Battle of the Sink Hole

The Battle of the Sink Hole, fought on 24 May 1815 near the mouth of the Cuivre River in present-day Missouri, was the actual last engagement of the War of 1812 — fought five months after the Treaty of Ghent and four months after the better-known Battle of New Orleans. News of the peace simply had not reached the upper Mississippi. The combatants included two men who would shape American history for decades: Captain Zachary Taylor, future twelfth President of the United States, and Black Hawk, the Sauk war leader who would lead his own war against the United States in 1832.

Taylor, commanding approximately 350 regulars and rangers, was escorting a supply convoy up the Mississippi when his force was ambushed by approximately 300 Sauk and Fox warriors under Black Hawk. The warriors, still operating under the British alliance and unaware that the war was over, attacked Taylor’s encampment near a geographical depression known as the “sink hole.”

The fighting was fierce. Taylor’s men were initially pinned down, and the captain himself was reportedly in danger of being cut off. After approximately forty-five minutes of close-range combat, the warriors withdrew. American casualties were 7 killed and 4 wounded. Indigenous losses were estimated at approximately 10 killed with an unknown number wounded.

The Sink Hole was the war’s true last battle — not New Orleans, which is commonly cited but which occurred on 8 January 1815, nearly two months before the Treaty of Ghent was ratified by the US Senate. The engagement illustrates that the war’s consequences extended far beyond the formal diplomatic settlement. On the upper Mississippi, the conflict between the expanding American republic and the Indigenous peoples it was displacing would continue for another generation — through Black Hawk’s War of 1832, through the Indian Removal Act, and through the systematic dispossession that Taylor himself, as president, would oversee.