From Frontier Region to Indian-Free State:

Illinois Remembers the Black Hawk War

 

By Michael J. Sherfy

A version of the following paper was delivered by the author at the Great Lakes American Studies Association Conference in Athens, OH in Spring 2002. It is included here because it raises some of the issues we should keep in mind as we consider our relationship to our region’s not-so-distant past.

 

During the Black Hawk War, which threw northern Illinois and southern Wisconsin into great turmoil between May and August of 1832, a change in attitude seems to have occurred among white residents of the state of Illinois. When Europeans first settled the region in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, they appeared willing (though clearly not always pleased) to live with a large and scattered Native American population in their midst. Even after achieving statehood in 1818, citizens of Illinois--while perhaps not wanting Indian villages too near their own settlements--seemed for the most part willing to allow Native Americans to remain in the sparsely settled (and, to them, undesirable) northern parts of the state even when they did not consider themselves legally bound to do so. By the 1830s, however, the tense peace of the Illinois frontier became increasingly fragile and, after the first battle of the Black Hawk War, it was irrevocably shattered. Within a year and a half, all organized and discrete Native communities had been relocated beyond the borders of Illinois. For that state, the Indian wars were over.

Yet, despite its rather thorough removal of its Native population, Illinois was not "done" with Indians. An interesting—and confusing—relationship developed between the current and the original Native residents of the state of Illinois. One could even go so far as to argue that the regional identity of northern Illinois is derived to some degree from a selective memory of its Native American past…a manipulation that culminated in the creation of a nostalgic fiction about Indian-White relations. To make that point, however, I need to present some background information.

In 1804, the consolidated Sauk and Mesquakie nations sent a delegation of four men from their main village at Saukenuk (modern Rock Island, IL) to St. Louis to negotiate the release of a young Sauk Chief who was being held prisoner there for the murder (in self-defense) of three settlers. Though they were unable to secure the release of their kinsmen, the group met with William Henry Harrison, who recently had been appointed a special agent to deal with the Indians on the subject of land cessions and boundary lines by Thomas Jefferson.

The Sauk delegates, though not authorized to do so and by some accounts too drunk to be aware of what they were doing, signed a treaty that, among other things, ceded all lands occupied by the Sauks and Mesquakies east of the Mississippi to the Americans in exchange for a small annuity. The Indians, however, would be allowed to remain in the ceded territory until it could be parceled out and sold to American settlers.

Click here to read the text of the Sac and Fox Treaty of 1804

 

This treaty met with disapproval among the Sauks and Mesquakies but, since the document allowed them to remain on the land until federal authorities formally opened the area to settlement, there was little protest made against it at the time. While the treaty was in keeping with the idea, generally held by government officials and the region's non-Indian residents, that Native Americans would eventually remove to lands west of the Mississippi, it was temporarily lenient. It demonstrated to American settlers that the threat posed to them by the natives was not permanent and, perhaps encouraged by this, a few of them began trickling into the area. Yet, since the treaty had no immediate effect on the resident Indians, a situation emerged in which isolated settlers and established native communities, each vying for the same agricultural and mineral resources, were bound to come into contact--and conflict--with one another.

Early Illinois, however, was settled primarily from the South and few Americans strayed much farther north than St. Louis or Springfield. Aside from the Mining District around Galena, central and northern Illinois held little appeal…especially when one remembers that the British and the various native tribes and bands allied with them remained a threat until after the War of 1812 and that prairie land, with few trees and thick sod, virtually unbreakable before the development of steel plows, was considered unfit for farming. It was not until the 1820s that large numbers of settlers began pouring into the Sangamon and Illinois River countries and spilled into the area north of them. Once they came, though, they came in great numbers and the natives and the newcomers had to find ways to deal with one another.

Unfortunately, though, it is very difficult to determine how these intercultural relations operated on an individual level. Few newspapers were published in Illinois until the late 1830s and those that were in operation earlier were located in the population centers in the South such as Kaskaskia, Vandalia, and Alton. These have proven of little help here. In addition to being geographically distant from the area I study, the general character of newspapers at this time was overwhelmingly political. State and national political news, more often than not cribbed from other newspapers in the East, received a good deal of coverage but local events were practically ignored. As one scholar put it, in these early newspapers, "[o]ne finds more often an account of the hops yield in Silesia than of the wheat crop in Illinois." They might occasionally devote some space to reporting a particularly grisly crime or noting the rise and fall of the river levels but they offer almost nothing about the more mundane daily lives of their readers.

The obvious place to look for such details would be personal letters, journals, and diaries. Even these, however, are difficult to find. After the conclusion of the Black Hawk War, settlers from the Northeast began pouring into the region making it one of the fastest-growing territories in the world. Between 1830 and 1850, the population of Illinois swelled from 25,000 families to over 200,000. From that period, sources are plentiful. Letters from Illinois pioneers, often encouraging family members back East to come to the Midwest by extolling the region's virtues, survive in great numbers. Diaries and journals from that period are less common, but they do exist…some, such as Eliza Farnham's, have even been published.

Antoine LeClaire

For the period before the Black Hawk War, however, such evidence is much less plentiful. The literate population was much smaller and folk seem to have been more concerned with feeding themselves and taking care of their families than with recording their thoughts for future historians.

Contemporary writings dealing with Indian-White relations from the period, then, consist mostly of official or semi-official documents. George Davenport and Antoine LeClaire, Indian traders in the Rock Island area, for example, kept ledger books that at least list the names, account balances, and items purchased by or given to individual Sauks and other Native Americans. Beyond the strictly material and economic, however, they do not have much to say about how these people interacted with one another.

 

For that type of description, we have to turn to the letters and reports by Indian agents such as Thomas Forsyth or Henry Gratiot and letters, minutes, and reports generated by William Clark, superintendent of Indian Affairs at St. Louis. Forsyth's papers, now part of the Draper Collection of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, are especially invaluable in that he retained his position as Agent to the Sacs and Foxes at Rock Island for over 15 years and, over that time, cultivated deep personal relationships with the prominent chiefs and headmen of the bands under his charge. Keokuk himself served as one of Forsyth's closest advisors and Forsyth relied heavily upon the Sauk headman's ability to mediate disputes between his people and the Americans. Until he was removed from office in 1830 for political reasons, Forsyth ably and effectively dealt with situations ranging from murder investigations and averting the threat of Indian war to negotiating the return of strayed or stolen livestock and making restitution for petty thefts and depredations committed by individuals on both sides of the racial divide.

What these agency reports show us is that, by the 1820s and into the 1830s, both settlers and natives in northern Illinois attempted to work within a system designed to maintain good relations between the two groups. Granted, Native Americans were at a disadvantage since virtually all of the prominent figures in the department of Indian Affairs assumed that they would eventually be relocated beyond the borders of the state but, most of the time, Native people still chose to enlist their Agents' assistance in resolving disputes peaceably rather than resorting immediately to violence. During this period, neither the Americans nor the Indians were quite powerful enough to push the other group out of the country they saw as their own so they made use of the only significant governmental presences in the region: the Indian Agents and the frontier military outposts.

The problem with looking at Agency records to discuss Indian-White relations on the frontier is that, though they often record incidents in great detail, the incidents they record are not necessarily representative. For historians, these records pose the same problems as do court cases. That is, they can offer great insights into the workings of a society but, by definition, they deal with aberrant cases in which social and legal norms have been transgressed. Agents like Forsyth come into play mainly when something went wrong or when there was a chance that something was about to go wrong. Most people do not appear in their records at all, so where can we turn to find descriptions of a multiracial frontier society functioning relatively smoothly?

 

The one place I have been able to find such descriptions is in memoirs…especially those recorded by "Old Settler" Societies mainly between the 1880s and 1910s. The Rock Island area is especially rich in these narratives, thanks primarily to the work of John Henry Hauberg. Hauberg, the son of a German immigrant, became a lawyer and a self-taught historian. He also had the good sense to marry into the wealthy Weyerhaeuser family which allowed him to devote large amounts of time, energy and money to his avocation, the study of the natural and cultural history of the Upper Mississippi Valley. Among his many projects, which included the creation of the Black Hawk State Park and convincing members of the Sauk nation to return from Oklahoma and Kansas to Rock Island to celebrate Fort Armstrong's centennial, Hauberg helped found the Rock Island Old Settlers Association. One of the main purposes of this organization was to preserve recollections of the Rock Island's early days by conducting oral history interviews with the area's oldest surviving residents as well as with the descendants of Rock Island's first American settlers. These interviews yield some of the most interesting stories about Indian-White relations on the Illinois frontier.

 

For example, Sam Calloway, who came to the Rock Island area as a boy and spent much of his time with the local Indians, tells this tale

 

One year when I was here--I don't remember the year--a party of Indians came through here in bad shape. They were on their annual hunting trip. They were out of ammunition and they seemed to find me out and I loaned them my rifle and all the ammunition I had and folks said I was crazy. I'd never see them again. After six or eight months, they came back and returned my gun and lots of ammunition and wanted to give me a couple of ponies for the accommodation. I couldn't talk to these Indians because they were not the same tribe I went to the swamps with.

 

If a settler sharing his weapon with a band of Indians with whom he was unfamiliar is not a strong enough indication of the potential for amicable relationships on the frontier, there are numerous examples that document more intimate forms of hospitality being exchanged. Ellen Bromley, for example, recalled that settlers often fed Indians and Indians often used settler cabins as sleeping places when travelling. Mrs. S. B. Hendren, who came to Rock Island as a young girl, remembers:

Do I remember Indians? Well I guess I can remember Indians. They'd come to our house and lay down on the floor all night. In our log house one night I had a fever and got up to get a drink and started for the other room and tripped on an Indian. He had a bell on him and he started with a "woof" and scared me so I didn't get over it for a week.

 

With few opportunities for lodging on the frontier, it is perhaps unsurprising that hospitality was a virtue prized by native and settler alike. Sometimes, though, individuals carried this idea to an extreme. Jonas Case, for example, came to Saukenuk in 1829 to open a trading post in competition with that of George Davenport. He arrived in winter, while the Sauks were hunting west of the Mississippi, and, unable to build his own cabin immediately, he commandeered the largest lodge in the temporarily deserted village--which happened to be Black Hawk's. Case also dug up a cache of corn stored there and used it to feed his family until spring. According to Case's grand-daughter, "Black Hawk was more than pleased and satisfied when he received pay for it."

These were the type of stories that I had intended to use to flesh out a picture of Illinois before the Black Hawk War. From these narratives, it is not difficult to imagine a frontier region in which natives and newcomers lived together in a tense and temporary, but momentarily workable, brand of peace. I was uneasy, though, in relying so heavily on a single type of historical source to make that point. The incident described above, in which settlers occupy Black Hawk's lodge, is especially troubling since Black Hawk left his own account of the affair--an account in which he is clearly neither "pleased" nor "satisfied" by any aspect of the situation. As he wrote in his autobiography:

During the winter, I received information that three families of whites had arrived in our village…I immediately started for Rock river, a distance of ten days travel, and on my arrival, found the report to be true. I went to my lodge, and saw a family occupying it. I wished to talk with them, but they could not understand me. I then went to Rock Island, and (the Agent being absent,) told the interpreter what I wanted to say to these people, viz: "Not to settle on our lands--nor trouble our lodges or fences--that there was plenty of land in the country for them to settle upon--and they must leave our village, as we were coming back to it in the spring." The interpreter wrote me a paper, and I went back to the village, and showed it to the intruders, but could not understand their reply. I expected, however, that they would remove, as I requested them. I returned to Rock Island, passed the night there, and had a long conversation with the trader…The next morning I crossed the Mississippi, on very bad ice--but the Great Spirit made it strong, that I might pass over safe. I travelled three days farther to see the Winnebago sub-agent, and converse with him on the subject of our difficulties. He gave me no better news than the trader had done. I started then, by way of Rock river, to see the prophet, believing that he was a man of great knowledge.

 

So what in the Old Settler account seems like a story of accommodation takes on a very different character in Black Hawk's own version. Rather than Black Hawk being "pleased and satisfied" with payment for his corn, the presence of the Case family in his lodge prompted him to undertake several weeks of travel—involving at least some degree of danger—as he sought advice on how to get rid of the people intruding in his village. To present the former narrative without the latter would have been disingenuous--if not outright deceptive. Once both accounts are presented, though, I have to somehow account for the discrepancies between the two.

The easiest explanation would be to cite the nostalgic tendencies of human memory. The Old Settler narratives were collected from elderly individuals reflecting on their childhood years. By the time their interviews were conducted, they lived in a world that bore little resemblance to the one they encountered when they first came to the Illinois frontier. Some of the events are even recorded secondhand, as family stories passed on to the children and grandchildren of those who actually lived them. They are bound to paint their stories in a rosier hue than actual circumstances might warrant. Nostalgia alone is enough to make us take any memoir, especially those taken so long after the fact, with more than a grain of salt.

I think, however, there is something more at work here than mere nostalgia. The state of Illinois has an intriguing relationship with its Native American past. A state that is named for a powerful Indian confederacy has no reservation or trust lands within its borders and no organized Native American communities have existed there for almost 170 years. Yet northwestern Illinois defines itself as Black Hawk's country and is home to Black Hawk Community College, the Black Hawk Credit Union, and a host of other Indian-themed businesses. Lorado Taft's colossal concrete statue, over 45 feet high, commemorates the "spirit of Native America" and looks out over the Rock River valley outside of Oregon, IL and that town has more recently erected a smaller statue of Black Hawk standing back-to-back with Abraham Lincoln.

Indian place-names abound throughout the entire state. Residents of the Peoria area take pride in the role of Dickson Mounds in their own history just as residents of the region east of St. Louis draw great satisfaction from the presence of the mound complex at Cahokia. And, though most high school sports teams in Illinois have reluctantly done away with their Native American mascots, Chicago’s professional hockey team is named for Black Hawk. Even the state university with which I am affiliated maintains a fictional Indian chief as its "revered symbol."

In short, Illinoisans, like most Americans, seem to love Indians, so long as they remain abstract fictions, are long ago dead and buried, or live far away. Before the Black Hawk War, Native Americans were a threat to Illinois settlers and, in the documents of the day, they were generally vilified or, at best, treated as obstacles to be overcome by a superior people. Once they ceased to pose a threat, however, they could be romanticized and, after fighting a bloody war against them and depopulating the state of its native inhabitants, white settlers could "remember" how well they used to get along with the Indians. The Old Settler narratives might have some basis in reality, but they seem just as likely to be part of a desire to legitimate their authors' presence through the creation of a fictive history more desirable than the one that they inherited. In the absence of actual flesh-and-blood Native Americans to complicate matters, images of Indians are prone to conscious and unconscious manipulation in historical memory. They can be transformed into whatever interested parties want or need them to be. Since Illinois was so thorough in its Removal policy, this tendency is perhaps more pronounced and visible there than in many other places, but it is a common phenomenon…and one that deserves more thought and consideration than it generally receives. The 1830s, after all, marked America's first encounter with wholesale ethnic cleansing--a national trauma that set the U.S. on a path to exclusion and expulsion within a liberal democratic framework. Hopefully, projects such as mine can not only shed light on the process through which this trauma occurred, but illuminate also the power and agency involved in shaping the ways that we remember and describe it. Too often, we are content merely to treat cultural and historical processes naturalistically, as if they are faceless and beyond human control. To truly understand our own history, however, we need to consider it not as the result of distant mechanistic and inhuman processes but, rather, as the product of innumerable acts of selective remembering and conscious forgetting by individual human beings who, each for their own reasons, create a history that fits with the way they view their world…and (more importantly) the way they view themselves.

 

 

Back to Black Hawk: Myth and Reality


   Department of Anthropology
   copyright © 2002 University of Illinois, All rights reserved.
Questions and Comments to Brenda Farnell