IntroductionThe spring of 1832 was a season of war on the Illinois frontier. On the last day of May, readers of Springfield's Sangamo Journal could experience the horrors of war vicariously as they read a reprint of a week-old letter by an army lieutenant, Reuben Holmes, whose dramatic prose was matched by the horrifying details he related. Lieutenant Holmes reported:15 men, women and children, the victims of a most inhuman butchery, perpetrated yesterday morning by the ruthless, inhuman barbarians-The men were mutilated beyond the reach of a modest description; the women hung up by the feet, and the most revolting acts of outrage and indecency practiced upon their bodies.1As they read on, Springfielders learned that two teenaged sisters were yet from the site of the massacre, an isolated cluster of cabins on Big Indian Creek in LaSalle County. Readers were likely unaware that by the time they had read of the missing girls, their tribulations had already reached a conclusion. Abducted by the band of Potawatomi Indians that had perpetrated the massacre on May 20th, the sisters-seventeen-year-old Rachel and nineteen-year-old Sylvia Hall-were held captive for ten days, and had since been ransomed for the price of ten horses, wampum, and corn by a delegation of Ho Chunk2 Indians who subsequently delivered them into the custody of Colonel Henry Gratiot at Blue Mounds Fort in Wisconsin. The young women's return to white society had occurred on the same morning that the Journal had reported them missing. As a newspaper item, the story of the Indian Creek Massacre and the Hall captivity was over before it was reported. Yet, for years to come, the incidents would be among the most repeatedly recounted episodes of the four-month fiasco known as the Black Hawk War.3The episode and its subsequent replication provide a unique opportunity to witness the intersecting historical forces of gender, warfare, literature, and politics during Illinois' Jacksonian era. In their immediate context, the sources that chronicled the Halls' experience constitute a rich description of a brief piece of the military and social narrative of the Black Hawk War. As literature, the account eventually earned a place in the broader genre of the captivity narrative. As a repeated episode of gendered history, the Hall story has its appropriate place as a commentary on the role of femininity and masculinity on a violent frontier. While the Black Hawk War granted Illinois' frontier generation one last opportunity in which to forge their martial credentials against an unassimilated Indian foe, it was the constant repetition of a female narrative that would effectively script the meaning of manhood in a state free from Indian resistance.4The central purpose of the present essay is to conduct an analysis of three distinct generations of the Hall captivity tale-as they proliferated between 1832 and 1855-against the gendered landscape of Illinois' changing political culture. To ground the source material for such an endeavor, it is first necessary to set the context for the incident at Indian Creek itself. As such, a prologue of Indian-white relations in the region- beginning with the settlement story of the Old Northwest, narrowing eventually to the details of the Black Hawk War, and ultimately to the fate of Rachel and Sylvia Hall-will precede the interpretive portion of this essay.5The Long War for the Old NorthwestAn understanding of the broader sweep of history into which the Hall sisters and their Potawatomi captors stepped as they fled the grisly scene at Big Indian Creek in May of 1832 requires contemplating over two centuries of Indian crisis in the Western Great Lakes. Faced with demographic, economic, and imperial revolutions of unprecedented scale, the hundreds of Algonquian groups that inhabited the region bounded by the bounded by the Mississippi, the Ohio, the Appalachians, and the shores of the Great Lakes cobbled together as many policies as might be imagined to maintain their interests and their dignity as successive waves of Europeans fought and negotiated for access to land, resources, and loyalty. …