Source: Sun Sentinel
Source: The Atlantic
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Author: Chad Brown, January 2022
Black Hawk – is the namesake of Black Hawk County and my favorite NHL team, the Chicago Blackhawks. I’ve always identified the Black Hawk War with Illinois and the participation of Abraham Lincoln, but Black Hawk lived some time and passed away in the state of Iowa.
Black Hawk was born in 1767 in the village of Saukenuk on the Rock River (present-day Rock Island, Illinois). Black Hawk’s father was the tribal medicine man of the Sauk people. The Sauk used the village all year. They built log homes, fenced in their fields, and hunted in Illinois and across the Mississippi River in Iowa.
Little is known about Black Hawk’s youth. He was said to be a descendant of a Sauk chief who, according to tradition, met an early French explorer, possibly Samuel de Champlain. At age 15, Black Hawk accompanied his father Pyesa on a raid against the Osage. He won approval by killing and scalping his first enemy. The young Black Hawk tried to establish himself as a war captain by leading other raids. He had limited success until, at age 19, he led 200 men in a battle against the Osage, in which he personally killed five men and one woman. Soon after, he joined his father in a raid against Cherokee along the Meramec River in Missouri. After Pyesa died from wounds received in the battle, Black Hawk inherited the Sauk medicine bundle which his father had carried, giving him an important role in the tribe.
After an extended period of mourning for his father, Black Hawk resumed leading raiding parties over the next years, usually targeting the traditional enemy, the Osage. Black Hawk did not belong to a clan that provided the Sauk with hereditary civil leaders, or “chiefs.” He achieved status through his exploits as a warrior and by leading successful raiding parties.
During the War of 1812, Black Hawk, now 45, served as a war leader of a Sauk band at their village of Saukenuk, which fielded about 200 warriors. He supported the invalidity of Quashquame’s Treaty of St. Louis (1804) between the Sauk and Fox nations and then-Governor William Henry Harrison of the Indiana Territory that ceded territory, including Saukenuk, to the United States. The Sauk and Fox are consensus-based decision makers and those representatives sent to the meeting with the US government did not have the power to cede tribal territory, although Quashquame did. The lack of the consensus aspect by each of the Sauk and Fox councils meant that the treaty could never be considered valid by Black Hawk and other traditionalists. Black Hawk took part in skirmishes against US forces at the newly constructed Fort Madison in the disputed land; this was the first time he fought directly against the U.S. Army.
During the War of 1812, forces of Great Britain and its colonies in present-day Canada were engaged against those of the U.S., with major battles on the Great Lakes and surrounding remote lands. The British depended upon alliances with the Native American population to wage war in this area since the British were occupied with Napoleon in Europe. Robert Dickson, a Scottish fur trader, amassed a sizable force of Native Americans at Green Bay to assist the British in operations around the Great Lakes. Most were from the Potawatomi, Ho-Chunk, Kickapoo, and Ottawa tribes. Black Hawk and his band of about 200 Sauk warriors were included in this group of allies.
Dickson commissioned Black Hawk at the rank of brevet Brigadier General, with command over all native allies at Green Bay and presented him with a silk flag, a medal, and a written certificate of good behavior and alliance with the British. The war leader preserved the certificate for 20 years; it was found by US forces after the Battle of Bad Axe, along with a flag similar in description to that Dickson gave to Black Hawk.
During the war, Black Hawk and Native warriors fought in several engagements alongside Major-General Henry Procter on the borders of Lake Erie. Black Hawk was at the Battle of Frenchtown, Fort Meigs, and the attack on Fort Stephenson. The United States Army was able to inflict a significant defeat on Tecumseh’s Confederacy by killing Tecumseh during the war.
Black Hawk despaired over the many lives lost in the fighting; soon after, he quit the war to return home. Back in Saukenuk, he found that his rival Keokuk had become the tribe’s war chief. Black Hawk rejoined the British effort toward the end of the war, fighting alongside British forces in campaigns along the Mississippi River near the Illinois Territory. At the Battle of Credit Island and by harassing U.S. troops at Fort Johnson, Black Hawk helped the British to push the Americans out of the upper Mississippi River valley.
Black Hawk fought in the Battle of the Sink Hole (May 1815), leading an ambush on a group of Missouri Rangers. Conflicting accounts of the action were given by the Missouri leader John Shaw and by Black Hawk.
After the end of the War of 1812, Black Hawk signed a peace treaty in May 1816 that re-affirmed the treaty of 1804. Later he said he was not aware of this stipulation.
As a consequence of the 1804 treaty, the Sauk and Fox tribes had ceded their lands in Illinois and in 1828 were removed west of the Mississippi. Black Hawk and other tribal members disputed the treaty, as noted above, and said leaders had signed it without full tribal authorization. Angered by the loss of his birthplace, between 1830 and 1831 Black Hawk led a number of incursions across the Mississippi River to Illinois. He was persuaded to return west each time without bloodshed.
In April 1832, encouraged by promises of alliance with other tribes and with Britain, he moved his so-called “British Band” of more than 1500 people, both warriors and non-combatants, into Illinois. Finding no allies, he tried to return to Iowa, but the undisciplined Illinois militia provoked open attack at the Battle of Stillman’s Run. A number of other violent engagements followed. The governors of Michigan Territory and Illinois mobilized their militias to hunt down Black Hawk’s Band. These actions led to the last Native American War fought on the east side of the Mississippi River. The conflict became known as the Black Hawk War.
When Black Hawk entered Illinois in April, his British Band was composed of about 500 warriors and 1,000 old men, women, and children. The group included members of the Sauk, Fox and Kickapoo tribes. They crossed the river near the mouth of the Iowa River and followed the Rock River northeast. Along the way, they passed the ruins of Saukenuk and headed for the village of Ho-Chunk prophet White Cloud.
As the war progressed, factions of other tribes joined, or tried to join Black Hawk. Other Native Americans and settlers carried out acts of violence for personal reasons amidst the chaos of the war. In one example, a band of hostile Ho-Chunk intent on joining Black Hawk’s Band attacked and killed the party of Felix St. Vrain in what Americans knew as the St. Vrain massacre. This act was an exception as most Ho-Chunk sided with the U.S. during the Black Hawk War; the warriors who attacked St. Vrain’s party had acted independently of the Ho-Chunk nation. From April to August, Potawatomi warriors also joined with Black Hawk’s Band.
The war stretched from April to August 1832, with a number of battles, skirmishes and massacres on both sides. Black Hawk led his men in another conflict, the Battle of Wisconsin Heights. Afterward, the Illinois and Michigan Territory militias caught up with Black Hawk’s “British Band” for the final confrontation at Bad Axe. At the mouth of the Bad Axe River, pursuing soldiers, their Indian allies, and a U.S. gunboat killed hundreds of Sauk and Potawatomi men, women and children. On August 27, 1832, Black Hawk and Wabokieshiek asked to surrender to the Indian agent Joseph Street but were instead taken to Zachary Taylor. They surrendered to Lieutenant Jefferson Davis, future president of the Confederacy, after hiding on an unnamed island in the Mississippi River.
Following the war, with most of the British Band killed and the rest captured or disbanded, the defeated Black Hawk was held in captivity at Jefferson Barracks near Saint Louis, Missouri together with Neapope, White Cloud, and eight other leaders. After eight months, in April 1833 they were taken east, as ordered by U.S. President Andrew Jackson. The men were taken by steamboat, carriage, and railroad, and met with large crowds wherever they went. Jackson wanted them to be impressed with the power of the United States. Once in Washington, D.C., they met with Jackson and Secretary of War Lewis Cass. Afterward, they were delivered to their final destination, prison at Fortress Monroe in Hampton, Virginia. They were held only a few weeks at the prison, during which they posed for portraits by different artists.
On June 5, 1833, the men were sent west by steamboat on a circuitous route that took them through many large cities. Again, the men were a spectacle everywhere they went, and were greeted by huge crowds of people in cities such as Baltimore, Philadelphia and New York. In the west, closer to the battle sites and history of conflict, the reception was much different. For instance, in Detroit, a crowd burned and hanged effigies of the prisoners.
Near the end of his captivity in 1833, Black Hawk told his life story to Antoine LeClaire, a government interpreter whose life has already been told here on Iowans Making History. Edited by the local reporter J.B. Patterson, Black Hawk’s account was one of the first Native American autobiographies published in the U.S. The Autobiography of Ma-Ka-Tai-Me-She-Kia-Kiak, or Black Hawk, Embracing the Traditions of his Nation, Various Wars In Which He Has Been Engaged, and His Account of the Cause and General History of the Black Hawk War of 1832, His Surrender, and Travels Through the United States. Also Life, Death and Burial of the Old Chief, Together with a History of the Black Hawk War was published in 1833 in Cincinnati, Ohio. The book immediately became a best seller and has gone through numerous editions. In its time, it was not without controversy, Thomas Ford, governor of Illinois, disliked Black Hawk, Le Claire, and George Davenport, and believed that Black Hawk had little to do with the writing of his autobiography, dismissing the book as a “catch-penny publication.”
After his tour of the east, Black Hawk lived with the Sauk along the Iowa River and later the Des Moines River near Iowaville in what is now southeast Iowa. At the end of his life, he tried to reconcile both with American settlers and with his Sauk rivals, including Keokuk. He spent some time in Burlington, Iowa in the home of businessman and legislator Jeremiah Smith, Jr.. An attorney with whom he shared a room recalled, “I roomed with Black Hawk for weeks, and observed him carefully and under all circumstances. He was uniformly kind and polite, especially at the table; but often silent, abstracted and melancholy…. He presented the noble spectacle of a warrior chief, conquered and disgraced with his tribe by his conquerors; but, resigned to his fate and covered with the scars of many battles, in the spirit of true heroism, breaking bread with and enjoying the hospitality of his destroyers.”
Black Hawk died on October 3, 1838, after two weeks of illness. He was buried on the farm of his friend James Jordan, on the north bank of the Des Moines River in Davis County.
In July 1839, his remains were stolen by James Turner, who prepared his skeleton for exhibition. Black Hawk’s sons Nashashuk and Gamesett went to Governor Robert Lucas of Iowa Territory, who used his influence to bring the bones to security in his offices in Burlington. With the permission of Black Hawk’s sons, the remains were held by the Burlington Geological and Historical Society. When the Society’s building burned down in 1855, Black Hawk’s remains were destroyed.
An alternative account is that Governor Lucas passed Black Hawk’s bones to Enos Lowe, a Burlington physician, who was said to have left them to his partner, Dr. McLaurens. After McLaurens moved to California, workers were reported to have found the bones at his house. They buried the remains in a potter’s grave in Aspen Grove Cemetery in Burlington.
There is a marker for him in the Iowaville Cemetery on the hill over the river, although it is unknown if any of his remains are there.
Several place names, including Black Hawk County, Iowa, the Black Hawk Bridge between Iowa and Wisconsin, and the historical Black Hawk Purchase in Iowa, are named in honor of Black Hawk.
I am a fan of the Chicago Blackhawks. The Chicago Blackhawks of the NHL indirectly derive their name from Black Hawk. Their first owner, Frederic McLaughlin, was a commander with the 333rd Machine Gun Battalion of the 86th Infantry Division during World War I, nicknamed the “Black Hawk Division” after the war leader. McLaughlin named the hockey team in honor of his military unit.
Sources: Wikipedia, Rock Island County Historical Society