Writing about AFRICAN-AMERICAN history, I follow these race terms:
- "NEGRO" was the term used until the mid-1960s.
- "BLACK" started being used in the mid-1960s.
- "AFRICAN-AMERICAN" [Afro-American] began usage in the late 1980s.
— PLEASE PRACTICE HISTORICISM —
THE INTERPRETATION OF THE PAST IN ITS OWN CONTEXT.
"...they believe that the Government has treated them
more harshly, and with Greater injustice, than any Other Indian nation,"
wrote Indian trader George Davenport to Illinois Congressman Joseph Duncan in
February of 1832. Davenport was trying to explain the bitterness felt by the Sauk (Sac) and Mesquakie (Fox) Indians at white encroachment on the area around their principal village
of Saukenuk, located at the site of present-day Rock Island, Illinois.
While the Sauk and Fox were in no position to be objective
about their mistreatment by the American government, they were not too far off
base. The way in which they were stripped of their Mississippi Valley home
easily holds its own with better-known tales of how whites used trickery,
fraud, and, finally, overwhelming force to sweep the Indians out of the way of
the relentlessly advancing frontier.
The Sauk were of Central Algonquian stock
- Eastern Woodland Indians. Before 1700, they had been driven from Quebec by
the powerful Iroquois, had settled first in Michigan, then moved westward to
the vicinity of Green Bay, Wisconsin, where they had joined forces with their
kinsmen, the Fox. Finally, they moved on to the Upper Mississippi Valley and,
about 1760, they established Saukenuk on the Rock River about two miles above
that pleasant stream's junction with the Mississippi.
The Sauk were the dominant partners in the alliance, and
Saukenuk itself evidenced how well they managed their affairs. It consisted of
some one hundred lodges - neatly constructed, rectangular residences laid out
in orderly rows on the low ground between the river and a seventy-foot-high
bluff. They were built with sturdy wood frames covered with strips of elm bark, which, as one early settler put it, "turned the rain very well." On
lowlands along the river, the women raised corn, beans, squash, and melons. The
rivers teemed with fish - the prairie groves with birds and small game - and
the tribes' winter sojourn to their Iowa hunting grounds produced prodigious
hauls of deer, beaver, otter, and raccoon pelts. Everything they had was shared
by all, and British adventurer Jonathan Carver noted with surprise and
admiration that the Sauk "esteem it irrational that one man should be
possessed of a greater quantity than another, and are amazed that any honor
should be annexed to the possession of it."
They were also fierce and warlike enough to satisfy the most
fevered Hollywood imagination and were in pain to look the part. The
warriors' faces were painted in fantastic blue, white, yellow, and black patterns. As if to taunt and defy their enemies, they shaved their heads close
except for a bristling scalp-lock, which would be adorned for battle or ceremony
by a clutch of eagle feathers. War was the principal road to distinction, and
tales of exploits by their elders told and retold bred generations of young
braves thirsting to prove their mettle. They found ample opportunity to do so
in the series of wars in which the Sauk and Fox seized coveted Illinois, Iowa,
and Missouri hunting grounds from their weaker neighbors just as they had
themselves been ousted from their Canadian home by the powerful Iroquois. It
was these wars that led Meriwether Lewis to observe that the Sauk and Fox,
while "extremely friendly" to the whites, were "...the most
implacable enemies to the Indian nations with whom they are at war; to them is
justly attributed the almost entire destruction of The Missouri, The Illinois, The Cahokias, Kaskaskias, and Peorias." Carver, perhaps seeking
to reconcile his admiration for the Sauk's well-ordered community life with his
dismay at their torture and execution of helpless captives, commented:
"They are the worst enemies and the best friends of any people in the
world."
From the start, their relationship with the Americans was a
rocky one. The Sauk had experienced French, British, and Spanish
"fathers" and had accommodated, as events demanded, the varying
Indian policies of each. They had found the Europeans to be interested in the
fur trade and in military alliances and free with presents and much-prized
medals. The Americans were a different story. Henry Goulbourn, one of the
British peace commissioners negotiating the Treaty of Ghent, which ended the War
of 1812, wrote: "Till I came here, I had no idea of the fixed determination
which there is in the heart of every American to extirpate the Indians &
appropriate their territory." The Sauk version was that the Americans were
like a spot of raccoon grease on a blanket, barely noticeable at first but
spreading irresistibly until the entire blanket was ruined.
 |
| Portrait of William Henry Harrison by Rembrandt Peale. |
No American was more determined to move the Indians
out of the way than the future hero of Tippecanoe, William Henry Harrison,
Governor of the Indiana Territory. Harrison had been given responsibility for
Indian affairs in newly acquired Louisiana and had been instructed by the
Secretary of War to try to obtain minor cessions of land on either side of the
Illinois River. Then, in August of 1804, an incident occurred which gave him
the excuse for a much bolder stroke. At the Cuivre River, some forty miles
north of St. Louis, white squatters had been trespassing on Sauk and Fox hunting grounds for some time. A fight had broken out between the squatters and some
Sauk and Fox, and when it was over, three or four whites had been killed. One
version has it that the killings were in revenge for the beating of an Indian
who had tried to stop an American from taking liberties with his daughter.
Others suggested that fiery young Sauk warriors committed the killings as an
act of defiance toward the tribal elders for failing to stand up to the
Americans. Whatever the actual facts, there was an immediate war scare along
the frontier. Whites fled for protection to forts and blockhouses, and Sauk and
Fox, living near St. Louis, retreated to the relative protection of Saukenuk.
The worried Sauk chiefs sent two of their number to St.
Louis to express their regret over the incident, to inquire what satisfaction
the Americans demanded, and to express their hope (soon to be dashed) that
their new father "would not punish the innocent for the guilty." What
the Sauk chiefs actually expected, in keeping with the custom prevalent among
their own and neighboring tribes, was that the Americans would demand payment
in money or goods to "cover the dead," i.e., to compensate the
families of the victims. They were considerably taken aback when advised that
the murderers must be delivered up to white justice and that the Sauk must
appear at a council with Harrison in St. Louis. No mention was made, however,
of contemplated land cession.
On October 27, another Sauk deputation appeared at St.
Louis led by a minor chief, Quashquame, with three or four other members and
with one of the supposed murderers in tow. The presumed culprit was promptly
clapped behind bars, and Quashquame and his delegation spent much of the
following week vainly pleading for his release - the rest of it forgetting
their troubles in St. Louis taverns and grog shops. On November 3, confused,
intimidated, and either drunk or hungover, Quashquame and the others were
assembled before Harrison and his retinue. An interpreter read to the befuddled
Indians a 2,000-word treaty between the United States and the Sauk and Fox to
which the Indians were to subscribe by making their mark.
What they heard (along with a number of less important
provisions) was that the Sauk and Fox were received into the "friendship
and protection" of the United States and that they were to cede to their
friend and protector their rights to some 23,000 square miles of western and
northwestern Illinois, southwestern Wisconsin, and a sizable chunk of eastern
Missouri. In exchange, the Sauk and Fox would receive a one-time payment of
goods worth $2,234.50 and, each year thereafter, additional goods worth $1,000.
Considering that their winter fur catch was reputed to have brought the Sauk
and Fox as much as $60,000 in a single season, the deal was preposterous on its
face.
Quashquame, who spent the rest of his life being condemned
as the man responsible for the misfortunes of the Sauk and Fox, always claimed
that neither he nor his associates ever "touched the pen." More
likely, he simply had no clear memory of what had happened. That he and the
others were drunk virtually all of that week in St. Louis is supported by Isaac
Galland, an exotic frontier character who practiced law and medicine, edited a
number of newspapers, and speculated in the land (it was Galland who sold Joseph
Smith the site for the Mormon settlement at Nauvoo). Galland reported that the
money paid to the Sauk and Fox upon signing the treaty was used to pay the
Indians' grog shop bills and went on to observe, "The writer has no doubt,
from his own personal knowledge of Quas-quaw-ma, that he would have sold to
Gov. Harrison at that time, all the country east of the Rocky Mountains, if it
had been required." Professor Cecil Eby of the University of Michigan has
observed that if Harrison had undertaken to transfer the Indiana Territory to the
Sauk and Fox, his action would have been repudiated as that of a madman. The
equally absurd cession by Quashquame and his companions of an area about as
large as Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New Jersey combined was serenely
accepted by the United States as a legal and binding act.
Having maneuvered a handful of drunken Indians into agreeing
to a cession that they had no authority to make, Harrison took the further
precaution of employing a bit of legal camouflage to ensure that nothing would
upset the formalized larceny that he had planned. Article 7 of the treaty was cleverly
designed to put to rest any troubling questions that might occur to Quashquame
or his associates as they listened to the interpreter droning on: "As long as the lands which are now ceded to the United States remain their
property, the Indians belonging to the said tribes, shall enjoy the privileged
of living and hunting on them."
Like most American Indians, the Sauk and Fox had little or
no concept of private land ownership. The tribe itself held dominion over their
villages, fields, and hunting lands. It was natural that they would assume the
same to be true with the Americans, and accordingly, Article 7 meant to them
that, under American dominion, they could expect to live and hunt on the land
forever. Unfortunately, there was no pro bono lawyer present to point out that, in fact, it meant exactly the opposite. As soon as the government sold the land
to settlers, the Indians would be evicted. Of course, had the draftsman of the
treaty been concerned with clarity, he could have said just that. Clarity was
not what the United States had in mind. Eby rightly calls the document signed
that day "one of the most notable swindles in American history."
When the Sauk and Fox tribal leaders learned what had taken
place at St. Louis, there began a steady stream of Indian protests aimed at the treaty's irregularity and at the pitifully meager compensation it provided.
Thanks to Article 7, there was little awareness shown of the fact that
Quashquame and the others had put their mark on a paper that signed away the
tribes' land forever.
The question did not present itself squarely for most of the
next two decades, during which northwestern Illinois remained largely an
unsettled wilderness, and the tribes continued to occupy their fields and
villages undisturbed. Then, in the 1820s, the development of the lead mines at
Galena and Dubuque brought the first significant influx of whites to the Upper
Mississippi Valley. With them came the familiar demands for the westward removal of
the Indians. Now, the Treaty of 1804 was trotted out, and there was no mistaking
the American view of its meaning and effect. The land around Saukenuk was
offered for sale, and Illinois Governor Ninian Edwards blustered, fulminated
and threatened to lose his militia on the Sauk and Fox unless the Federal
government saw to it that they were promptly moved out of the way of the lead
miners, settlers, and land speculators who crowded the decks of the steamboats
headed upriver from St. Louis.
 |
| Late nineteenth-century photograph of Chief Keokuk. |
The pragmatic Sauk leader, Keokuk, saw no choice except to
bow to the inevitable, and most of the Sauk and Fox sadly followed him across
the Mississippi to Iowa, but a naive, courageous, and idealistic warrior who
was woefully uninformed about the extent of American power, refused to concede.
His name was Ma-ka-tai-me-she-kia-kiak, Black Sparrow Hawk, shortened by the
whites to Black Hawk. He and his followers had fought for the British during
the War of 1812 and had been known to the Americans ever since as the
"British band" of Sauk and Fox.
Black Hawk's view of the Americans was expressed in his
observations that the British made few promises but kept them faithfully; the
Americans made many promises but kept none of them.
Black Hawk clung stubbornly to the belief that their
homes and fields could not be taken from the Sauk and Fox by a piece of paper
to which the tribes had never agreed. In 1831, he and his followers asserted
their ownership of Saukenuk in outright defiance of the treaty and demanded
that the whites leave. When they were confronted by 1,500 militiamen called out
by another Indian-hating Illinois governor, John Reynolds, the outnumbered
Indians slipped away in the night. The frustrated militiamen burned Saukenuk to
the ground for consolation.
The following spring, unwisely relying on the predictions of
Wabokieshiek, the Winnebago Prophet, that the Winnebagos, Potawatomi, and even
the British would come to his aid if he stood up to the Americans, Black Hawk
determined to try again. On April 5, 1832, he led some 1,000 Indians, about half
of them women and children, across the Mississippi to re-occupy Saukenuk and to
plant corn for the coming season. There followed what we know as the Black Hawk
War.
 |
Map of the territory acquired from the Sauk and Fox in the
Treaty of 1804 as prepared by Ernest Royce.
In Wisconsin, the acquisition stopped at the Wisconsin River. |
It was not really much of a war. It began with the fiasco of
Stillman's Run in which some forty or fifty Sauk warriors sent 275 panicked
militia fleeing thirty miles across the Illinois prairie to Dixon's Ferry, where
the main American force was encamped. There, they breathlessly recounted their
miraculous escape from thousands of bloodthirsty savages. Black Hawk was
astonished at this unexpectedly easy victory, but he also knew that his plight
was now even worse than before the encounter. The allies promised by the
Prophet had not materialized. He was burdened with hundreds of women and children.
There was little or nothing to eat except what could be gathered or obtained by
hunting and fishing while fleeing from a pursuing army, and that army - now
embarrassed and more determined than ever to punish him - refused to allow him
to surrender. Indeed, Stillman's Run had been precipitated by the first of what
were to be many futile attempts at surrender. The remainder of the
"war" was little more than the pursuit and hunting down a
dwindling band of starving, miserable Indians who kept trying to surrender but
whose pursuers either did not understand or did not want to understand.
It ended where Wisconsin's tiny Bad Axe River joins the
Mississippi, some thirty miles north of Prairie du Chien. There, many of the
remnants of Black Hawk's band were slaughtered as they tried to get across the
river to the west, where the Americans presumably wanted them to be. That no
longer mattered. No one was spared. Braves, old men and women, and mothers in
the water with their infants lashed to their backs as they tried to swim to
safety were all fair game for the troops on the bank and for the steamboat
Warrior cruising up and down the shoreline blasting away with its six-pounder
cannon. Nor was there any sanctuary for the few who managed to make it across.
They were hunted down by the Sioux, who had been commissioned by the Americans
to make sure that no one escaped.
The massacre at the Bad Axe River was the final act in the tragedy that had begun twenty-eight years earlier with William Henry Harrison's
unconscionable Treaty of 1804. While it differs only in detail from dozens of
other instances of egregious mistreatment of the American Indian, it needs to
be remembered as an example of what we did to those unfortunate people who had
the bad luck to find themselves in the path of Manifest Destiny[1].
By Herbert S. Channick
Editing by Dr. Neil Gale, Ph.D.
[1] Manifest Destiny: In the 19th century, manifest destiny was a widely held belief in the United States that its settlers were destined to expand across North America.
