Black Hawk: The Battle for the Heart of America

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Contents

Title Page

Copyright Notice

Dedication

PROLOGUE

1. THE BEGINNING OF SORROWS

2. THE CENTER OF THE WORLD

3. THINGS FALL APART

4. A TANGLED WEB

5. BANISHED

6. SPIRITS OF THE FATHERS

7. THE ROAD TO WAR

8. A MARTIAL PEOPLE

9. THE GREAT FEAR

10. A HERO AROSE

11. HUNTING A SHADOW

12. INTO THE VALLEY OF DEATH

EPILOGUE

Notes

Bibliography

Acknowledgments

Index

Also by Kerry A. Trask

About the Author

Copyright

TO VICTOR E. TRASK

PROLOGUE

I will tell you something about stories

[he said]

They aren’t just entertainment.

Don’t be fooled.

They are all we have, you see

All we have to fight off

Illness and death.

You don’t have anything

If you don’t have the stories.

Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony

MEN WITH MUSKETS slung over their shoulders and women carrying infants and heavy loads of food and supplies made their way slowly to the broad brown river that lay ahead. It was early April of 1832. Spring had arrived reluctantly that year, with cold rains and scowling skies, following a hard winter in the hunting camps far up the Des Moines and Iowa rivers. But as the light of spring began to warm the frozen earth, a large band of Sauk people, warriors and women, old people and children—more than fifteen hundred of them in all—were moving toward the Mississippi.

Two days before they had gathered near the charred ruins of what had been Fort Madison, on the west side of the Mississippi about fifteen miles above the mouth of the Des Moines River. There were a few Fox and Kickapoo among them, and all headed northward together from the old fort until they were directly across from the long, sandy bluffs known as Yellow Banks, which stretched between the Pope and Henderson rivers on the Illinois side. At that place the great river made a slight bend and narrowed a little, and there the entire band crossed over to the other side.

Throughout the morning of April 9, more than a hundred canoes carried packs and people across, while at least five hundred horses, tethered on long reins, swam behind the boats. And while the people who had already landed ascended the high bluff to the flat and treeless plateau above, the small bark boats returned again and again, without mishap, until everyone and everything had been carried over.

Once everyone had regrouped above the river, their northward journey was resumed. The older members of the band, accompanied by most of the women and children, were sent off across country with nearly a hundred heavily laden packhorses. Most of the warriors—maybe as many as five hundred of them—all well armed and on horseback, made their way up the east bank of the Mississippi in battle formation, having sent flankers on ahead to reconnoiter and fast-moving messengers on to the friendly Winnebago and Potawatomi villages beyond the Rock River. The rest of the warriors and all the young men remained with the canoes and, paddling hard against the powerful, flood-swollen current, moved most of the band’s supplies and equipment upstream.

Silently witnessing the crossing was Black Hawk. He was a thin, ascetic-looking man, with a grand roach-cut crest of hair bristling down the middle of his otherwise bald head. His ears were studded with trade-silver rings, and a large round medal, bearing the likeness of the British king, hung on his chest. He was a man of small physical stature—probably no more than five feet, four or five inches tall, and weighing only about 125 pounds—and well past his prime. By his own reckoning he was sixty-five years old. And yet he was the undisputed leader of the band, even though he held no official position of authority within the Sauk tribe, being neither a chief nor a shaman. Indeed, the source of his authority was mysterious, and one of his earliest biographers indicated he was a remarkable instance of an individual, in no wise gifted with any uncommon physical, moral, or intellectual endowments, obtaining by force of circumstances, the most extraordinary celebrity.¹

Certainly circumstances contributed to his rise to prominence, but it was mostly what he represented that made him important. As an unyielding traditionalist, he honored the old customs and ways, never wearing white people’s clothing or tasting their alcohol in any form, and in upholding the ancient virtues he often engaged in long and punishing periods of fasting and self-purification and experienced powerful dreams believed to contain messages from the supernatural forces that governed the world. And amid the great confusion and vicissitudes unleashed by the white people, he had held steady and was seen to be the very personification of the tribe’s authentic collective identity. He was, thought his followers, what a Sauk man ought to be, and for the people who crossed the river that day he represented what they had all once been and hoped to become again.

That was what they wanted, but because they believed the true Sauk way of life was inseparably connected to a particular geographic place, they were returning to Saukenuk, at the very center of their world, to regenerate what had been lost in themselves. Saukenuk was their great community near the confluence of the Rock and Mississippi rivers, in northwestern Illinois, to which all the Sauk had traditionally returned each spring. When they were all there together it had a population of more than six thousand inhabitants, making it the largest settlement of any kind in the upper Mississippi region. It was where the tribe experienced its fullest physical reality, where all the great cycles of its collective life began and ended, where they held their most important feasts and festivals, and where all their dead were laid to rest on the brow of the long ridge that arose just beyond the town. It was also there, they believed, the four cosmic layers above and below the visible world were connected, thus making it a place of extraordinary magical power. That power was manifest in the fertility of their gardens, their horses, and their women, and in the abundance of the fish they caught below the last great rumbling rapids of the Rock River. They had always had plenty there and felt safe and happy together—as happy as the buffalo on the plains, exclaimed Black Hawk.

But all of that had begun to change after 1822, when white people swarmed into the region looking for lead and the American Fur Company aggressively took tightfisted control of the fur trade. Their arrival set powerful, unwanted changes in motion, upsetting the old rhythms and cycles of life. It was as if some terrible curse had been cast upon the land, fouling the water and air, driving the animals and good spirits away, and corrupting even the character of the Sauk people. In less than a decade, their ancient way of life was in ruinous decline. Hunger and want had become common, as had drunkenness and debt. White people invaded their gardens and hunting grounds, even took possession of their lodges and plowed up the graves of their beloved dead. Dissension and anger divided them, and in the spring of 1831 the soldiers came and expelled them from Saukenuk itself.

It was in defiant reaction to their banishment beyond the Mississippi that Black Hawk and his followers, longing for what they had lost, recrossed the great river and headed homeward to the center of the world.

By doing so they had traversed a Rubicon of sorts from which there was no going back. Soon after they reached the eastern side, in a manner that appeared almost preordained, they were caught in what seemed an inalterable pattern of violence that had been repeated again and again with awful certainty since the very beginning of the English encounter with America. Fear of the other, and fear of what they themselves might become in the New World wilderness, drove Englishmen to lash out in angry violence against the native people, making Indian war a defining characteristic of the Anglo-American colonial experience, and resulting in King Philip’s War becoming, as one historian observed, the archetype of all the wars which followed.² Forever after, the metaphysics of Indian hating, as Herman Melville called it, persisted in the very identity of white America, perpetuated and made stronger by the frequent shedding of Indian blood and the constant retelling of heroic tales about great battles amid the dark shadows of the continent’s wild regions against the monstrous savages.

It was a somewhat simple dualistic worldview of the us and the others—the good people of the light against the evil wild men of the darkness—until the Revolution greatly complicated the entire matter of identity. As a consequence of the colonists’ successful rebellion against their king, not only did they sever their ties with the home country, they also renounced their own historical and cultural past, and on that very first Fourth of July ceased forever to be English. With that sudden and complete rejection of the old identity, there was a compelling need to create a new one, and efforts to do so became especially intense during the decades immediately following the War of 1812.

But that was no easy undertaking. It was not a time for clear and cogent visions. The explosive growth and spread of both the economic market system and the national population were rapidly and radically changing the very nature of the society itself. The number of people increased at an astounding rate of more than 30 percent each decade, and many moved in waves of mass migration over the Appalachians and into the West so that the very size and shape and density of the country continually changed. It was a young and restless society in constant motion; by 1820, 58 percent of its inhabitants were under the age of twenty, and ten years later a full one-fourth of them lived in the sprawling territory between the old mountains and the Mississippi River. Old norms and customs were undermined and discarded as new demands and desires asserted themselves. Traditional influences of social restraint became increasingly anemic. Long-accepted roles and relationships of deference and subordination, once so essential for public order, eroded away and the authority of fathers and father figures was everywhere in decline. Public life grew ever more fragmented and chaotic, and people more self-focused and combative.

Territorial expansion, and the way it was accomplished, intensified a painful conflict that lay lodged in the very heart of the young Republic’s ideological self-image and pulled and prodded the country in contrary directions. On the one hand there were the humane and life-affirming republican values with their strong emphasis on human rights and personal freedom, all of which had been the primary justification for the Revolution. On the other there were the powerful imperialistic drives and ambitions and a seemingly insatiable appetite for new territory, usually acquired by armed aggression with little regard for the rights and interests of the continent’s indigenous people. It was a paradoxical alignment of principles and priorities, and the more Americans emphasized the importance of their own rights and goals, the less they regarded or respected the rights or even the lives of groups of people they considered to be others. The country was deeply divided and ambivalent about itself, being boastful, arrogant, and stridently self-righteous while, at the same time, harshly self-critical and even repentant about its collective failures to live up to its own ideals. Some preachers and intellectuals delivered scathing jeremiads, bewailing the nation’s faults and transgressions, calling the people back to the virtues of the republican covenant, while politicians, businessmen, and land speculators pointed to the promised land across the mountains and advocated the fulfillment of the nation’s manifest destiny and the westward course of empire.

The regional divisions within the country itself matched those inner conflicts of interest and purpose. Regionalism became quite strong, producing distinctive attitudes and subcultures, which militated against the coalescence of a truly national identity. Easterners, for example, and particularly intellectuals of the urban Northeast, looked down disparagingly upon the people of the Midwest interior, finding them a backward, ignorant, uncouth lot who lived in near barbaric conditions. Not surprisingly, westerners had a very different sense of who they were, and in psychological self-defense returned the insult by dismissing the men of the East as soft, arrogant, effeminate elitists, while regarding themselves to be hardy, courageous, and manly. The contrasting views of East and West produced fundamentally divergent images of the Indian as well. From the 1820s on, people in the East were increasingly inclined to view the native people as victimized noble savages. Westerners, on the other hand, regarded them as morally depraved, diabolically cruel killers of innocent white women and children, and brutish, subhuman obstacles to the advancement of republican civilization. There, in the early nineteenth century, along the violent edge of the American empire, the metaphysics of Indian hating came into full and ugly bloom.

So much of what the national identity and its regional variations consisted of was imaginary stuff—myths and metaphors and stereotype images—but a great deal of it related to deeply disturbing concerns and insecurities about gender, region, and race, which went to the very heart of America’s ambivalence about itself. And when Black Hawk and his band crossed the Mississippi River that early spring day, they were inescapably caught and eventually dragged under by the stress and storm caused by the clash of such powerful symbols. The band’s actions quite predictably provoked a hostile response from the Americans. Troops of the federal army were sent. The Illinois militia was raised. And the old pattern, which had occurred so many times before, was played out once again, ending, as it always did, with the brutal blood-sacrifice of the native people. Trapped along the east bank of the mist-covered Mississippi, just a few miles south of the Bad Axe River, the Indian fugitives were descended upon by shouting soldiers and militiamen who emerged into the early morning light from the dimness of the dense forest above. The Indian agent from Prairie du Chien watched and described how horses and Sauk men, along with defenseless women and children and old people—even infants held in the arms of terrified young mothers—fell like grass before the scythe, and the river changed color, tainted with the blood of the Indians who were shot on its margin & in the stream.³ But all of this would recur again many times, like the compulsive playing out of the pathological urges of a serial killer, down to the bloodbath in the snow along Wounded Knee Creek in 1890 and then beyond the seas. The Black Hawk War was a single manifestation of that tragically redundant pattern, but it also had special significance because it happened at the very time national consciousness was emerging and the national identity was being formed. It had direct impact on that and also dramatically revealed the origins and nature of this country’s collective character. By looking into this brief but horrific conflict, we may begin to better understand ourselves by discovering in the events of that angry, not so long ago, rain-soaked summer how we came to be who we think we are.

1

THE BEGINNING OF SORROWS

And ye shall hear of wars and rumours of wars: see that ye be not troubled: for all these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet. For nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom: and there shall be famines, and pestilences, and earthquakes, in diverse places. All these are the beginning of sorrows.

Gospel of St. Matthew, chapter 24: 6–8

CONFLICT WAS EVERYWHERE, flaring up and spreading throughout the tribal territories of the upper Mississippi. There had always been intertribal clashes, but violence intensified after the War of 1812—following the departure of the British and the arrival of ever-increasing hordes of Americans. It signaled the collapse of the old balance of power, especially after 1822 when the interests and security of the native people were threatened even further by the arrival of frenzied migrants who swarmed into northwestern Illinois and the adjacent region of what became Wisconsin, hoping to strike it rich in newly discovered lead mines. The invention of the steel trap in 1823, which escalated the slaughter of animals, and the voracious greed of the American Fur Company, eager to swallow up its competitors, soon commenced the downfall of the traditional fur trade. Suddenly an ancient way of life was dying. Old cultures and relationships were subjected to powerful new pressures, not least of which was the increasingly crushing indebtedness of native hunters. Rivalries for land and resources grew more dangerous, setting in motion a chain reaction of Indian attacks and calls for vengeance among white settlers. Soon, American officials on the scene feared a catastrophic Indian war, one involving all the tribes and engulfing the whole region in a rampage of unimaginable terror.

Eventually those mounting anxieties produced a major effort to halt the deadly attacks and counterattacks. During the summer of 1825 some of the chiefs had suggested a conference at which the conflicting tribes might come to some agreements about boundary lines for their various hunting regions. Secretary of War James Barbour liked the idea and put Lewis Cass and William Clark in charge of arranging and conducting such a conference. Cass was then governor of the Michigan Territory, which included all of what would later become the states of Michigan and Wisconsin, and Clark, the experienced Indian fighter and captain of the Lewis and Clark expedition, was superintendent of Indian affairs for the upper Mississippi and Missouri River regions. Once granted authority, the two men set about planning what would become a grand and important gathering involving thousands of Indians from a wide assortment of tribal nations. It was to take place with appropriate pomp and solemnity at Prairie du Chien during the first week in August. In preparation, Clark ordered 85,000 pounds of fresh beef, 900 barrels of flour, and, surprisingly, 100 gallons of whiskey.

When the appointed time arrived, large numbers of people converged on the site, creating a sprawling camp along the east bank of the Mississippi River, above and below Fort Crawford. Delegations of Sioux, Ottawa, Menominee, Winnebago, Ojibwa, Potawatomi, and Kickapoo were there and settled in by August 3, but it was not until the morning of the next day when the Sauk, Fox, and Iowa arrived. When they did, they made a grand show of it, moving upriver in a large flotilla of war canoes, more than a dozen men in each, beating drums and loudly chanting. They could be heard long before they were seen, and the people encamped around Fort Crawford, aroused by the noise, flocked to the riverbank and stood waiting as the canoes gradually drew into sight. When the Sauk and their allies finally reached the place, rather than coming directly ashore, they remained out upon the river, paddling and drifting back and forth before their enthralled spectators. The men in the large bark boats were naked except for breechcloths and leggings, and all were painted, with heads newly shaved, ready for battle. After passing by a number of times, they stood upright in their canoes, thrusting their paddles high into the air and chanting with an intense ferocity. All were well armed, and when they finally came ashore they did so with sullen and angry looks upon their faces. Hardly what the crowd expected from people coming to a peace conference.

The next morning William Clark, who was known to the tribesmen as the Red Headed chief, added his own theatrical flourishes by standing on a raised platform and conducting the opening ceremonies of the council. Martial music and waving flags, soldiers on parade and solemn speeches were followed by animated negotiations and accompanied by much pipe smoking and political posturing, which continued for twelve days. Clark and Cass worked tirelessly among the tribal delegations to reconcile and adjust their conflicting claims and remove all probable cause of future difficulties, as Cass put it. With much hard bargaining and considerable compromise, boundary lines were eventually agreed upon, and Clark felt convinced all parties were well satisfied with the results. Both he and Cass were quite sanguine about the prospects for a peaceful future, and although they remained realistic enough to anticipate minor disturbances caused by young warriors eager to win war honors by stealing some horses and taking some scalps, they were confident that the tribal leaders would keep troublemakers under control. They emphatically informed Secretary Barbour: But we are certain that the feelings of the tribes, heretofore hostile to one another, are entirely changed, and we believe, that if individual aggressions are committed, they will not lead to important results. Both felt certain all the tribes were sincerely desirous to terminate their wars, apparently satisfied that their hostilities, without any reasonable object, would produce only mutual injuries.¹

Their high hopes seemed fully justified throughout the next year. But in the spring of 1827 the peace was threatened once more. In early May Sauk hunters discovered some Sioux hunting parties encamped along the Raccoon fork of the Des Moines River, well within Sauk territory and in clear violation of the agreement made at Prairie du Chien. When the Sauk hunters retreated to Saukenuk, their grand tribal community near the confluence of the Rock and Mississippi rivers, people there became quite upset on hearing the news of the latest Sioux aggression. There were soon cries for war, and some of the angriest and most insistent came from Black Hawk.²

Little had been heard from him for years. Although a warrior of considerable reputation and accomplishment while a young man, he had spent most of the middle portion of his life attending to the private needs of his family, and because he was neither a chief nor a shaman, he had not participated in the Prairie du Chien conference. In May of 1827 he was sixty years old, and most of his people probably assumed his best days were well behind him. His bellicose demands undoubtedly surprised some of them, while attracting the attention of a number of the community’s rowdier youths.

What sparked his hostile outburst against the Sioux is not clear. Perhaps he had simply reached a breaking point where he could no longer tolerate the further insults of enemies or hold back his own accumulated feelings of grievance and outrage. Or maybe the rumors of an impending war between the United States and Great Britain had reawakened within him a zeal for battle that had remained dormant since the War of 1812, in which he had fought on the side of the British fathers. In any case, at the very same time the Sauk and Fox were sending a delegation off to Fort Malden in Upper Canada (Ontario) to hear the straight story from the British Indian Agent at that place³ concerning the latest dispute with the Americans, Black Hawk raised the battle cry against the Sioux. His call for action had probably been preceded by a vivid dream in which he felt urged on by spirits to take up the tomahawk against the enemies of his people. But whatever provoked him, Black Hawk eagerly set about recruiting a war party and adamantly demanded approval for his efforts from the entire community. While that was occurring, upriver at Dubuque’s Mines, Morgan, a métis war chief of the Fox village there, raised another war party to also go against the Sioux.⁴ Thomas Forsyth, the Indian agent at Rock Island, was concerned. He worried that Black Hawk and Morgan might very well find some worthless young men to follow them, and by their rash actions set off a major conflict with the Sioux and their allies.⁵

The chiefs at Saukenuk shared his concerns and strongly opposed Black Hawk’s efforts, and Forsyth reassured Clark: A very great majority of the Sauk and Fox Indians are for peace. In their first attempt to avert trouble, the chiefs tried to buy off Black Hawk and offered him three horses and other property if he would give up his attempts to raise a fighting force. He was insulted by the offer and became more enraged than before. The chiefs tried again. All of them went to the old man’s lodge and pleaded with him to stop his call for bloodshed. They also increased their offer to seven horses. Once more he spurned their entreaties, declaring that nothing but death should prevent him from going to war.⁶

Forsyth backed the chiefs by sending his own message to Black Hawk, warning him to give up his reckless intentions or he and his misguided followers would be arrested and sent down in irons to St. Louis, where they would pass the remainder of their days in prison. The Indian agent also threatened to call upon William Clark to come up to Saukenuk with an armed force of two thousand soldiers to destroy them if they tried to carry out their plans or attempted to resist arrest.⁷ That combination of threats and bribes appears to have had some influence. Finally, there were also some mollifying overtures from Wabashaw, an important Sioux chief of a large village on the west side of the Mississippi, above Lake Pepin. He sent pipes and conciliatory messages to both Dubuque’s Mines and Saukenuk, and in mid-June Forsyth was relieved to inform Clark that both Black Hawk and Morgan had given up their plans to make war on the Sioux.⁸

Although that crisis passed without bloodshed, it was not the only disturbance of the peace that spring. In fact, in early March a French Canadian resident of Prairie du Chien, a man by the name of Methode along with his Indian wife and their five children were brutally murdered and their bodies viciously mutilated in their sugar camp. This seemed all the more tragic to William Snelling, the youthful literary adventurer and son of the founder of Fort Snelling, who regarded Madame Methode to be one of the most beautiful women [he] ever saw. When Indian agent Nicholas Boilvin investigated the crime, the Winnebago chief De-kau-ray (Decorah) rather matter-of-factly admitted that some foolish young men of his village had gotten drunk and committed the killings. It was the whiskey and not they, that killed Methode and abused his wife, the chief told Boilvin in a feeble attempt to excuse what had been done.⁹

But matters became even worse in early summer when a large number of Winnebago warriors joined forces with some of the Sioux to make war on the Ojibwa, and Forsyth reported to Clark that in one of their raids they had killed twenty of the Ojibwa’s people. He also told the superintendent about the Indian named L’Arc (or Lark), a half-Sioux, half-Winnebago chief of a Sioux village above Prairie du Chien, who, he said, had plans to send an assassin up to Fort St. Anthony to murder Lawrence Taliaferro, the Indian agent there, and to shortly go up to St. Peter and kill Col. Snelling’s hogs (meaning his soldiers). Forsyth admitted he was unsure of the origins of those hostile feelings, but informed Clark that something of an irritated nature was brewing especially among the Winnebago, and that he felt certain they were embroiled in an elaborate plot with the Sioux, saying, [I] am much mistaken if something very serious is not at the bottom of this affair.¹⁰

At the very same time Forsyth felt those apprehensions, a small Winnebago war party led by the chief Red Bird attacked the farm of Registre Gagnier, located in McNair’s Coulee, about three miles southeast of Prairie du Chien. Gagnier was one of the five sons of an African-American woman affectionately known in the community as Aunt Mary Ann and held in high esteem for her knowledge and skill as a midwife and nurse.¹¹ According to William Snelling, Registre Gagnier was also well regarded by his fellow settlers particularly for his humanity to the poor, especially [among] the Indians. On June 24 Gagnier was at home with his young wife and their two children—a boy of ten and an infant daughter of eighteen months—along with their hired man, Solomon Lipcap, a retired soldier from Fort Crawford. None of them were particularly surprised when Red Bird and two companions appeared at their door asking for food. Gagnier, who was well acquainted with Red Bird, invited them in for a meal of fish and milk. They ate their fill, and then Red Bird arose from the table and with cold-blooded deliberateness shot Gagnier dead, while one of his companions killed Lipcap as he sat quietly in a rocking chair near the fireplace. The baby girl was then grabbed from her mother’s arms, stabbed, scalped, and thrown to the floor. But in the commotion, Madame Gagnier picked up a musket and pushed the muzzle into Red Bird’s chest. Then, while her would-be murderer stood paralyzed in anticipation of his own death, she and her son turned and swiftly dashed from the house into the forest. Almost miraculously they made it safely to town.

As Madame Gagnier and her boy made their escape, Red Bird and his accomplices fled the murder scene northward to a Winnebago camp at the mouth of the Bad Axe River. Thirty-seven warriors and their families awaited them there. Six days later, and following some heavy drinking, they opened fire on the keelboat Oliver H. Perry, which was heading downriver after delivering army supplies to Fort St. Anthony. The boat moved slowly, fighting a brisk headwind, and seemed an easy prize for the Indians, who opened fire on the vessel as it drew near the Mississippi’s east bank. A fierce battle ensued in which Winnebago warriors not only fired round upon round of musket shot into the boat but also rushed upon it in their canoes, boarding it briefly and killing some crew members at close range. In the struggle seven Winnebago were killed and fourteen wounded, while four people aboard the keelboat died and two others suffered minor wounds.¹²

News of those attacks caused consternation among the settlers in and around Prairie du Chien. People fled their farms, deserted their homes, and rushed to Fort Crawford for protection. The panic soon became widespread. Madame Adele Gratiot, living inland about sixty miles southeast of Prairie du Chien at Gratiot’s Grove, later recalled: "The news spread like wild-fire, and all was terror and confusion; families were flocking to the Grove from the neighboring ‘diggings’ and preparations were making [sic] for defense."¹³ The men hurriedly built a strong stockade, while the women and children were sent off to Galena. Daniel Parkinson was in Galena at the time and reported thousands of people to be rushing into the town. The roads were lined in all directions with frantic and fleeing men, women, and children, expecting every moment to be overtaken, tomahawked, and scalped by the Indians.¹⁴ At Galena Adele Gratiot observed that the flat prairie between the bluff and the river was covered with wagons, the families camping in them; block-houses were erected on the hill, companies forming, drums beating, and Gen. [Henry] Dodge was busily engaged in organizing troops, creating order and confidence out of terror and confusion.¹⁵ Another camp of fearful refugees, numbering more than three thousand, gathered near the mouth of the Apple River, a few miles south of Galena.¹⁶ Chicago too was in a panic and sent a messenger to the settlements along the Wabash River pleading for help. An armed force of fifty men eventually arrived from Danville to defend the village from the bloody onslaught of savages, which they all felt certain would soon crash down upon them.¹⁷

On the Fourth of July Lewis Cass came to the rescue of Prairie du Chien. He and Thomas McKenney, head of the War Department’s Indian Office, had been holding another of their large Indian councils at Butte des Morts, near Green Bay, when news of the Winnebago attacks reached them. Cass departed immediately in a large canoe propelled by six strong French Canadian voyageurs. They traveled up the Fox River, through Lake Winnebago, and crossed over at the portage to the Wisconsin River, which they descended as fast as humanly possible, covering more than four hundred miles in just six days. When he arrived at Prairie du Chien, where no regular troops were any longer stationed, Cass ordered a militia company under Captain Thomas McNair to occupy Fort Crawford and protect the people who had taken refuge there.

Cass was personally well aware of the dangers posed by the hostile Winnebago, for during his trip down from Butte des Morts he had come perilously close to losing his own life at the hands of one of their warriors. While still on the Fox River, he and his crew had encountered a small band of Winnebago hunters and had gone ashore to converse with them. No sooner had they landed when one of their young men boldly approached Cass, cocked the hammer of his musket, pushed the muzzle into the governor’s bulging belly, and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened. Cass then abruptly pushed the weapon and his assailant aside, returned to his canoe, and continued the journey.¹⁸

After attempting to organize the situation at Prairie du Chien, Cass then rushed off to Galena. There he raised a volunteer company of riflemen under the command of Abner Fields. Alexander Hamilton’s youngest son, William, was a lieutenant in that company and Daniel Parkinson its sergeant, and they all boarded the keelboat Maid of the Fever River and were sent up to reinforce the militiamen already guarding Fort Crawford. Soon after their departure, Henry Dodge, who had recently moved there from Missouri, organized a company of mounted volunteers, which Parkinson said was constantly in the field … keeping [a] lookout for Indians.¹⁹

Meanwhile, regular troops were sent down to Prairie du Chien from Fort St. Anthony, and on July 15 another force of 580 soldiers moved upriver from Jefferson Barracks, near St. Louis, commanded by Brigadier General Henry Atkinson. Not long after that, Major William Whistler, the officer in charge of Fort Howard at Green Bay, collected one hundred regular soldiers and militia volunteers, along with sixty-two Oneida and Stockbridge warriors, and set off for Portage, between the Fox and Wisconsin rivers, in a small fleet of canoes and Mackinaw boats. They arrived on August 31. Two days later, Red Bird and his principal accomplice, Wekau, surrendered voluntarily to Major Whistler.

Thomas McKenney was there to witness their capitulation, and what he saw, or imagined he saw, seemed more like a scene from James Fenimore Cooper’s recently published novel The Last of the Mohicans, than any actual event. McKenney was emotionally moved by the drama of the occasion. Flags lazily floating in a gentle early autumn wind, the clank of swords and scabbards, a military band softly playing a solemn hymn, the straight and ridged rows of soldiers, the stoic procession of painted, unarmed Indians, and the eerie echo of the Winnebago death chant from the nearby forest all combined to create for him a near enrapturing experience. Then into the scene entered Red Bird and Wekau, who, like Uncas and Magua of Cooper’s woodland romance, seemed to McKenney the very embodiments of what he and many of his countrymen believed were the light and dark sides of the Indian’s paradoxical character. He remarked about there being something heroic about Red Bird, who was a dignified man about six foot tall, with a well-toned athletic build, and handsomely dressed in newly made, white elk skin garments decorated with blue and white wampum and feathers. Of all the Indians I ever saw, wrote McKenney, he is without exception, the most perfect in form, in face, in gesture. Half of his face was painted red, and the other side covered with green and white pigment, but McKenney declared he had never beheld a face that was so full of all the ennobling, and, at the same time, the most winning expression. Dwelling upon the young chief’s countenance, and apparently forgetting the cruel events that occurred at the Gagnier farm, he wrote: It appears to be a compound of grace and dignity; of firmness and decision, all tempered with mildness and mercy. There, that day in the midst of the Wisconsin wilderness, Thomas McKenney must have felt certain he had come face-to-face with the elusive noble savage. But, in contrast, he saw in Wekau all that was alleged to be menacing and malevolent in the Indian character. Never before, were there two human beings so exactly, in all things, so unlike one another, he observed, finding Wekau to be a repulsive, miserable-looking being, dirty in his person and dress—crooked in form—like a starved wolf, gaunt, hungry, and blood-thirsty—his entire appearance indicat[ing] the presence of a spirit wary, cruel, and treacherous. While Red Bird seemed a prince … born to command, Wekau was, by comparison, a cruel and coldhearted man who could scalp a child and had been born to be hanged.²⁰

Such imagery was common to the era, but Lewis Cass, with his extensive personal experience with the Indians, was not at all inclined to indulge in any such romantic illusions. Cass was appointed governor of the Michigan Territory during the War of 1812, at the young age of thirty-one, and served there until becoming Andrew Jackson’s secretary of war in 1831. He was a large, imposing man whose knobby face, sagging jowls, puffy eyes, and portly, bearlike body gave him a physical resemblance to a dour Sir John Falstaff. A New Englander by birth with a well-ordered mind, he took a keen scholarly interest in Indian culture and was considered one of the nation’s preeminent experts on such matters. McKenney had great respect for him on that account, declaring, Few men have so intimate a knowledge of the Indian character as Governor Cass.²¹

For a long time Cass believed it was the duty of the American Republic to reclaim the native people from the savage situation in which they were placed, and to transform them into civilized people who were hardworking, property-owning farmers.²² By 1827, however, he had changed his mind and come to the conclusion that no matter what was tried, the Indians could not be improved since all their many defects and deficiencies were deeply rooted in an inalterable racial character. A principle of progressive improvement seems almost inherent in human nature, he observed, but there is little of all this in the constitution of our savages.²³ In one of his long, elaborate essays, published in the North American Review in 1828, he reiterated this view and asserted quite emphatically that the failure to reform the natives was most definitely not to be attributed to the indifference or neglect of the whites, but rather to an inherent difficulty, arising from the institutions, character, and condition of the Indians themselves. Because of that, he concluded, it was utterly impracticable to even try to remodel the Indian character, and fashion it after the Civilized form.²⁴

Reflecting his own puritanical perspective on the human condition, Cass was convinced the problem had its origins in what he believed to be the Indian’s almost total absence of emotional self-control, characterizing him as a child of impulse and a person unrestrained by moral considerations. And of all the passions that stirred the savage soul, Cass declared it was the Indian’s lust for violence and his seemingly insatiable appetite for bloodshed that most dominated his life and drove his actions.²⁵ The Indians are impelled to war by passions, which acknowledge no control, and he described them as being every bit as wild, and fierce, and irreclaimable, as the animals with which they shared the forests.²⁶ They made war, he insisted, for the sheer sadistic ecstasy of it, working themselves into a frenzy, killing, scalping, mutilating, wantonly slaughtering even the smallest of children and most innocent female inhabitants of their enemy’s camps, and committing atrocities of which no parallel can be found in other ages or nations.²⁷

Because he was a leading expert on Indian affairs, Cass’s ponderous writings about the natives carried great weight and received considerable attention. And yet his convictions about the Indian’s instinctual propensity for violence reflected surprisingly little accurate understanding of the complex cultural characteristics of woodland warfare.

That was most certainly the case when it came to the Sauk’s methods of making war. To his credit, there could be no disputing the importance of war to them. It was central to their notions of manhood and essential to the preservation of their society. But far from being the consequence of the violent venting of undisciplined passions, it was, in fact, a highly structured and organized social activity involving principles of morality and religion, with rules and procedures that had to be adhered to down to the most minor of details. Although Cass seemed unaware of any of that, a great deal was recorded about the Sauk way of warfare by Thomas Forsyth and Major Morrell Marston, both of whom observed Sauk life at very close range.²⁸ Forsyth was their Indian agent at Rock Island from 1818 to 1830, and Marston the army officer in charge of Fort Armstrong on Rock Island in 1821. Each of them wrote detailed, ethnographic-like reports, which went a long way in correcting the bloodthirsty stereotypical images perpetuated by Lewis Cass.

Forsyth concurred with Cass about the eagerness of young Sauk men to engage in battle. Young Indians, wrote Forsyth, are always fond of war … and it may be said, that the principle of war is instilled into them from the cradles, [and] they therefore embrace the first opportunity to go to war … so that they may be able to proclaim at the dance, ‘I have killed such a person.’ In his view, their love of war was clearly attributable to social influences rather than to an inalterable racial predisposition, and, according to Forsyth, their taking to the warpath was never an endeavor of mere hotheaded exuberance, most especially not with the Sauk.²⁹

Any Sauk warrior in good standing could initiate the process of going to war. If the man wished to become the leader of a war band, he would begin by blackening his face with charcoal, and then in a state of somber humility, he would neglect his appearance, dressing in rags and allowing the hair on his otherwise clean-shaven head to grow out. He would also fast, refraining from all food and drink from dawn until dusk for a succession of days, and cut himself off from all contact with women. In that state of deprivation he would pray to the Great Spirit, pleading for a visionary dream that would empower him to make war. If he had a dream containing bad omens, he would immediately give up his quest. On the other hand, if the dream was favorable, the warrior would erect a small lodge beyond the village in which he would hang belts of red wampum and strips of scarlet cloth, and there he would sit and wait for volunteers to join him.³⁰

To succeed at this, a man needed a reputation for personal courage and an impressive collection of scalps from previous raids. Nevertheless, personal prowess alone was not enough, for like all the central Algonquin people, the Sauk were deeply insecure about their own personal powers and abilities and anxiously sought to supplement them with supernatural assistance. That was most especially the case when it came to warfare, and therefore the spiritual potency assumed to be contained in the would-be war leader’s dream was considered of great importance.

But even the most potent dream was insufficient, and only a man who possessed a medicine bag—what the Sauk called a mi’shâm—reputed to have extraordinary powers could hope to attract a war band. Medicine bags were usually made from an otter skin and contained some sacred tobacco and relics. They were believed to have been presented to the ancestral founders of each of the tribal clans by the great culture hero Wisaka. Passed down through the generations in an unbroken succession of oldest sons, they were regarded as powerful talismans and mnemonic symbols of the commandments given to the Sauk at the very origins of the tribe. If the people respected his teachings and revered the mi’shâms he had given them, then, it was believed, Wisaka would enable them to triumph over their enemies. Ye shall retain the vigor of youth even to old age, ye shall increase in the land,… ye shall be clothed with strength all the days of your lives; your faces shall be a terror to your enemies, and in battle they shall not be able to stand before you, the hero had promised them long ago.³¹

Any young man wishing to become a member of a war party would simply go to the leader’s lodge, enter