Colonel Davenport House

06/10/2026

The Dickson or "Pioneer" Cemetery, near the Black Hawk State Historic Site, Rock Island.

William Dickson (1783–1869) was an early pioneer, a War of 1812 veteran, and a founder of Camden Mills (now Milan, Illinois). He is remembered in Rock Island County for donating two acres of his land in 1836 to establish what became the first non-native public burial ground in the county and served as the primary burial ground for South Rock Island's earliest settlers.

Among the interred: The Rinnah Wells family who staked a claim in 1827 near the historic Sauk village on the north side of the Rock River, and later established land claims on the river. Joshua Vandruff who arrived shortly after in 1828, initially came alone from Pennsylvania before bringing his wife and large family of children. Vandruff built a cabin on a 220-acre island in the Rock River. He and Rinnah Wells effectively shared the island early on, building cabins just a few hundred feet apart.

It is said that Black Hawk once paddled over to Vandruff's Island where Joshua was establishing an inn and knocked the head off of a barrel of whiskey to stop him from selling it to Sauk Indians. Joshua Vandruff is not buried at the Dickson cemetery but many of his family members were. When Chippiannock Cemetery was established in 1856, many remains were moved there. Dickson Cemetery later became a pauper's graveyard.

At some point Dickson sold his land (probably around 1843 when established himself at Camden Mills) including the cemetery to David B. Sears who deeded the latter to Rock Island County in 1908, who turned it over to the State of Illinois in 1942. The last person to be buried there was John Long, one of Colonel Davenport's murderers. After Long was hung in 1845 his body was donated to Dr. Patrick Gregg who displayed the skeleton for years in his Rock Island Arsenal office.

In one version of the story the skeleton was given to Dr. Charles Kahlke of Chicago after Gregg's death and donated to the Rock Island County Historical Society in 1940. However, John H. Hauberg Jr. claimed in his memoirs that the skeleton hung in the basement of the Hauberg Estate for a time when he was a boy (he was born in 1916). His father, John Sr. was a prominent member of the RICHS.

John Long's skeleton was later displayed in a glass case in the Rock Island County Courthouse before being moved to the Hauberg Indian Museum around 1975. On September 14, 1978, Long's skeleton was finally laid to rest in an unmarked grave at Dickson Cemetery. His brother Aaron's body was also donated for research in 1845, but the whereabouts of his remains are unknown. The cemetery was neglected and many markers were stolen before it was cleaned up in 2015 when Boy Scout Noah Kelly made it his Eagle Scout project.

06/08/2026

On this day in 1988, the Rock Island Arsenal was designated a National Historic Landmark by the National Park Service.

06/07/2026

The Full Sauk and Meskwaki Migration Map & the Fox Misnomer

Thanks to Suzanne Wanatee Buffalo and Johnathan Buffalo for the full version of this map. Due to interest and questions about the first map it seemed proper to post it again uncropped. One commenter (Tkéyanmet Ndezhnekas) on that post was kind enough to share a similar map of Kickapoo migration with me, and it shows them migrating from southern Michigan to Wisconsin via the southern route around the tip of Lake Michigan. The Kickapoo were close cultural relatives of the Sauk and Meskwaki, so it’s possible that some bands of the latter two tribes may have also taken that southern route, but there is no Meskwaki oral tradition that supports this theory.

Evidence that the Sauk and Meskwaki were once in Michigan can be found in place names like Saginaw, which is widely considered an Anglicized corruption of the Ojibwe word for “where the Sauk were” or “Sauk Town.” Specifically, it derives from the Ojibwe term zaagiinaad-wiikwed (“Outlet Bay”) or osaginang (“place of the Sac/Sauk”). When French and English colonists transliterated this, it became known as Sac or Sauk, with “Saginaw” adapting to mean the place where they lived.

The first documented contact between the French and the Meskwaki was recorded by Jesuit missionary Father Gabriel Druillettes in 1656 when the tribe was living below Green Bay along the Fox and Wolf Rivers and near Lake Winnebago. A decade later Father Claude Allouez wrote that the “country of the Outagami lies Southward toward the Lake of the Ilimouek [Lake Michigan]. They are a populous tribe, of about a thousand men bearing arms, and given to hunting and warfare. They have fields of Indian corn and live in a country offering excellent facilities for the hunting of the Wildcat, Stag, wild Ox, and Beaver. Canoes they do not use, but commonly make their journeys by land, bearing their packages and their game on their shoulders.”

Father Claude-Jean Allouez used the term “Outagamie” because his earliest and most intensive experiences in the Great Lakes region were spent living among and learning the languages of the Anishinaabeg peoples—specifically the Ojibwe (Saulteurs) and Odawa (Ottawas). He had not yet visited the Meskwaki, he heard about them from his Ojibwe and Odawa informants, they described them using their own exonym: Odugameeg (people of the opposite shore, or the other side) which he Frenchified into “Outagamie”.

So, how did they get to “Fox”? I searched through a few volumes of The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents, and Allouez consistently called them the Outagamis. The most commonly repeated reason for the French calling the Meskwaki/Outagamie the “Fox” tribe of Indians is that there was some cultural misunderstanding between some French traders and some men who identified themselves by their clan name (Fox). I could find no first-hand or primary source for this story.

The “mistaken name” theory did not emerge until the 19th century, roughly 150 to 200 years after the French first encountered the Meskwaki. Reuben G. Thwaites (who edited the translated Jesuit Relations in 1899), and other ethnologists such as Albert Gallatin (Jefferson and Madison’s Secretary of State), and Truman Michelson appear to have popularized this version of the story. Perhaps there is a lost source for this mistake. Or perhaps it was perpetuated by historians and ethnologists because it effectively sanitizes colonial history. Modern Meskwaki are not a monolithic or single-minded people, but many do not believe this story.

There is no denying that the French did at some point start calling the Meskwaki les Renards or the Fox. In the foreword for Dr. Eric Zimmer’s book Red Earth Nation: A History of the Meskwaki Settlement (2021), Meskwaki Tribal Historian Johnathan Buffalo and tribal member Suzanne Wanatee Buffalo give a more nuanced, contextual explanation: the Meskwaki were so problematic for the French monarchy and the missionaries who subsequently held them in such low esteem that they were given a common, derisive name for cunning, destructive “varmints” — the Fox.

The Meskwaki were almost never in the good graces of the French King, who would have probably hunted foxes for sport. In Europe foxes were considered wily, but they were also considered pests; destructive, indiscriminate killers of valuable domestic fowl and livestock. The consistent tone of the communications between Paris and New France about the Meskwaki used heavily loaded, animalistic language, describing them as a pestilence that needed to be “destroyed” or “extirpated” from the woods. The “Fox clan” story is likely apocryphal, but all history is revisionist history and is an ongoing conversation that tries to reach a consensus. However, we do like to cling to long-held beliefs and familiar stories.

06/03/2026

UPDATE!! DUE TO A TRIBAL MEMBER'S PASSING, THIS EVENT HAS BEEN RESCHEDULED TO SATURDAY, JUNE 13.

Thanks to everyone who works for or partners with the Tribe and for doing the amazing work that you do in order to better the lives of people in our community, our employees, and our neighbors. Working together has been a strong tradition here in Iowa for a long time.

This presentation on June 6th takes a closer look at the Tribe's shared history with Iowa, a unique story in America without compare. This event is sponsored by the Iowa Department of Transportation, and we sincerely appreciate their steady long-lasting partnership in this and many other endeavors.

The Meskwaki Museum will also be open at noon for visitors before, during, and after the presentation. Stop by for a visit!

06/03/2026

The Sauk and Meskwaki Migration from Canada to the Mississippi Valley 1640-1740 (Map from the Meskwaki Tribal Museum)

During the period sometimes referred to as the Beaver Wars (1640 – 1701) the expansion of the Iroquois Confederacy’s hunting ground completely realigned the tribal geography of upper North America. Tribes such as the Sauk and Meskwaki, two distinct tribes originally from the Montral area who shared a similar Algonquian language and culture, were pushed up the St. Lawrence River Valley into the Great Lakes region. To counter the Iroquois alliance with the Dutch and then the British after 1664, the French strategy was to create an alliance with the new “western tribes” of the Great Lakes region, many of whom were rivals with each other at best, and enemies of the tribes whose land they were now encroaching on such as the Dakota Sioux. The Meskwaki settled in the Green Bay area along the Fox River and its tributary the Wolf River, but they never fully trusted the French.

In 1701 the Iroquois were a party to a treaty known as The Great Peace at Montreal with the French during which they pledged neutrality in exchange for the cessation of the near constant warfare. New France continued to pursue its western alliance and Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac’s proposal to establish a new fort at Detroit was approved by King Louis XIV and implemented after the Great Peace in Montreal. The plan for Detroit was to form a ‘Company of the Colony’ that could adequately supply the interior tribes with trade goods and draw them in closer proximity to the fort to mitigate intertribal fighting and blunt their attempts at diplomacy with the Iroquois (one Fox speaker at The Great Peace Conference stated that he regarded the Iroquois as his brothers). Another purpose for establishing Fort Detroit was to prevent the smuggling of western furs to the British at Albany.

During Queen Anne’s War (1702-1713) which was one of the many Anglo-French conflicts that had a colonial component during the Long Seventeenth Century (roughly 1598–1715), the Meskwaki remained “troublesome” for the French. They resisted efforts to join the French alliance, established a village at Fort Detroit, squabbled with their neighbors, and continued to pursue trade independent of the French. Jacques-Charles Renaud Dubuisson, Cadillac’s replacement as post commander at Detroit found the Fox troublesome for pilfering French cattle and boasting openly about their plans to trade with the British. In his memoirs Cadillac lamented that the Fox were growing powerful and more insolent, and that the war with the Iroquois had prevented New France from taking steps to humble them.

When King Louis XIV of France, the Sun King, died on 1 September 1715, his great-grandson Louis XV assumed the throne. He was five years old. Shortly after turning 13, then considered the age of maturity, Louis XV did something unprecedented in the province of New France: he encouraged his colonial officials to engage in a total war of annihilation against the Fox Indians. After the Fox attacked Fort Detroit, the Illinois, Miami, Ojibwa, Wyandot, Potawatomi, and Ottawa tribes demanded that the French join them in an attack on the nearby Fox and Mascouten villages. During a nineteen-day siege over one thousand Fox, Mascouten and Kickapoo were killed or captured while only one hundred escaped what can only be described as a massacre. This was the beginning of the “Fox Wars” with France.

The western Indian allies had pushed the Fox out of Detroit, and Dubuisson noted that a faction of the Saukies had even defected to the French side. The Fox dispersed into the Wisconsin woods but would not forget their betrayal, and they began a four-year campaign of raids and reprisals against Detroit and any Frenchmen found in the countryside. Despite the Fox making diplomatic inroads with the Ioway, Otoe, and even the Sioux, the relentless French pressure caused the Fox allies to fall away. Even the Mascouten and the Kickapoo were forced to fight for the French. Abandoned by allies, surrounded by enemies, and fleeing from the French, the Fox were caught in an open Illinois prairie and once again nearly annihilated. Only about fifty warriors managed to escape the slaughter and make their way back to Wisconsin, while the others were either killed or captured and enslaved.

The remnants of the Fox tribe sought refuge among their former allies, but the Mascouten and Kickapoo were too fearful to take them in. The fifty or so remaining Fox were taken in by a village of Saukies near Green Bay in 1733. The allied Sauk and Fox had to fight their way out of the Green Bay area and flee into Iowa where they fortified themselves along the Des Moines River for the inevitable French assault. The attack failed as the long journey in mid-winter exhausted the French expedition and sufficient Indian support failed to materialize. Many of the Huron and Potawatomi had deserted the French and the Kickapoo who agreed to go as guides intentionally led them in circles. In 1735 a war party of Kansas and Missourias forced the Sauk and Fox to abandon central Iowa for the Mississippi Valley where the Foxes split up, one band settling near the mouth of the Wisconsin River in northeastern Iowa and the other near the mouth of the Rock River in Illinois with the Saukies. By 1750 most of the Meskwaki were living along the lower Rock River, but later formed independent villages in the Mississippi Valley on the west side.

After the departure of French forces from the Illinois Country, the competition for trade between the Spanish to the south and the British (after the French and Indian war) to the north brought economic and political stability to the Sauk and Meskwaki villages in the Mississippi Valley. At these villages they planted corn in the spring, celebrated successful war campaigns against the Osage and the Illinois tribes in the summer, hunted and trapped for fur in the winter. For a few decades old men sat by their fires at night and told stories about defying the French. The U.S. would later recognize them as the confederated “Sac and Fox” tribe for treaty purposes.

05/25/2026

George Davenport – U.S. Army Veteran of the War of 1812
(Sketch image by Bruce Walters - River City Reader)

John King was born in or near Louth, Lincolnshire, England, on November 29, 1783, less than three months after the American Revolutionary War ended with England recognizing the United States as an independent nation. Young John was apprenticed to a tailor, but around 1800, according to family lore, his father placed him with an uncle on a merchant sea vessel. In 1804 King’s ship arrived in New York, and he would later tell the story about how his leg was badly injured when he jumped from the ship’s stern into a small boat to save a drowning shipmate who had fallen overboard, forcing him to stay behind. Convalescing from his injury in Rahway, New Jersey, King met Lt. William Lawrence, an Army recruiter who persuaded him to enlist. On October 23rd, 1805, George Davenport began his service in the U.S. Army for a term of five years with the rank of Private.

Davenport trained at Carlisle, Pennsylvania before marching to Louisiana to serve under General James Wilkinson during a tense territorial dispute between the United States and Spain over the western boundary of the Louisiana Purchase. Pvt. Davenport was involved in arresting one of Aaron Burr’s co-conspirators who were plotting with Wilkinson to carve out a private empire in the Spanish southwest during this standoff. While in New Orleans, Davenport was promoted to Corporal. In May 1808 while stationed at Fort Adams, about forty miles south of Natchez, Davenport was promoted to Sergeant. He was later moved to Fort Belle Fontaine, located on the Missouri River, just north of St. Louis, where he spent much of his time before being mustered out of the service. His enlistment expired in October 1810, but after a few weeks of civilian life he reenlisted for another five years.

Davenport’s time was also spent recruiting in Virginia, and when the War of 1812 broke out, he fought for the U.S. against the country of his birth. The Mississippi River Valley was a highly contested borderland between the U.S., European empires, and Native tribal nations at this time. Davenport got to know the frontier environment during these years, gaining information, familiarity, and contacts that would serve him after the war. He took part in one series of events known as the “Battle of Peoria Lake” where U.S. forces and state militias attacked Potawatomi and Kickapoo villages as well as the French settlement of Peoria in retaliation for of the massacre of American soldiers as they abandoned Fort Dearborn. Thomas Forsyth, secret U.S. agent at Peoria was arrested along with many French settlers who traded with the British and the local Indians. Forsyth was later named agent to the Sauk and Meskwaki, a position he held from 1818-1830. Among the French-Canadian settlers arrested and taken to St. Louis were trader Antoine LeClaire Sr., and his sons Francois and Antoine Jr.

In July 1814 Sgt. Davenport’s First Regiment was sent to Fort Erie, Ontario, which had been captured from the British in early July. Around July 25th the First Regiment joined the Battle of Lundy’s Lane in progress at Niagara Falls, the bloodiest, hardest-fought ground encounter of the entire war. It was an undecisive battle but the battered American troops we forced to fall back to Fort Erie where they were soon under siege by British forces. Davenport did picket duty at Fort Erie and the Americans survived the siege. U.S. forces withdrew from Fort Erie in November, and a negotiated peace ended the war in December.

According to Regena Schantz, Davenport was then sent on special assignment in Pittsburgh as an orderly sergeant. Franc Wilkie’s 1858 narrative specifies only that Sgt. Davenport’s regiment returned to Fort Belle Fontaine “after the siege was over.” He remained there until his second term of service expired in June 1815. At that time, the Army was already making preparations to send an expedition of troops from Fort Belle Fontaine to build Fort Armstrong on Rock Island. The expedition was set to leave in September and arrive at Rock Island the following Spring, and one of the contractors was a civilian named George Davenport.

References

Draper, Lyman C. “Antoine Le Clair’s Statement: Fragmentary Notes Taken by Lyman C. Draper.” In Collections of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, Vol 11. Democrat Printing Company, 1888. http://archive.org/details/collectionsstate11stat.

Fredriksen, John C. The United States Army in the War of 1812: Concise Biographies of Commanders and Operational Histories of Regiments, with Bibliographies of Published and Primary Resources. McFarland & Co, 2009.

Schantz, Regena T. The Trader at Rock Island: George Davenport and the Founding of the Quad Cities. Heritage Documentaries, Inc., 2020.

Wilkie, Franc B. Davenport, Past and Present. With The Library of Congress. Luse, Lane & Co., 1858. http://archive.org/details/davenportpastpre00wilk_0.

05/24/2026

Barbie we are coming for ya!! So many yarn doll fans today.

05/24/2026

Perfect weather for a beautiful day at the Dan Nagle Walnut Grove Pioneer Village. Come see us! Wapsi Wranglers are here, live music and the best ice cream! Not to mention Chuckies Food truck.

05/24/2026

The Davenport House Abandoned by the Family in 1857

George Davenport was murdered in his home in 1845, and when his wife Margaret died in 1847 she was buried beside him under an oak tree behind the house. The owner and primary resident was then Susan, the 46-year-old daughter of Margeret and the mother of George Davenport’s two sons, George L., and Bailey, who were then about 30 and 24, respectively. George L. Davenport had married in 1839 and moved his young family out of his father’s house shortly after he was murdered. The newly married George L. had fathered a daughter named Jennie (Chi-ni-ha) Davenport with a Meskwaki woman between1840-1844, and Jennie lived at the family house during the summer. By 1846. Bailey had fathered a child named Harry C. (Wa-kee-maw-wita) Davenport with a Meskwaki woman named Hianope (I-a-no-pee), and they all continued to live with Susan at the house after Margaret’s death.

In 1849 Susan married the Episcopalian Reverend Zachariah Goldsmith whose problems with the Church’s money caused him to resign before the wedding. Goldsmith’s drinking got him banished from the island in 1850, and the family made a financial arrangement with him in return for him relinquishing any and all other claims on family assets. Goldsmith was defrocked by the Church the following year and died of the DTs in 1854. Bailey moved into a Rock Island hotel and Susan continued to live in the house with her three servants, while a German family that worked for her lived elsewhere on the grounds. In 1853 Hianope, Harry and Jennie went to the Sac and Fox Reservation in Kansas, the terms of their parting unknown. They all moved back to Iowa when the Meskwaki bought land in 1857, and the two Davenport lines of descendancy remain there today.

The first railroad bridge across the Mississippi opened near Susan Goldsmith’s house in 1856, the same year that a judge ruled against the Government’s claim to the island, endangering Susan’s claim to the house and 155 acres she had inherited. In July of that same year Bailey got married and Susan purchased a house in Rock Island. The following year the 1833 Davenport House, the area’s first permanent house (barring the Claims House) was boarded up, and abandoned. It was eventually sold back to the U.S. Government when congress passed an act to keep the island as a military reserve. The vacant Col. Davenport House was then used by Captain Reynolds and Colonel Johnson as administrative offices and headquarters for the Rock Island Arsenal Civil War prison camp.

The Rock Island Arsenal was officially established on July 11, 1862, when President Abraham Lincoln signed an Act of Congress authorizing its creation. Richard H. Lloyd came to the Rock Island Arsenal by direct appointment from Washington D.C. to supervise the design and construction of the post-Civil War buildings. The Arsenal's military commander, Major C. P. Kingsbury, officially designated the empty Davenport House as the Lloyd family's residence. They lived there from 1864 to 1869 while he drafted the structural plans for the island's legendary stone manufacturing shops. The empty house fell into disrepair over the next four decades.

Referenced: The Trader at Rock Island: George Davenport and the Founding of the Quad Cities by Regena Trant Schantz.

Painting of the Davenport House and fort Armstrong by Johann Caspar Wild 1844

05/22/2026

American Militia Troops Burn the Main Sauk Village in 1780

This sign at the Black Hawk State Historic site identifies this minor conflagration as the westernmost battle of the American Revolution, the Sauk village being west of St. Louis despite being east of the Mississippi. Scant details of this event have been preserved, and Black Hawk, who would have been about thirteen years old and lived at the village, makes no mention of it in his autobiography.

In 1778 Patrick Henry, the Governor of Virginia, ordered a state militia campaign led by George Rogers Clark to secure the western frontier. In order to maintain security and avoid pushback from the Virginia Assembly, Governor Henry issued Clark “Secret Orders” on January 2, 1778. Publicly, Clark was told only to raise troops to defend the Kentucky settlements; privately, he was authorized to launch an offensive strike north of the Ohio River.

By capturing key regional outposts like Kaskaskia, Cahokia, and Vincennes, Clark intended to break the British hold on the region and eventually position his forces for an attack on the main British stronghold at Fort Detroit. Clark repeatedly requested reinforcements from Virginia and the Continental Congress. He estimated he needed at least 1,500 to 2,000 disciplined men to take the heavily fortified post, but he rarely had more than a few hundred at any given time.

Rogers’ success in the Illinois Country had everything to do with its inhabitants’ proximity to or from British power. Tribal loyalty to England was inversely proportional to their distance from Detroit, which was now the seat of British Indian trade and policy, and villages on the Wabash and Mississippi could easily carry their trade to the Spanish downstream. With British soldiers away in the East, the Illinois Country forts were mostly garrisoned by French habitant militiamen who actually supported the American resistance to England.

The British counterstrategy was to retake Vincennes and to establish a base camp at Prairie du Chien for an attack on the Spanish Illinois settlements and St. Louis, whose merchants, traders, and the Spanish commander, Fernando De Leyb, were supporting Clark. There were no British regulars available for this campaign, so Lieutenant Governor Patrick Sinclair at Michilimackinac ordered Emanuel Hesse, a trader at Prairie du Chien, to assemble the local Menominee, Ho-Chunk, Sauk, and Meskwaki tribes at the Fox-Wisconsin portage, join with the Upper Mississippi Sioux at Prairie du Chien, then descend the Mississippi to the Rock River where the main body of the Sauk and Meskwaki tribes would join them.

Sinclair expected an easy victory, but both Illinois Country and St. Louis officials seem to have expected the attack and the Spanish militia was able to partially fortify the city and send out advance scouts to watch for signs of the impending attack. On May 26, 1780, the attack by British forces, comprised mostly of tribal fighters, a few French traders, and no British regulars, lasted only for the afternoon.

On June 4, 1780, Clark sent Colonel John Montgomery with a force of about three hundred and fifty men to pursue the retreating Native fighters to their stronghold at Prairie du Chien and destroy it. About one hundred members of Montgomery’s expedition were Frenchmen who had been promised plunder at Prairie du Chien, only to be disappointed when a shortage of provisions forced the group to return south after burning the Sauk village on the Rock River.