By a strange fatality it chanced that in the last days of July, 1832, the deluded Sac leader, Black Hawk, flying from the wrath of the Illinois and Wisconsin militiamen, under Henry and Dodge, chose this seat of the ancient power of his tribe to be one of the scenes of that fearful tragedy which proved the death-blow to Sac ambition. Black Hawk, after long hiding in the morasses of the Rock above Lake Koshkonong, suddenly flew from cover, hoping to cross the Wisconsin River at Prairie du Sac, and by plunging across the mountainous country over a trail known to the Winnebagoes, who played fast and loose with him as with the whites, to get beyond the Mississippi in quiet, as he had been originally ordered to do. His retreat was discovered when but a day old; and the militiamen hurried on through the Jefferson swamps and the forests of the Four Lake country, harrying the fugitives in the rear. At the summit of the Wisconsin Heights, on the south bank, overlooking this old Sac plain on the north, Black Hawk and his rear-guard stood firm, to allow the women and children and the majority of his band of two thousand to cross the intervening bottoms and the island-strewn river. The unfortunate leader sat upon a white horse on the summit of the peak now called by his name, and shouted directions to his handful of braves. The movements of the latter were well executed, and Black Hawk showed good generalship; but the militiamen were also well handled, and had superior supplies of ammunition, so when darkness fell the fated ravine and the wooded bottoms below were strewn with Indian bodies, and victory was with the whites. During the night the surviving fugitives, now ragged, foot-sore, and starving, crossed the river by swimming. A party of fifty or so, chiefly non-combatants, made a raft, and floated down the Wisconsin, to be slaughtered near its mouth by a detail of regulars and Winnebagoes from Prairie du Chien; but the mass of the party flying westward in hot haste over the prairie of the Sacs, headed for the Mississippi. They lined their rugged path with the dead and dying victims of starvation and despair, and a sorry lot these people were when the Bad Axe was finally reached, and the united army of regulars and militiamen under Atkinson, Henry, and Dodge, overtook them. The "battle" there was a slaughter of weaklings. But few escaped across the great river, and the bloodthirsty Sioux despatched nearly all of those.