Pottawatomies. But the time was passed for honorable alliances among
the Indians. His oath-bound confederates gave him little assistance,
and soon cast in their lot with the stronger party.

This movement excited general alarm in the State. General Henry
Atkinson, commanding the United States troops, sent a formal summons
to Black Hawk to return; but the old chief was already well on his way
to the lodge of his friend, the prophet Wabokishick, at Prophetstown,
and treated the summons with contemptuous defiance. The Governor
immediately called for volunteers, and was himself astonished at the
alacrity with which the call was answered. Among those who enlisted at
the first tap of the drum was Abraham Lincoln, and equally to his
surprise and delight he was elected captain of his company. The
volunteer organizations of those days were conducted on purely
democratic principles. The company assembled on the green, an election
was suggested, and three-fourths of the men walked over to where
Lincoln was standing; most of the small remainder joined themselves to
one Kirkpatrick, a man of some substance and standing from Spring
Creek. We have the word of Mr. Lincoln for it, that no subsequent
success ever gave him such unmixed pleasure as this earliest
distinction. It was a sincere, unsought tribute of his equals to those
physical and moral qualities which made him the best man of his
hundred, and as such was accepted and prized.

[Sidenote: Reynolds, "Life and Times," p. 363.]

At the Beardstown rendezvous, Captain Lincoln's company was attached
to Colonel Samuel Thompson's regiment, the Fourth Illinois, which was
organized at Richland, Sangamon County, on the 21st of April, and
moved on the 27th, with the rest of the command under General Samuel