With the exception of a scouting trip to Galena and back, fruitful of
nothing more than Indian scares, Major Iles's company remained quietly
in the neighborhood of the Rapids of the Illinois until June 16th,
when Major Anderson mustered it out. Four days later, June 20th,
at the same place, he mustered Lincoln in again as a member of an
independent company under Captain Jacob M. Early. His arms were
valued this time at only fifteen dollars, his horse and equipment at
eighty-five dollars.[D] The army moved up Rock River soon after the
middle of June. Black Hawk was overrunning the country, and scattering
death wherever he went. The settlers 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."