The Black Hawk War · minute men, a stockade, and the "bloody three hundred"

1832

The county's first war was a fright that never arrived — and its record survives in a participant's own telling: When Black Hawk's war broke out in 1832, South Bend raised a company and built a fort. Colonel Hiram Dayton beat up for volunteers, drilled the company until he was satisfied with its proficiency, and dismissed the men to meet again at one minute's call — "hence they were called minute men," the narrator says, whispering that he was one of the band himself. The town then built a stockade on the triangular piece of ground bounded by Jefferson Street on the south, St. Joseph Street on the west and Pearl Street (now Vistula Avenue) on the northeast: a wall of split-log puncheons set three feet in the ground and rising nine or ten feet, pierced with port-holes.

A party — the narrator names Jonathan A. Liston, Elisha Egbert and Dr. Stoddard, "but I am not certain as to the persons" — rode sixty or seventy miles west on reconnaissance and reported before Peter Johnson's tavern that there was not a hostile Indian within a hundred and fifty miles, and that Pokagon was friendly, with the American flag flying over his cabin. At the blockhouse on Portage Prairie, the same recollection tells, a picket found asleep and snoring on his post was solemnly sentenced by his officers to be shot — and then let go, the officers having discovered in the night that they had no lawful court to try him. The narrator himself files the story's limits: "I will not swear this story is all true, but it is in substance as it was reported at the time." The war's coda was the county's first press-and-arms confrontation.

The governor had called out a battalion of three hundred cavalry under Colonel Rupel which never got nearer than a hundred miles of where its services were needed; John D. Defrees's St. Joseph Beacon said in print (issues of 27 June and 4 July 1832) that this "holiday battalion" would never be found within a hundred miles of a hostile Indian. When the battalion came back through South Bend, its men surrounded Defrees in the street and swore his press and type should go into the river; Captain Anthony Defrees, the editor's uncle, held the hewed-log printing office at the southwest corner of St. Joseph and Pearl streets with five or six armed men for three or four hours until the squads withdrew. The battalion was "always afterwards recognized and known as 'the bloody three hundred.'" Howard calls the services of Dayton's corps "unrequited" — the county's first soldiers were never paid for the war that did not come.

Sources:

1. Howard, History of St. Joseph County (1907), vol. 2 — the participant recollection printed in the military chapter (Dayton's minute men, the stockade's site and construction, the reconnaissance and Pokagon's flag, the sleeping picket at the Portage Prairie blockhouse, with the narrator's own hedge), and the Beacon episode with the "bloody three hundred," the office's location and Anthony Defrees's defense.