The “Scalping Editor”

Black Hawk’s band was in desperate straits during their fighting retreat to get back across the Mississippi River. “…especially the old, [who] were dying or just stopping along the trail to meet their fate. As the volunteers came across [them], those weak, nearly incapacitated Indians found alive were summarily killed and scalped, the corpses discovered were scalped and sometimes mutilated, and the graves plundered. One lone aged Sac was found sitting next to the fresh grave of his wife, who had just died from starvation and exhaustion the evening before. Dr. Addison Philleo, a physician and editor of [The Galenian newspaper], instantly raised his gun, as did others, and…shot the old [man] dead where he sat. Philleo then ‘rushed to the dead man and scalped him, holding the grisly trophy high in one hand as he danced a little jig.’”

Philleo sent the scalp, along with another, to Galena “and an article soon…appeared in “The Galenian” touting its editor’s escapades. [militaryhistoryonline]

This response to Philleo’s atrocity was printed in the Cincinnati Chronicle: “We trust that the Galenian is the only paper in the Union that could boast of such a feat, and that its editor is the only one of the fraternity capable of penetrating so disgusting and cruel an act.”

The editor of the Boston Post of September 3, 1832, wrote this: “It is not common for editors to fight with weapons more potent than the goose quill—and, when they do, it is the duty of the
press…to note them.”

In “The Black Hawk War of 1832,” Patrick Jung notes that Philleo “kept his scalps as trophies and displayed them at his residence in Galena for many years after the war.”

Philleo wasn’t the only militiaman to take “trophy scalps,” but he was among the most prominent in the Lead Mining District to do so.