Black Hawk

Black Hawk (1767-1838), chief of the Sac, or Sauk, Native Americans. His Native American name was Ma-ka-tae-mish-kia-kiak. In 1804 the Sac and Fox agreed, for an annuity of $1000, to cede to the United States their lands east of the Mississippi River. Black Hawk promptly repudiated this agreement, declaring that the whites had persuaded the Native Americans to sign it after making them drunk. In the War of 1812, Black Hawk fought with the British against the United States. The cession of the disputed territory was again arranged by treaties signed in 1815 and 1816, and in 1823 most of the Sac and Fox settled west of the Mississippi. When white settlers began to occupy the vacated lands, Black Hawk once more refused to recognize the agreement. 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 white settlers shot a peaceful emissary sent by Black Hawk and thus began the so-called Black Hawk War, one of a long series of so-called Indian Wars. The Native Americans were defeated near the Wisconsin River on July 21, 1832, and they were defeated again in the Bad Axe Massacre on August 3; Black Hawk surrendered on August 27. The Sac and Fox were settled soon afterwards on a reservation near Fort Des Moines, Iowa, where Black Hawk died. His bones were eventually exhumed and put on display in an Iowa museum, where they were destroyed by fire in 1853. He wrote The Autobiography of Black Hawk (1833).