The War of 1812 at the fort

A fort that could be fired upon

To understand the attacks you have to start with the ground. The fort was placed at the base of a bluff next to a ravine. The high ground above it and the broken edges of the ravine gave attackers cover and a line of fire down into the post. The garrison of about 60 soldiers had to fight every engagement from a position that an enemy could shoot into. That single fact runs through everything that happened here.

The trouble started before the war did. In April 1809, during a council inside the unfinished stockade, Sauk warriors outside began a dance and moved toward the gate, meaning to get inside. Lieutenant Kingsley had been warned. He turned out his men and had the cannon wheeled to the gateway with a soldier holding a lit match, and the Sauk leaders called the dancers back. No shot was fired. Black Hawk, who was there, wrote later that had they got in, the garrison would not have survived it. The post held, but the attempt showed how exposed it was and how little goodwill surrounded it.

1812: the war comes upriver

When the United States went to war with Britain in 1812, the conflict on the Upper Mississippi grew with it. Many Native nations in the region were allied with the British, who supplied arms and encouraged resistance to American settlement and forts. In March 1812, as the fighting opened, Ho-Chunk (Winnebago) war parties working the ground around the post killed two soldiers: a corporal ambushed while hunting two miles out, and a sentry shot at his post who died of his wounds two weeks later.

The serious blow came in September 1812. About two hundred Ho-Chunk (Winnebago) and Sauk (Sac) warriors surrounded the fort and fought it for four days. They did not need to build works to fire from: the river bank ran within thirty paces of the walls and a wooded spring run gave sixty yards of cover, and from that ground they could shoot into the post almost at will. Their aim was to burn the garrison out. The soldiers answered with musket fire and a howitzer, and burned their own trading house outside the walls rather than leave it standing as cover for the men firing on them. On the fourth day the attackers withdrew, their ammunition spent. The garrison lost one man killed and one wounded, and the attack made plain that the fort could be threatened any time the country around it turned hostile.

Black Hawk and the flag

Among the fighters at the fort was Black Hawk, the Sauk leader whose name would later be tied to the 1832 war that bears it. He took part in the fighting here, and in his own account he shot the halyard in two and brought the fort's flag down: “I took my rifle and shot in two the cord by which they hoisted their flag, and prevented them from raising it again.” The garrison recorded the same moment from inside the walls, a shot cutting the halyards after hours of firing and a shout going up outside. The detail has stayed with the story ever since: the American banner over a struggling frontier post, brought down by one of the people whose land the fort was meant to hold.

1813: resistance and a failing supply line

The fort lived through 1812, but the pressure never lifted. Native warriors continued to resist the American military presence, and leaving the walls stayed dangerous. In July 1813, six soldiers were killed in two attacks, including two men from a party sent out to cut wood. Those were the last recorded attacks on the fort before its abandonment.

By fall a second problem had become critical: provisions. The fort depended on private contractors and river transportation for much of its food and supplies, and that system repeatedly failed. By October some of the garrison's pork and flour was spoiled and unfit to eat. A post that could not be reliably fed could not be held through a Mississippi winter, especially one sitting on ground that gave every advantage to the people outside.

The November evacuation

With winter approaching and resupply increasingly uncertain, Lieutenant Thomas Hamilton ordered the post evacuated. In November 1813, the soldiers loaded government property aboard boats and withdrew down the Mississippi. Before departing, they set fire to the fort so that no opposing force could occupy or use it. The fort was never captured. The post that had been built in 1808 burned behind them.

Black Hawk later said that nothing remained but the chimneys.

That line has become the way the fort's first chapter ends. The walls, the blockhouses, the barracks, and the trading house were gone. The chimneys stood for a while over the ashes, and then the river town grew up around the site and the burned fort sank into the ground, where it waited more than 150 years to be found again.