The State Street and Van Buren Street station as it looked when it opened in 1897.

The State Street-Van Buren station as it looked when it opened in 1897. The station, built in the Colonial Revival style, was standard for the stations of the Van Buren leg of the elevated Loop. Notice the open "porches" on the corners of the station house. These were enclosed by mid-century. (circa 1899)

Also relevant is that State Street is paved with Chicago street paver bricks, not cobblestone, as some suggest. Read about the history of Chicago street paver bricks in my Digital Research Library of Illinois History Journal™

A Chicago Artilleryman's Account of the Battle of Shiloh. "Our Wish for a Hard Battle."

The Battle of Shiloh took place on April 6-7, 1862 in southwestern Tennessee. It was also known as the Battle of Pittsburg Landing to southerners. The Union army was led by Major General Ulysses S. Grant and he faced Confederate forces under Generals P.G.T. Beauregard and Albert Sydney Johnston. 

Civil War soldiers were closely bound to the home front. Letters, packages of food, and visits from friends and loved ones were common. For the first year of the war the front for most Illinois soldiers was located in the neighboring states of Missouri, Kentucky, and Tennessee. Because people back home in Illinois kept in close touch with the troops, shifts in the attitude of the soldiers were followed by shifts in popular perception of the war.

Members of Battery A, First Light Artillery, also known as the Chicago Light Artillery. This photograph was taken at Camp Smith, near Cairo, Illinois. (June 1861)

In the spring of 1862, Illinoisans were naively optimistic about the progress of the war. Ulysses S. Grant's victories at Fort Henry and Fort Donelson had secured a large portion of Kentucky and Tennessee for the Union. Soldiers and civilians alike looked forward to a large battle as a means to kick out the last props on the rotten Confederacy. They saw battle as a test of valor and thought in terms of wars won and lost in a single Waterloo-like contest. This letter is a window into a common soldier's reaction to the trial of battle and the shock that courage and Christian soldiering were no guarantors of victory.

James Milner was a young artilleryman in the Chicago Light Artillery (later Battery A, 1st Illinois Artillery). The letter which was originally a private communication to his father, Robert Milner, was printed in the Chicago Tribune on Friday, April 18, 1862. James Milner enlisted in the army immediately after Abraham Lincoln's call for volunteers. The unit was made up of middle class Chicagoans, many of whom were members of the YMCA and the St. James Episcopal Church in Chicago.

There is a memorial altar to the unit's dead in the vestibule of St. James and a beautiful Leonard Volk sculpture in Chicago’s Rosehill Cemetery on which is inscribed the names of the men Battery A lost at Shiloh.

"The Sabbath dawned upon us clear and warm," Milner wrote. His unit was camped in a meadow as part of Brigadier General William H. L. Wallace's Division. While watering the battery's horses, Milner heard firing in the distance. The unit quickly harnessed the horses and limbered the guns. They were immediately sent forward to the rapidly forming Union battle line.

Capture of Union forces at Pittsburg Landing, Tennessee, by Confederates, Sunday, April 6, 1862.

Although the men had seen action at Fort Donelson, they were by no means veteran troops. As they came under fire, they laughed at each other for involuntarily flinching. The laughter stopped when Sergeant Jerry Powell had his arm ripped off by a Rebel shell. Throughout the morning, the battery was engaged - hurrying from one crisis to another - trying with little success to break the Confederate advance.

Repulsing the combined Confederate attack at the Peach Orchard, Shiloh, Tennessee, Sunday, April 6, 1862.

The fighting took a heavy toll on the battery. Out of ninety of the men who went into action thirty-two were killed or wounded. "Ed Russell, a young man whom you have seen behind the counter of Smith's bank, as gentlemanly a man as we had in the battery, had his bowels torn out by a solid shot. He lived but a half an hour. His last words were as he lay on his face, 'I die like a man.' And good man Farnham, a Christian man, my tent-mate for six months...was shot through above the heart... Flanigan a merry hearted Irishman and the intimate friend of Ed Russell, was shot through the mouth." At this point, the infantry fighting in front of the battery broke and ran. Their fighting took them across the battery's field of fire. "We yelled at them to keep away from our fire, but they didn't hear. I ran forward and waved my hat, but to no purpose, and I went back to my post and fired through them." The battery's own retreat nearly cost them their howitzer. Under the direct fire of the enemy, the men struggled to sort out the tracers amid dead and panicked horses. "We saved the howitzer, having eight men wounded in the performance." After trying one final try to help stem the rebel tide, the battery again limbered their guns and joined the retreat to Pittsburg Landing on the Tennessee River.

Reccapture of Union artillery by the First Ohio Regiment at Shiloh Church, Monday, April 7, 1862.

"I now knew we were beaten and in full retreat. I stopped, and with the aid of some infantry, helped one of our guns out of a mud-hole, and walked on till we came to a road jammed with wagons: I felt then I had never witnessed so painful a sight as a disorganized army. Here I found Billy Williams...riding in a baggage wagon. He said to me in a pitiable tone, 'Jimmy, won't you come take care of me, I am shot through?' I had to refuse. This was truly painful. I helped him down and put him into an ambulance." In the wagon, Milner discovered another wounded comrade, Jerry Paddock. "I got into the ambulance and examined Paddock's wound, I found that he was shot through the liver, and that there was no blood coming through the wound, I made my mind he was bleeding internally, he was very frail, and I thought he must die. I put his handkerchief over his wound and went back to my gun." Under the shelter of the high bank of the Tennessee River, Milner saw hundreds of panicked men, "neither eloquence of speech nor cursing could induce them to go to the front."
Battery A was placed into the center of Grant's last-ditch battle line. As darkness fell, the Union soldiers at one end of the line, although they had fought and lost all day, signaled their determination to resist what they thought would be a final rebel onslaught by issuing a "tremendous cheer." At that moment, there was a lull in the firing "and the cheer was taken up and echoed along the whole line and among the straggling squads of disorganized troops." During the long, wet nightmare night that followed, the men of Battery A talked about "the boys" who had died. "My heart was rilled with hatred and revenge against the enemy... I could not restrain my tears and felt that I would hazard my life in any position to mow down their ranks with canister. After this I had a feeling of utmost indifference as to my fate."

"With the light of day the battle was renewed. We had recovered nearly all the ground lost the day before. The fire opened fierce from the start, and we did not wait long for orders to the front. Our position was near the center, and we commenced shelling with the four guns we were still able to man." At one point, General William Tecumseh Sherman personally directed the battery forward to stem a Confederate counterattack. No sooner had that action ended when: "General Sherman again rode up and ordered us to a new front 'Come on,' he said, 'I'll lead you,' and he did. We limbered up, mounted our seats...and we galloped forward through a fierce storm of shell and bullets. 'Well up to the front,' said Lt. Wood, and we took up position in advance of the infantry and poured in a rapid fire of shell. General Sherman who (as Gen. Wallace says is perfectly crazy on the subject of artillery) told a Louisiana officer in the presence of one of our men, it was the grandest thing he ever saw done by artillery... It was the liveliest engagement of all, for the time it lasted, and I really enjoyed it."

With the help of reinforcements from General Don Carlos Buell's Army of the Ohio, Grant was gradually able to push back the Confederate Army. At 3:30 p.m., General Pierre G. T. Beauregard was forced to order a general retreat, but the Rebels were not the only soldiers who had reached the end of their tethers. Just before the moment of victory, Milner wrote that: "We were tired out. The rain was falling, and I for one felt more dispirited here than at any other time." No sooner did they retrieve a few crackers from their haversacks than the men noticed cavalry rushing to the front "and we knew that the enemy were in retreat." Battery A was again ordered to the front as part of a general effort to pursue the enemy.

Two days after the battle, Milner wrote to tell his father he had survived. "I have gone into these tedious details to show you exactly what war is. I have since rode over the whole battlefield, but will spare you the horrid and disgusting details of the thousands of suffering wounded, and mangled corpses I saw." Shiloh altered the young Chicagoan's view of war: "We have at last had our wish for a hard battle gratified and never again do I expect to hear the same wish from the lips of our men. We are just as ready now to do our duty as we were, but to desire another hard battle, with the same chances of loss to our company, is quite a different thing."

The account of James Milner provides insight into the reaction of Illinoisans to the shocking reality of the battle of Shiloh. The battle was a turning point in Midwesterners' attitudes toward the Civil War. Shiloh took the lives of more Americans than had died in all the previous wars fought by the United States. Before the battle, Grant had believed the rebellion was on the brink of defeat. After the bloody two-day contest, he realized that the Confederacy would yield only after a long, difficult war of conquest. Shiloh steeled Midwesterners to the painful truth that the Civil War would be a long, drawn-out conflict.

After Shiloh, many Chicagoans assumed a much harsher posture toward the South. The editors of the Chicago Tribune likely printed Milner's letter to his father (against the young soldier's expressed wishes) in order to give readers a clear sense of the trial of battle and to stir in them the same reaction the death of his comrades aroused in Milner "revenge." Letters from other soldiers also began to make their way into the press with rumors of rebel atrocities. Confederate guerrillas were reported to have cut the nose and ears off a captured Union soldier. Other stories recounted poisoned wells, the refusal to bury Union dead, and the "making of tools and utensils of their bones." As the enemy became demonized, more and more voices on the home front and in the army began to call for harsh measures against all Rebels. "I begin to think the better way would be to utterly desolate wherever we went," an officer from Elgin, Illinois, wrote home. "If I had control when this army had marched through the Gulf States no landmarks would be left to show the boundaries of the towns, counties, or states." Shiloh began the evolution of the Civil War toward total war.

By Theodore J. Karamanski
Editing by Neil Gale, Ph.D.

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[1] Note: Milner's account of the Battle of Shiloh appeared in the April 18, 1862, edition of the Chicago Tribune under the headline: "The Pittsburg Battle." 

The History of the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd Marshall Field and Company State Street Store Clocks beginning in 1891.

Marshall Field & Company, State and Washington Streets, Chicago, showing the one and only Field clock at that time. (c.1891)

Marshall Field & Company, State Street Store, Chicago, looking northeast from State and Washington Streets. Note the original clock. (1904)

1st clock on the corner of State and Washington Sts.

Marshall Field & Company, State Street Store, Chicago, Illinois - The 13-story granite building (the North portion) was constructed in stages between 1891-1892 and 1914 on a partitioned block with sections that were added to the building in 1902, 1906, 1907, and 1914. The south building was razed and replaced in 1907. 

The first Marshall Field clock was installed in 1897 on the building's corner of State and Washington streets (the old south building).

A second, fancier clock was added at the corner of State and Randolph streets in 1902. For five years the designs of the clocks didn’t match, but in 1909 the original clock at State and Washington was replaced with one that was identical to the second clock on State and Randolph streets when the south building was built to match the north building.

Marshall Field & Company, State Street Store, Chicago, looking northeast from State and Washington Streets. Note the New Clock (1912)

State and Washington Streets looking North. July 9, 1916.

NOTE: Time on two faces is a little off.

NOTE: The two faces show different times.

Marshall Field’s 1960s.

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The Boston Store and its clock are on the corner of State and Madison Streets, which is one block SOUTH of Marshall Field's.

Looking west on Madison Street from State Street, Chicago. 1928

Above is a picture of the BOSTON STORE CLOCK at the corner of State and Madison Streets. Boston Store's clock, often misidentified as the Marshall Field clock, is one block south of Marshall Field. 

The Field's clock at State and Washington streets can be seen in the distance in many pictures and postcards looking north from the Boston Store.

MARSHALL FIELD & COMPANY ARTICLES

Copyright © 2017, Dr. Neil Gale, Ph.D.

The History of Charles "Carl" Frederick Günther, known as "The Candy Man" and "The P. T. Barnum of Chicago."

Charles "Carl" Frederick Günther (1837–1920), known as "The Candy Man" and "The P. T. Barnum of Chicago," Gunther was a German-American politician, caramel confectioner, chocolatier, numismatist, and art, antiquities, and curiosities collector, who purchased many of the coins and artifacts now in the Chicago History Museum.

Born in Wildberg, Württemberg, Germany, on March 6, 1837. He emigrated with his parents to Pennsylvania when he was five years old in 1842. They moved from Pennsylvania to Peru, Illinois, in 1850.

At the age of 14, he was employed as a clerk in a country store and later went to work in a drug store "where he gained quite an insight into the art of pharmacy." Gunther became a manager of the post office in Peru, Illinois. He spent five years employed by a banking house. Then moved to Memphis, Tennesee, and was employed by a local ice dealer in 1860.

Upon the outbreak of the Civil War, he was employed as purchasing agent and purser of the steamer "Rose Douglas" in the Confederate Service. Being captured when blockaded in the Arkansas River by Federal gunboats in Van Buren, Arkansas, "he was released in a prisoner exchanged and made his way north until he finally reached Peru."

"His life while acting in this capacity was anything but peaceful, and his adventures were many." Gunther returned to Peoria, where he was employed by a banking house. Then Gunther joined C. W. Sanford, a Chicago confectioner, as a traveling salesman visiting the principal cities of the South and those in Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Kentucky, and West Virginia." In the Fall of 1863, he next entered the employ of a wholesale grocery house. The line was not to his taste, and he entered the employment of a New York confectionery house, which he represented in the New England, Middle, and Western states.

In the meantime, Gunther had traveled extensively in Europe and Asia. He knew how these people prepared confections and, combined with what he learned of the business while representing manufacturers of confectionery on the road, made him finally decide to enter business on his account.

Gunther opened his own candy factory and store at 125 Clark Street in Chicago in the Fall of 1868. He originated and introduced caramels, a staple product of all factories ever since. Among his confectionery treats were candy chocolate cigars he called 'La Flor de Gunther Cigars' de chocolate.'

Captain William Barker of Hook and Ladder Company № 9, Chicago Fire Department, was born in Chicago on October 13, 1863, and joined the Fire Department on April 14, 1887. Due to the "Saturday Night Fire" on October 7, 1871, there was an empty water reservoir. At the disastrous fire in the Gunther confectionery establishment on October 8th the building was razed by the Great Chicago Fire. Gunther did not have insurance on his inventory.

But great feats of heroism were performed during the fire. About 250 panic-stricken girls who were at work making bonbon's for the autumn festival, were rescued uninjured. Baker and his men were badly burned about the face and hands. They said that hey would never forget this experience because the spectators were yelling at the firefighters begging them; "for God's sake, come down the ladder!" 

—Encyclopedia of Illinois, Cook County Edition, Vol.2, Published 1905.

The factory and retail store at 125 South Clark Street was utterly destroyed, leaving Gunther with almost no resources. Besides the building and inventory lost in the fire, his newly formed collection of rare artifacts, including a copy of the Emancipation Proclamation, was also destroyed.

Interior of Gunther's Confectionery, 125 South Clark Street, Chicago, c. 1870.

The Exterior of Gunther's Confectionery, 125 South Clark Street, Chicago, c. 1870.

Gunther reopened a temporary kitchen and store at 78 Madison under the McVicker Theater in 1871-72. His business began to take off and boom by 1875. He renamed his business "Gunther's Candies Company" and built a factory with a store at 212 State Street, "a model example of a retail store and factory."

"By 1886, his name as a manufacturer of candies was known from one end of the country to the other."

Excerpt from "Chicago by Day and Night. The Pleasure Seekers Guide" Published in 1892. 

Coming to the consideration of candy, confectionery, and fine fruits, the name of Charles Gunther first challenges attention. The Gunther store, 212 State street, is without doubt one of the sights of the city, containing, as it does, in addition to the regular stock-in-trade, the Gunther museum, which the proprietor has spent the best years of his life in collecting. The museum embraces curios of all sorts and some of them are of great value. The entire collection is worth a fabulous amount and there is a well-defined impression abroad that the owner intends to give it to the city some day. The furnishings of the Gunther store are magnificent. Tall mirrors reflect the customer's shape at every step. The rear part of two floors is dotted with tables, at which iced drinks, ice cream, and light luncheons are served. Whether with a view of purchase or not, the store will well repay a visit. Gunther's candy is advertised the country over, and the concern enjoys an enormous out-of-town trade.

Gunther's Candies Company on the northwest corner of
South Wabash Avenue and Harmon Court, Chicago, Illinois.

Gunther added another factory with a retail store on the ground floor at 1018 South Wabash Avenue in Chicago.

Gunther Confections Box Lid.

By the early 1900s, Chicago was called the world's Candy Capital, and Chicago was home to over one thousand candy purveyors, associations, and publications supporting confections.

At that time, he began decorating his candy store with antiques, artifacts, coins, and curiosities. In 1877, he purchased the deathbed of Abraham Lincoln, which he set up in his store.

Gunther Confections Tin Box.

Gunther introduced his caramel-coated popcorn with peanuts in the late 1860s, which became the rage at the 1893 World's Fair. It was later named "Cracker-Jack," and Gunther was given yet another nickname, the "Cracker-Jacks King."

Frederick "Fritz" William Rueckheim and his brother Louis claim to have sold Molasses and sugar-coated popcorn mixed with peanuts at 113 Fourth Avenue (today's Federal Street) in Chicago beginning in 1871. The issue is that type of product was already known by the 1860s.

An original package for Cracker Jack.

Both claims involve introducing this product at the 1893 World's Fair. Whomever it was, Cracker Jack is still popular today! 

As a frequent business traveler, he used his trips to the East and South to scour for items to add to his collection. As his reputation grew, many people, including Civil War veterans, anxious to turn what they had in storage into cash, would contact him in Chicago. With wealthy customers like socialite Bertha Honoré Palmer, Gunther amassed a fortune and began purchasing historical artifacts to display in his factory. Many artifacts were from the Civil War, but his collection also had more unusual items, such as shrunken heads. Gunther was extraordinarily naive and was easily bilked by flimflam artists who sold him fake relics and antiquities like the West Point Chain, the mummified remains of Moses' foster mother Bithiah, and the "Skin of the Serpent that tempted Eve in the Garden of Eden."

Garden of Eden Serpent Skin

[runtime: 1:42]

Gunther's collection continued to grow, and he eventually turned his sights to the Libby Prison, a former Confederate prison in Richmond, Virginia. Gunther purchased the structure and had it dismantled and shipped to Chicago, where it was reassembled and converted into a museum to house Gunther's artifacts. 

The Libby Prison War Museum was on Wabash Avenue between 14th and 16th Streets, opened to the public in 1889, and hosted thousands of visitors within its first few months. The prison's infirmary was converted into the Lincoln Room, in which Gunther displayed Lincoln's deathbed and other artifacts associated with Lincoln's assassination. Although the Museum was in Chicago during the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition, it had no connection with the World's Fair and was never considered a Fair attraction. Gunther later tried to purchase an Egyptian pyramid and Philadelphia's Independence Hall to bring them to Chicago, but he was unsuccessful.

During the 1890s, Gunther became involved with Chicago's growing convention industry. When the original Chicago Coliseum burned down in 1897, Gunther decided to build a new Coliseum on the site of the Libby Prison War Museum since attendance at the museum was beginning to wane. He was the organizer of the Coliseum Company and its first president. He gave many paintings to the Y.M.C.A. hotel, and some of his finest works adorned the walls of the South Shore Country club, to which they had been loaned.

The prison building was disassembled, and parts of it were donated to the Chicago Historical Society, of which he was a director for twenty years. Gunther offered the rest of his collection to the City of Chicago, hoping that the city would build a museum for it in Garfield Park. Illinois law prevented such a building from being constructed on public parkland.

Gunther served two terms (1896–1900) as a Chicago alderman and one term (1901–1903) as city treasurer. He was briefly a Gold Democrat and supported John McAuley Palmer for president in 1896. In 1908, Gunther sought the (regular) Democratic Party's nomination as an Illinois gubernatorial candidate but lost to Adlai E. Stevenson I.

He offered his entire art and historical collection to the city of Chicago, providing a fire-proof building was erected for it. The city made no appropriation, and he left it to his widow and son in his will. Gunther was a thirty-third-degree Mason, a member of the Medinah Temple shrine. Other affiliations were the Academy of Sciences and the Art Institute, of which he was a trustee. Geographical association, Chicago Association of Commerce, and Illinois Manufacturers Association. The Iroquois, Union League, Illinois Athletic, Aero, Germania, and Press Club were his clubs. Mr. Gunther was also a member of the Illinois State Historical Society. 

He died of pneumonia on February 10, 1920, at 83, at his home, 3601 South Michigan Avenue in Chicago. 

3601 SOUTH MICHIGAN AVENUE, C.H.I.C.A.G.O.
2019 Estimated Market Value = $1,186,710
Three Story, Single Family, Masonry, 4 full bath
Full and Unfinished Basement and Attic - No Garage
Built-in 1889
Building Square Footage = 6,360

His funeral was at his home. He was buried in the family mausoleum at Rose Hill Cemetery in Chicago, where his son Whitman (1872-1907) had been interred thirteen years earlier.

The Gunther family mausoleum at Rose Hill Cemetery in Chicago.

After Gunther's death, the Chicago Historical Society purchased Gunther's vast collection, paying $21,321.20, far less than the originally agreed-on price from the estate of $150,000.

By that point, Gunther's collection included Lincoln's deathbed, Lincoln's piano, Lincoln's carriage, Lincoln's dispatch to Gen. U.S. Grant saying, "Let the thing be pressed," a towel used to soak up Lincoln's blood, a shoe from John Wilkes Booth's horse, and other Lincoln memorabilia. Also in his vast collection was the table on which Gen. Robert E. Lee accepted Civil War surrender terms at Appomattox Court House. 

Shortly afterward, the Chicago Historical Society began building a $1 million museum to display its expanded collection. The building opened in 1932 at Clark Street and North Avenue and is currently known as the Chicago History Museum.

Compiled by Dr. Neil Gale, Ph.D.

William Henry Harrison, Governor of the Indiana Territory, Steals Western Illinois from the Sauk and Fox Indian Tribes.

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In historical writing and analysis, PRESENTISM introduces present-day ideas and perspectives into depictions or interpretations of the past. Presentism is a form of cultural bias that creates a distorted understanding of the subject matter. Reading modern notions of morality into the past is committing the error of presentism. Historical accounts are written by people and can be slanted, so I try my hardest to present fact-based and well-researched articles.

Facts don't require one's approval or acceptance.

I present [PG-13] articles without regard to race, color, political party, or religious beliefs, including Atheism, national origin, citizenship status, gender, LGBTQ+ status, disability, military status, or educational level. What I present are facts — NOT Alternative Facts — about the subject. You won't find articles or readers' comments that spread rumors, lies, hateful statements, and people instigating arguments or fights.

FOR HISTORICAL CLARITY

When I write about the INDIGENOUS PEOPLE, I follow this historical terminology:

• The use of old commonly used terms, disrespectful today, i.e., REDMAN or REDMEN, SAVAGES, and HALF-BREED are explained in this article.

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.

 

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"...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. 

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[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.