IT WAS ON AUGUST 3, 1814 that Major Zachary Taylor, later President of the United States, pointed 22 battle barges
north from "Old St. Louis" to attempt to run the Black Hawk gantlet at Rock Island and reach Prairie
du Chien which had been captured by the British. The British had, however, reinforced the natural Indian stronghold
at Rock Island, where Campbell had been defeated at short time before, and Taylor knew not the terrible reception
that there awaited him.
John Shaw, who accompanied Taylor on this expedition and rode with him on his boat, the Commodore, has given two
accounts of the famous battle at Rock Island, one to General William R. Smith of Mineral Point, Wisconsin, in 1854,
and another to Lyman C. Draper, corresponding secretary of the Wisconsin State Historical Society, in 1855, the
latter being for the most part a commentary upon the earlier relation. The following account is from the Smith
history, this being the more complete of the two narratives:
"Incidents of the War of 1812. Attack at Rock Island. (Page 364, Vol. III, The History of Wisconsin, Historical,
Documentary and Descriptive. Compiled by direction of the Legislature of the State by William R. Smith, President
of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, Madison, Wis.: Beriah Brown, Printer, 1854.)
"The personal narrative of Mr. John Shaw of Marquette county, Wisconsin, touching events of the War of 1812
"About two months after the capture of Prairie du Chien, Major Zachary Taylor came up the Mississippi with
22 fortified boats, each containing an average of about 80 men under his command. When the expedition arrived near
Rock Island it was discovered that about 4,000 Indians had there collected. Mr. Shaw was on board the boat with
Major Taylor.
"The battle commenced (Shaw, in his ‘Memoirs,' says the attack occurred on a very bright morning, the preceding
night having been cloudy and very windy with some rain), and the first ball from the British guns passed completely
through the advance boat on which was Taylor (and Shaw) and he immediately ordered it to be put about; the second
ball cut off the steering oar of the next boat (Rector's) that was advancing and a strong wind springing up at
the moment, this boat drifted over the river to the western bank. The men having no steering oar could not prevent
this.
"About 1000 Indians took to their canoes and paddled over the river, expecting no doubt to get the boat as
a prize as she must inevitably drift into shallow water. The Indians kept up a constant fire on the unfortunate
boat and Indian horsemen galloped down the west shore with their guns elevated in their right hands, gleaming in
the sun, and shouting their war cries in the most hideous manner.
"On the first fire from the British guns Major Taylor had ordered a retreat. General Samuel Whiteside, who
had command of one of the boats, impelled with the natural desire of assisting the disabled boat, drifting across
the river into the power of merciless savages, disobeyed the order (later, in 1855, Shaw says he would not again
say that General Whiteside disobeyed), and steered toward the disabled craft.
"When he approached it he called for ‘some brave man to cast a cable from his own boat on board of her.'
An individual named Paul Harpole jumped from the disabled boat, in a most exposed situation, caught the cable and
made it fast to the boat. In less than a minute's time a thousand Indians would have been aboard her. She was then
in two and a half feet of water, among some small willows, which in some measure protected the Indians.
"In the meanwhile Harpole called for guns to be handed him from below; stood on the deck of the boat completely
exposed, and fired no less than 14 guns, when he was evidently struck in the forehead by a ball. He pitched forward
towards the Indians and the instant he struck the water the savages had hold of him, hauled him ashore and cut
him with their knives into a hundred pieces. All this was witnessed by the other boats. The crippled boat having
been towed off into the deep water, the whole body retreated and descended the Mississippi. This expedition had
left St. Louis on the eighth of August, 1814."
MacKinlay Kantor, well-known author, catching the spirit of Shaw's personal narrative (parts of which he quotes
in prelude), thus sang the memorable exploit in the columns of the Chicago Daily News in 1930:
THE BALLARD OF PAUL HARPOLE
A Saga of the Indian Wars
By MacKinlay Kantor
Washington was yellow dust,
Custer was not born;
West of wild Mahaska
There was not a field of corn.
(There was not a ship of air
Or wire on the plain --
But you'd hear the buffalo
Running in the rain ...)
Twenty hundred miles of grass --
And painted men who flew
On their painted ponies
Over trails along the Loup.
Taylor took a fleet of boats
(For yet there was no Dewey)
Pointed them against the stars
North from old Saint Louis:
"Only skins of red and rust,
Only British rifles
Rise to balk our journeying
And these are merely trifles!"
There were many men aboard
But one was steel of soul!
Carve his name along the clouds:
Paul Harpole.
Taylor watched the crooked miles
Wash away behind:
"Pull, my lads, there's blood ahead
And arrows in the wind!"
Twenty scores of leather arms
Wrenched against the oars,
As the songs went echoing
Out to willowed shores.
(Night was mist and panther yells
Ere the age of wires;
Yet you'd dream of buffalo
Herding by your fires.)
****
Out against the island drawn
Rose an August day,
Rose a thousand Indians
Through the river hay,
Waltzing in their thin canoes --
A fiendish, feathered rush;
All you'd hear were British guns
Booming in the brush.
Cannon shattered oaken sweeps,
Cannon took their toll
In the Yankee boat where rode
Paul Harpole.
"See, we drift against the shore!
See, this cursed river
Washes us where Injun knives
Wait for heart and liver!"
All the fiends of hell could cry
And never stop its drifting,
As the crippled barge came round
In the river's rifting --
"Lose your life, some Yankee hound,
And try to cast a cable!"
...Harpole spoke so quietly,
"Will — if I am able."
****
Standing on the splintered deck
He was half a saint,
With a thousand greasy ghouls
Screaming in their paint.
His was arm of ash and oak,
His was shape of willow
When he hurled the tawny rope --
Calm as on his pillow.
"Ho! They've caught it...
Wind it fast
To a brace or thole!"
He was grinning as he died --
Paul Harpole!
Fourteen guns they say he shot
Ere the arrows slew him;
Fourteen Indians he got
Ere the shafts went through him!
While the drifting boat was caught
While the cable tightened
There were prayers on frozen lips:
Even God was frightened;
(In the eddied ooze he fell
Without another sound ...
But his barge went safely back
From the savage ground).
****
Oh, you sang of Lee and York,
Oh, you sang of Custer --
Now you'll sing of Paul Harpole
With his smoking luster!
Black Hawk lies in prairie sod,
Gunners all are gone --
And you'll ride with Taylor's ghost
If you ride at dawn.
West from Mississippi trees
Are wires, lane on lane ...
Yet we dream of buffalo
Running in the rain!
Shaw, recounting Harpole's exploit in 1855, said: "It became necessary for someone to expose himself in
order to cast a cable from a disabled boat which was drifting fast towards the shore where the Indians were, to
Captain Whiteside's boat; and one Paul Harpole greatly exposed himself in accomplishing the object. But having
done this, he lingered, and one after another he shot at the enemy 14 guns handed to him. Then he himself was shot
in the forehead, and tumbled forward into the river, when his body was obtained by the Indians, and cut into a
hundred pieces. The crippled boat was saved, but poor Harpole's exploit, in which he lost his life, was the wonder
and admiration of all. He was a young man of some 23 years of age, and resided near Wood's Fort, in Missouri (site
of present Clarksville) where he had always been celebrated for his strength and activity, and was possessed of
much backwoods wit and humor."
Mrs. Ethel Harpole Shaw of Pittsfield, to whom the historian is indebted for a longhand copy of MacKinlay Kantor's
ballad, says that the Harpole children were brought up on the thrilling exploit of that young Paul Harpole of this
heroic incident and that the story, as her father, John D. Harpole, former Pike county clerk, told it to his children,
was precisely as Colonel John Shaw, the eye witness of the exploit, recounted it, except that in her father's story,
Harpole, when he exposed himself on the deck of Rector's boat to "hurl the tawny rope," had a red cloth,
something like a red bandanna handkerchief, bound around his head, which made a flaming target for the infuriated
savages.
Another Paul (William Paul) Harpole, believed to be an uncle of the hero of Taylor's expedition, came over from
Ramsey Creek, Mo., in May, 1825, and rented ground from Belus and Egbert Jones (first settlers in what is now Pleasant
Hill township), raised a crop, and the following autumn brought his family over and settled on the southeast quarter
of section 35, Pleasant Hill, where he resided until his death. Paul Harpole and his wife Nancy were among the
earliest comers to what is now Pleasant Hill township, being preceded by the Jones brothers, James W. (My Lord
Coke) Whitney and Thomas Proctor.
With the defeat of Taylor's expedition at the site of present Rock Island, the second of two expeditions sent up
the river for the relief of Prairie du Chien ended in disaster. "The prairie where Major Taylor halted to
repair his boats and attend to the wounded," says Shaw, "was about three miles below the mouth of Rock
river, on the Illinois shore. There were, as Major Taylor states, a great number of Indian horses opposite the
mouth of Rock river, doubtless placed there to decoy the whites ashore into an ambuscade."
After Taylor's retreat, Fort Edwards was built at Warsaw and was held to the end of the war. This fort and the
one at Peoria (Fort Clark) marked the northernmost line over which the Americans were able to claim control on
the Illinois frontier.
Amid these savage scenes, the writer's paternal grandfather, William B. Thompson, was born on the wild Missouri
border, March 13, 1813. In some of the encounters here related, his father, James Thompson, battle-scarred for
life in the Indian wars of George Shaw and Harpole and Roberts and Paul Jones and the Boones and those other gallant
men who protected the frontier in the savage days of 1812-14.
James Thompson, Virginia born, had followed the Boones westward and in a very early day, even before the coming
of Shaw in 1808, we find him pioneering in Upper Louisiana, and later in Missouri Territory. An old Indian fighter,
he had participated in the Indian wars when Washington was President and was with General St. Clair on that wild
morning of Nov. 4, 1791 when the savages, in a surprise attack led by Little Turtle, the Miami chief, cut to pieces
the white man's army, near the Miami villages on the upper reaches of the Wabash, in the wilderness that is now
Ohio. In that battle in the old Northwest Territory, wherein Governor St. Clair lost half his army of 2,000, James
Thompson was wounded in the right leg, which left him a cripple for life.
Throughout the Indian wars, Thompson carried a trusty rifle gun named "Betsy," on the stock of which
was said to be numerous notches, cut with a hunting knife, each of which was understood to account for a Miami
warrior. The gun's name was reputed to have been given it by Betsy Boone, second daughter of Squire Boone and a
sister of Daniel Boone, with whose daughter, Betsy Boone Grant, the Indian fighter in his youth was said to have
become infatuated. In later years, James Thompson crossed the river from Missouri Territory into Illinois Territory
and settled in the region now known as Washington county, near present Nashville. This was early in 1817, nearly
two years before Illinois Territory became a state.
With the War of 1812 now nearing its close, we come face to face with another instance of the "ingratitude
of republics." At the close of the war, we find John Shaw, hero of many a border foray and who many a time
risked his life in defense of the settlers on the frontier, left penniless. Not only was his great military scouting
unrewarded by the government but Shaw, deeply in debt for supplies he purchased and forwarded to the Rangers during
the war, finds himself unable to meet his obligations, because the Rangers, who were to have paid him out of their
pay from the government, received no pay themselves from the government during their period of service.
In a succeeding chapter, Shaw recounts the bitterness of those days, when he found himself without means and $30,000
in debt to millers and stockmen on the frontier; and the miraculous escape from the hands of savages of three noted
men of early Pike county. Judge John York Sawyer; John S. Miller, later first settler at what is now Galena; and
Dr. Samuel Muir, first settler at the site of Keokuk, Iowa.
