The Black Hawk War: The Last War East of the Mississippi

American treaty makers spent forty years hunting for "the chief" of the Sauk and never found him. A Sauk civil chief could only persuade, a war leader could lead only the young men who chose to follow, and the fields, the lodges and the stored corn belonged to the women. So when a few Sauk and Meskwaki men signed away the Rock River country at St. Louis in 1804, many at Saukenuk, a town of some fourteen hundred people where the Rock meets the Mississippi, never accepted that they had the right.

By 1831 settlers were plowing Saukenuk's fields and its people had been forced across the river. In April 1832 the war leader Black Hawk brought more than a thousand of them, families as much as fighters, back into Illinois. At Stillman's Run, militia fired on men he sent under a white flag, and a standoff became a war. For four months the band was chased up the Rock River and across Wisconsin, until soldiers and a steamboat caught them where the Bad Axe meets the Mississippi, trying to get across.

Black Hawk's rivalry with Keokuk runs through the book, which carries on past the killing to the surrender, the tour of eastern cities that turned a prisoner into a celebrity, the men in the ranks who would one day be president, and the removal that took the Sauk to Kansas. Black Hawk said his people had crossed back to plant corn. By the end of that summer, hundreds of them were dead.