From Frontier Region to Indian-Free State:

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 18^th and early 19^th 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.

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.

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?

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:

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.