Hawk, Black

Born c. 1767

Saukenuk, Virginia Colony

(present-day Rock Island, Illinois)

Died October 3, 1838

Iowaville, Iowa

Native American resistance leader and warrior

"I fought hard, but your guns were well aimed. The bullets flew.... My warriors fell around me; it began to look dismal. I saw my evil day at hand."

Black Hawk was a powerful leader of the Sauk (also called Sac) and Fox American Indians located in northwestern Illinois and southern Wisconsin in the early nineteenth century. Black Hawk was one of the few Sauk who urged his people to fight the settlement of whites in the region. Despite his fierce resistance, Black Hawk was forced to surrender after the Massacre at Bad Axe River in 1832. His autobiography is one of the best records of the Native American experience.

Becoming a warrior

Black Hawk was born around 1767 in Saukenuk, a village of approximately one thousand people located near the convergence of the Rock River and the Mississippi River in present-day Illinois. He was given the name Ma-ka-tai-me-shekia-kiak (Black Sparrow Hawk); his father, Pyesa, a member of the Thunder clan, was the keeper of the Sauk band's medicine bundle (a bundle containing items associated with the religious life of the tribe).

In his autobiography Black Hawk recalled that "Few, if any, events of note, transpired within my recollection, until about my fifteenth year." However, that changed when Black Hawk joined his father in a war party against the Osage Indians. Black Hawk described his first kill: "Fired with valor and ambition, I rushed furiously upon another [Osage], smote him to the earth with my tomahawk—run my lance through his body—took off his scalp, and returned in triumph to my father! He said nothing, but looked pleased. This was the first man I killed!" In the years that followed Black Hawk killed several other enemies, and led war parties of his own in battle against enemy groups.

When Black Hawk was nineteen years old, his father died in a battle against the Cherokee. As was the custom among his people, Black Hawk blackened his face with charcoal, put aside all his belongings, and went into a period of mourning (grieving for the dead). According to biographer Maggi Cunningham, "Black Hawk spent five years alone in the forest and on the plains seeking strength and guidance from the Great Spirit.... During that hard and lonely time, Black Hawk learned about the ancient laws of nature, healing powders and herbs, and signs from Mother Earth and Father Sky." When he returned to his people he was the keeper of the medicine bundle and during his twenties and thirties became a famed warrior and leader of his people.

The white enemy

For many years, the Sauk people traded with the French and Spanish traders who traveled throughout their region. But their attitude toward white people began to change after 1803 when the United States purchased a vast tract of land from the French for fifteen million dollars. This land purchase, called the Louisiana Purchase, brought numerous American settlers into the territory that stretched from the Mississippi River to the Rocky Mountains. In 1804 Black Hawk encountered his first problems with U.S. government representatives. A group of leaders from the southern Sauk and Fox tribes had traveled to St. Louis to negotiate the release of a member of their tribe held captive by the whites; yet somehow the leaders ended up signing a treaty, the Treaty of St. Louis, that gave all tribal lands east of the Mississippi—some fifty million acres—to the United States in exchange for one thousand dollars a year. Black Hawk and other tribal leaders were outraged, for such a treaty could not be made without the approval of all tribal leaders. To the Americans, however, the deal was done, and the Indians no longer held claim to the land. Thus began the conflict with the United States that would shape the rest of Black Hawk's life.

In the years following the Treaty of St. Louis, the Sauk lands—parts of Illinois, Iowa, Wisconsin, and southern Minnesota—were still considered the frontier of the United States and were home to few white settlements. Therefore, Black Hawk and others in his tribe still hoped that they could keep their land. With the start of the War of 1812 (1812–14; a conflict between the British and the Americans over the control of the western reaches of the continent and over shipping rights in the Atlantic Ocean) Black Hawk and his people sided with the British forces in their attempt to keep Americans out of the Midwest. Black Hawk and his warriors, known as the British Band, helped the British take several forts in Ohio before the British surrendered to the Americans. Though Black Hawk and his warriors had helped the British control the entire Upper Mississippi Valley, the British signed a treaty that gave the Americans full control over all the land south of the Great Lakes.

In 1816 the U.S. Army built Fort Armstrong at Rock Island, Illinois, in the heart of Black Hawk's traditional homeland. The protection of the army paved the way for white settlement, especially in the eastern half of the territory. Two years later, the Illinois Territory became the twenty-first state. Though Black Hawk and his followers continued to oppose white settlement, another group of Indians listened to the advice of a Sauk leader named Keokuk. Keokuk had long believed that his interests lay with the Americans, and he had become rich by trading with them. It was Keokuk who sold American whiskey to the Sauk, which led to widespread alcoholism among the Sauk. (Black Hawk was strongly opposed to alcohol use.) By 1829 Keokuk and two other chiefs had sold the remainder of the Sauk lands east of the Mississippi to the United States in exchange for land in Iowa and cash payments. The treacherous Keokuk also warned the Americans that Black Hawk would resist with force white occupation of the land.

The Black Hawk War

In the spring of 1829 Black Hawk led his people from their winter hunt back to their village of Saukenuk, only to discover their homes and land occupied by white squatters. Though the whites and Indians lived in close proximity for some time, eventually the white squatters called on Illinois governor John Reynolds to remove the Indians. On June 26, 1831, army troops prepared to remove Black Hawk's people from Saukenuk. Hearing of the army's advance, Black Hawk peacefully removed his people across the river into Iowa to avoid conflict. While staying in Iowa, Black Hawk came under the influence of two men—Neapope and White Cloud—who urged him to fight back against the Americans. Black Hawk became determined to reclaim his people's homeland.

At the crossroads of history

During the course of his opposition to U.S. settlement, Black Hawk came into contact with many of the most important Americans of the nineteenth century. William Henry Harrison (1773–1841), who later became the ninth president of the United States, negotiated the Treaty of St. Louis (1804) that inspired Black Hawk's crusade to defend his people's land. Zachary Taylor (1784–1850), who would become the twelfth president of the United States, was defeated in an early skirmish with Black Hawk and later accepted the surrender of the Sauk leader after the end of the Black Hawk War. Jefferson Davis (1808–1889), who became president of the Confederacy during the Civil War (1861–65), escorted Black Hawk to his imprisonment in St. Louis just after Black Hawk's surrender to the white men. Finally, a young Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865), who later became the sixteenth president of the United States, served for a brief time in the Illinois militia that was sent to hunt down Black Hawk.

On April 5, 1832, Black Hawk and a band of one thousand people crossed the Mississippi River back into Illinois and headed north, looking for a place to settle as well as for support from other tribes in the area. The Winnebago and Potawatomi Indians, however, wanted to avoid war with the U.S. military and refused to support Black Hawk. Soon, the U.S. Army and state militias (volunteer armies that served for a short time, usually thirty days) were ordered to round up the Indians. A month later, hungry and discouraged, Black Hawk was ready to admit defeat and surrender. On May 14, 1832, as his group approached the U.S. troops under a white flag, nervous soldiers fired on them. Black Hawk's warriors attacked and handily won the battle, which became known as Stillman's Run (after the panicked flight of Major Isaiah Stillman's men). Happy in their victory—but fearful of further attacks—Black Hawk and White Cloud headed north. For the next two months, the U.S. forces kept Black Hawk's band on the run. With little aid from other tribes, lacking food, and losing troops to desertion, Black Hawk continued to press north into Wisconsin.

On July 21, 1832, the U.S. forces, aided by Winnebago informers, attacked Black Hawk in the Battle of Wisconsin Heights, northwest of Madison. Many Sauk were killed, but others escaped by raft across the Wisconsin River, pushing westward toward the Bad Axe River that flows into the Mississippi. On August 1, 1832, the U.S. steamship Warrior, armed with cannon and supported by soldiers on the riverbank, attacked Black Hawk's group at the mouth of the Bad Axe River, even though the group approached under a white flag. Approximately twenty-eight Native Americans were killed. The following day Black Hawk pushed for a northward march to the land of the Anishinabe and the Chippewa. Most of his band refused to follow him, so Black Hawk left with White Cloud and around fifty followers. On August 3, 1832, the army forces attacked with cannon, artillery, and sharpshooters, slaughtering three hundred Native Americans who had stayed behind. Dakota tribesmen killed those Sauk, Fox, and Winnebago who reached the western bank of the Mississippi. This slaughter became known as the Massacre at Bad Axe River.

Prisoner of war

Exhausted and demoralized, Black Hawk, White Cloud, and the remaining native resistance fighters surrendered at Fort Crawford (present-day Prairie du Chien), Wisconsin, on August 27, 1832. In his surrender speech, Black Hawk stated, "I fought hard, but your guns were well aimed. The bullets flew.... My warriors fell around me; it began to look dismal. I saw my evil day at hand. The sun rose dim on us in the morning, and at night it sank in a dark cloud, and looked like a ball of fire. That was the last sun that shone on Black Hawk. His heart is dead, and no longer beats in his bosom. He is now a prisoner to the white men."

Imprisoned for a time in St. Louis, Black Hawk and a few of his men were sent to Washington, D.C., in April of 1833 to meet with President Andrew Jackson (1767–1845; see entry). Black Hawk expected that he would be treated with respect, but Jackson berated Black Hawk for his attacks and sent him and his men to another prison at Fort Monroe, Virginia. In 1833 Black Hawk was allowed to return to his people, but not before he was taken on a tour of eastern cities that was meant to show him how powerful America had become.

Shortly after his return to Iowa in 1833, Black Hawk dictated a moving account of his life story to interpreter Antoine LeClaire. Published as Life of Ma-ka-tai-me-she-kia-kiak, or Black Hawk, the book offered Black Hawk's version of the wrongs that had been done to him and his people. Black Hawk died on October 3, 1838, at the age of seventy-one. Not long after his death, Black Hawk's remains were stolen from his burial ground by a man who wanted to display them in museums and traveling shows. The governor of the Iowa Territory protested and eventually secured the remains at the Iowa Historical Society. When the society's building burned to the ground Black Hawk was finally free of the white man's grasp.

After Black Hawk's death, the United States, with Keokuk's cooperation, took the remaining six million acres of Sauk and Fox lands. By 1842 the tribes were forced to give away all their land in Iowa as well and move to a smaller reservation in Kansas. Finally in 1867, the Sauk and Fox were moved to their final destination in Indian Territory in Oklahoma.