Fort Armstrong (Illinois)
Of stone and timber construction, 300 feet square, the fort was begun in May 1816 and completed the following year and consisted of three large blockhouses, like the replica, on its prominent corners.
[2] In 1805, when President Thomas Jefferson sent Lewis and Clark on their expedition into the Louisiana Territory, he also sent Lieutenant Zebulon Pike and Major Stephen H. Long up the Mississippi River to gather data and determine strategic sites for forts.
It was our garden, like the white people have near their big villages, which supplied us with strawberries, blackberries, gooseberries, plums, apples and nuts of different kinds.
The US wanted to establish a military presence to dissuade the French and English Canadians (who traded in areas nearby) from encroaching upon the unorganized territory.
The Sauk disapproved of its construction; Black Hawk wrote in his memoir, "When we arrived we found that the troops had come to build a fort on Rock Island.
Unhappy with the treaty and distrusting of the five chiefs who had signed, Black Hawk gathered other disaffected Sauk and Fox to his cause and crossed back into Illinois, where he began raiding settlements and farms.
[5] During the Black Hawk War of 1832, General Winfield Scott led 1000 troops to Fort Armstrong, to assist the U.S. Army garrison and militia volunteers stationed there.
General Scott's army had contracted Asiatic cholera before they left the state of New York, and by the time the final march from Fort Dearborn in modern day Chicago to Rock Island, Illinois was completed only 220 soldiers remained alive.
Black Hawk, two of his sons, and other Sac and Fox warriors had been taken to the fort as prisoners after their captures following the Battle of Bad Axe.
They spent the winter held at Jefferson Barracks in St. Louis, after which the Army took the men on a tour of Eastern cities, hoping to impress them with the wealth and power of white civilization.
After a brief period of imprisonment at Fortress Monroe at Hampton Roads, Virginia, the Sauk and Fox warriors were allowed to return to Iowa.
