The two army couriers had come from Fort Dearborn, with dispatches for General Whiteside. The news they brought was not favorable. General Winfield Scott, “Old Fuss and Feathers,” had set out from Fortress Monroe, in far-away Virginia, with nine companies of regulars and picked up a number of newly commissioned officers of the cadet class of 1832 at West Point. By way of the Hudson River and the Erie Canal, the detachment had then advanced to Buffalo on Lake Erie. Here the general leased four steamboats, among the first of that type of boat to appear on the Great Lakes. These new-fangled ships were the Sheldon Thompson, the Henry Clay, the William Penn and the Superior. Scott put troops on the Thompson and the Clay, and supplies on the others, and put out up the lakes. Unluckily, cholera, a dread disease common at that early day, broke out on Scott’s ship, the Henry Clay. Making the port of Detroit, the General transferred his staff to the Sheldon Thompson and sent the West Pointers back home. A lot of desperately sick men had to be landed, while others, fearful of the deadly cholera, took the opportunity to desert into the neighboring forests. Two officers and fifty-three privates had already died of the malady. Scott messaged that he was forced to delay at Detroit until the cholera subsided, and he could secure replacements from the east. To balance the loss of Scott’s troops, the Secretary of War at Washington ordered Colonel Zachery Taylor, later a Mexican War hero and President of the United States, to proceed north from St. Louis with a small force of regulars. These were to be supplemented by a fresh levy of Illinois volunteers, which Governor Reynolds was hastily assembling. Two weeks later, when both the regulars under Taylor and the raw volunteers had arrived, there was a total force of four thousand men at the ferry. General Henry Atkinson, U. S. Regulars, was now sent to take command of this formidable array, his rank as a regular army general giving him precedence over the redoubtable Sam Whiteside, who was only a Brigadier-General of volunteers. CHAPTER 15 Rock River Camp “Gotta have the gunsmith take a look at this ol’ piece o’ mine,” declared Pete Perkins, coming up with an ancient flintlock rifle on his shoulder. “The plaguey screw won’t grip the flint hard ’nuff ter make it strike fire, an’ it’d be jest orful ter have my flint drap when I’m pullin’ trigger on a red Injun.” “It would be downright disconcertin’,” agreed Bill Brown. “An’ take a peek at them mocc’sins,” went on Pete, lifting up a foot to expose the sole. “Bottoms wore ez thin ez tissue paper, with all this durned drillin’. What’s more, that’s my third pair since j’inin’ the volunteers.” “Why don’t you get the quartermaster to issue you a pair of leather boots?” Ben Gordon proposed. “Never owned but one pair in my life. Couldn’t git used ter ’em. They wore me ’leven y’ars. Course I never put ’em on, if I could help it, an’ I most ginerally could.”