One of the first to enlist was Abraham Lincoln, an Illinois citizen of two years’ standing. He had come with his family in his seventh year from Kentucky to Indiana and thence in 1830 to the newer settlements of Illinois. He was twenty-three years old, and was a tall, sturdy backwoodsman, who was to prove himself in the wrestling matches that were the soldiers’ pastime, the strongest man but one in the whole army. He was at once chosen captain of his company, an honor which brought him more gratification than most of his greater successes. The volunteers were organized into four regiments, and started to follow Black Hawk up the Rock River. The command of four hundred regulars was given to Colonel Zachary Taylor, afterwards President of the United States; and during the months of this war there served in the army Robert Anderson, the defender of Sumter, Winfield Scott, Albert Sidney Johnston, the Confederate hero, and Jefferson Davis. It was a distinguished group of men who responded in their youth to the call of their country. The marching was difficult. There were no roads or bridges, only marshy trails and streams swollen into torrents by the spring thaws. But the hardy backwoodsmen were used to such conditions. They marched steadily on, and when they had gone some ninety miles up Rock River to Dixon’s Ferry halted to await the arrival of General Atkinson with the regular troops and the loads of provisions. They found there two battalions of horsemen, under the command of Majors Stillman and Bailey, which had been gathered in the upper country. They had had no long march to weary them, but were impatient to get a chance at the enemy. They set off as scouts on a dark, threatening morning in May, with orders to coerce what Indians they met into submission. “I thought,” says the governor in his memoirs, “they might discover the enemy.” And they did.