlefield between the two sides. While the “Proggies” managed to negotiate a slightly better contract, Peabody officials refused to hire any PMA workers. In fact, PMA membership became a ticket to being fired in most mines.

The upstart Progressive Miners of America tried to foil the United Mineworkers’ John L. Lewis and the coal companies’ efforts to cut miners’ pay. The companies and the UMWA responded with violence. (minewars.org image)

With this as a backdrop, in 1933, open warfare finally broke out between the PMA on one side and the mine owners and the UMWA on the other. A headline in the Taylorville Breeze on Wednesday, Jan. 4, 1933 reported: “4 Killed, 14 Shot in Mine Battle.” According to the news story, PMA opened fire on “scabs and special deputies” at Peabody’s Taylorville Mine No. 7. The report said the PMA miners opened up with rifles from “several homes,” and included machine gun fire from Freddie Bassana’s gas station (Bassana was subsequently charged with murder).

Clearly things were getting out of hand in Taylorville, so Gov. Henry Horner called out the Illinois National Guard. Initially, five infantry companies from Danville, Champagne, Springfield, and Salina were activated, along with a headquarters company from Sullivan to respond to Horner’s call.

The Illinois National Guard was dispatched to the Taylorville region in 1933 to maintain peace as the unions and companies fought each other over a new labor contract. (minewars.org image)

And ominously, on Jan. 7, 17 cases of explosives were reported stolen from a nearby mine.

Tensions went up further in February when National Guard cavalry from Chicago was stationed in Taylorville. The cavalrymen were generally well-to-do, and didn’t get along at all with the miners. By March 28, 10 miners had been killed and 100 wounded in the mine war. On April 3, a Baptist church in Taylorville was bombed, and a gun battle in Duquoin on April 7, left two Progressives dead. On April 13, perhaps thinking to cash in on the situation, Montgomery-Ward advertised a “Special Sale” on .22 cal. Rifles—just $3.41.

Then on May 13, the Breeze reported that the National Guard company from Kankakee that had been on duty at Taylorville was being replaced by Company E of the 129th Infantry, based in tiny Plattville, right here in Kendall County.

Leadership of Company E, 129th Illinois National Guard Infantry, pictured about 1935 at Camp Grant, Illinois. Company commander Capt. Charles “Timmy” Howell is second from left; his son, Clyde, is on the far right. (Little White School Museum collection)

The company had been established and accepted for service on July 16, 1923 with Capt. David Mewhirter, a World War I veteran, in command. In June 1928, Capt. Charles Howell succeeded Mewhirter. Howell was in command when the company was deployed to Taylorville.

On April 5, 1933, the Kendall County Record reported that “Capt. Charles Howell of Company E. Plattville, was in receipt Friday of orders for the men to be ready and fully equipped for service at Taylorville, the scene during many months of serious mine labor trouble and riots. When the orders for actual movement to the area will be received it cannot be foreseen, but farmers here are looking around for substitute hired men who can fill in during the Company’s absence Since the beginning of the disputes at Taylorville, national guard companies have been sent to the area in rotation for stated periods of time.”

Company E. Model 1903 Springfield rifles they carried while on duty at Taylorville, stacked outside the armory tent during their 1935 deployment to Camp Grant. (Little White School Museum collection)

The Daily Herald in nearby Morris reported on May 11 that: “A telephone message was received at midnight last night by Capt. Charles Howell in Plattville where the company quarters are located, to report for duty in Taylorville and the company of 60 men will leave for the trouble zone Saturday night by bus.”

According to the May 17, 1933 Kendall County Record, “Company E, 129th Infantry, left Yorkville Saturday night for Taylorville, where they will relieve the company from Kankakee and resume the guard of the mines. The company left in special buses. A truck carried the necessary equipment for the stay. The boys will return in two weeks. Their company is the last one in the district to be called. Capt. Charles F. Howell is in command. His lieutenants are Arthur Hubbard, first [lieutenant[; Irwin Knutson, second [lieutenant]; Rasmus Knutson, William Reed, Harvey Reed, Vernon Wright, Nels Nelson, Gordon Bertram, and Wilbert Henne, sergeants; and Harold Stein, mess sergeant.”

From both press reports and letters home, Company E did well. Years later, Clyde Howell, Capt. Howell’s son, recalled that “There were no problems when E Company was down there because they could read each other because everybody in E Company was a farmer. When you had somebody from Chicago, it wasn’t so good.”

On May 24, 1933, Capt. Howell wrote in a letter to the editor of the Record that “Taylorville is a very pretty town and the people treat us fine, but the small mining towns around are not so good. Fights are common afternoons and evenings.”

When Company E’s tour was up, the Guardsmen headed back to their homes, farms, and businesses in Kendall County. While it didn’t seem like much at the time, the experience they gained served several members of Company E in good stead some years later when World War II broke out. After it was nationalized, Company E and the rest of the 129th served in the Pacific Theatre throughout the war.

The boys from Kendall County made a good showing, both during their service during the mine war, and later on, during their actual combat against Japan. A pretty good showing for the farmers and small businessmen coming out of the nation’s smallest National Guard Armory. How tiny Plattville got a certified armory is a fascinating story in itself—but one for another time…