Soon after the army moved up the Rock River, the independent spy company, of which Lincoln was a member, was sent with a brigade to the northwest, near Galena, in pursuit of the Hawk.  The nearest Lincoln came to an actual engagement in the war was here.  The skirmish of Kellogg’s Grove took place on June 25th; Lincoln’s company came up soon after it was over, and helped bury the five men killed.  It was probably to this experience that he referred when he told a friend once of coming on a camp of white scouts one morning just as the sun was rising.  The Indians had surprised the camp, and had killed and scalped every man.

“I remember just how those men looked,” said Lincoln, “as we rode up the little hill where their camp was.  The red light of the morning sun was streaming upon them as they lay heads towards us on the ground.  And every man had a round red spot on the top of his head about as big as a dollar, where the redskins had taken his scalp.  It was frightful, but it was grotesque; and the red sunlight seemed to paint everything all over.”  Lincoln paused, as if recalling the vivid picture, and added, somewhat irrelevantly, “I remember that one man had buckskin breeches on."[E]

By the end of the month the troops crossed into Michigan Territory—­what is now Wisconsin—­and July was spent in floundering through swamps and stumbling through forests, in pursuit of the now nearly exhausted Black Hawk.  A few days before the last battle of the war, that of Bad Axe on August 2d, in which the whites finally massacred most of the Indian band, Lincoln’s company was disbanded at Whitewater, Wisconsin, and he and his friends started for home.  The volunteers in returning, in almost every case, suffered much from hunger.  Mr. Durly, of Hennepin, Illinois, who walked home from Rock Island, says all he had to eat on the journey was meal and water baked in rolls of bark laid by the fire.  Lincoln was little better off.  The night before his company started from Whitewater he and one of his mess-mates had their horses stolen; and, excepting when their more fortunate companions gave them a lift, they walked as far as Peoria, Illinois, where they bought a canoe, and paddled down the Illinois River to Havana.  Here they sold the canoe, and walked across the country to New Salem.

[Illustration:  View of the Sangamon river near new Salem.

The town lay along the ridge marked by the star.]

ELECTIONEERING FOR THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY.

Lincoln arrived only a few days before the election, and at once plunged into “electioneering.”  He ran as “an avowed Clay man,” and the county was stiffly Democratic.  However, in those days political contests were almost purely personal.  If the candidate was liked he was voted for irrespective of principles.  Around New Salem the population turned in and helped Lincoln almost to a man.  “The Democrats of New Salem worked for Lincoln out of their personal regard for him,” said Stephen T. Logan, a young lawyer of Springfield, who made Lincoln’s acquaintance in the campaign.  “He was as stiff as a man could be in his Whig doctrines.  They did this for him simply because he was popular—­because he was Lincoln.”