In Indian days, all trails led to the Sauk village, and an excellent ford was found at the foot of the Watch Tower, where Rock river flowed over a flat-rock bottom.
One of these trails, which has been located, passed up the left bank of the Mississippi, doubtless to the lead mines about Galena, which the Sauk and Fox owned, and from which the Americans and Spaniards secured lead for use during the Revolutionary war.
The trail to the southwest, to Oquawka, was doubtless much used by the Sauk and Fox nation in going to and from their hunting ranges in Missouri and other points. The Illinois volunteers came to the Watch Tower over this trail in both the 1831 and 1832 campaigns of the Black Hawk war.
Black Hawk's last camp near his beloved village was on the trail which followed the south side of Rock river toward the northeast. This was in April, 1832. In May of the same year the Illinois volunteers followed him over the same trail, and it was doubtless used by Gen. Winfield Scott's regulars the following August in coming down from Dixon to Fort Armstrong.
The trail passing by Coal Valley and Crampton is known to history as "The Great Sauk Trail," and led from the village at the Watch Tower around the southern bend of Lake Michigan to Detroit and to Fort Malden, at Amherstsberg, Canada. It forked somewhere near Orion, Ill., and one part of it led to Peoria. It is probable that Col. John Montgomery followed this in 1780, when, with his allied army of 350, he burned the Sauk village.
See pp. 87 to 109 of "Transactions of the Illinois State Historical Society," for 1921.