This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island.
Apparently, wolves were at a premium around Rock Island when Joshua Vandruff, Hackley Samms, and other white settlers began moving into the area in the early 1830s. This may explain why the two men were forced to cry turkey rather than wolf.
The first settlers around Rock Island had every reason to be nervous. They had all settled on land belonging to the Sauk Indians, and a few families had actually moved into Indian homes in Saukenuk, the great Indian village near the mouth of the Rock River. They had destroyed Sauk gardens and plowed up the pastures where the Sauk kept their horses.
Across the river in Iowa, the Sauk war leader Black Hawk was encouraging his people to retaliate. You can see how the slightest rumors were able to send the squatters running to nearby Fort Armstrong for protection.
Finally, after yet another false alarm, the fort's commandant, Captain Bliss, sent them back to their spring planting, after arranging for an alarm signal—the firing of a gun—as the first sign of danger.
Captain Bliss had not counted on turkeys. On April 7th, as Vandruff and Samms were crossing Vandruff's Island in the Rock River, they came across a flock of wild turkeys. They did what had to be done: they each shot a turkey without thinking.
The settlers were terrorized. Only when Joshua Vandruff came across his wife and their ten children running pell-mell for Fort Armstrong, did he realize what he had done. He ran for the fort, only to find it packed with men, women, and children. Bliss had already left with a company of soldiers to fight the Indians. The fort was preparing for a siege.
Captain Bliss was not happy. An eyewitness account reported that "the air became impregnated with Sulphur."
Vandruff and Samms became a part of local folklore; for many years afterwards in the Rock Island area, Aesop and his story of the boy who cried wolf took a back seat to the two local boys who cried turkey.
Rock Island Lines with Roald Tweet is underwritten by Augustana College, Rock Island, Illinois.