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]

By the end of the month the troops crossed into Michigan
Territory--what is now Wisconsin--and July was spent in floundering
through swamps and stumbling through forests, in pursuit of the now
nearly exhausted Black Hawk. A few days before the last battle of
the war, that of Bad Axe on August 2d, in which the whites finally
massacred most of the Indian band, Lincoln's company was disbanded at
Whitewater, Wisconsin, and he and his friends started for home. The
volunteers in returning, in almost every case, suffered much from
hunger. Mr. Durly, of Hennepin, Illinois, who walked home from Rock