Battle of Credit Island War of 1812

Major Zachary Taylor

September 1814 — Near Credit Island, Upper Mississippi: They went upriver chasing ghosts. Eight keelboats, heavy and slow, grinding through the brown current under a blistering sun. The soldiers called it “Taylor’s little war.” Major Zachary Taylor—thirty years old, square-jawed—was supposed to punish the Sac and Fox for embarrassing the United States that summer.

Governor William Clark had sent him north to settle the score. Burn the villages, flatten the corn, and show the flag. It sounded easy enough when they launched from Cape au Gris, Missouri, on August 23. Three hundred thirty-four men, a few light cannon, and enough arrogance to make the river laugh.

The Mississippi wasn’t buying it. For almost two weeks they fought it mile by mile, rowing through mud and heat and clouds of mosquitoes thick enough to choke on. The river kept shifting under them—sandbars one day, deep channels the next. Everything felt uncertain except the current.

They reached the mouth of the Rock River somewhere close to September 5. The air was heavy, and the wind came out of nowhere—sheets of rain, boats colliding, men shouting just to hear themselves. By nightfall, the flotilla was smashed up on a spit of mud and willows called Credit Island. It wasn’t part of the plan.

At dawn, the fog thinned, and they saw figures moving in the trees across the water, watching. Sac and Fox warriors. Hundreds of them, with painted faces, rifles in hand, quiet as smoke. Taylor pulled his men into line, trying to look calm. Captain James Rector rolled a small cannon ashore and set it facing upriver.

Chief Black hawk

Then came the thunder. Not from Rector’s gun—but from the British. Officers out of Canada, with heavier artillery and a clear view. The first round hit the river so close it doused half the men in spray. Taylor stood there, realizing he’d walked straight into someone else’s war.

He tried to make something of it, thinking he could pull them off their ground, draw them downstream, double back and torch their towns. That’s what he told himself. “I was in hopes to draw them some distance from their towns,” he’d write later.

That night the wind returned—in what Taylor called “a perfect hurricane.” The boats spun like toys. Rain poured sideways. Men cursed, bailed, and prayed, all at once. When the storm passed, they were stranded again, mid-river, surrounded by fires flickering on both banks. Canoes slipped silently across the current, the paddles barely touching the water. Nobody slept.

At first light, a single shot cracked through the fog. A corporal on Captain Samuel Whiteside’s boat took it in the chest and went down without a sound. The rest froze. Taylor looked around at his soaked, exhausted men, the wreck of his mission, and called it. He gave the order to retreat.

They floated down to the mouth of the Des Moines River and built a fort—if you could call it that. Fifty yards square, twelve-foot pickets, mud up to the ankles. A British officer, Lieutenant Duncan Graham, called it “a modest work.” He was being polite.

Taylor wrote his report like a man trying to sound calm after a beating. “It would have been madness in me,” he said, “as well as a direct violation of my orders, to have risked the detachment without a prospect of success.”

Across the water, Black Hawk watched the Americans fade into the current. “I was prepared to meet them,” he said, “but was soon sadly disappointed—the boats had started down the river.”

So ended the Battle of Credit Island. No towns were burned, and no glory claimed. Just rain, smoke, and a river that never picked sides.