RockneCAST
A Review of Black Hawk: Battle for the Heart of America (#266, 21 Nov. 2024)
I just finished reading Black Hawk: Battle for the Heart of America by Kerry Trask. Loved it! If you're interested in the history of the Upper Midwest, you'll love this book!
In this episode, I cover Henry Dodge, White Cloud, the Ho Chunk, Prophetstown, Battle of Pecatonica and also a little history leading up to this War and its aftermath.
- Duration:
- 56m
- Broadcast on:
- 21 Nov 2024
- Audio Format:
- other
Hey guys, today we're going to cover Blackhawk, the Battle for the Heart of America by Gary Trask. I just finished reading this book and it is really, really good. So for this episode of The Rapping Gas, I'm going to cover The Life of Chief Blackhawk. And in particular, give you a little bit of history about the Blackhawk War, how I came to be interested in this topic of Blackhawk. We're going to cover the cast of characters in this war, and I think some of you are going to find some of these names familiar. People like Jefferson Davis, Zachary Taylor, William Clark, you know, yeah, William Clark, the guy in Lewis and Clark. We're going to talk a little bit about Blackhawk, mania, what that was. We're also going to give you a really interesting description of one of the heroes of the Blackhawk War from the American side. A guy named Henry Dodge, those of you who live in Wisconsin and Iowa have probably heard of Dodgeville, Dodgeville State Park, Fort Dodge and Iowa, yeah, that's the same Henry Dodge. Let me tell you, Henry Dodge was a total badass, and we'll cover a little bit about the surrender of Blackhawk's forces in August of 1832 after the Battle of Badaxe and who led him at where he surrendered and where he ended up going after that particular surrender, and then what happened after that, which to me is kind of incredible. I'm going to try, you know, yesterday I did my podcast in Carl Jung, and I was talking about how my mind was totally blown. So hopefully I'm going to avoid saying my mind was blown, but, you know, my mind kind of was blown by this book. This is really, really, really interesting history. So let's talk a little bit about how I got interested in Blackhawk. I'm a lifelong island. I haven't moved too far from home, so yeah, I did live in Iowa City for 25 years, but now I'm back in Missing County. I love my home region, yeah, it's cold when a chic, and we'll get to why that's important. But growing up in this part of the upper Midwest, we have Blackhawk County. I live in Winnesheak, my hometown was Dicora, named after Chief Waucon Dicora, and there were some surrounding towns near my hometown, places like Preyra de Chien, McGregor, Alkater. Things that I kind of just took for granted growing up. About three years ago, I moved back to Northeast Iowa, a very, very proud member of the Driftless region now, and my partner and I quite frequently would go to this really awesome little small town called McGregor, Iowa. It's right across, it's located in Clayton County, right across the river from Preyra de Chien. We played those guys in basketball and football, just another town, never really thought of it much other than a town situated on a river that I played football against in basketball when I was growing up in Dicora, Iowa. But I, my partner and I really rediscovered this place called McGregor. We love this bookstore there called the Paper Moon Bookstore. For those of you who love bookstores, the Paper Moon is your spot. It has all sorts of books, books on science, and fiction, and literature, and the proprietors are classic bookstore people, super chatty, really good reading list. Probably now in my life a little liberal for my taste, but I don't, I still love liberals. I don't want them running things, I want them running places like book shops. They also have a really good regional set of books at the Paper Moon Bookstore, and I came across this book called The War of 1812 in Prairie de Chien by Mary Antoine, and I thought, gosh, maybe that should be a book that I should buy. I kind of passed up on it. Finally, I decided I was going to read it because I was thinking, oh my gosh, there was actually a battle in Prairie de Chien, and I'm not going to do a big deep dive into it for this episode. I am going to do a separate standalone podcast on the Battle of Prairie de Chien. But the punchline here is, is that a couple different things that kind of picked my interest in Blackhawk. One there was this little battle in 1812 over this Fort Crawford, which was kind of strategically located in Western Wisconsin, and of course it's proximity to the Mississippi River made Prairie de Chien a very strategic location. It was not a central theater of the War of 1812, but it was an important location that people actually cared about. But picked my interest in Blackhawk, he was not directly involved in this battle. But through my reading in this book, it became quite clear to me that Blackhawk and the Sock Indians, that's S-U-K, and their allies, the Fox, were allied with the British, and they were actually known as the British Band. And so this book itself is really interesting, War of 1812 by Mary Antoine, it talks about all the intrigues between the British, the Americans, the Reverius agents, and the drama between the various tribes. The battle itself wasn't really that interesting, but I mean, it was kind of interesting, but there wasn't really many casuals. I think there was like seven people injured, so it really wasn't a battle. I mean, I'm sorry, in order for a battle like someone has to die, no one even died during this battle, but a whole book was done on this, and it was kind of opening to me in terms of Blackhawk. Oh my gosh, he was actually affiliated with the British. I don't know, why was he affiliated with the British? And it really occurred to me, I've lived in Northeast Iowa for large portions of my life, have now returned back, and I knew almost nothing about the Blackhawk War of 1832. Now, in terms of casualties, there weren't a lot of people that died in the Blackhawk War of 1832, but if you're looking at the history of the Upper Midwest, this is one of the most significant events in the Upper Midwest, especially between Native peoples and Euro-American settlers in this region. It is categorized as a war, it's really more of a series of skirmishes, but it was very significant in the sense that there was a lot of important players that were involved in this war, and I knew almost nothing about it. And so I thought, gosh, I have to know something about it. And so I went on to Amazon and just put in Blackhawk War, and I came across this book called Blackhawk, The Battle for the Heart of America by Carrie A. Trask. And if any of you have an interest in history about the Upper Midwest, Indigenous peoples, and the life of Blackhawk as well as the Blackhawk War itself, this is the book for you. It is so good. I can't cover every element of this. I'm hoping to reach out to him so I can interview Carrie Trask. But if you have an interest in this region and in this area and in Blackhawk, I want you to read this book because it is a sacred book. It describes a series of sacred events that are hauntingly beautiful, that are hauntingly bring every sorts of emotion that you can have, both as to the American and to the Indigenous peoples who fought against the Americans. So I'm going to do a deep dive into that book. I'm not going to cover every single battle. You've got to read the book to get the battle, but I thought I would dive in on the "Battle of Pecatonica" and Henry Dodge as the most significant figure that I'll talk a little bit about the battle of bad-acts, not the battle of bad-ass, the battle of bad-acts near DeSoto, Wisconsin, and just some of the other historical figures in this book. But the other quick thing I want to get to before I kind of do a deep dive in a little bit of the background in terms of how the Blackhawk War arose, another thing happened that just kind of blew my mind, I guess I said that again, blew my mind. I have to avoid saying that, it blows my mind, I sound like a pothead or so, I do not smoke any bots. Yeah, man, it blows my mind, dude, yeah, it is kind of amazing. So Blackhawk, there's this war in 1832, Blackhawk's surrenders, he's really, he's in custody for a while, Andrew Jackson decides to just pardon him on one condition, he has to go visit the East Coast. So he takes Blackhawk and Whitecloud and they do this grand tour just after they completed this war. They're not executed, they're not in prison, they're taking on a tour, and on the East Coast, they are treated like total rock stars, people, mobs of people seeing them so much so that Jefferson, that Andrew Davis even gets jealous. And the other thing that kind of amazed me is that Blackhawk writes an autobiography after the Blackhawk War, and it was translated by Antoine Lequette Claire, you know, over there, Iowa, you know, that junk show is based out of Lequette Claire, what is it, those guys that go search around for junk, I forget the name of those guys, you know, that show, it's just north of Davenport, Iowa along the Mississippi River. Antoine Lequette Claire reported Blackhawk's story and recorded it. So you get to hear the perspective from Blackhawk, his view of the war, his view of the American. So I'm going to share a little passage from that book, and hopefully you get the opportunity to read it, because I think it's rare in American history that you not only get, of course, the written sources of the European in the conflict, but you get a direct primary source from Chief Blackhawk. Now as to his side of the conflict, now the introduction in that book gives a little bit of questions as to whether every part of the interpretation was 100% accurate. But I think for the most part, this is considered an accurate recitation or interpretation of Chief Blackhawk. So that's another thing. So we're going to deep dive into this. So I think it's going to be an interesting kind of will open your mind a little bit to this area of the upper Midwest, this part of our history, and I hope you get the chance to do your own further investigation and buy this book, Blackhawk Battle for Heart of America by Kerry Trask. I will hope to line him up. And also as a companion to that, by Blackhawk, the life of Blackhawk, and by the way, here's his name in Ho-Chunk language, Makatai-Meshikai-Kiyak, if I mouse that right, but that's actually his name. His name is actually Makatai-Meshikai-Kiyak, I don't know if that's right, but who the hell knows? I'm doing the best I can people. So let's set the stage a little bit for the Blackhawk war. What was going on here in the upper Midwest at that time? As I had previously mentioned, Blackhawk was affiliated with the British band during the War of 1812. So many of you thought, well gosh, didn't the British lose the Revolutionary War? Yeah, they did, but what happened is, is after the Revolutionary War, for the most part, the British ceded control over this place called the Northwest Territories. It's kind of hard to describe exactly how far west that went, but it basically went up to the Mississippi River. Now of course, when the British did this, the Indians were not part of this particular negotiation. So they had some disputes about what was and was not agreed to, but it was kind of a dispute that really didn't materialize much because after the Revolutionary War, the settlement was relatively modest. There were some villages like Prairie Deschine, like Green Bay, like the Mackinac Straits between Lake Superior and Lake Huron. But for the most part, there really wasn't that much settlement. And so the Indians were allowed to kind of do what they had already done for centuries to hunt, to fish, to farm. And so there was kind of the seeds were set for conflict, but they didn't really metastasize into significant conflict for a variety of reasons. But the British, having lost the Revolutionary War, still kind of wanted to maintain their influence in the upper Midwest. And they primarily did this through how always we introduced with it, try to influence people through money, through protection, through guns, through arms, through trade, through the fur trade, they had these various agents, the developed relationships with the various Indian tribes. And they kind of wanted to keep their control and sort of these British agents that acted on behalf of the British government and were very active in this part of the world. The Americans, of course, too, were expanding less word, but the settlement really wasn't that significant. And how in 1804, so we have a such a situation where you remember from your high school history in 1803, the United States bought the Louisiana Purchase, giving the United States huge tracts of land west of the Mississippi. Well what was going on east of the Mississippi? Of course, the United States always kind of believed that they, because they negotiated with the British, that they had obtained control. And of course, there were tribes that kind of disagreed with that. So the tribes during this time were not only interacting with the British, were not only interacting with the French, were not only interacting with the Americans, but they also had all their own skirmishes, they had all sorts of different things that they were doing. And of course, they didn't really have a written language. They didn't write, they didn't do treaties, they didn't do this kind of thing. Yeah, they would talk, they had their own rituals, they had their own ancient traditions, but they didn't do any of those sorts of things. And so they're fighting amongst themselves. So just prior to 1804, the some members of the SOC or Fox tribe were involved of a massacre of a fellow tribe. The perpetrators were eventually discovered and in the Indian culture, I think this is true in feudal Europe too, you weren't, they have prosecuting attorneys. But basically, like if you killed someone else from another tribe or another family, what you would kind of do is say, okay, I killed your brother. What do you want? I'll give you some wapum, I'll give you some tobacco, I'll give you something to kind of give you recompense and make you whole. So the perpetrators of this particular massacre were brought down to St. Louis. And at the time, they were kind of said, okay, well, yeah, as long as you give this part of this, this tract, you can essentially go free and you'll settle up your account. So this is called the Treaty of St. Louis. This ceded their claim, that is the SOC and Fox Nation claim to the land right up to the Mississippi River. They signed it away. Now of course, the question is, as an any authority, were these people that actually signed these agreements, were they actually authorized to do that? Needless to say, Blackhawk did not agree with that. But for the most part, it didn't really, there wasn't really any problem. So they had signed this, this Treaty of St. Louis in 1804. But it didn't really matter that much because there weren't a ton of settlers after that. That started to change after the War of 1812 especially, because keep it in mind that even though the United States had the the du jour, the legal rights to this area, as well as to the area west of the Mississippi, the British were still very, very actively involved in the area through various means through trading companies, through their own individual agents, through individual fur trappers, the French to a lesser degree at this time. But they were still actively involved in the area, kind of causing a lot of problems. The War of 1812, they should call it the War of 1812 to 1815. It didn't really resolve itself until 1815. At that point, I think it's called the Treaty of Gunn, the British United States finalized the war and they signed this treaty. And for the most part, really what it did is, it was kind of a second chapter to the Revolutionary War. They had fought the Revolutionary War. The United States kind of had claims over up to the Eastern Mississippi River. But the 1850 War or Treaty was where the British finally said, okay, we acknowledged that we're going to stop meddling in this particular part of the United States. We are not going to attempt to interfere. This is yours. It is your will not interfere. But in exchange, the United States kind of agreed, we're not going to go up into British Canada. So each side kind of had an understanding as to how they were going to conduct themselves in North America. Well, how did this affect the Indians? Well in a couple of different ways. You'd remember that Black Hawk and his band, they had their own self-described band. But in terms of how they were known to the British and to the Americans, the socks and the ones affiliated with Black Hawk were called the British band. And so once the British acknowledged that, hey, we're still your friends, but we're not going to be actively involved in this part of the country. Well, what did that mean to the indigenous people in this area, including people like Black Hawk? It meant that they no longer had this big powerful ally that they knew they could count on to back them up if necessary. They no longer had the guarantees to get arms, to get food, to get supplies. If conflict erupted to the United States, they couldn't say, hey, a British father who they described, they're Britain's, that's the father. They could no longer rely upon that. And so there was kind of this, the stage where the stage was set for conflict, except there really wasn't a lot of conflict in the sense of conflict with American settlers. So during this entire timeframe, the socks were centered and that's Black Hawk's tribe in a place called Sockenuck, which is located near present day Rock Island, Illinois. This is a beautiful and sacred place to the Black Hawk tribe, the socks. Beautiful farmland, beautiful hunting, it was essentially tons of forest. They had all these rituals that they had developed there and they kind of had seasonal occupancy of the Sockenuck village. And so typically what they would do is during the summer, they would grow their corn, they would do their hunting. And then they would depart and then they would go hunt the buffalo and places to the west and then return. So they kind of had this seasonal occupancy and then they would leave and then they would come back. Well, during this time, people were starting to settle in this particular area. So even though they had quote, unquote, seeded their land in the, you know, 1804 treaty and what really became more likely that settlement would occur after the war of 1812. Once the British kind of left, the settlers kind of felt more comfortable to start meeting out their territory and doing property and making their farms. Now this was an extremely light settlement at that time. And at the time, the American government did not have a lot of official soldiers. So there wasn't a lot, a huge army to go and enforce American claims in this area. It was essentially a very light footprint of settlers. Well, what happened in the, in the time leading up to 1832 is finally the American agents were beginning to say, Hey, you know, you guys got to leave. And so we've, we've arranged a place for you to the west of the Mississippi River in present day, Kia Kuck, Iowa, we'll get to why Kia Kuck is important, but Sockenock, sorry, you got to leave. And they had told them that it's not today, but it's kind of like, it's kind of like you get a notice of foreclosure on your health, you don't have to leave today, but it might be an 18 months at the end of legal proceedings, right? So you kind of know what's bad, but, and then you maybe have a timeframe where it's like, okay, I'm enjoying my life. Oh, wait a minute. When the sheriff comes, that's when it's really over. So that's what happened. And yet they still kind of engaged in this right annual ritual to kind of leave and then come back until finally in 1830, 1831, during one time when they came back to Sockenock, Blackhawk found that people were actually in his village. They'd started dividing it up into farms. And there were these white people there that they had no idea who they were. Now why didn't Blackhawk immediately attack at that point? Why didn't he just massacre those people? Well, the reasons are complex, but one of the reasons why he didn't was he didn't really have the manpower at that time. And the other thing too is there were American forces in the area. The settlers were armed and he was able to be persuaded to move to the west of Mississippi River. So reluctantly in the 1831, he did sign an agreement to move to the west of the Mississippi River. And he was there close to Chief Kiekuk. Now, Chiekuk is his rival in the sack nation. It's obviously the namesake for Kiekuk, Iowa. Kiekuk's view was, yeah, this really sucks, but I've been to the east coast. There's no way we can ever hope to defeat this civilization. There's simply too numerous or too powerful or technology is too advanced. There's just no possible way that we can defeat them. So I fight when you know it's essentially a suicide mission. Blackhawk agrees reluctantly. He signs this agreement saying I will go to the west of the Mississippi River and to the Fort Dodge Kiekuk, Iowa area. And of course, it's not as good. The hunting is as good. The ground is as good for planting corn. A lot of the people are really kind of angry. A lot of the Indian women were like, hey, you guys are fucking pussies. I mean, a lot of them were kind of like questioning their manhood because they didn't fight for the territory. And some of the women were going to the American agents and say, hey, we didn't sign. We're the ones that tended the corn. We never signed it. We were the elders. It's an invalid contract because we didn't sign it over. And at least in the book, as reported by Kerry Trask, it was kind of some of the women that were kind of like questioning the manhood of the Braves, like, hey, guys, you just left and we lost our land and you guys didn't even fight for us. What kind of men are you? So in the spring of 1832, Blackhawk and other affiliated tribes, the Fox, as well as the Kicapoo, they crossed back into the east side of the Mississippi. You know, if we were talking about Rome, Caesar crossed the Rubicon upon which there was no return. They crossed back to the other side. Now, at least from historical sources, it appears that they weren't really intending to have a battle. They were mainly going to just kind of try to occupy the, you know, just kind of travel and I think they spent a little time in Sockenock. I think that their original goal, though, was to hook up with WhiteCloud and here of the Ho-Chunk nation in a place called Prophetstown, Illinois. Now WhiteCloud, the book doesn't get really detailed into this, but he's essentially referred to as the prophet. See, I found this very interesting because the Ho-Chunk, that's another name for the Winnebago, Winasheek was a Winnebago Indian and so it is kind of just in northeast Iowa, which is where I live and I found that really, really interesting. So the tribe, the Sock tribe is about a thousand people that are in this tribe that are just roaming east of the Mississippi River and, of course, a lot of the American agents know this and they settle in Prophetstown and at that point, I think WhiteCloud is kind of like, "Yeah, you know, I kind of support you guys, but not really. I don't want to like die and I support you, but I think you'd basically tell a blocked hook. Well, maybe if you go back to Sockenock that we can, you know, you might be able to be granted permission to return." And so BlackHawks people kind of start moving again and in the course of moving. Now, here the historical sources are not quite clear. They come across another militia. BlackHawk claims that they claim with white flags, the European militia, the American settlers at that time, claimed it was, they thought it was a ruse. Well, one thing led to another and the militia engages the BlackHawk warriors and the Kickapoo and the Fox. The outcome of this battle is the Americas get their ass kicked. Now, they only lost 15 dead, but they ran BlackHawks tribe one. So in terms of actual deaths, there was not that many deaths. The Indians only lost, I think, two or three men, but the militia got their ass kicked. The impact in terms of media, keep in mind, you're on the western edge, the northwest quote unquote, of the United States expansion, but they're at, by this time there are towns. There's Galena, Illinois, mineral mining is really big. There's a place called mineral point in the Wisconsin territory. There were newspapers, you're not that far from the railroads, from the rivers. So this defeat spreads like wildflower, wildflower, wildfire, and not only was it defeat, but as was typical of the time, the dead were scalped and mutilated and, you know, disemboweled and just every sort of sundry thing was done to them. And at that point, there is absolute panic on the, on the prairie. That entire region was a flame with fear. And that kind of led to the mobilization of these militias, as well as some of the traditional army elements. Although, ultimately, I'll get into this why they didn't really get that it was primarily conducted by the militia, the war parties. There was very little involvement of the army itself. Just at the time, the traditional army, because Jackson was like, Oh my God, what the hell's going on here? Why can't we defeat these, these warriors send in the real military? So he sends a wind-filled Scott, like the crack general of the American army, wind-filled Scott barely gets there, and he gets there a little bit too late by the time the last battle occurs because of cholera. His armed forces were totally destroyed by cholera, and the fatality rate with cholera at the time in the 1830s was between 30 and 50 percent. Way worse. You imagine with COVA, COVID, if there was a 50 percent death rate, holy shit, we would have been like, in our bathrooms the whole time was reading in fear. Either that or it would have just like, what the hell am I as we'll have a, have a beer while we wait to die. Yeah, so he never really gets there. But so then from that time from the Battle of Stillman Run, basically Black Hawk's Band kind of meanders up to north, eastern Illinois, they get up into the present day Madison. They fight a battle called the Battle of Wisconsin Heights, and then the war ends in the Battle of Badaxe in near DeSoto, Wisconsin, August 1st and 2nd of 1832. And so the whole quote unquote war is only about three months. But in the course of that war, there was some very interesting things that would happen. So I thought I would do a deep dive into the Battle of Pecatonica because here I'm going to introduce you to the character of Henry Dodge. You know, growing up I had heard of Dodgeville and Fort Dodge, but I had no idea what a badass Henry Dodge was. He's kind of like, you know, they have Davy Crockett in Tennessee, Kentucky has Daniel Boon. Well, Henry Dodge is kind of the Daniel Boon of the Upper Midwest. And a lot of you are like, oh God, you know, is he really, yeah, he is. So here I'm just going to read one part. And if you're still here, yeah, you're going to listen to me read of Kerry Trast's book. It describes the person of Henry Dodge, the leader of the colonial militia. And this is the guy who was involved in the Battle of Pecatonica, one of the most significant engagements of the Black Hawk War. So here's how Trast describes Henry Dodge. Dodge himself was a tough and attractive man with a strong personality. And some decidedly charismatic qualities. He was ambitious, ambitious, ambitious, and pushy, but people respected him. And there was a good many men in the mining district eager to work for him and in time eager to follow him and fighting the Indians. He was tall, strong with a long, thick mane of dark hair, dressed in tan, boxed in hunting shirt, he carried two pistols in Hollister and a sword on a broad belt around his waist. He probably had a big ass knife like a bowie knife to. He was very much the image of a weather worn frontiersman made muscular and resourceful by life in the backwards. When Lieutenant Joseph Steele Gallagher of the regular army met him during the Black Hawk War, he described Dodge and the letter to his wife as a good looking man of about 40 dark complexion, good features and a very decided but not discern expression of countenance. Dodge was actually 50 years old at the time, but must have been in very fine physical condition. And Gallagher also added a letter known to his brother that he was a man of great personal bravery. So that's how this guy, this guy, he struts around, this guy has a big pair of balls. I mean, that is who Henry Dodge is. A guy with balls who's willing to fight and guarantee you Henry Dodge would not be voting for Joe Biden. I guarantee you, he would be a Trump guy because he has a pair of balls. I'm sorry to get into that politics, but that leads into kind of probably one of the most exciting episodes of this book, The Battle of Pecatonica. So what happened was is that after the beginning of the war, these militia were kind of just wild ass farmers that didn't really have a lot of military skill and they would get all liquored up and brave, but had no discipline, didn't really know how to fight. And they got their ass kicked by the Indians because the Indians, they like to fight like I don't know if you've ever seen sons of anarchy, that's basically the Indians. They would fight the Osage and, you know, Blackhawk talks about his biography and it's kind of like, it's a sign of being a man once you kill and scalp them. And they would just, they would fight over territory, they would kick the shit out of the Osage. The Osage would kick the shit out of them. They would go go to a certain tribe and massacre them and then massacre them back. He said, I'm not making this up, this is just in in the autobiography of Chief Blackhawk. It's just really interesting, parenthetically. One thing that I'm very, very interested in is the training techniques of the indigenous braves because they were very good fighters. What were their muscular training tanks? What did they do to decrease their cardiovascular? What were the martial arts of the Indians? Because they obviously would have had techniques they would have learned, they would have been passed down from generation to generation. And so there was this question of, oh my gosh, we should win, but why aren't we winning? These guys are tough. They are kicking our ass and we got our ass kicked. And at the time, it wasn't super heavily populated. It was lightly populated, this region of Northwest Illinois, Southwest Wisconsin. There were not a lot of forts, there was not a lot of protection and a lot of people were in total panic. They didn't think they could necessarily win. Well, here comes the personages of Henry Dodge and his irregulars. It's kind of like the outlaw Josie Wells. Henry Dodge is a total badass. So he gets this group, this group of cracked troops to hunt the Indians. He then goes and searches for them and they come across a guy named Henry Apple, a German settler that was heading home. They kind of crossed paths, but eventually what had happened was is Dodge, they'd set high to Apple and they'd set high to Dodge. What happened was is that Apple eventually had not gone far before he actually got entrapped and ambushed by Indians who were actually trying to get Dodge. So the Indians were hunting Dodge. Dodge was heading this group of Indians and what had happened was Dodge and his companions heard shots and then saw Apple's horse gallop by with gunshot wounds to an ear to its neck and a great deal of blood on its saddle. It was a riderless horse, I think of Ichabod Crane in Washington Irving, reached the fort. At that point, they saw a wildless horse with blood, a riderless wort with blood and all the time the men's energy was up there like, "Oh my gosh, let's go kick those guys ass." And they did. And so this results in the, and first of all, they're all wild and at some point, one of the orders, one of the captains had to kind of calm them down and basically said, "You guys got to calm down." And at that very moment, we can't commit the same air that we did during the battle of Stillman's run. A few minutes later, Henry Dodge and his guys came right in through the gate and took command. They went hunting for those Indians. They couldn't find the Indians until they came across an impenetrable swab, a thicket, with various Indians hidden within there. And at that point, the Indians had vanished. They couldn't see where they were. And here is where Henry, the trash, Kerry Trash describes what happened next. According to Charles Brackens, a young lieutenant with a tack party, Dodge briefly halted the squad and gave anyone who might have poems about proceeding into the tangle to underbrush the opportunity to fall out. So here, he's saying, "Boys, if you're too big of a pussy, get the hell out of here." No one did. They all had a pair of balls. Those are my language. All 21 men that advanced in an extended line into the dense thinking, not knowing where the Indians were hiding. After Dodge's group penetrated the woods about 200 yards, the stillness and the suspense of the action was suddenly broken when the Indians who were hiding in the bank of an Oxbow Lake of the Pentatonica let out a war cry and opened and fired from about 60 feet away. Three of Dodge's men, Samuel Black, Samuel Wells, and Monteville Morris went down. Dodge then ordered the rest of the party to charge. They did so without hesitation and got to within about six feet of the Indians before letting loose with a blazing volley upon them. They literally shot them to pieces, said Dodge. What followed next was hand-to-hand combat. "The charge brought the Indians face-to-face and breast-to-best, breast-to-breast," said Parkinson. "And after discharging their guns, they all become entangled in a brutal hand-to-hand malaise, spears and tomahawks, bayonets, musket bucks, and bare hands. There were 11 Indians altogether, and Dodge later reported to Atkinson. The nine of them were killed on the spot, and the remaining two killed crossing a lake. Then when the rage and the fury of the conflict was spent, Dodge's men proceeded to scalp the enemy dead, procuring for themselves trophies that would prove that they had outdone the Indians at their own savage form of war hair. Franses Gejo, who participated in the battle, told a friend, "The men behaved with great gallantry and bravery on this occasion. By winning the battle and scalping the dead, we showed the Indians that we were not the soft breed," as they said, that we were declared Peter Parkinson. This victory in battle spread like wildfire. At that point, they knew they had a leader. They had this badass, this Daniel Boole and this mythical figure called Henry Dodge, the guy that had the toughness to kick ass when he needed to. He establishes his leadership bonafides during this particular battle. From there, the book goes on to describe the battle of the Wisconsin Heights. What happened after this battle and others skirmishes, the Indians at that point, I think, essentially knew that they couldn't win. It was kind of this great chase for a while, where they couldn't locate the ban. Of course, the Indians knew this country inside and out. Essentially, Black Hawk was hiding. There was a whole bunch of swamps and some—I didn't know where there was all these swamps and southern Wisconsin, but apparently there are, and he was able to hide out for a significant period of time until the battle of Wisconsin Heights, which I will not get into. The Indians did get beat in that battle, which allowed Black Hawk and some of his other warriors to escape. Then this finally led to the Battle of Badax near DeSoto, Wisconsin. I'm not going to do a deep dive on that one either, but that, in essence, ends the Black Hawk War. It basically lasted for about three to four months. The Americans lost only about 77 dead, about 500 to 1,000 Indians were killed, at least the best that we can guesstimate. The estimates ranged from about 1,000 Indians that were part of this ban to potentially 2,000. The fear, of course, is one of the reasons why, though, it was much greater fear than just 1,000, is because a lot of the Americans felt, "Well, gas is Black Hawk going to initiate other tribes to get involved that were kind of sitting on the sidelines." Essentially, what he was trying to do is kind of catalyze some of these other Indians who had been on the sidelines and activated them to be allies. Black Hawk himself believed, one of the reasons why he entered is he thought that the British were going to get back involved again, and that they were going to support him and maybe then re-enter or reassert control over this region. Black Hawk hoped to catalyze other Indian nations, establish the bravery of the Indians, maybe get the British involved again, none of those came to fruition. Finally, the battle of bad acts occurred. Some people call it the massacre. Only about five Americans died during that, about 500 Indians died. Women and children was a very sad place. There's a historical marker in to Soto, Wisconsin. I'm only about an hour dry from theirs, and definitely going to go there at some point, so I can just check out this area of significance and be haunted by what happened there. But I think kind of the end of this particular story, I think, I think is really kind of fascinating. You know, there's a lot of hand-wringing in the United States about our treatment of indigenous people, how awful we are. It's just pure bad. No good. Well, one of the interesting things about this is so Black Hawk goes on this war, and a lot of the killing that they did against the settlers was like massacre and mutilation. Both sides did it, so he realizes he's going to lose. He hides out for a while just north of Hairy La Crosse, their present day, to see La Crosse, Wisconsin. He eventually realizes, I think the Indians kind of hosted him for a little while, but they're kind of like, you know, Black Hawk, you need to get the fuck out of here, because essentially what they told him, because, you know, that's not good for us to harbor you. So Black Hawk agreed, along with White Cloud, got his finest on kind of like Robert Lee surrendering to the United States Army, and surrenders in prior to Shane Wisconsin, and the interesting things about that. One of the peoples he surrenders to is a guy named Jefferson Davis, yet a guy that became president of the Confederacy, and Jefferson Barrett Davis then accompanies him to Jefferson Barracks, which is where he was held in custody. But here's the interesting thing, Black Hawk was not held in custody for barely long. I don't know how long it was, but essentially he agreed to peace, and essentially what the terms were, you got to give up, you got to move west of the Mississippi River, and you got to do a tour of the East Coast. So Black Hawk agrees, and he tours all throughout the East Coast of the United States, and he's traded like an absolute rock star, mobs of people want to see and experience Black Hawk. So much so that there's a joint event, and Andrew Jackson, the president of the United States, kind of gets a little jealous, and doesn't want to do a joint appearance with him because he's so frickin famous, Black Hawk then meets Andrew Jackson, and for the most part, Andrew Jackson is like, okay, well, good to see you, why did you do all that stuff, and Black Hawk is like, yeah, we were fighting for our land, and then the tour ends, and Black Hawk goes throughout the East Coast at the time, contrary to what most people think, there was a lot of hand-wringing in the East Coast about the treatment of indigenous people. Now the closer you got to the actual front, where people would actually experience death at the hands of the Indians, there was obviously a different view, and so this is kind of this great morality trail tale of the Europeans, the indigenous, the ones that fought, the ones that didn't the story, the heartbreak, the massacres on both sides, there was a, it was this kind of dramatic tale, and so this this revelry of Black Hawk was resulted in a term called Black Honeya, like Black Hawk Mania, like people went nuts for Black Hawk, so he gets back 1833-ish, and Black Hawk does a autobiography, and I've read it, it's really good, I'll share one little part of the autobiography that was kind of fun, he isn't, there's an interpreter named Antoine Leclerc, which I had mentioned earlier, and it's really kind of fun because you know, one of the things that I had thought is, I didn't really, I've never really heard a lot of first-hand accounts of what it was like to live in the Indian villages, I think the closest that we get to this is that one kind of common feature of Indian raiding during this time frame, when they would come upon a settlement, they would usually kill all the adult women, women and children, except they would kill the adults, men and the women, the teens, they would usually kill the babies, but a lot of times they would take captive children in the ages from five to ten, and they would, they did this for a variety of reasons, but one of them was that the population of these particular tribes wasn't particularly strong, it was difficult to survive even in this era, hardship was something that's very significant, and so there are a few first-hand primary sources of some of these people that have been taken captive, but then were able to report what it was like to actually live with some of these indigenous tribes, they literally went native, so here though I just thought I'd give you a brief description in the autobiography, though this is actual Black Hawk's actual words as interpreted by Antoine LaClaire, he's talking about his his difference of the experience between the British and the Americans, his observations of what made them different, so I thought you might get a kick out of that and just get a little bit of first-hand Black Hawk knowledge, and here he's talking about the way that they fought, and it was shortly after an attack that had occurred on another Indian village, but he says on my arrival to the a village, I was met by chiefs and braves and conducted to a lodge that had been prepared to receive me, after eating I gave an account of what I had seen and done, I explained to them the manner in the way in which the British and the Americans fought, instead of stealing upon each other and taking every advantage to kill the enemy and save their own people, and this is an italics, as we do, which with us is considered good policy for a war chief, they march out in open daylight and fight, regardless of the number of warriors they lose, and after the battle is over, they retire to feast and drink wine, as if nothing had happened, after which they make a statement in writing, of which they have done, each party claiming the victory, here he uses an exclamation point, and neither giving an account of half the number that have been killed or their own side, they all fought like braves but would not do to lead a war party with us, our maxim is, kill the enemy, save our own men, those chiefs would do better to paddle a canoe but not to steer it, and there he says, the Americans shoot better than the British, but their soldiers are not so well clothed or provided for, so that was kind of an interesting description of the difference between the Americans and the Brits, and of course you see a little bit, if you've seen the movie Last of the Mohicans, the Indians are kind of the original guerrilla warfare experts, they did not have a lot of bribes to lose, a braves to lose because they didn't have huge numbers, so Blackhawk had probably about 500 men that could fight the braves, the rest of the tribe that was with them was women and children and older men, and so you couldn't just afford to do a frontal assault, you had to act surreptitiously, and you had to use every advantage to your, every trick in your trade to be able to win the battle because the goal was is to win, to survive, to live on, to fight another day, they did not have another enough men to do a frontal charge, and of course the British and American being allowed this as dishonorable and deceptive, and so when they first came across Blackhawk's ban, they knew that they would use trick-reared deceit to be able to win the battles. From Blackhawk's point of view, that made perfect sense, well why wouldn't you use every means at your disposal to win a battle? And Blackhawk gets into this a little bit in terms of morality, he talks about the internal morality of the Indian versus the external reality of the Americans, where he says, we kind of listen to our own compass and what we think is his right of run. The Americans have this external thing that guides the behavior and decision-making, it's very, very interesting stuff. So if you're interested in this area of history, I strongly encourage you to read Blackhawk the Battle for the Heart of America by Carrie A. Trask, and couple it with a life of Blackhawk, by Chief Blackhawk, so you can actually get a good sense of this area of history. So I hope you found this as interesting as I did. I freaking love this area of history, and it is totally made. My knowledge of this particular area, even richer and more textured, and it's like seeing the world in 3D when you know the stories of the people behind the particular region. This area where we're living is this sacred space, it was fought over, it was died for. People were born here, they died here, they celebrated, they feasted here, and when you just have that knowledge, it makes your history, your knowledge of the place, so much richer. You know, I just did a hike at the Yellow River Forest near the Paint Creek hiking area that's surrounded by steep cliffs, this beautiful forest, this beautiful stream, and I was thinking gosh, at one point this must have been a settled location that must have been considered a kind of paradise. It's flat, beautiful, covered with timber, valleys, I just like kind of love to know whether any indigenous people had ever lived there. I'm sure that they had, but just to kind of know that history was just kind of so fascinating, and it just brings it into 3D, and so I am going to go to the Battle of Badax historical marker. I don't know, I don't think there's any museum there, and there's probably just going to be a historical marker, but I'm going to go there, because I know what happened there, I know what it means to the people of the whole chunk, to the American people, to the settlers that were there, to the individual participants. So I'm excited, that's what history is all about. Now these, I kind of do whatever I'm interested, I hope you found this really fun and intriguing to listen to, that's the goal. I'm also experimenting with AI to make my podcast sound a little bit more studio quality sound. I've been listening to it, it sounds a little tinny to me, so I don't know whether the audio sounds better, or whether I should just keep doing it with the echo-y sound of just my office and my laptop. So if you have any feedback on that, let me know, rock the cast at gmail.com, rock the call at gmail.com, so that I can kind of decide how I want to do the future episodes. I hope you get a chance to read these two bicks, they're ricking awesome, and I hope you all are having a great day, and that you are living your life to the fullest, that you learn about wonderful people like Henry Dodge, and Antoine Leclerc, and Chief Blackhawk, and White Cloud, this is good stuff, love it. So thank you so much for tuning in, I hope you're all having a wonderful day, until next time you and I see each other on the rock the cast.
I just finished reading Black Hawk: Battle for the Heart of America by Kerry Trask. Loved it! If you're interested in the history of the Upper Midwest, you'll love this book!
In this episode, I cover Henry Dodge, White Cloud, the Ho Chunk, Prophetstown, Battle of Pecatonica and also a little history leading up to this War and its aftermath.