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Black
Hawk War
By
1830 most native peoples in Illinois had been forced to
move west across the Mississippi. In 1804 the Sac
and Fox had agreed, for an annuity of $1,000, to cede
to the United States their lands east of the Mississippi
River. One Sac chief, Black
Hawk, had promptly repudiated this agreement, arguing
that the whites had persuaded the Native Americans to sign
it after getting the Sac and Fox drunk. Treaties signed
in 1815 and 1816 ceded more disputed territory, and in 1823
most of the Sac and Fox settled west
of the Mississippi. Black Hawk, however, once more refused
to recognize the agreements after white settlers began occupying
the vacated lands. The Native Americans were, moreover,
suffering from hunger in their new, less fertile lands,
and so in April 1832 they returned to the disputed territory
to plant crops.
The
war began after white settlers shot a peaceful emissary
sent by Black Hawk, who had come to realize that he
could not defeat the whites. Black Hawk led the Sac
to an early victory, but they were defeated near the
Wisconsin River on July 21, 1832, and were almost completely
annihilated in the Bad Axe Massacre on August 3. Black
Hawk escaped the massacre, but then surrendered on August
27. Following Black Hawk's defeat, the remaining members
of the group were settled in Iowa. In 1833 the last
treaty relating to the native inhabitants of Illinois
was negotiated, and the Potawatomis and two other remaining
tribes relinquished all claims to disputed territory
in northeastern Illinois.
from:
"Illinois," Microsoft® Encarta® Online Encyclopedia
2001 http://encarta.msn.com
© 1997-2001 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.
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