It’s Time to Leave: The Black Hawk “War” and Indian Removal in the Old Northwest
Plus a music video and a song on some of the same themes.
Below is a music video for the song “Hawk Returns” by Lomira, a band I am in with Marielle Allschwang. It’s from the EP “A Lapidary World.” The song and video both touch on the events of The Black Hawk War of 1832 in various ways. Both diverge wildly from there. Hopefully the music, the visuals, and the following essay about the history of the war can work together to create a cohesive understanding of history, space, time, death, life, birth, birds, rebirth, moths, light, land, airplanes, insects, imperialism, dreams, trees, soil, water, war, electricity, mitosis, meiosis, violence, peace, love, and anything else you might manage to take from it.
It’s April 1832. Black Hawk and about 1,500 followers cross to the east side of the Mississippi River and head north toward their village of Saukenuk. They are mostly Sauk, but there are some Meskwaki and Kickapoo. There are men, women, children, and elderly people. Though some of them are armed, this is not an invading army.
They had been forced to leave Saukenuk when the government started selling their land to settlers. But they had farms there. Their relatives were buried there. None of this seemed fair, and so they headed back.
Black Hawk was an unlikely leader for such an audacious undertaking. He was not a chief or a religious leader, and held no formal political power within the Sauk. He was not known as a great orator. He had been a respected war leader, but that was decades ago. He was in his sixties now. Maybe so many joined him because finally someone decided they had experienced enough dislocation and humiliation and it was time to disobey.
Black Hawk and his band would never set foot in Saukenuk on this journey. Five months later, it would all end in a massacre as they tried to get back across the Mississippi.
Prelude to “War”
There was a treaty that said they had to leave Saukenuk (present-day Rock Island, Illinois) and move to present-day Iowa. In 1804, William Henry Harrison—then Governor of the Indiana Territory who would go on to a long and storied term as President of the United States—met with five representatives of the Sauk and Meskwaki (or the Sac and Fox). Some young Sauk warriors had killed three U.S. citizens near St. Louis, and five chiefs from the Sauk and Meskwaki went to negotiate payment for the murders. (The chiefs’ names were Pashepaho, Quashquame, Outchequaka, Layavois, and Hashequarhiqua.)[1]
These representatives weren’t authorized to sell any land, let alone all of it, but that’s what they did, whether they knew it or not. As John P. Bowes writes in Black Hawk and the War of 1832, “The true story of this treaty remains somewhat mysterious. Harrison did not keep notes of the council, and the memories of the Sauk delegation were not very detailed. Pashepaho and his colleagues would later state that they did not know what they were signing. They also argued that Harrison kept them drunk during their stay in St. Louis. Until his death, Quashquame denied that he ‘ever sold any land above the Rock River.’”[2]
The U.S. Government made this treaty with the “United Sac and Fox Tribes.” The “United Sac and Fox” was a legal fiction forced into being through this treaty—not an existing political entity these men represented when they arrived. The Sauk and Meskwaki had been closely linked since 1735 when they fought together against the allied French, Huron, Ottawa, and Potawatomi, but they remained separate nations.
In his memoirs, Black Hawk says of the 1804 treaty: “I will leave it to the people of the United States to say, whether our nation was properly represented in this treaty? or whether we received a fair compensation for the extent of country ceded by those four [actually five] individuals? I could say much about this treaty, but I will not, at this time. It has been the origin of all our difficulties.”[3]
The difficulties did not begin immediately. Article VII of the treaty stipulated that the Sauk and Meskwaki could continue using their land until the Federal Government started selling it to private citizens—only then would they have to leave. Not much changed for several decades, but in the 1820s and ’30s, lead mining became a booming business in the region, and huge numbers of settlers started purchasing property from the government.
It wasn’t just white settlers that were making money digging lead from the ground. The Sauk had mines of their own and were active in the growing lead market. Major Morrell Marston, who lived in the region at the time, wrote about the scale of the Sauk mining operations: “Four or five hundred thousand weight of this mineral is dug by them in a season.”[4] These were lucrative lead mines, just waiting to be purchased out from under the Sauk.
In the winter of 1828-29, while the Sauk were away on their winter hunt, squatters deemed Saukenuk “deserted” and began moving in. They fenced off crops and knocked down houses. Judge John Pence of Indiana moved his family into Black Hawk’s home.[5] After a few years of conflict and confusion between the Sauk and settlers, the militia came in May 1831 and forcibly removed the Sauk. Afterward, some militiamen dug up and desecrated Sauk graves.
The Sauk now lived west of the Mississippi River, needing new houses and new crops. It was too late in the year to do anything but scramble to survive. The following April, Black Hawk and his followers crossed the Mississippi to go home, and set off what is known as the Black Hawk War.
The “War”
News spread quickly that fifteen hundred Native Americans had unexpectedly arrived where they’d been told not to be. Governor Reynolds of Illinois called out the militia and began pursuing Black Hawk’s Band. But the Sauk and their allies changed course, moved fast, and successfully evaded the militia—which included a young Abraham Lincoln—until the Battle of Stillman’s Run in the middle of May.
“Stillman’s Run” is not the name of the place where the battle took place. The fighting occurred in northern Illinois near Sycamore Creek. It’s called “Stillman’s Run” because Isiah Stillman commanded the militia, and run is what most of them did. Accounts vary, but it seems Black Hawk sent three warriors under a flag of truce to discuss the pursuit or arrange safe passage for his people. Another group of warriors watched from a distance. Part of the militia attacked these observers. Once the firing started, the militia shot one of the warriors under the flag of truce. The other two fled. As the militia launched an uncoordinated attack, Black Hawk counterattacked, killed eleven militiamen, and sent the rest on a chaotic stampede away from the fighting.
This skirmish changed everything. What could have been settled with words had turned violent. It also set off widespread paranoia and fear. The U.S. army was still mobilizing and the militia was embarrassed and wanted to go home. Settlers in the region were in a total panic because a band of killers was on the loose and the force sent to stop them had failed miserably.
Black Hawk did little to alleviate these fears when a group of Potawatomi traveling with him raided a farm in northern Illinois, killed almost everyone present, kidnapped two women, and stole as much food as they could carry. Black Hawk was seemingly anywhere, everywhere, and capable of anything. Fear spread across the region.
Black Hawk and his Band moved north into present-day Wisconsin, undetected in the swampy series of lakes where Madison, Wisconsin now sits. Things were not going well. They were starting to starve and had resolved to cross back over the Mississippi as soon as possible.
A new militia, under the command of Henry Dodge, caught up with them in late July along the Wisconsin River for the Battle of Wisconsin Heights. The Sauk and their allies took a good defensive position on a thickly wooded hill. They suffered heavy losses, but managed to silently make a nighttime retreat. The entire band of hungry, injured, and tired people of all ages started traveling toward the Mississippi River well ahead of Dodge and his militia.
But on August 1, 1832, the U.S. Army intercepted Black Hawk and his Band as they attempted to cross the Mississippi. Daniel Parkinson, who took part in the ensuing two-day Battle of Bad Axe, described it as “more a massacre than a battle.”[6] The Warrior, a steamboat piloted by Captain James Throckmorton, found the Sauk and their allies still on the east side of the river. Black Hawk waved a white flag and tried to surrender. Throckmorton, afraid of falling into a trap, decided to open fire. The Warrior fired its cannons and its troops fired their guns until Throckmorton headed off to refuel.
Black Hawk and a few others fled north and hid deep in the woods. The rest of his followers were left on the banks of the Mississippi with little to do but run and hide. Around two o’ clock in the morning, Dodge’s militia and U.S. Army troops found and attacked the remainder of the band from land. The Warrior returned later that morning and attacked from water. Very few made it across the river alive. Dakota Sioux later attacked those who successfully crossed, leaving even fewer survivors.
Black Hawk surrendered himself on August 27, 1832. Lieutenant Robert Anderson was assigned to escort Black Hawk to military prison, but the cholera epidemic of 1832 caught up with Anderson and he became too ill to do the job. Lieutenant Jefferson Davis stepped in.[7] Decades later, at the start of the U.S. Civil War, Anderson would command Fort Sumter in South Carolina and Davis would be President of the Confederacy, ordering the first shots of the Civil War fired in Anderson’s direction.
Black Hawk would be dead long before then, passing away in 1838, but not before meeting President Andrew Jackson and receiving a tour of the eastern seaboard, where he was treated like a celebrity.
This is a sad story filled with misunderstandings, cruelty, and unnecessary deaths. The U.S. hunger for land and lead mines drove these settlers to displace or kill many Native Peoples. The Indian Removal Act of 1830 was in effect. Dispossession, forced removal, and murder were all too common.
In addition, the United States was expanding rapidly while also developing its identity—an identity in crisis as the founding generation passed away. New men were in charge. Henry Dodge, Isiah Stillman, and so many others wanted to fight for their land like George Washington fought for his. This new generation killed to assert their masculinity and feel some self-worth. They needed land to win and an enemy to kill. The Old Northwest was some of the land they found, and the Sauk were some of the people they killed.
[1] John P. Bowes, Black Hawk and the War of 1832: Removal in the North (New York: Chelsea House, 2007), 29.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Black Hawk, Black Hawk: An Autobiography (1833: Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 54.
[4] Qtd. In Kerry A. Trask, Black Hawk: The Battle for the Heart of America (New York: Henry Holt, 2006), 38.
[5] Ibid., 65.
[6] Ibid., 284.
[7] K. Jack Bauer, Zachary Taylor: Soldier, Planter, Statesmen of the Old Southwest (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1985), 64-5. See also, William J. Cooper, Jr., Jefferson Davis, American (New York: Vintage, 2000), 59-60.