For a little war against a few Indians there were many famous names on the white man's roll. Among the regulars were General Scott, later the commander in the war with Mexico; Colonel Zachary Taylor, who had defended Fort Harrison from Tecumseh--and probably Black-hawk--in the war of 1812, and who was to be President; Lieutenant Jefferson Davis, who became president of the Confederate States; Lieutenant Albert Sydney Johnston, who became a Confederate general; Lieutenant Robert Anderson, who commanded Fort Sumter in 1861; and among the volunteers was Captain Abraham Lincoln. Black-hawk had about five hundred braves, mainly Sacs and Foxes, with a few Winnebagos and Potawatomis; but when twenty-five hundred soldiers were chasing him through the settlements, he stood little show. After several skirmishes, and one or two bad defeats, his people were eating horse-flesh and bark and roots. To save them, he planned to go down the Wisconsin River, in southwestern Wisconsin, and cross the Mississippi. He put his women and children and the old men on rafts and in canoes. They started--but soldiers fired into them, from the banks, killed some and drove the rest into the forest. Many died there, from hunger. Black-hawk and his warriors, and other women and children, had cut across by land. When they came to the mouth of the Bad Axe River, at the Mississippi above the Wisconsin, the armed steamboat _Warrior_ met them. Sioux were upon the western bank. Black-hawk decided to surrender. He again raised the white flag, and called out to the captain of the _Warrior_ that he wished a boat sent to him, so that he might go aboard and talk peace. Perhaps the Winnebago interpreter on the _Warrior_ did not translate the words right. At any rate, the captain of the _Warrior_ asserted that Black-hawk was only trying to decoy him into ambush. He waited fifteen minutes, to give the Indian women and children that much time to hide; then he opened on the white flag with canister and musketry. The first cannon shot "laid out three." In all, he killed twenty-three. Black-hawk fought back, but he could not do very much against a steamboat in the river. So he had been unable to surrender, or to cross the Mississippi. His people were frightened, and sick with hunger and wounds. The next morning, August 2, he was working hard to get them ready to cross, when General Atkinson's main army, of four hundred regulars and nine hundred militia, fell upon him at the mouth of the Bad Axe. The Indian women plunged into the Mississippi, with their babes on their backs--some of them caught hold of horses' tails, to be towed faster; but the steamboat _Warrior_ was waiting, sharp-shooters on shore espied them, and only a few escaped, into the hands of the Sioux. In two hours Black-hawk lost two hundred people, men and women both; the white army lost twenty-seven in killed and wounded.