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Who is Black Hawk? 1600–1804

General Edmund P. Gaines, a veteran frontier soldier, had issued the call for an urgent council. His orders directed him to move the troublesome segment of Sauk and Mesquakie Indians, known as the British Band, out of Illinois and west across the Mississippi River into Iowa. As Gaines and his aides waited, Indian leaders arrived at the Rock Island agency house. Keokuk and Wapello, two of the principal chiefs, and their followers, entered the meeting place, crowding it to the doors. Then Black Hawk and his partisans appeared. Armed with their lances, spears, and war clubs, and carrying their bows strung with arrows at the ready, they marched up to the door chanting a war song. Seeing that the supporters of his competitor, Keokuk, had already filled the room, Black Hawk refused to enter. Instead, the taciturn warrior waited until General Gaines had ordered some of the others from the room. Then Black Hawk and a few of his adherents stalked into the chamber.

Figure 1.1 Black Hawk: Charles Bird King, 1833.

Source: New York Public Library.

Gaines had remained seated until the latecomers filed in and then rose to address the tribal leaders. Although aware that some of his listeners carried more than the usual number of weapons into the council house, he had taken no notice except to increase the guard quietly. As he spoke, the general reminded the Indians that nearly three decades earlier they had sold the land on which their major village stood and that they had signed several other treaties with the United States recognizing the validity of that cession. He lectured them about the expense of having to bring troops up the Mississippi River from Jefferson Barracks, near St. Louis, just to get them to do what they had already promised. Urging them to think of their own best interests by cooperating and keeping the peace, he encouraged the Indians to move west across the Mississippi immediately.

According to his own account, Black Hawk began speaking almost before the General could retake his seat. “We had never sold our country,” he insisted. “We never received any annuities from our American father! And we are determined to hold onto our village.”

Bolting to his feet, the angry Gaines demanded, “Who is Black Hawk? Who is Black Hawk?”

After a moment's hesitation, a flushed Black Hawk retorted, “I am a Sauk! My forefather was a SAUK! and all the Nations call me a SAUK!” With that exchange, the council lost even the façade of civility. Bluntly, General Gaines gave the Indians two days to move west across the Mississippi, threatening to use his troops against them if they refused. To this, the aging warrior responded that “I never could consent to leave my village,” and he remarked that he was determined not to leave it. With those words, the meeting ended as the angry participants separated. During the next year, 1832, American forces destroyed the British Band, and incarcerated Black Hawk and the other Indian leaders in chains at Jefferson Barracks.

Black Hawk's shouted insistence on his identity as a Sauk provides a key to his years as a youth and young adult, as well as to his self-image and relationship to the Indian past. He grew to manhood at a time when traditional customs remained in place. These included everything from the naming ceremony for a baby to the burial rites and mourning practices for the dead. Although clearly affected by long-time white presence in eastern North America, the Sauks and their close neighbors the Mesquakies had maintained rich cultural traditions and strong tribal identities well into the beginning of the nineteenth century. In the decades after the American War of Independence, growing white influence and economic pressures began to buffet many native groups, and the tribes of the upper Mississippi Valley could no longer ignore the turbulence that swirled around them.

These pressures came at the time young Black Hawk was growing to manhood, and they clearly upset him. Whether or not consciously aware that the changes resulted the actions of whites, the young Sauk came to see himself as a defender of his village and tribal traditions. When his father died, Black Hawk proudly announced that he “now fell heir to the great medicine bag of my forefathers, which had belonged to my father.” He stood, then, at a watershed in history for the Sauk and Mesquakie people. Fundamental changes in economics, diplomacy, and society swept across eastern North America as the British replaced the defeated French after 1763 and the British and Americans competed bitterly with each other after 1776. During those decades, Black Hawk saw few of the invading whites. While he may have heard about some of their actions, his world rarely went beyond family or village affairs. As a result, he had little experience to help him understand events that would soon destroy much of tribal life as he knew it. He tended to look backward, to favor long-established traditions and practices rather than to accommodate the present. He had learned the lessons of his forefathers well. Unfortunately, these lessons did not always fit the new situations he would face as a mature adult.

The almost willful self-destructiveness Black Hawk had displayed at the June 1831 meeting with General Gaines illustrated a long-demonstrated trait of the Sauk people. Since first encountering Europeans in the early seventeenth century, the actions taken by the Sauks and their allies the Mesquakies (or Foxes) appear to have been shortsighted, even ruinous. Nevertheless, their behavior resulted from well-thought-out motivations and clearly recognized principles of conduct. By the late eighteenth century, the whites considered the Sauks and Mesquakies a single tribe. That was incorrect. Although related by language and culture, and enjoying substantial cooperation and even intermarriage, the two peoples always remained separate entities in their own minds.

The Osakiwugi or Sauks called themselves the yellow-earth people, while their neighbors the Mesquakies were known as the red-earth people. Both tribes spoke closely related language variations of what ethnologists call the Central Algonquian group, and during the late prehistoric era they used the technology of many eastern woodland peoples. They hunted, fished, gathered, farmed, and mined for lead, as did some of their aboriginal neighbors. They erected permanent villages with multiple-family lodges built of poles, mats, and bark, living in them during the summer while their nearby crops matured. Their technology remained simple, based primarily on the use of wood, bone, and stone implements. Adept at weaving mats, they also fashioned animal skins into clothing, and made earthenware pottery. Except when unusual weather, such as a severe winter or a particularly late spring, brought hardship, these people conducted their affairs in relative stability prior to the European invasion of North America. Thousands of foreigners came to the continent, and with them came disease, demands for land, and fundamental economic, political, and diplomatic changes in the tribes’ relationships with each other.

Sauk traditions told of Black Hawk's great grandfather Na-na-ma-kee, or Thunder, meeting a French explorer, perhaps Samuel de Champlain, near what is now Montreal at the beginning of the seventeenth century. Increasing warfare with their Indian neighbors drove the Sauks westward from their probable home in southern Ontario, and a few decades later they lived in the Saginaw Bay area in eastern Michigan. From there they followed several other Central Algonquian peoples, including the Mesquakies, into western and southern Michigan and beyond into Wisconsin. By the period of the Iroquois Wars, extending from the 1640s through the 1670s, other Indians fled before the ever wider ranging Iroquois war parties, the entire pattern of tribal locations undergoing major disruptions. By the 1660s, Jesuit missionaries reported that several of the Algonquian tribes had forced their way into the Green Bay region of eastern Wisconsin, an area formerly claimed almost exclusively by the Ho-Chunk or Winnebago people. The Ho-Chunk gave way grudgingly, but the invading groups remained relatively small, here being plenty of land, with ample resources for the natives and the newcomers alike.

The Sauks migrated west to the shores of Green Bay, as did the Mesquakies, Potawatomis, and others. The new tribal homes, seemingly out of the reach of the dreaded Iroquois war parties, turned out to be good ones for the refugees. By the 1680s, the Sauks and Mesquakies had erected stable villages, cleared and cultivated land, and learned to exploit the local resources effectively. They soon became successful farmers and soon sold their surplus corn and other foodstuffs to the French traders who traveled from Green Bay up the Fox River, down the Wisconsin, and west to the Mississippi and beyond in their never-ending quest for furs. From their earliest contacts with the whites, the Indians of this region experienced frequent changes in their economic, social, and diplomatic / military relations. Driven from their eastern homes, and forced to invade the territory of other tribes, they had learned well how to shift their allegiances and alter their economic practices to fit new circumstances.

Nevertheless, these immigrant tribes continued to face disruptions of their economies and societies as the...