Wisconsin's First Missing MIA
Although no battle ever raged at Fort Blue Mounds during the Black Hawk War 175 years ago, the first U.S. military veterans to see action in what is now Wisconsin do lie in unknown locations somewhere near the site.
By 1827, a national chase to find precious lead ore, similar to the later California Gold Rush of 1849, had reached the edge of present day Blue Mounds village. Among those eager to rake in riches on this new frontier was Ebenezer Brigham, who arrived at the Mounds in 1828. When Brigham discovered a valuable body of lead ore buried beneath the prairie soil, others soon followed. He established a boarding house and trading center, and eventually a post office to serve the growing community that would become Pokerville.
This scramble for land and riches throughout the Lead Region was heightening tensions between the new arrivals and the Native Americans, who had long fished its streams, hunted its woods and prairies, gathered food, held sacred ceremonies, and buried their dead in area hills and valleys. In May of 1832 rumors of the Sauk leader Black Hawk’s departure from a U.S. government-imposed home west of the Mississippi, and his planned return to the Wisconsin Territory with 400 warriors and 1,200 women, children and old men, set off a panic in lead mining settlements. Under Brigham’s direction, on the prairie near Blue Mounds the settlers quickly threw up a 45 by 55 foot log fort, whose protective walls and two blockhouses would house them for four anxious months. Thus encouraged not to flee, the fort’s residents instead became garrisoned volunteer members of General Henry Dodge’s Iowa-Michigan brigade from May 20 to Sept. 20, 1832.
Holed up in the small fort, the settlers had to leave occasionally for provisions. Setting out to gather water for the fort from a spring a mile away, Captain William G. Aubrey, a member of the garrison, was soon ambushed and killed by Indians. On June 20 a pair rode out from the fort about two miles to the northeast, where Indians ambushed them, killing Lieutenant George Force immediately and wounding Captain Emerson Green. With a broken arm, Green tried to escape toward the fort on horseback, but the Indians, also mounted and more numerous, succeeded in surrounding him and taking his life. These men’s bodies lay on the ground for about three days until General Henry Dodge came out from Dodgeville with the rangers or volunteers and buried them just where they had been killed. Afterward, their remains were exhumed and buried near the fort.
Lieutenant Force had been wearing a gold watch, which he used to regulate the timing of guard duty. W. Rowan, a Cross Plains area settler, found this watch later that summer on the charred remains of a slain Indian. Rowan, in pursuit of Black Hawk, came upon the Indian’s body in a burned-over prairie near Pheasant Branch Creek.
Despite repeated surrender attempts, Black Hawk’s band of Sac and Fox Indians was virtually annihilated at the junction of the Bad Axe and Mississippi Rivers Aug. 2, 1832. Thus ended one Native American group’s efforts to confront the pressures of white settlement. The Black Hawk War was not only one of the most tragic historic episodes in Wisconsin, but also one of the most significant. It gave the federal government the excuse needed to remove Indians from the territory, which paved the way for more rapid white settlement and earlier statehood.
Accounts of these attacks and burials vary slightly in the several writings of the day. However, according to former State Archaeologist, Bob Birmingham, it is known for certain that the remains of these early veterans are somewhere out in the fields surrounding the fort site, their actual resting places lost to history.
Artist rendering of Blue Mound's Fort