St. Vrain massacre

The St. Vrain massacre took place on May 24, 1832, near present-day Pearl City, Illinois, in an area known as Kellogg's Grove, during the Black Hawk War. The dead included United States Indian Agent Felix St. Vrain, John Fowler, William Hale, and Aaron Hawley. Some accounts reported that St. Vrain's body was mutilated.

St. Vrain and his party were traveling from Dixon's Ferry, Illinois, to Galena, Illinois, after General Henry Atkinson ordered St. Vrain to deliver dispatches to Fort Armstrong. The group had originally been purchasing cattle in Sangamon County when news of conflict with Black Hawk's band reached them, prompting their return north. Along the way, at Buffalo Grove, they discovered the body of William Durley, a victim of the earlier Buffalo Grove massacre, and returned to Dixon's Ferry to report the find before setting out again with St. Vrain the next day.

On the morning of May 24, after stopping for breakfast about three miles from their overnight camp, the men were approached by roughly 30 warriors. In the ensuing attack, St. Vrain, Fowler, Hale, and Hawley were killed, while Thomas Kenney, Aquilla Floyd, and Alexander Higginbotham escaped and reached Galena three days later. An account attributed to Gen. George Wallace Jones, St. Vrain's brother-in-law who identified his body, described the warriors scalping the dead and further mutilating St. Vrain's remains; at least one source indicated the mutilation began before he died.

The attackers were not part of Black Hawk's main band but were reportedly en route to join it. Contemporary and later accounts differ on their identity: older histories, including works by Frank Stevens (1903) and Nehemiah Matson (1887), described the attackers as Sac and associated with a chief called "Little Bear," who was said to have adopted St. Vrain as a "blood brother." Perry A. Armstrong's 1887 history disputed this, denying that Little Bear existed as a Sauk or Fox chief. Modern sources instead identify the attackers as Ho-Chunk warriors acting without the sanction of their nation, most of whom otherwise sided with the United States during the war. A May 30, 1832 New Galenian article speculated the attackers belonged to Keokuk's band, though Keokuk's band was not near the scene and had volunteered to assist settlers against Black Hawk.

Following the massacre, a detachment led by Colonel Henry Dodge recovered and buried the remains of St. Vrain, Hale, and Fowler; Hawley's body was never recovered. Public and military records indicate that Aquilla Floyd, long listed among the dead on a monument erected in 1886, actually survived, was discharged from the militia in August 1832, and died of old age in Kentucky in November 1879.