The march in pursuit of the Indians led the army to Ottawa, where the volunteers became so dissatisfied that on May 27th and 28th Governor Reynolds mustered them out.  But a force in the field was essential until a new levy was raised; and a few of the men were patriotic enough to offer their services, among them Lincoln, who on May 29th was mustered in at the mouth of the Fox River by a man in whom, thirty years later, he was to have a keen interest—­General Robert Anderson, commander at Fort Sumter in 1861.  Lincoln became a private in Captain Elijah Iles’s company of Independent Rangers, not brigaded—­a company made up, says Captain Iles in his “Footsteps and Wanderings,” of “generals, colonels, captains, and distinguished men from the disbanded army.”  General Anderson says that at this muster Lincoln’s arms were valued at forty dollars, his horse and equipment at one hundred and twenty dollars.  The Independent Rangers were a favored body, used to carry messages and to spy on the enemy.  They had no camp duties, and “drew rations as often as they pleased.”  So that as a private Lincoln was really better off than as a captain.[C]

With the exception of a scouting trip to Galena and back, fruitful of nothing more than Indian scares, Major Iles’s company remained quietly in the neighborhood of the Rapids of the Illinois until June 16th, when Major Anderson mustered it out.  Four days later, June 20th, at the same place, he mustered Lincoln in again as a member of an independent company under Captain Jacob M. Early.  His arms were valued this time at only fifteen dollars, his horse and equipment at eighty-five dollars.[D] The army moved up Rock River soon after the middle of June.  Black Hawk was overrunning the country, and scattering death wherever he went.  The settlers were wild with fear, and most of the settlements were abandoned.  At a sudden sound, at the merest rumor, men, women, and children fled.  “I well remember these troublesome times,” says one old Illinois woman.  “We often left our bread dough unbaked to rush to the Indian fort near by.”  When Mr. John Bryant, a brother of William Cullen Bryant, visited the colony in Princeton in 1832, he found it nearly broken up on account of the war.  Everywhere the crops were neglected, for the able-bodied men were volunteering.  William Cullen Bryant, who travelled on horseback in June from Petersburg to near Pekin and back, wrote home:  “Every few miles on our way we fell in with bodies of Illinois militia proceeding to the American camp, or saw where they had encamped for the night.  They generally stationed themselves near a stream or a spring in the edge of a wood, and turned their horses to graze on the prairie.  Their way was barked or girdled, and the roads through the uninhabited country were as much beaten and as dusty as the highways on New York Island.  Some of the settlers complained that they made war upon the pigs and chickens.  They were a hard-looking set of men, unkempt and unshaved, wearing shirts of dark calico and sometimes calico capotes.”