The War of 1812 at the fort

A fort that could be fired upon

To understand the sieges 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, attackers tried to storm the fort outright and were driven off by cannon fire. 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. The fort was attacked in March 1812 as the fighting opened.

The serious blow came in September 1812. Attackers laid siege and pressed in close against the walls. At one point the post was nearly overrun. What saved it was artillery: cannon fire destroyed a fortified position the attackers had built near the fort, breaking the assault before it could carry the walls. The garrison survived, but barely, and the siege 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 claimed to have shot down the fort's flag. 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: the firewood siege

The fort lived through 1812, but the pressure never lifted. In 1813 a determined siege cut the garrison off from its firewood. On the Mississippi, going into the cold months, that was nearly as deadly as cutting off powder and shot. Soldiers cannot hold a post they cannot heat, cook in, or keep men alive in, especially a post already sitting on ground that gave every advantage to the people outside.

The garrison made the only choice that left them alive and free: they would give up the fort, but they would not hand it over.

The night they burned it

In September 1813, the soldiers set fire to the fort as they abandoned it, so that no enemy could take it whole. Then they slipped out after dark. They had dug a trench down toward the river, and under cover of night they moved through it to boats waiting in the water. The boats carried them away. 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.