CHAPTER XVI

THE BLACK HAWK WAR

The settlement of northern Illinois and Wisconsin by American colonists brought on in 1832 the last serious Indian outbreak in the lake region. The white men had been pushing the Indians farther and farther west. On the banks of the Mississippi the red men turned and made a desperate attempt to keep possession of the lands which held the homes and the graves of their ancestors.

Between Rock River in Illinois and the Wisconsin River there lay on the eastern bank of the Mississippi a region which had been known to the white men ever since the visit of Nicholas Perrot in 1690 because of its extensive deposits of lead. Mines had been worked there by the Indians and Frenchmen for two centuries and had yielded a considerable output, which had been bought by French-Canadian traders and in later years by the British. The United States concluded in 1804 a treaty with the Sauk and Fox Indians, who occupied this country, by which they ceded to the Americans the territory east of the Mississippi River from the mouth of the Illinois at the south to the mouth of the Wisconsin at the north. It had been agreed that so long as the lands remained the public property of the United States the Indians might live and hunt there, but when they were bought by settlers the Indians must move.

[Illustration: Map: “From Lake Michigan to the Mississippi”]

American mining settlements sprang up after the close of the War of 1812, and by 1827 an established coach road, known as Kellogg’s Trail, ran from Peoria one hundred and twenty miles north to Galena, which was in the heart of the mining country. Along this road were occasional groups of cabins, while on either side trails ran off into the wilderness which would have led the traveller who followed them to solitary homesteads and well-ordered farms. In a rich and fertile tract at the mouth of Rock River stood the chief village of the Sauks. It was one of the largest and most prosperous Indian towns on the continent, with more than five hundred families, and was besides the principal cemetery of the nation. Squatters seized the Indian fields, built their huts on their clearings, and stole their harvests. Until the lands were formally sold the Indians had a right there, and their complaints were just. In 1828, however, the site of the village was sold, and the tribes were given notice to leave. Keokuk, the chief of the Sauks, crossed the Mississippi with the majority of the tribe and counselled the rest to yield peaceably. A considerable number of the Indians remained in the settlement, living on the high bluff which has since been known as Black Hawk’s Watch Tower, and cultivating the few fields which remained to them.

Black Hawk was one of the Indians who did not share Keokuk’s submissive temper of mind. He was a warrior about sixty years of age, who seems always to have been a restless and discontented member of the tribe. He was a tall, spare man, with pinched features, high cheek-bones, and a prominent Roman nose. His black eyes were piercing; he had practically no eyebrows, and his hair had been plucked out save for a single scalp-lock, in which on occasions was fastened a bunch of eagle feathers. He was a striking figure, and his history bore out in interest his appearance. He had begun his warlike career in early youth. Before he was fifteen he had won in his tribe the rank of a brave, and at that age the scalping of an enemy had gained him the coveted right to paint, to wear feathers, and to dance the war-dance. Since that time he had been involved in every tribal skirmish that had taken place, and he had played a prominent part in the white men’s wars.

[Illustration: Portrait of Black Hawk, shown wearing several necklaces as well as numerous earrings which are in both ears.]

In the unsettled period before the War of 1812, Black Hawk had gathered about him a group of two hundred young warriors, who won for themselves in the war the name of the “British Band,” from their support of the British troops. He had fought at the battle of Frenchtown on the River Raisin, at the battle of the Thames under Tecumseh, and after the latter’s death he returned to Illinois and carried on there a border warfare which was only ended by his signing at St. Louis in 1816 a treaty of peace. Since that time he had made the Rock River village his headquarters, and when the white men began to take up his lands, his smouldering hatred of the Americans blazed out. Returning with a band of warriors from the winter hunting season of 1831, he was warned off his land. He refused to cross the Mississippi River, and appealed to the Indians to defend the graves of their ancestors. In spite of Keokuk’s remonstrances the best young men of the Sauk and Fox tribes flocked to his standard, and his threats excited such alarm among the settlers that Governor Reynolds of Illinois issued a call for volunteers to assist the regular troops in guarding the frontier. There was a prompt response, and when the troops reached Black Hawk’s village the Indians withdrew during the night to the west side of the river and signed a treaty never to return to their former homes without the express permission of the United States authorities.

Black Hawk did not abide by this treaty. During the winter of 1832 he recruited a large force, and in the spring he crossed the Mississippi at a point just south of his former village, and began a march up the Rock River Valley. This invasion of the state by a hostile band of savages excited great alarm along the frontier. The settlers came in from their lonely farms and built about the larger villages stockades and defences. A call for volunteers was issued, and the enthusiastic response was a surprise, even to the governor who summoned them.

One of the first to enlist was Abraham Lincoln, an Illinois citizen of two years’ standing. He had come with his family in his seventh year from Kentucky to Indiana and thence in 1830 to the newer settlements of Illinois. He was twenty-three years old, and was a tall, sturdy backwoodsman, who was to prove himself in the wrestling matches that were the soldiers’ pastime, the strongest man but one in the whole army. He was at once chosen captain of his company, an honor which brought him more gratification than most of his greater successes. The volunteers were organized into four regiments, and started to follow Black Hawk up the Rock River. The command of four hundred regulars was given to Colonel Zachary Taylor, afterwards President of the United States; and during the months of this war there served in the army Robert Anderson, the defender of Sumter, Winfield Scott, Albert Sidney Johnston, the Confederate hero, and Jefferson Davis. It was a distinguished group of men who responded in their youth to the call of their country.

The marching was difficult. There were no roads or bridges, only marshy trails and streams swollen into torrents by the spring thaws. But the hardy backwoodsmen were used to such conditions. They marched steadily on, and when they had gone some ninety miles up Rock River to Dixon’s Ferry halted to await the arrival of General Atkinson with the regular troops and the loads of provisions. They found there two battalions of horsemen, under the command of Majors Stillman and Bailey, which had been gathered in the upper country. They had had no long march to weary them, but were impatient to get a chance at the enemy. They set off as scouts on a dark, threatening morning in May, with orders to coerce what Indians they met into submission. “I thought,” says the governor in his memoirs, “they might discover the enemy.” And they did.

Black Hawk had been urging the tribes of the Rock River region to join him, but had received so little encouragement that he was almost prepared to make peace with the advancing army. He was now a little way up the river with a party of forty or fifty warriors, a body-guard selected from his eight hundred men, who were encamped seven miles beyond. As the chief sat at supper on the evening of the 14th of May, he was told that a small party of white horsemen was making camp near by. The creek on whose banks the Americans had halted was lined with tall willows, which made a good protection for the camp. The vanguard of the two brigades had stopped, tied their horses to the trees, and begun to build fires for supper when three Indians appeared on a height nearly a mile away. It afterwards proved that these Indians were messengers from Black Hawk and were bearing a white flag of truce. The scouts at sight of the Indians rushed out and seized them. Black Hawk and his men, watching at a distance, saw their men captured and prepared hastily to meet and attack the whites. The squads of soldiers who had started in the chase were scattered without any regular order along half a mile of the valley. When the foremost of the pursuers came upon Black Hawk and his men hidden behind a growth of brush, the savages dashed out upon them with wild war-whoops. The soldiers thought that eight hundred Indians were behind their leader, and scattered in every direction. Their officers tried to rally them, but the force was disorganized. The men leaped on their horses and rode away. The Indians, astonished at this sudden development, feared that they were being led into an ambush; but they pursued the white men, killing those whom they overtook. At one or two places companies of soldiers turned and made a gallant fight, but most of them escaped on their swift horses. By twos and threes they straggled into the camp at Dixon’s Ferry, twenty-five miles away, with a story of defeat that spread a panic over the whole frontier. The army marched next day to the scene of the surprise; but Black Hawk and his men were gone, and it was not thought wise to pursue them farther north without a better supply of provisions. The unexpected and easy victory had encouraged Black Hawk and had brought many Indians of other tribes to his side.

A reign of terror followed Stillman’s defeat. Scalping parties organized by Black Hawk covered the frontier, making raids on the exposed northern settlements. Many on both sides lost their lives, for small parties of American settlers made gallant defences in their scattered villages and held the Indians back. Three weeks from the time of the first attack a new army of volunteers, four thousand strong, took the field. They marched to Dixon’s Ferry and then plunged into the wilderness, taking every precaution as they proceeded into the enemy’s country to guard against surprise. On the 30th of June they crossed the Illinois border near the present city of Beloit, Wisconsin, and came upon abandoned camps and other signs of the retreating Indians.

The progress through the wilderness of Wisconsin was slow and difficult. Day after day the troops pushed on, wading up to their armpits in mud and water, or hewing away the trees and underbrush that barred their course. After three weeks they came up with the last of the fugitives. Passing through a forest where stands to-day the city of Madison, they came to the shores of the Wisconsin River, and there they fought the battle of Wisconsin Heights. The loss of life among the Indians was heavy; among the Americans, light. During the night after the battle, the startled soldiers sitting in their camp heard from the direction of the Indian encampment a loud, clear voice speaking in an unknown tongue. They feared that some chief was directing his men to descend upon the camp and make a night attack. After a time, however, the voice ceased and nothing more was thought of the incident. It proved afterwards that this was the voice of an orator sent by Black Hawk to beg for peace. He had used the Winnebago tongue, and as the members of that tribe had left the camp that very day, no one understood him. Thus the second attempt of Black Hawk to make peace failed.

From this time on the story of the campaign is a tale of relentless pursuit and slaughter of the fugitives. Black Hawk and his starving war-party reached the banks of the Mississippi, but an American steamer prevented their crossing in safety. The troops came upon them at a point called Bad Axe, and for three hours the bloody conflict raged. The white men lost only seventeen men killed, and twelve wounded. At least one hundred and fifty Indians were killed in the battle and as many more men, women, and children were drowned or shot down in their attempts to escape. Nearly a thousand Indians had crossed the Mississippi at Rock River, two hundred miles below. Barely one hundred and fifty regained the western bank at Bad Axe.

General Winfield Scott brought home the remaining troops, who were attacked by cholera on the journey and suffered great losses. The Winnebagoes, with whom Black Hawk sought refuge, delivered him over to the Americans, who put him under the guardianship of his former rival, the peace-loving Keokuk. By order of the war department the fallen warrior was taken during the time of his captivity on a tour of the country to see in the east the strength of the white man and realize the futility of further resistance by the Indian. On his first trip he went to Washington, was received by President Jackson, and was taken to Philadelphia, New York, up the Hudson, and back by way of the Great Lakes to Rock River, where he was set free. In 1837 Keokuk, who did not dare leave him unwatched in his absence, took him to Washington again with a deputation of Sauk and Fox Indians, and on this trip he went to Boston. The experiences of the savage warrior in this eastern city take us back to the time when Champlain took his Indian host Darontal to the little settlement at Quebec in 1616, and showed him the civilization of the Frenchman. Nothing could portray better the change in the relations of the white man and the red man in the two hundred years that had come between.

The Indian delegation was received by the mayor, the aldermen, and the common council of Boston at Faneuil Hall. The armories and the navy-yard were visited to show the military power of Bostonians; a levee was held at Faneuil Hall to receive the ladies who desired to meet the warriors; and on Monday morning, October 30, 1837, they were formally received in the Hall of the House of Representatives by Governor Everett, attended by his staff and other officers. In flowing and graceful language the governor welcomed the Indians on behalf of the Commonwealth, addressing them in the Indian style of oratory. The chiefs responded, one by one, to his words, Black Hawk in a shrill, clear voice that attracted the attention of the audience to the famous veteran warrior. All thanked the governor for his kind words and shook hands with him, expressing their desire for friendship with the white men. The party then adjourned to the Boston Common, where they performed a series of war-dances in the presence of an immense crowd; and in the evening they went to the Tremont Theatre to see “The Banker of Bogota,” which was being played there. With this scene the picture of the life of the last great Indian warrior of the lake region ends. Black Hawk returned to his home and died the next year at the age of seventy-one, in a reservation at Des Moines, Iowa, set apart for him and his few remaining followers. The Indians had been humbled and defeated.

The Black Hawk War called national attention to the western country. The troops had explored a wilderness little known to the Americans, and the story of their march into Wisconsin had been published in full in the newspapers of the East. Guide-books were issued, painting in brilliant colors the charms of the region, and a tide of westward immigration followed the sale of public lands by the government. Northern Illinois gained a large population, and Wisconsin was made a territory within four years. The foundation of the lake states had been laid; the Northwest had been Americanized.

PART III

OCCUPATION AND DEVELOPMENT