by Noah Gordon
Her father was mild, a worker. First he and her mother, Matapya, Union-of-Rivers, farmed two fields of corn, pumpkins, and squash, but when the Council saw he was a good farmer they gave him two more fields. The trouble began in Two Skies’ tenth year, when a mookamon named Hawkins came and built a cabin in the field next to one her father had in corn. The field Hawkins settled on had been abandoned after its farmer, Wegu-wa, Shawnee Dancer, had died, and the Council hadn’t gotten around to reassigning the land. Hawkins brought in horses and cows. The crop fields were separated only by brush fences and hedgerows, and his horses got into Green Buffalo’s field and ate his corn. Green Buffalo caught the horses and brought them to Hawkins, but next morning the animals were back in his cornfield. He complained, but the Council didn’t know what to do, because five other white families had come and settled on Rock Island too, on land that had been farmed by Sauks for more than one hundred years.
Green Buffalo resorted to tethering Hawkins’ livestock on his own land instead of returning them, and at once he was visited by the Rock Island trader, a white named George Davenport. Davenport had been the first white to live among them, and the People trusted him. He told Green Buffalo to give the horses back to Hawkins or the Long Knives would imprison him, and Green Buffalo did as his friend Davenport advised.
That fall, the autumn of 1831, the Sauks went to their winter camp in Missouri, as they did each year. When they came back to Sauk-e-nuk in the spring, they found that additional white families had come and homesteaded on Sauk fields, breaking down fences and burning longhouses. Now the Council no longer could avoid action, and it consulted with Davenport and Felix St. Vrain, the Indian agent, and Major John Bliss, the leader of the soldiers in the fort. The meetings dragged on, and in the meantime the Council assigned other fields to the tribesmen whose land had been usurped.
A short, stocky Pennsylvania Dutchman named Joshua Vandruff had appropriated the field of a Sauk named Makataime-shekiakiak, Black Hawk. Vandruff began selling whiskey to the Indians from the hedonoso-te Black Hawk and his sons had built with their own hands. Black Hawk wasn’t a chief, but for most of his sixty-three years he’d fought against Osage, Cherokee, Chippewa, and Kaskaskia. When war between the whites had broken out in 1812, he’d gathered a force of fighting Sauks and offered their services to the Americans, only to be rebuffed. Insulted, he had extended the same offer to the English, who treated him with respect and gained his services throughout the war, giving him weapons, ammunition, medals, and the red coat that marked a soldier.
Now, as he neared old age, Black Hawk watched whiskey being sold from his home. Worse, he witnessed the corruption of his tribe by alcohol. Vandruff and his friend B. F. Pike got Indians drunk and cheated them out of furs, horses, guns, and traps. Black Hawk went to Vandruff and Pike and asked them to stop selling whiskey to Sauks. When he was ignored, he returned with half a dozen warriors who rolled all the casks from the long-house, staved them in, and poured the whiskey into the ground.
Vandruff at once packed his saddlebags with provisions for a long journey and rode to Bellville, home of John Reynolds, governor of Illinois. He swore in a deposition to the governor that the Sauk Indians were on a rampage that had resulted in a stabbing and much damage to white homesteads. He gave Governor Reynolds a second petition signed by B. F. Pike that said “the Indians pasture their horses in our wheatfields, shoot our cows and cattle, and threaten to burn our homes over our heads if we do not leave.”
Reynolds was newly elected and had promised the voters that Illinois was safe for settlers. A governor who was a successful Indian fighter might dream of the presidency. “By Jesus, sir,” he told Vandruff emotionally, “you’re asking the right man for justice.”
Seven hundred horse soldiers came and camped below Sauk-e-nuk, their presence causing excitement and unease. At the same time, a steamship belching smoke chugged up the Rocky River. The ship grounded on some of the rocks that gave the river its name, but the mookamonik freed it and soon it was anchored, its single cannon pointed directly at the village. The war chief of the whites, General Edmund P. Gaines, called a parley with the Sauks. Seated behind a table were the general, the Indian agent St. Vrain, and the trader Davenport, who interpreted. Perhaps twenty prominent Sauks came.
General Gaines said the treaty of 1803 that had set up the fort on Rock Island also had given the Great Father in Washington all the Sauk lands east of the Mississippi—fifty million acres. He told the stunned and puzzled Indians that they had received annuities, and now the Great Father in Washington wanted his children to leave Sauk-e-nuk and go to live on the other side of Masesibowi, the large river. Their Father in Washington would give them a gift of corn to see them through the winter.
Chief of the Sauks was Keokuk, who knew that the Americans were too many. When Davenport gave him the words of the white war chief, a great fist squeezed Keokuk’s heart. Though the others looked at him to answer, he was silent. But a man rose to his feet, who had learned enough language while fighting for the British, so he spoke for himself. “We never sold our country. We never received any annuities from our American Father. We will hold our village.”
General Gaines saw an Indian, almost old, without a chief’s headdress. In stained buckskins. Hollow-cheeked, with a high, bony forehead. More gray than black in the roached scalp lock that split his shaven skull. An insulting beak of a big nose leaping out between wide-set eyes. A sullen mouth above a dimpled lover’s chin that didn’t belong in that ax of a face.
Gaines sighed, and looked questioningly at Davenport.
“Name of Black Hawk.”
“What is he?” the general asked Davenport, but Black Hawk answered.
“I am a Sauk. My fathers were Sauks, great men. I wish to remain where their bones are and be buried with them. Why should I leave their fields?”
He and the general gazed at one another, stone on steel.
“I came here not to beg nor to hire you to leave your village. My business is to remove you,” Gaines said mildly. “Peaceably, if I can. Forcibly, if I must. I now give you two days to remove. If you don’t cross the Mississippi by that time, I will force you away.”
The People talked together, staring at the ship’s cannon pointed at them. The soldiers who rode by in small groups, yipping and hollering, were well-fed and well-armed, with plenty of ammunition. The Sauks had old rifles, few bullets, no reserve of food.
Keokuk sent a runner to summon Wabokieshiek, White Cloud, a medicine man who lived among the Winnebago. White Cloud was the son of a Winnebago father and a Sauk mother. He was tall and fat, with long gray hair and, a rarity among Indians, a scraggly black mustache. He was a great shaman, tending to the spiritual and medical needs of the Winnebago, the Sauks, and the Mesquakies. All three tribes knew him as the Prophet, but White Cloud had no comforting prophecy to offer Keokuk. He said the militia was a superior force and Gaines wouldn’t listen to reason. Their friend Davenport the trader met with the chief and the shaman and urged them to do as they were ordered and abandon the land before the dispute became bloody trouble.
So on the second night of the two days the People had been granted, they left Sauk-e-nuk like animals that were driven away, and they went across Masesibowi into the land of their enemies, the Iowa.
That winter Two Skies lost her belief that the world was safe. The corn delivered by the Indian agent to the new village west of Masesibowi was of poor quality and not nearly enough to keep hunger away. The People couldn’t hunt or trap enough meat, for many had bartered their guns and traps for Vandruff’s whiskey. They mourned the loss of the crops left in their fields. The mealy corn. The rich, nourishing pumpkins, the huge sweet squashes. One night five women recrossed the river and went to their old fields and picked some frozen ears of the corn they had planted themselves the previous spring. They were discovered by white homesteaders and severely beaten.
A few nights later, Black Hawk led a few men on horseback back to Rock Island. They filled sacks
with corn from the fields and broke into a storehouse, taking squashes and pumpkins. Through the terrible winter, a debate raged. Keokuk, the chief, argued that Black Hawk’s action would bring the white armies. The new village wasn’t Sauk-e-nuk, but it could be a good place to live, he argued, and the presence of mookamonik across the river meant a market for the furs of Sauk trappers.
Black Hawk said whiteskins would push the Sauks as far as possible and then destroy them. The only choice was to fight. The only hope for all red men was to forget tribal enmities and join together from Canada to Mexico, with the help of the English Father, against the greater enemy, the American.
The Sauks argued at length. By spring most of the People had decided to stay with Keokuk west of the wide river. Only 368 men and their families linked their fate with Black Hawk. Among them was Green Buffalo.
Canoes were laden. Black Hawk, the Prophet, and Neosho, a Sauk medicine man, set out in the lead canoe, then the others pushed off, paddling hard against the mighty current of Masesibowi. Black Hawk wanted no destruction or killing unless his force was attacked. As they moved downstream, when they approached a mookamon settlement he ordered his people to beat their drums and sing. With women, children, and the old, he had nearly thirteen hundred voices, and settlers fled the terrible sound. In a few settlements they collected food, but they had many mouths to feed and no time to hunt or fish.
Black Hawk had sent runners to Canada to ask the British for help, and to a dozen tribes. The messengers brought back bad news. It wasn’t surprising that old enemies like the Sioux and Chippewa and Osage wouldn’t join with the Sauks against the whiteskins, but neither would their brother nation the Mesquakies, or any other friendly nation. Worse, their British Father sent the Sauks only words of encouragement and wishes for good fortune in war.
Remembering the cannon on warships, Black Hawk took his people off the river, beaching their canoes on the eastern bank from which they had been exiled. Since each scrap of food was precious, everyone became a bearer, even squaws who were big with child, like Union-of-Rivers. They skirted Rock Island and went up the Rocky River to meet with Potawatomi from whom they hoped to lease land on which to grow a corn crop. It was from the Potawatomi that Black Hawk heard that the Father in Washington had sold the Sauk territory to white investors. The townsite of Sauk-e-nuk and nearly all their fields had been bought by George Davenport, the trader who, pretending he was their friend, had urged them to abandon the land.
Black Hawk ordered a dog feast, for he knew the People needed the help of the manitous. The Prophet oversaw the strangling of the dogs, the cleansing and purification of the meat. While it was stewing, Black Hawk set his medicine bags before his men. “Braves and warriors,” he said, “Sauk-e-nuk is no more. Our lands are stolen. White-skinned soldiers have burned our hedonoso-tes. They have torn down the fences of our fields. They have plowed up our Place of the Dead and planted corn among our sacred bones. These are the medicine bags of our father, Muk-ataquet, who was the beginning of the Sauk nation. They were handed down to the great war chief of our nation, Na-namakee, who was at war with all the nations of the lakes and all the nations of the plains, and was never disgraced. I expect you all to protect them.”
The warriors ate the sacred flesh and were given courage and strength. It was necessary, for Black Hawk knew the Long Knives would be moving against them. Perhaps it was the manitous who allowed Union-of-Rivers to drop her baby at this encampment rather than along the trail. It was a man-child and did as much for the warriors’ spirits as the dog feast, because Green Buffalo named his son Wato-kimita, He-Who-Owns-Land.
Spurred by public hysteria over rumors that Black Hawk and the Sauks were on the warpath, Governor Reynolds of Illinois called for one thousand mounted volunteers. More than twice that number of would-be Indian fighters came forward, and 1,935 untrained men were mustered into military service. They were assembled at Beardstown, merged with 342 regular militiamen, and quickly formed into four regiments and two battalions of scouts. Samuel Whiteside of St. Clair County was declared a brigadier general and placed in command.
Reports from settlers indicated where Black Hawk was, and Whiteside moved his brigade out. It had been an unusually wet spring and they had to swim even the smaller creeks, while ordinary sloughs became bayous through which they floundered. It took them five days of hard travel through trailless country to reach Oquawka, where supplies should have been waiting. But the army had blundered; there were no supplies, and the men long since had eaten what they had carried in their saddlebags. Undisciplined and cantankerous, they berated their officers like the civilians they actually were, demanding that they be fed. Whiteside sent a dispatch to General Henry Atkinson at Fort Armstrong, and at once Atkinson ordered the steamer Chieftain downstream with a cargo of food. Whiteside sent the two battalions of regular militia forward, while for almost a week the main body of volunteers filled their bellies and rested.
They never lost the awareness that they were in a strange and ominous environment. On a mild May morning the bulk of the force, some sixteen hundred mounted men, burned Prophetstown, White Cloud’s deserted village. Having done so, they were inexplicably nervous and gradually became convinced that avenging Indians were behind every hill. Soon nervousness became fear, and terror produced a rout. Abandoning equipment, weapons, supplies, and ammunition, they fled for their lives before a nonexistent enemy, crashing through grasslands, brush, and forest, not stopping until, singly and in small groups, they made their shamefaced way into the settlement of Dixon, ten miles from the place where they had started to run.
The first actual contact took place not long after. Black Hawk and about forty braves were on their way to meet with some Potawatomi from whom they were trying to rent a cornfield. They had made camp on the banks of the Rock River when a runner told them a large force of Long Knives was moving in their direction. At once Black Hawk fixed a white flag to a pole and sent three unarmed Sauks to carry it to the whites and request a meeting between Black Hawk and their commander. Behind them he sent five Sauks on horseback to function as observers.
The troops were inexperienced Indian fighters, terrified at the sight of Sauks. They quickly seized the three men with the truce flag and made them prisoners, and then set out after the five observers, two of whom were overtaken and killed. The other three made it back to their camp, pursued by the militia. When the white soldiers arrived, they were attacked by about thirty-five braves led by a coldly furious Black Hawk, who was willing to die a good death to avenge the whiteskins’ treachery. The soldiers in the vanguard of the cavalry had no idea that the Indians didn’t have a vast army of warriors behind them. They took one glance at the charging Sauks and turned their ponies and fled.
Nothing is so infectious as panic in battle, and within minutes all was chaos within the militia. In the confusion, two of the three Sauks who had been captured with the flag of truce escaped. The third was shot and killed. The 275 armed and mounted militiamen were gripped by terror and fled as hysterically as had the main body of volunteers, but this time their peril wasn’t imaginary. Black Hawk’s few dozen warriors stampeded them, harried the stragglers, and came away with eleven scalps. Some of the 264 retreating whites didn’t stop their withdrawal until they reached their homes, but most of the soldiers finally straggled into the town of Dixon.
For the rest of her life the girl who was then called Two Skies would remember the joy following the battle. A child felt the hope. News of the victory sped through the red-skinned world, and at once ninety-two Winnebago came to join them. Black Hawk strode about wearing a ruffled white shirt, a leather-bound law book under his arm—both found in a saddlebag abandoned by a fleeing officer. His oratory waxed. They had shown that the mookamonik could be defeated, he said, and now the other tribes would send warriors to form the alliance that was his dream.
But the days passed, and no other warriors came. Food dwindled and hunting was bad. Finally Black Hawk sent the Winnebago in one dir
ection and he led the People in another. Against his orders, the Winnebago struck unprotected white homesteads and took scalps, including that of St. Vrain, the Indian agent. Two days in a row the sky turned green-black and the manitou Shagwa shook air and earth. Wabokieshiek warned Black Hawk never to travel without sending scouts deep ahead, and Two Skies’ father muttered heavily that it didn’t take a prophet to know bad things were going to happen.
Governor Reynolds was furious. His shame over what had happened to his militia was shared by the populace of every border state. The depredations of the Winnebago were magnified and blamed on Black Hawk. Fresh volunteers poured in, drawn by a rumor that a bounty set by the Illinois legislature in 1814 was still in force—fifty dollars to be paid for every male Indian killed or every squaw or red-skinned child captured. Reynolds had no trouble swearing in three thousand more men. Two thousand nervous soldiers already were camped in forts along the Mississippi, under the command of General Henry Atkinson, Colonel Zachary Taylor second in command. Two companies of infantry were moved into Illinois from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and an army of one thousand regular soldiers was transferred from eastern posts under the command of General Winfield Scott. These troops were afflicted with cholera while steamboats carried them across the Great Lakes, but even without them, an enormous force, hungry for racial revenge and restored honor, had been set into motion.
