Black Hawk

Pyesa was the Sauk medicine man at Saukenuk on the Rock River, and what he left his son was a sacred bundle rather than a title. The Sauk had civil chiefs by descent and war captains by demonstration, and Black Hawk was the second kind. At about 15 he wounded an enemy and was admitted to the ranks of the braves, and on a raid against the Osage soon after he killed and scalped his first man. Pyesa died of wounds taken fighting Cherokee along the Meramec. By 19 the son was leading 200 men. In 1804 four Sauk delegates ceded everything east of the Mississippi at St. Louis for a thousand dollars a year, and he spent the next 28 years insisting they had no authority to do it.

In April 1832 he brought about 1,500 people back across the Mississippi into Illinois — roughly 500 warriors and a thousand old men, women and children, Sauk with Meskwaki and Kickapoo alongside. Four months later the survivors were being shot in the water at the Bad Axe. He asked to give himself up to the Indian agent Joseph Street, was handed to soldiers instead, and went east in irons to Andrew Jackson. BriefHistory carries that war and what the country made of it. This page is about what was left of the man afterward.

He came home to a rank the United States had handed to somebody else. Officials found Keokuk calm and willing to negotiate, named him the Sauk leader, and dealt with nobody else. Black Hawk had once threatened to kill Keokuk for failing to defend Saukenuk. He sat at councils with nothing to decide. He had also signed an 1816 treaty reaffirming the 1804 cession, and said later he had not known it did. A lawyer who roomed with him in Burlington remembered a man courteous at table, often silent, melancholy. At Fort Madison on July 4, 1838, three months before his death, he told a crowd of settlers that Rock River had been a beautiful country, that he had fought for it and it was theirs now, and that he had once been a great warrior and was now poor.

He was buried on James Jordan's farm above the Des Moines River. In July 1839 a man named James Turner dug him up and prepared the skeleton for exhibition. His sons Nashashuk and Gamesett went to the territorial governor, who got the bones as far as Burlington, where the Geological and Historical Society held them until the building burned in 1855 and they burned with it. A second account has them ending in a potter's grave at Aspen Grove. The marker at Iowaville may cover nothing. The book outlasted the body — though in 1882 Patterson reissued it with the wording altered, so that the annihilation of all of their race became the annihilation of the last remnant of their tribe.

Black Hawk's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Autobiography of Ma-Ka-Tai-Me-She-Kia-Kiak, or Black Hawk book
  Dictated to the interpreter Antoine LeClaire and edited by the reporter J. B. Patterson 1833
• The British Band other
  The Sauk, Meskwaki and Kickapoo he led back across the Mississippi in April 1832
• Address at Fort Madison speech
  Delivered on July 4 to a crowd of settlers, three months before his death 1838

• c. 1767 aged ~0 Born at Saukenuk on the Rock River His father Pyesa carried the tribe's sacred bundle, which Black Hawk inherited.
• 1804 aged ~37 Four Sauk delegates cede the Illinois lands at St. Louis Black Hawk argued for the rest of his life that they had no authority to sign.
• 1812 aged ~45 Robert Dickson commissions him brevet brigadier general at Green Bay He kept the written certificate for 20 years. U.S. troops found it after the Bad Axe.
• May 1816 aged 48 Signs a peace treaty that reaffirms the 1804 cession He said afterward that he had not understood that clause was in it.
• April 1832 aged 64 Leads about 1,500 people back into Illinois
• August 27, 1832 aged 65 Asks to surrender to the Indian agent Joseph Street He was taken to Zachary Taylor instead and handed over to Lieutenant Jefferson Davis.
• June 5, 1833 aged 65 Sent west by steamboat through the eastern cities Crowds turned out in Baltimore, Philadelphia and New York. In Detroit they burned his effigy.
• July 4, 1838 aged 70 Tells a Fort Madison crowd he was once a great warrior and is now poor
• October 3, 1838 aged 71 Dies in Davis County, Iowa, after two weeks of illness

• William Henry Harrison 1773–1841
  Whig general elected ninth president who died one month into his term. negotiated the 1804 treaty
• Tecumseh 1768–1813
  Shawnee leader who sought a broad Indigenous confederacy to resist U.S. territorial expansion. the confederacy that failed before him
• Andrew Jackson 1767–1845
  Seventh President whose populist policies and Indian Removal Act left a deeply contested legacy. ordered him brought east
• Jefferson Davis 1808–1889
  President of the Confederacy whose defense of slavery and secession made him central to the Civil War and its memory. escorted him to prison
• Abraham Lincoln 1809–1865
  16th President who preserved the Union during the Civil War and issued the Emancipation Proclamation. served in the war as a militia captain
• Quanah Parker 1845–1911
  Last Comanche war leader who became a reservation-era negotiator and figure in the Native American Church. the same argument, two generations west