Corn Kings and One-Horse Thieves
Odds & ends
Illinois past and present, as seen by James Krohe Jr.
The Corn Latitudes
The Sauk in Illinois
The whites' war on Indian country
See Illinois (unpublished)
2004
The occupation of Sinnissippi—northern Illinois outside Chicago—by peoples of several Native American cultures was continuous since the last of the great ice sheets crept back into Canada some 12,000 years ago. Nonetheless, 'Indian" in Sinnissippi these days means "Sauk," who are thought to have arrived from the east only in the 1600s.
This summary account is taken from the manuscript of my never-published guide to Illinois history and culture. See Publications for more about that project.
The Sauk (sometimes spelled Sac or Sak) and the Fox clan of the Mesquaki or Mesquakies, who lived in confederation with the Sauk, were interlopers who had been in Illinois even less long than the French. The Sauk were here because they had been repeatedly pushed west from near the St. Lawrence Seaway in Canada by more numerous or more aggressive intruders. As they moved west, the Sauk did some pushing of their own: people of the Illinois Confederacy had villages in what became the Quad Cities area in 1673 but Sauk and Mesquakies drove them out in 1680.
By 1800 or so, Sauk and Mesquakies occupied the lower reaches of the Wisconsin and Rock rivers and a large area west of the Mississippi. One band had settled in a metropolis they called Saukenuk, where the Rock drains into the Mississippi immediately south of where the white were to build Rock Island; the Mesquakies lived nearby, three or four miles upriver on the Mississippi. It was the custom of the Sauk to settle in such a town for the spring and summer to farm and gather, then abandon it for their winter hunting grounds in Iowa.
As Indian towns went, Saukenuk was sizable, with several thousand residents at its peak. In organization at least it outdid most Euro-American towns of the era. Lodges—the long bark-covered houses preferred by the Sauk that covered as much as 4,000 square feet each—were arrayed in blocks. The site was well chosen too, offering spring water, fertile soils on the alluvial terraces, fish from the river rapids, and rich pickings of wild fruit on “Rocky” Island (now Rock or Arsenal Island) upstream in the Mississippi. For a century, recalled Black Hawk, for whom Saukenuk was home, “We always had plenty.”
A beautifully drawn map of Illinois from 1824 in the collection of the Newberry Library shows the territory north of today’s Interstate 80 marked simply, “Sauk and Fox Indians.” But while dominant, the Sauk were not Sinnissippi’s only inhabitants in the Euro-American era. Winnebago had also been forced in to Illinois from Wisconsin and sojourned along the upper Rock River and its tributaries beginning some 40 miles upriver from Saukenuk. (The Freeport area, on the Pecatonica River, was home to the Winnebago in 1835, and the county of which Rockford is the seat was named after them.) Farther east, the valley of the upper Illinois River was occupied by Potawatomi.
Historian Theodore Pease correctly notes that the concentrated Indian presence here made Sinnissippi “another world distinct and independent from that to the south.” Sinnissippi was, by every obvious test, Indian country for more than a decade after Illinois’s white tribes organized themselves as a state in 1818. In Jo Daviess County (named after an Indian fighter), Thompson Township was at first known as Indian Grove, where local Indian are said to have held their final council; the present site of Hanover in that county was occupied by a Sauk and Mesquakie Indian village when white settlers showed up in 1828. Another village lay where Prophetstown State Park is today, on the northeast edge of the town of the same name along the south bank of the Rock River in Whiteside County. (Prophetstown was named after its chief, Wa-bo-kie-shiek, or White Cloud, who was Black Hawk’s counselor.) Spencer Park on South Appleton Road in Belvidere is where dwelt the last vestige of Potawatomi Indians in Boone County.
Ownership of some Sinnissippi lands had been ceded to the U.S. government by Indian leaders as early as 1804. As was the case with most of the cessions in what became Illinois, those cessions were disputed, with the result that some land in northern Illinois had to be ceded more than once before all claims to it were satisfactorily extinguished. The details are tedious and, to anyone sympathetic to Indians’ faint grasp of the consequences of what they were doing, dismaying. The process took more than 30 years, ending in 1833; it involved five “tribes,” and six treaties; the price paid for millions of acres was pathetically small, although the Indians, once they realized what they were signing away, gradually learned how to drive harder bargains.
One cession proved especially crucial to the early history of Sinnissippi. In 1804 all the Sauk land in what was still the Indiana Territory—some 50 million acres including all the lands lying between the Illinois and Mississippi rivers—had been ceded by a Sauk chief whom the whites incorrectly assumed to speak for all of his people. Under its terms, the Sauk and Mesquakies had the right to use the lands of Sinnissippi for as long as those lands remained in federal hands—that is, until Washington ceded them to the states that would eventually be formed from them, or sold them to individual settlers.
This provision enabled the Sauk to dwell unmolested on the land for years, sustaining not only their people but the illusion that the land was still theirs. For some twenty-five years after 1804, the whites in Sinnissippi were few in number and thus easily tolerated. The vanguard of white settlement in Illinois was still well to the south, and while traders and (later) lead miners were present, they were transients whose relation to the region was, in economic terms, not much different from the Indians.’ The latter felt unthreatened, and thus were peaceable apart from isolated acts of mayhem that enliven relations between any neighbors.
As the permanent white settlements grew, many Sauk favored resistance to continuing American occupation of the lands ceded in 1804, but none did so more fervently than Black Hawk, of the Thunder clan. The rightness or wrongness of Black Hawk’s actions swing crucially on whether the 1804 treaty was valid. The whites thought so, of course, but a gap of customs, concepts, and language separated the sides. For years, apparently, many of the Sauk believed the annual annuities paid them under the treaty were presents, tokens of the whites’ good will. As an anthropologist, William Henry Harrison, the territorial official who negotiated the deal, was a fine general, accustomed to hierarchical social systems with chains of command. His assumption that a chief was a general of sort who could speak for all of even his own band, much less for kindred clans, was unfounded. Black Hawk himself complained in his autobiography, “What do we know of the manner of the laws and customs of the white people?” This may be ingenuous; the Sauk of the Rock river country, unconditionally assented to and confirmed the treaty of 1804 in 1816, 1822, and again in 1825, although Black Hawk would later claim that he was ignorant of its conditions or, more darkly, that the treaty language had been changed after he signed it.
By the 1830s, Black Hawk and the Americans already had a history, to borrow a phrase. The Sauk had allied themselves with the British in the latter’s wars against the French and later, against their own American colonists. After the Americans' war for independence, British officials continued to foment trouble along the frontier from Canada, in which mischief Black Hawk eagerly took part. Black Hawk and his “British band” annoyed the Americans on behalf of the British at every opportunity. During the War of 1812, for example, Indians led by Black Hawk attacked and mauled a badly out-manned U.S. force at the Mississippi River island known today as Campbell's Island, upstream from Rock Island off East Moline.
The end of the war left the Sauk and Fox (in Pease’s words) chastened but morose. A nervous governor of the territory prodded Washington to build a fort to secure the Mississippi and “overawe” Black Hawk at Saukenuk. In 1816, a fort was built on Rock Island. The redoubt, dubbed Fort Armstrong, was an affront to Black Hawk—indeed was intended to be. Not only was it only three and one-half miles upriver from Black Hawk’s Watch Tower, but it defiled “Rocky Island,” which has been called “the recreational and spiritual center of Sauk life.”
A marker on the spot notes that the fort was garrisoned by United States troops until May 1836, served as headquarters for the Sauk and Fox Indian Agent from 1836 to 1838—appropriately, as it was a military occupation—and as a military depot from 1840 to 1845. It was destroyed by fire in 1855. Perhaps inevitably, a federal arms facility, the Rock Island Arsenal, was later built on the spot.
To the injustice of the 1804 treaty soon was added insult. As noted, the Sauk and Fox were free to use Sinnissippi as long as the federal government owned it, but many whites respected Washington’s claims no more than they did those of Indians. Instead of soldiers, Black Hawk began coping with what proved a peskier and scarcely less truculent foe in the form of squatters. Whites—mainly poor white farmers with little respect for the edicts of any chief, red or white—wanted land, not skins or ore. If the Indians conceived that occupation of land conferred ownership, these new white squatters assumed that ownership under the 1804 treaty gave them the right of occupation.
In 1829 white squatters moved into the Rock River valley while the Sauk were away on their annual hunt. All of Sinnissippi open to settlement, but the farmers chose to encroach on Saukenuk,since the land, which lay near river ports, was already cleared and enjoyed the protection of Fort Armstrong. The whites fenced off long-established Indian fields and in some cases plowed up their graves. The Indians, irked, broke down fences and took the whites’ livestock in retaliation.
Attempts at truce-making over several years failed. By then the squatters were considered under white law to have earned ownership rights to the disputed land, based on their occupation of it. This ended the federal government’s interest, and the fuss became a matter between local Indians and settlers (more specifically, between Indians and the settler’s state government in Vandalia) rather than the Indians and the federal treaty-makers. The new state government was hardly likely to side with Indians against its own citizens, and after a show of force from the state militia the Sauk were ejected from Saukenuk and packed off to Iowa. While their unharvested crops rotted, Black Hawk nurtured the resentments that would result in violence.
In 1832, Black Hawk and a band of 1,000 of his people—most of them women, children, and old men—crossed back from exile from Iowa into Illinois. Their return set the frontier “ablaze with excitement,” in Pease’s phrase. Among the volunteers who rushed to the settlers’ defense was a 23-year-old captain named Abraham Lincoln. He bore no particular animus toward the Sauk (he mainly became a soldier because he needed the money) but served a total of 90 days—the only military experience for the man who would in 28 years later command the greatest army ever assembled on U.S. soil.
Sadly, not many of Lincoln’s compatriots were his superiors in military experience. More than most wars, this one was a blend of farce and horror. The opening encounter on Sycamore Creek that came to be known as Stillman’s Run occurred after Black Hawk had already been convinced of the futility of hoped-for aid from either other clans or his British friends; he was looking for someone to surrender to. That encounter caused panic among Illinois’s under-led and over-whiskeyed militia; a more disciplined and larger force had to be called up to complete the job. After that, the “war” was mostly a chase. Black Hawk’s band—eventually outnumbered ten to one—sought safety, first by heading eastward across northern Illinois, then westward through what is now southern Wisconsin. They suffered a major defeat on the Wisconsin River on July 21 and near-annihilation while trying to cross the Mississippi on August 3 at the Battle of Bad Axe.
That final encounter would be more accurately known as the Massacre of Bad Axe. Raking fleeing children with cannon shot and picking off drowning women with rifles was barbarous even by the standards of Americans even less fastidious in war than they are today. Not more than one hundred and fifty of the band of nearly a thousand Indians survived. Black Hawk escaped alive but was turned over to U.S. authorities by Winnebago Indians. The fighting had lasted four months and cost 72 Euro-American dead (counting generously) and those of an unknown number of Indians. Historian Robert Howard would later dismiss the “war” as “overrated, expensive, and avoidable”—true of most wars, but especially and sadly true of this one. ●
SITES
OF
INTEREST
Essential for anyone interested in Illinois history and literature. Hallwas deservedly won the 2018 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Illinois State Historical Society.
One of Illinois’s best, and least-known, writers of his generation. Take note in particular of The Distancers and Road to Nowhere.
See Home Page/Learn/
Resources for a marvelous building database, architecture dictionary, even a city planning graphic novel. Handsome, useful—every Illinois culture website should be so good.
The online version of The Encyclopedia of Chicago. Crammed with thousands of topic entries, biographical sketches, maps and images, it is a reference work unmatched in Illinois.
The Illinois chapter of the American Institute of Architects in 2018 selected 200 Great Places in Illinois that illustrate our shared architectural culture across the entire period of human settlement in Illinois.
A nationally accredited, award-winning project of the McLean County Historical Society whose holdings include more than 20,000 objects, more than 15,000 books on local history and genealogy, and boxes and boxes of historical papers and images.
Mr. Lincoln, Route 66, and Other Highlights of Lincoln, Illinois
Every Illinois town ought to have a chronicler like D. Leigh Henson, Ph.D. Not only Lincoln and the Mother road—the author’s curiosity ranges from cattle baron John Dean Gillett to novelist William Maxwell. An Illinois State Historical Society "Best Web Site of the Year."
Created in 2000, the IDA is a repository for the digital collections of the Illinois State Library and other Illinois libraries and cultural institutions. The holdings include photographs, slides, and glass negatives, oral histories, newspapers, maps, and documents from manuscripts and letters to postcards, posters, and videos.
The people's museum is a treasure house of science and the arts. A research institution of national reputation, the museum maintains four facilities across the state. Their collections in anthropology, fine and decorative arts, botany, zoology, geology, and history are described here. A few museum publications can be obtained here.
“Chronicling Illinois” showcases some of the collections—mostly some 6,000 photographs—from the Illinois history holdings of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library.
I will leave it to the authors of this interesting site to describe it. "Chicagology is a study of Chicago history with a focus on the period prior to the Second World War. The purpose of the site is to document common and not so common stories about the City of Chicago as they are discovered."
Illinois Labor History Society
The Illinois Labor History Society seeks to encourage the preservation and study of labor history materials of the Illinois region, and to arouse public interest in the profound significance of the past to the present. Offers books reviews, podcasts, research guides, and the like.
Illinois Migration History 1850-2017
The University of Washington’s America’s Great Migrations Project has compiled migration histories (mostly from the published and unpublished work by UW Professor of History James Gregory) for several states, including Illinois. The site also includes maps and charts and essays about the Great Migration of African Americans to the north, in which Illinois figured importantly.
An interesting resource about the history of one of Illinois’s more interesting places, the Fox Valley of Kendall County. History on the Fox is the work of Roger Matile, an amateur historian of the best sort. Matile’s site is a couple of cuts above the typical buff’s blog. (An entry on the French attempt to cash in on the trade in bison pelts runs more than
2,000 words.)
BOOKS
OF INTEREST
Southern Illinois University Press 2017
A work of solid history, entertainingly told.
Michael Burlingame,
author of Abraham
Lincoln: A Life
One of the ten best books on Illinois history I have read in a decade.
Superior Achievement Award citation, ISHS Awards, 2018
A lively and engaging study . . . an enthralling narrative.
James Edstrom
The Annals of Iowa
A book that merits the attention of all Illinois historians
as well as local historians generally.
John Hoffman
Journal of Illinois HIstory
A model for the kind of detailed and honest history other states and regions could use.
Harold Henderson
Midwestern Microhistory
A fine example of a resurgence of Midwest historical scholarship.
Greg Hall
Journal of the Illinois
State Historical Society
Click here
to buy the book
Southern Illinois University Press
SIU Press is one of the four major university publishing houses in Illinois. Its catalog offers much of local interest, including biographies of Illinois political figures, the history (human and natural) and folklore of southern Illinois, the Civil War and Lincoln, and quality reprints in the Shawnee Classics series.
The U of I Press was founded in 1918. A search of the online catalog (Books/Browse by subject/Illinois) will reveal more than 150 Illinois titles, books on history mostly but also butteflies, nature , painting, poetry and fiction, and more. Of particular note are its Prairie State Books, quality new paperback editions of worthy titles about all parts of Illinois, augmented with scholarly introductions.
The U of C publishing operation is the oldest (1891) and largest university press in Illinois. Its reach is international, but it has not neglected its own neighborhood. Any good Illinois library will include dozens of titles about Chicago and Illinois from Fort Dearborn to
Vivian Maier.
Northern Illinois University Press
The newest (1965) and the smallest of the university presses with an interest in Illinois, Northern Illinois University Press gave us important titles such as the standard one-volume history of the state (Biles' Illinois:
A History of the Land and Its People) and contributions to the history of Chicago, Illinois transportation, and the Civil War. Now an imprint of Cornell University Press.
Reviews and significant mentions by James Krohe Jr. of more than 50 Illinois books, arranged in alphabetical order
by book title.
Run by the Illinois State Library, The Center promotes reading, writing and author programs meant to honor the state's rich literary heritage. An affiliate of the Library of Congress’s Center for the Book, the site offers award competitions, a directory of Illinois authors, literary landmarks, and reading programs.