About this record
Joseph Dickson was a young man of 22 when in 1827 he joined other Illinois "adventurers" moving to the lead region near Plateeville. With the outbreak of the Black Hawk War 1832, he enlisted in the local militia and was put in command of an advance team sent in front of the main body of U.S. forces. Reconnoitering the location and strength of the retreating Sauk Indians, Dickson was among the first on the scene at the battles of Wisconsin Heights and Bad Ax. In this short memoir written about 1855, he gives his memories of those events as well as of homesteading and mining on the Wisconsin frontier. To see a typed transcript, click "Page & Text" while viewing any handwritten page.Citation
Dickson, Joseph. "Personal narrative of the Black Hawk War, 1855." Original manuscript in the Wisconsin Historical Society Archives (SC 1816).