Jackson, Donald

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The Palimpsest

A Fort is Built

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Volume 47 | Number 1 Article 3
1-1-1966
A Fort is Built
Donald Jackson
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Recommended Citation
Jackson, Donald. "A Fort is Built." The Palimpsest 47 (1966), 11-20.
Available at: https://ir.uiowa.edu/palimpsest/vol47/iss1/3
A Fort is Built
The line of boats that Kingsley led down the 
Missouri and into the mile-wide Mississippi was 
the largest convoy the Americans had yet sent 
into the upper country. There were at least four 
big keelboats, perhaps as many as six, and the 
task of getting them to the mouth of the Des 
Moines River took more than two weeks. So many 
of Kingsley’s soldiers were ill, probably of malaria, 
that there were barely enough hands to navigate 
the boats.
About September 11, 1808, the convoy reached 
the Des Moines, at a time when passenger pigeons 
would have been surging down from the north and 
flights of white pelicans would be passing in the 
western sky — alternately flapping and gliding 
across the scarlet flare of sunset. On the east the 
bluffs came to the edge of the Mississippi, but on 
the west, where the Des Moines came in, there 
was bottomland with sycamore, cottonwood, and 
walnut trees. The main channel ran along the* 
west side, and the two islands at the mouth of the? 
Des Moines made that little river seem to have 
three openings.
Army men in Washington were never quite sure 
of the topography of the upper Mississippi; some-
l i
12 THE PALIMPSEST
times they spoke of the Des Moines Rapids as the 
factory site, and sometimes they placed it at “the 
mouth of the Des Moines." The final instructions 
from the Secretary of War had been specific: 
build a post at the mouth of the Des Moines. But 
Kingsley feared the land near the mouth was sub­
ject to flooding, and he could find no supply of 
clean spring water for his men, so he moved on 
upstream across the twelve-mile stretch of rapids 
to the land that Governor Lewis had bought from 
the Indians. No luck here, either, for the only 
spot fit for a garrison was half a mile from the 
river and there were not enough big white oaks 
to make a stockade.
On up the river they went, scanning the west­
ern shore. Kingsley probably knew nothing of the 
recommendations that Zebulon Pike had made af­
ter a reconnaissance in 1805. Pike had suggested 
the head of the Rapids as a likely location for a 
trading house — considered solely on the basis of 
convenience for the Indians — and had picked a 
high elevation farther upstream, at what is now 
Burlington, Iowa, for a military post. Pike had not 
supposed that factory and fort would be combined.
Kingsley stopped short of Pike’s second site 
and chose a place on the north shore, some ten 
miles above the Rapids, and in choosing it he 
blundered. The location could never be defended; 
behind it ran a ridge where the Indians could take 
cover while firing down on the garrison, and along
13
the west was a ravine where war parties could 
infiltrate without being seen. Few military men 
who later saw the location failed to comment on 
its dismal shortcomings.
Kingsley liked it. “This situation is high,” he 
wrote the Secretary of War, “commands an ex­
tensive view of the river and the adjacent country 
— also an excellent spring of water — and I be­
lieve there is no place on the river which will prove 
more healthy, and none more advantageous to the 
Indian trade.’'
Because he had passed up the land bought by 
Governor Lewis, he would need to ask the Indians 
for permission to shift the site. Before he unloaded 
his boats he sent for the chiefs and important men 
of the Sauks, Foxes, Ioways, and Sioux of the 
Des Moines, and held a council. The Indians 
agreed upon the new site, took the $300 in mer­
chandise that Lewis had offered them for the 
earlier location, and went away satisfied. Then 
Kingsley began work on the establishment that, 
until the following spring, he would call Fort 
Bellevue.
No one pretended that Alpha Kingsley was the 
ideal man to supervise the building of a fort; he 
was merely a man doing a job that no one else 
was on hand to do. He was a Vermont man who 
had been appointed ensign in 1803, second lieu­
tenant in 1805, and first lieutenant in 1808. He 
would never make much of a name for himself,
A FORT IS BUILT
»»
14 THE PALIMPSEST
K '
though he would become the friend of Sam Hous­
ton and Andrew Jackson, and Houston would 
later describe him as "a very amiable man, and a 
good member of the Church."
The only junior officer on the expedition was 
Second Lieutentant Nathaniel Pryor, who had 
some of the intrepidity that Kingsley lacked. Pryor 
had been the first man to volunteer for the Lewis 
and Clark expedition and one of the four serg­
eants who had served in that group. He had won 
an army commission for his excellent work with 
Lewis and Clark. But he was doomed to a short, 
unhappy life spent mostly among the Osage In­
dians, after a brief career in the Army.
Two civilians had come with Kingsley. One 
was John Johnson, the factor, and the other was 
Nicholas Boilvin, the Indian agent. Johnson was 
a Maryland man who was now starting a career 
that would keep him among the Indians for many 
years, then take him back to civilization and make 
him, for a time, the mayor of St. Louis. Boilvin, 
a French Canadian, would see long years of serv­
ice among the Indians and would one day serve 
as a Justice of the Peace in Prairie du Chien. His 
present assignment was to help Johnson with the 
factory and to look after the temporarily defunct 
farm and blacksmith shop at the Rapids. He had 
with him the goods for the regular annuity pay­
ment to the Sauks and Foxes, provided for in the 
treaty of 1804.
V
* \
•J
A FORT IS BUILT 15
The winter of 1808-1809 was the roughest the 
Valley had seen in many a year. An early freeze 
caught the settlers unprepared; boats were locked 
tight in the channel as far downstream as the 
mouth of the Ohio. During this bad weather the 
men of Fort Bellevue lived in temporary huts 
while they worked on the permanent buildings. 
Work parties were cutting fourteen-foot logs of 
oak, twelve to fourteen inches in diameter, strips 
ping off the bark and hewing the great timbers 
flat on two sides. It was not easy to find enough 
logs that met specifications, and some were far 
from the building site. When snow fell, Kingsley 
hired sleds and oxen from trader Denis Julien to 
get the logs moved in. (Julien had settled just 
below Ewing's farm at the Rapids in 1805; he 
would supply laborers for the fort during the 
entire construction process, and would soon be 
freighting furs to St. Louis for John Johnson).
Frontier forts were quite standard in design. 
The pattern called for a palisade or stockade of 
upright logs about 120 feet square, with two- 
story blockhouses at each comer, twenty feet 
square. Kingsley decided to vary slightly from 
this pattern ant uild a five-sided stockade with 
three blockhouses. At first he thought he would 
put the factory inside the fort, but after looking 
over the tough, suspicious Sauks and Foxes he 
moved the location to a safer position west of the 
garrison.
16 THE PALIMPSEST
By the spring of 1809 the Indians had decided 
they disliked the look of things around the fort. 
They had agreed to a peaceful factory but the 
place looked more like a military installation. 
British traders such as Jacques Porlier and Ed­
ward Lagoterie, who had been wintering with the 
tribes at their hunting grounds down along the 
Wyaconda River, had been stirring up unrest. 
Now the Indians were about ready to come up 
the river and pass the fort on the way to their 
summer homes near the mouth of the Rock River. 
They knew the condition of the post, that it was 
still a vulnerable collection of huts surrounded by 
a temporary stockade of low and spindly pickets. 
The blockhouses were not completed. If any mis­
chief were to be done, now was the time.
One of the unhappier Indians was Black Hawk. 
He was by no means a principal chief of the Sauks, 
and in these days he had little influence. Later, 
as a fiercely pro-British warrior and probably a 
“war chief” of the Sauks, he would lead a group 
against the Americans in the War of 1812. Still 
later, his stubborn will to resist the westward 
movement would bring on the tragic Black Hawk 
War of 1832. As of now he was merely one of 
the ringleaders of a band that wanted to get inside 
the stockade and kill the soldiers.
The Indian activity around the fort so alarmed 
Kingsley that in late March he sent Pryor and 
six soldiers down to St. Louis to alert Governor
A FORT IS BUILT 17
Lewis and Superintendent Clark. Lewis issued a 
call for volunteer riflemen, and some of these 
Rangers and a detachment of regulars from Belle 
Fontaine set out by land and water to reinforce 
Fort Bellevue.
Early in April the entire population of the Sauk 
and Fox tribes appeared at the fort, swarming 
ashore on the opposite bank and leaving their 
hollow-log canoes heaped with rolls of loosely tied 
furs. After they camped, trading parties began 
to cross the river to barter with Johnson for their 
summer supplies. The peaceable Indians were in 
a hurry to reach their summer homes and put their 
fields in shape for com planting. Perhaps they 
also were anxious to get their trading done before 
the trouble started.
It was hard to keep a secret in an Indian camp. 
The old men sat gabbling in the spring sun, the 
bitter young men met in council and murmured 
their awful plans to one another, and the women 
chattered all day long at their work. It is not sur­
prising, then, that three separate warnings of an 
attack had already reached Kingsley. William 
Clark had sent word of possible trouble. Nicholas 
Jarrot, a merchant and trader, had stopped by the 
fort on April 8 with another warning. Finally a 
young Ioway brave had reportedly revealed, while 
trading was in progress, that the hour was near.
On April 10 a party of Sauks and Foxes came 
to the fort, led by Black Hawk and a chief named
18 THE PALIMPSEST
Pashepaho. “Bon jour, Father/' the chief may 
have said, using the traditional form of address 
for a white official. “My braves have finished their 
trading. They are happy to have made a good 
hunt and to have dealt well with the trader. Now 
they wish to come inside the stockade and do a 
dance for the white soldiers.”
A hurried parley with the interpreter, then 
Kingsley shook his head. No dance, he said. If 
they wanted to dance they could go over to the 
factory and dance for John Johnson. A rumble of 
surprise and disappointment ran through the party 
of warriors. Apparently it had not occurred to 
them that Kingsley might refuse their suggestion. 
Uneasily, not quite sure what to do next, they be­
gan to crowd the gate of the stockade.
Kingsley had kept all his men inside today, un­
der arms, and they stood ready with flintlock mus­
kets loaded and primed. Just inside the gate, its 
muzzle trained directly at the Indians, was a can­
non charged with grape shot. Beside it stood a 
soldier with a stick of flaming port-fire in his hand, 
ready to touch the fuse.
The Indians backed down. Pashepaho waved 
them away, and as they turned in retreat they 
raised war clubs and sent forth a great shout of 
defiance and frustration. “In twenty minutes,” 
said an eye witness, “not an Indian was to be 
seen on the north side of the river.”
Next day a party of chiefs that included Quash-
A FORT IS BUILT 19
quame came over to apologize. It was hard to 
keep the belligerent young men under control, they 
said, and they were thankful to know that “the 
smoke had disappeared.” Kingsley had the can­
non, a six-pounder, wheeled out to the river’s edge 
and fired. After a terrific boom, the balls of grape 
came spattering down into the water. The chiefs, 
said one report, “put their hands to their mouths 
with an exclamation that the shot would have 
killed half of them.”
The thwarted coup caused Kingsley to double 
his efforts. He burned fires about the fort to con­
ceal the nighttime movements of the men, and 
worked long hours to complete the stockade. The 
big logs went up fast now, and on the evening 
of April 14 the men tamped the earth around the 
final section, hung the gate and barred it, and 
were secure.
In the letter he wrote to Washington a few days 
later, Kingsley called his post Fort Madison for 
the first time. It was an obvious choice for a name, 
considering the fact that James Madison was now 
the President — so obvious that it had already 
been given to another post on the Arkansas River 
fifty miles above the Mississippi. There was still 
another Fort Madison in Annapolis harbor on the 
East Coast. Because of this duplication in names, 
there would always be some confusion in the 
records.
A detachment of regulars reached the fort after
20 THE PALIMPSEST
the excitement was over, stayed a few days, then 
started home. Downstream they met the militia­
men under Captain Bernard Pratte, a St. Louis 
merchant, bound for the fort in keelboats. Pratte’s 
boats were laden with supplies for Kingsley and 
it was necessary for them to finish the trip, but 
the volunteers were also soon hurrying back home.
The alarm was over. The Mississippi Valley 
settlers heaved a sigh, and Meriwether Lewis dis­
missed his Rangers.


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