Black Hawk (Sauk leader)

Native American leader

• Born: 1767
• Birthplace: Saukenak, Virginia Colony (now near Rock River, Illinois)
• Died: October 3, 1838
• Place of death: Near the Des Moines River, Iowa

Black Hawk was a leader in the last Indian war of the old Northwest, and he dictated one of the most revealing and enduring Native American autobiographies of his time.

Early Life

Known as Ma-ka-tai-me-she-kia-kiak in his native language, Black Hawk was the adopted brother of a chief of the Foxes and was brought up by the Sauk (Sacs)—“Sac” was the original French spelling. The Sauk and Foxes were small tribes that formed an alliance, sometimes including the Potawatomi and Winnebago, to defend themselves against larger neighboring nations. Black Hawk was already a warrior and a leader among his people at the age of fifteen.

In his autobiography, Life of Ma-ka-tai-me-she-kia-kiak: Or, Black Hawk (1834), Black Hawk described how he became chief at the death of his father when they were fighting together against the Cherokee near the Meramec River, a short distance below modern St. Louis. Black Hawk fell heir to the chieftainship but was obliged to mourn, pray, and fast for five years in what he called a “civil capacity,” hunting and fishing. When he was twenty-one he became head chief of the Sauk and Foxes. The two tribes were united and lived together as a single group.

Black Hawk’s early years were spent in warfare against neighbors, primarily the Osage, Kaskaskia (a member of the Illinois Confederacy), and Chippewa. According to Black Hawk, there were two major reasons for warfare among the Indians: the preservation of hunting grounds and revenge for the deaths of relatives. Despite Black Hawk’s renown as a warrior, there was a highly developed ethical and spiritual side of his character, and he tried to do what the Supreme Spirit directed.

Life’s Work

Black Hawk’s personality was complex, and it would be a mistake to oversimplify the main events in his life. Probably he should not be considered a great leader. He was highly individualistic, often impulsive, colorful, and emotional. His policies did not significantly help his nation, and other Indian leaders such as Pontiac and Crazy Horse were greater than he. It could be argued that his leadership was shortsighted and brought disaster on his people. The Black Hawk War could have been avoided.

Black Hawk never liked the American settlers, and for this he may be easily forgiven—during his lifetime the Sauk continually suffered from white armies, white officials, white traders, and white settlers. His adopted son was murdered by white American settlers. He liked the British. He was on good terms with a British trader and with Robert Dixon, British agent in the War of 1812, during which Black Hawk took an active role against the Americans. Most of Black Hawk’s life prior to his capture in 1832 was marked by his dislike of Americans. The experience that contributed to this attitude more than any other was the St. Louis treaty of 1804, which Black Hawk rejected. In his own words, “It has been the origin of all our difficulties.”

Napoleon sold Louisiana to the United States in 1803; soon after, American officials arrived in St. Louis to claim control and sign treaties with Indian tribes in the area. According to Black Hawk, the treaty with the Sauk was fraudulent. The Sauk had sent four representatives to St. Louis to obtain the release of a Sauk imprisoned there for killing an American—these were negotiators with a specific mission, not diplomats or chiefs. Much later they returned dressed in fine coats and wearing medals, and they could not remember much of what had happened. They were drunk most of the time they were in St. Louis. They also signed a treaty ceding all the Sauk lands east of the Mississippi to the United States.

Black Hawk and the rest of the Sauk were indignant. Not long after, a United States Army detachment came to erect Fort Madison near the Sauk villages. Black Hawk was scandalized by the treaty, asserting that the Sauk and Fox signers of the treaty had no authority from their nations. Twentieth century historian Milo Quaife, however, claims that “no more than the usual cajolery of the Indians was indulged in by the white representatives in securing the cession.” The rejection of this treaty by the Indians, and the acceptance of its legality by the United States, says much about the quality of American law during this period.

The second major event in Black Hawk’s life prior to his battles during the 1830’s against the Illinois militia and the United States Army was his rivalry with another Sauk chief, Keokuk. Although not a chief by birth, Keokuk rose by the exercise of political talents to a position of leadership in his tribe. He was more of a realist than Black Hawk, and although he may not have liked the Americans any more than Black Hawk did, he tried not to antagonize them. As a nation the Sauk were divided, some favoring Black Hawk and others, Keokuk. In 1819, Keokuk and other members of the nation were persuaded by American authorities to leave the Sauk home on Rock Island and go to the western side of the Mississippi. Keokuk ultimately triumphed over Black Hawk after the war of 1832, which placed Black Hawk under the governance of Keokuk.

The rivalry between Black Hawk and Keokuk had a long history. Throughout the 1820’s, Black Hawk resisted the encroachments of white settlers, and he tried to hold on to the Sauk’s ancestral home on Rock Island. At first Black Hawk favored negotiation with the white Americans no less than Keokuk. Eventually, however, having exhausted all means of peaceful resistance, Black Hawk took up arms and tried to recruit allies among the Potawatomi. He led his entire nation—warriors, women, and children—on a long anabasis from Rock Island to Bad Axe River, winning some battles and losing others, culminating in the final attempt to reach the safety of the western bank of the Mississippi. The most pitiful aspect of the tragedy was the fate of the Sauk women and children. In the words of historian Reuben Thwaites,

Some of the fugitives succeeded in swimming to the west bank of the Mississippi, but many were drowned on the way, or cooly picked off by sharpshooters, who exercised no more mercy towards squaws and children than they did towards braves—treating them all as though they were rats instead of human beings.

Black Hawk led the last great war between Indians and whites on the eastern side of the Mississippi; if it terrified numerous white settlers in the frontier regions of the old Northwest—what is now Illinois and Wisconsin—it should be stressed that the Indian civilian populations living on ancestral lands had been terrorized by whites for a far longer period of time. Although Black Hawk initiated the battle, the final tragedy was not his doing. The deliberate killing of noncombatants was an act of the United States, not an Indian act. A few Sauk managed to reach the western bank only to be attacked by a war party of Lakota (Sioux) Indians under the orders of General Atkinson.

Black Hawk would have been the first to condemn these military practices, and he fully expressed his indignation in his autobiography. These massacres went far beyond his conception of the conduct of war. Some historians have been hasty to blame him, failing to consider the requirements of defensive warfare at the time. Although the Indians received few favorable settlements in their negotiations with the whites, those who suffered the most were perhaps the most pacific—those who, because they never fought the whites, never signed treaties with them either, and consequently never received rights or privileges. Most of these nations have completely disappeared, leaving no survivors. In one of Black Hawk’s most telling critiques of Keokuk, he said: “I conceived that the peaceable disposition of Keokuk and his people had been, in a great measure, the cause of our having been driven from our village.”

Black Hawk had a quixotic, romantic temperament. He could be impulsively emotional and also ethical, courageous, even idealistic and chivalrous in battle. Some of these traits might surprise a modern reader accustomed to clichés about Indians. Repeatedly Black Hawk complimented the braver of his adversaries, whether enemy Indians or whites. If he encountered an enemy group that had less than half his number, he declined to do battle. He admired both determination and heroism in war, and the traits he came to admire in his white conquerors after 1832 were largely military virtues.

It was probably not a coincidence that Black Hawk struck up a spontaneous friendship with Lieutenant Jefferson Davis in 1832; these two leaders of rebellion had traits in common. Jefferson Davis was to repeat Black Hawk’s act of defiance against superior military forces twenty-five years later as president of the Confederate States, and the results would be comparable.

Black Hawk’s autobiography was dictated and translated on the spot in 1833; there is no extant text in the Sauk language. The book has a seemingly childish quality that is probably more attributable to the interpreter and editor than to Black Hawk himself. There are many exclamation points, underlinings, and expressions of delight, and much reveling in the good fight. Nevertheless, the document gives an ample, three-dimensional portrait of a man spontaneously describing his thoughts and feelings, trying to account for what he has done and what has happened to him.

Black Hawk died a broken man on an Indian reservation in Iowa in 1838. A decade later, his rival Keokuk died a wealthy man in Kansas, where he had moved after selling the Sauk and Fox lands in Iowa.

Significance

After the Black Hawk War, the combined population of the Sauk and Foxes was greatly diminished. They were finally resettled in an area west of the Mississippi in a segment of what was known as “the Permanent Indian Frontier of 1840.” It adjoined the Potawatomi to the west, the Lakota to the north, and the Winnebago to the northeast. The Sauk and Foxes would still need military virtues as well as diplomacy when they jostled with these Indians and, later, with whites in their new habitat. Military abilities did not immediately become obsolete—far from it. Soon, however, the Indians’ greatest adversaries were to become alcoholism, diseases such as cholera, and starvation.

Black Hawk’s major weakness was probably diplomacy. In his war against the whites he did not secure the adherence of a significant number of other Indian nations, nor did he spend much time or effort in attempting it. Seventy years earlier, Pontiac had been more successful in forging an antiwhite alliance. Whether Black Hawk could have been more successful if he had put more effort into negotiations, especially with other Indian nations, is a matter of speculation. Black Hawk thought in broad ethical categories. He believed the Great Spirit would reward him if he fought for justice. Patient diplomacy, with its concomitant drudgery and uncertainty, was not for him.

Bibliography

Black Hawk. Life of Ma-ka-tai-me-she-kia-kiak: Or, Black Hawk. Edited by Milo Milton Quaife. New York: Dover, 1994. Originally published during the 1830’s, Black Hawk’s autobiography is a fascinating document. However, it has many inaccuracies and biases, and should be read with critical skepticism. His account of the British is naïve, as well as his description of the “prophet” White Cloud. Black Hawk grossly understates his own losses in the battles of 1832. Still, a vivid picture of an admirable human being emerges from the pages of his autobiography.

Drake, Benjamin. The Life and Adventures of Black Hawk. Cincinnati: G. Conclin, 1844. Half history and half fiction, written shortly after the events described.

Eby, Cecil.“That Disgraceful Affair”: The Black Hawk War. New York: W. W. Norton., 1973. Perhaps the best book about the Black Hawk War. Very thoroughly documented and at the same time a readable narrative, as well as incisive critique of the major actors in the war.

Nichols, Roger L. Black Hawk and the Warrior’s Path. Arlington Heights, Ill.: H. Davidson, 1992. Biography of Black Hawk, focusing on the wars he waged against rival tribes, white pioneers, and others. Nichols seeks the reasons for Black Hawk’s actions, particularly his involvement in the war that bears his name.

Quaife, Milo Milton. Chicago and the Old Northwest, 1673-1833. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1913. Well-documented and thorough general history that draws somewhat specious conclusions.

Slotkin, Richard. Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1973. A critical or “revisionist” account of the frontier. A welcome antidote to earlier sentimental accounts of the frontier wars, but obsessively overstated.

Stevens, Frank E. The Black Hawk War. Chicago: F. E. Stevens, 1903. A thorough account, still useful.

Thwaites, Reuben G. Story of the Black Hawk War. Madison: Wisconsin State Historical Society, 1892. A narrative by one of the best American historians of the period; Thwaites combined great erudition with a keen critical spirit.