BLACK HAWK [Ma `kata wimesheka `ka, "Black Sparrow Hawk"] (1767-1838), American Indian warrior, was born at the Sauk village on Rock river, near the Mississippi, in 1767. This beautiful territory was long cov eted by the whites, and he and his people, who were so much under British influence as to be called the British band, were subjected to various acts of abuse by en croaching white squatters. As early as 1804 a few chiefs agreed to remove to the west of the Mis sissippi in return for an annuity of $I,000, a manifestly unfair agreement obtained by very ques tionable methods, but which was reaffirmed by the Indians in later treaties. In 1831 Black Hawk's threat of force to evict the usurpers caused the Illinois volunteers to march to the latter's rescue and the Indians to withdraw to the west bank of the Mis sissippi, whence they agreed not to return without the Govern ment's permission. Famine conditions prevailed among the, red men who had left their growing crops in the Illinois country; and the next spring with women, children and tribal possessions Black Hawk recrossed the river to plant a new crop. Instant panic prevailed among the settlers, and the undisciplined militia shot down one of the Indians carrying a flag of truce. Black Hawk, enraged, began to harry the border, for a time being success ful. He was defeated, however, at Wiscon sin Heights by volunteers under Colonel Henry Dodge and James D. Henry, and fleeing westward, his band, which was by this time in a starving condition, was prac tically destroyed at the battle, or rather massacre, of the Bad Axe river. The cold blooded way in which old men, little chil dren and women were all destroyed and a plea for mercy and a flag of truce alike disregarded make the whole affair one of the darkest blots in the shameful record of the whites' spoliation of the Indian. Black Hawk himself was captured, confined for a short time in Fortress Monroe, Va., and then taken by the Government through the principal eastern cities. On his release he settled on the Sauk and Fox reservation on the Des Moines river, in Iowa, where he died on Oct. 3, 1838. A statue commemorating him by Lorado Taft has been erected on a high bluff on the Rock river near Oregon, Illinois. Black Hawk was of a romantic and ambitious temper, and though he lacked the vision and the statesmanship of Pontiac or Tecumseh, there can be no doubt of the sincerity of his feeling for his territory and his people and of the shamefulness of the treatment accorded to him and his followers by the. whites.
Black Hawk's own story was told in Life of Ma-ka-tai-me-she-kia kiak (1834) ; Benjamin Drake's Life of Black Hawk (1846) was a popular early biography. An example of the numerous contemporary accounts is A. Wakefield's History of the Black Hawk War (1834), which was edited by F. E. Stevens in 1908. See also F. E. Stevens, The Black Hawk War (1903) ; numerous articles in the Wisconsin Historical Society Collections; the essay in R. G. Thvvaites, How George Rogers Clark Won the Northwest (19o3) ; J. F. Snyder, "The Burial and Resurrection of Black Hawk," Ill. State Hist. Soc. Jour., vol. iv., p. 47-56 (Springfield, Ill., 1911) ; and Amer Mills Stocking, The Saukie Indians and Their Great Chiefs Black Hawk and Keokuk (Rock Island, Ill., 1926) .