Battle of Credit Island

The Battle of Credit Island, fought on 21 July 1814 on a small island in the Mississippi River near present-day Davenport, Iowa, was an engagement in which the future President of the United States was defeated by a force consisting of approximately thirty British soldiers with a single cannon and four hundred Sauk, Fox, and Kickapoo warriors. Major Zachary Taylor’s gunboat expedition, sent to recapture Prairie du Chien, was driven back down the Mississippi in one of the war’s more humiliating American reverses.

Taylor had been dispatched upriver from St. Louis with eight gunboats and approximately 430 regulars and rangers. His mission was to retake Prairie du Chien, which had been captured by a British-Indigenous force from Mackinac earlier that month. The expedition was one of several American attempts to reassert control over the upper Mississippi — all of which failed.

At Credit Island, Taylor’s flotilla encountered a force that exemplified the British-Indigenous alliance at its most effective. A handful of British soldiers — reportedly no more than thirty, including Royal Marines and local militia under the command of a sergeant — had positioned a captured American three-pounder cannon on the island. They were supported by approximately 400 warriors from the Sauk, Fox, and Kickapoo nations who lined the riverbanks.

The engagement lasted several hours. Taylor’s gunboats exchanged fire with the cannon on the island and with warriors firing from the banks. One gunboat was disabled by the three-pounder. Warriors in canoes harassed the American vessels from multiple directions. Taylor, recognising that his force could not advance against the combined fire from the island and both banks, ordered a withdrawal downriver.

The retreat to St. Louis effectively ended American operations on the upper Mississippi for the remainder of the war. Prairie du Chien remained in British hands. The Indigenous nations of the region — Sauk, Fox, Kickapoo, Menominee, Winnebago — continued to ally with Britain until the Treaty of Ghent. Taylor’s failure at Credit Island, humbling as it was, would not prevent his later rise to military fame in the Mexican-American War and the presidency. But in July 1814, a future president was turned back by a sergeant and a three-pounder.