Nobody in it at all

This county has written one afternoon down three times, and each time it got shorter.

What happened is quickly told. In the summer of 1832, with the Black Hawk war on in Illinois and steady talk here about whether the Potawatomi camped in this county would rise, three or four men at a mill in the north of Springfield Township sat up after two of their neighbours had gone to bed and decided to frighten them.

Two or three, or perhaps more, assisted by several Indians, dressed themselves in full Indian war costume, with war paint and blanket and tomahawk, etc.

The miller played dead. Gage and Langdon ran, one north and one south, telling everyone they passed that the Indians had killed everyone at the mill and were coming through the country. Inside a day two forts were going up and more than a hundred armed men had gathered. About seventy-five Potawatomi were camped beside the mill.

They thought the whites were going to attack them, and hung out the white flag. In truth, the settlers could hardly be restrained from firing upon them.

Could hardly be restrained. That afternoon is told in full in two things that were not there.

All of that comes from one book.

It is in the county history published in 1882, across two chapters and seven hundred and fifty-five words. Both quotations above are in it, and so is everything this piece has just sent a reader elsewhere for: the man behind the tree, the blacksmith shop at Lexington, the island in Cedar Lake, the hundred men, the seventy-five, the flag, and what became of the five who staged it.

This county has written that afternoon down twice more since. Both times it got shorter.

Eleven years later the county published an atlas with a chronology in it, and gave the whole thing thirty-three words.

"Blackhawk war" rumors frighten the settlers. An unfounded rumor of hostilities at Mongoquinong, then an Indian trading post, causes settlers to flee to and fortify at Lexington, at a place called "Fort Donaldson."

No Gage and no Langdon. No mill. No costumes. Nobody deciding anything. No hundred armed men. No island.

And no camp, no flag, and nobody who came within a word of being shot.

The joke has become weather. In 1882 it was something men did, with names on it and consequences that ran for years. By 1893 it is an unfounded rumor, which is a thing that arrives from nowhere and belongs to nobody.

Five entries down the same page, under 1837, between a Baptist church and a road, that chronology says this.

Pottawotamie Indians removed from the county.

Six words. No agent, no number, no destination.

The same page that took seventy-five people out of an afternoon in 1832 gives their removal from the county one line in a list.

Then in 1920 the third account, longer than the atlas and much shorter than Battey.

Ira Ford gives it a hundred and eighty-nine words. Three settlers playing a joke on men who had said they were not afraid. The Frenchman, the Irishman and the Yankee. Langdon at Brushy Prairie. Over a hundred assembled.

And the camp comes back.

Seventy-five Indians were encamped near by, friendly Pottowattomies, who came near being fired upon by the assembled whites.

Ford has restored what the atlas cut. He has also added a word to it.

Friendly.

The 1882 account says a hundred armed men could hardly be restrained from firing on seventy-five people holding up a flag, and leaves it there. Ford's adjective explains why doing it would have been wrong, which moves the fault into the mistake and out of the act.

His forts are gone. So is the German miller, and so is the man behind the tree.

The name is the one thing all three agree on.

The 1882 chapters head it The Gage and Langdon War and More of the Gage and Langdon War. Ford uses the same name.

It is named for the two men who were frightened. Not for the men who staged it, not for the miller who played dead, and not for the seventy-five people who stood in a field and watched a hundred armed neighbours decide.

The 1882 historian was worried his readers would not believe him.

Do not say the story is magnified. When 100 men assemble, armed and prepared for fight ; when attempts are made to build forts and garrison islands in lakes, that section of country is in earnest and means business.

He is defending the size of the panic. He does not go back to the sentence two paragraphs earlier about the seventy-five.

He wrote it down, though, which is more than the next account managed. Everything in this piece about the camp and the flag comes from him, and that is worth saying in a piece that spends its last third on what the county left out.

Seven hundred and fifty-five words with five named men, two forts, a hundred armed neighbours and a white flag.

Thirty-three words with a rumour and nobody in it at all.

A hundred and eighty-nine with the camp put back and an adjective beside it.

Three accounts, sixty years, one afternoon.