p123  Red to White

Iowa Projects a Thumb and Finger
Black Hawk the Sauk

 p125  Iowa Projects a Thumb and Finger
The Half-Breed Tract — The Neutral Line

Between the years 1803 and 1833 Ioway, though yet a wilderness, felt stirrings toward white supremacy. West of the Mississippi in 1804 there was erected the District of Louisiana, and in 1805 this District became Louisiana Territory. Then in 1812 Louisiana Territory became the Territory of Missouri, from which in 1819 there fell away the Territory of Arkansas, leaving a truncated Missouri Territory whence in 1821 there fell away the State of Missouri, leaving instead a No‑Man's Land fraught with Ioway.

Definition on the West

In 1804 Lewis and Clark, mounting Missouri in keel boats, passed the Iowa stream Nodaway (the Nodaway just nods away) and the Nishnabotna and by July 21th were at the mouth of the great river Platte. Opposite the mouth of the Platte lay Ioway, and on the 22nd the party (fifty in all) pitched in Ioway their camp. Here they raised the 'American collours'.​86 They pitched in Ioway some ten or eleven successive camps, and took note among other things of the Little Sioux or Stone River which their guide ('Old Dorion')  p126 told them passed through a lake called D'Esprits — Lake of Spirits. Sergeant Floyd of the expedition died on August 20th and was buried at a spot now within the limits of Sioux City. At a bluff in Nebraska ('Council Bluff') the explorers held a council with members of the Otoe tribe to make known to the Indians the 'Change of Government' due to the purchase of Louisiana and 'the wishes of our government to Cultivate friendship with them'.87

Following Lewis and Clark there came up the Missouri in 1811 the Astor expedition carrying two men of mark — John Bradbury, English naturalist, and Henry M. Brackenridge, American literateur. Major Stephen H. Long of the Topographical engineers ascended the river in 1819. He was followed in 1825 by General Henry Atkinson, and in 1833 by Maximilian, Prince of Wied.

These explorers, one and all, found the great Missouri Valley delightful, not to say enchanting. Bradbury pronounced the view over Ioway 'magnificent'. 'The bluffs', he writes, 'can be seen for •more than thirty miles, stretching to the north-eastward in a right line, their summits varied by an infinity of undulations. The flat valley of the river, •about six or seven miles in breadth, is partly prairie, but interspersed with clumps of the finest trees, through the intervals of which could be seen the majestic but muddy Missouri'.

 p127  But it was the Long party who saw sights most unusual. 'For a few days', writes Dr. Edwin James (Long's historiographer), 'the weather had been fine, with cool breezes, and broken flying clouds. The shadows of these coursing rapidly over the [Ioway] plain, seemed to put the whole in motion; and we appeared to ourselves as if riding on the unquiet billows of the ocean. . . . Three elk, which were the first we had seen, crossed our path at some distance before us'. The mirage 'magnified these animals to a most prodigious size. For a moment we thought we saw the mastodon of America, moving in those vast plains, which seem to have been created for his dwelling place'.

The narrative continues: 'On one of the bright sunny mornings which occurred, when we were in the country near the sources of Grand river, we discovered, as we thought, several large animals feeding in the prairie, at the distance of •half a mile. These, we believed, could be no other than bisons; and after a consultation respecting the best method of surprising them, two of our party dismounted; and creeping with care and caution, •about one-fourth of a mile through the high grass, arrived near the spot, and discovered an old turkey, with her brood of half-grown young, the only animals now to be seen'.

 p128  On the East

While Lewis and Clark defined Ioway on the west, definition took place on the east.

Starting from St. Louis on August 9, 1805, Lieutenant Pike essayed the Mississippi in a keel boat with twenty men. Near the future Montrose he unfolded to the Sauks the news that 'their great father, the president of the United States', in celebration of his acquisition of Louisiana, 'had ordered the General [James H. Wilkinson] to send a number of his young warriors [the Pike party] in different directions, to take them by the hand'. Stopping at the sites of Fort Madison and Burlington and at Grand Prairie (Muscatine Island), the expedition reached the site of Davenport on August 27th. Thereafter came Dubuque's lead mines, the heights of McGregor, and Yellow River with its 'painted rocks'.

It was Pike's principal errand to choose points on the Mississippi suitable for military establishments, and he chose two — the hills of Burlington and McGregor Heights. Neither was ever occupied. Pike did not meet the Ioways, but he heard of them as on the rivers Iowa and Des Moines. They hunt, he observes, on 'the De Moyen, and westward to the Missouri; their wars and alliances are the same as those of the Sauks and Reynards, under whose special protection they conceive themselves to be. . . . Their  p129 residence being on the small streams in the rear of the Mississippi, out of the highroad of commerce, renders them less civilized than those nations'.88

On the South and on the North

Ioway on the south achieved definition in 1816 when the north boundary of what in 1821 resolved itself into the State of Missouri was established. But our present concern is with Ioway on the north. Here arose a situation fraught with the incalculable — a situation due to the St. Peter's River. In July, 1820, Captain Stephen W. Kearny left 'the Council Bluff' (Nebraska) to discover a route across the country to the outlet of the St. Peter's. Passing by way of the Ioway streams Boyer, Soldier, Little Sioux, and Raccoon, the party reached a point southeast of Spirit Lake and thence passed to the Little Blue Earth River near what today is the Iowa-Minnesota line. It was here that they saw the five thousand buffalo previously mentioned. Captain Kearny's expedition (and therein its point) tended to make the St. Peter's River the north boundary of Iowa.

'Iowa projects a Thumb and Finger': the 'Finger' was the Neutral Line and Neutral Ground; the 'Thumb' was the Half-Breed Tract.

The Half-Breed Tract consisted of the triangle  p130 formed by the rivers Mississippi and Des Moines — a tract reserved for half-castes by the Sauks and the Foxes from lands ceded by them to the United States in 1824.​89 Two of these half-castes (they numbered perhaps fifty in all) are of interest — Maurice Blondeau and the mother of Keokuk. Blondeau we have met.

The mother of Keokuk, who bore the lilting name Lalotte, was descended (who knows?) from the early French agent Pierre Marin who thus would have been several times prospective great grandfather to Keokuk himself.​90 The chiefs of the Sauks and Foxes, so runs a letter of 1830 to General William Clark, 'request that Lalott (Keokuk's mother) a half-breed, shall have a share in the above mentioned land, that is to say, that Thomas Abbott's and Lalott's land may join together at a place called the orchard [Tesson's] at the head of the Des Moines rapids'.​91 Makers of the treaty of 1824, and so of the Half-Breed Tract, were Pashepaho, Wapello, Taimah (new to our pages) and Keokuk.

So much, then, for Ioway's 'Thumb'. There remains the 'Finger'.

The 'Finger' — the Neutral Line of 1825 expanded into the Neutral Ground of 1830 — was a strip reaching, with a dip and a rise, from the Mississippi to the  p131 Des Moines and designed to reach the Missouri. Its purpose was to safeguard the white man in Ioway by safeguarding against one another the Indians of the upper Mississippi — among them the Sauks, the Foxes, the Ioways, and the Sioux. General William Clark at St. Louis and Governor Lewis Cass of Michigan Territory (the latter domain soon to embrace Ioway) became seized of an idea. They would put an end to intertribal warfare. Just assemble the tribes, they said, and let them know that for once the white man did not want land of them. Thus reassured, the tribes would consent to keep each within its own peculiar territory, south or north of a neutral line.

All very well but for Indian tradition! Tradition as to war and scalps, the deepest thing in Indian nature, thing glorified of the Indian woman — what of that? Did the Great Father forget? Give ear to Black Hawk. 'Such of our young men', he says, speaking of the Sauk national dance, 'as have not been out in war parties and killed an enemy stand back ashamed, not being allowed to enter the square. I remember that I was ashamed to look where our young men stood, before I could take my stand in the ring as a warrior'. And, says Dr. Edwin James, squaws 'whose husbands have not been successful in war, frequently murmur, saying, "You have had me for a wife a long time, and have never yet gratified me with the scalp dance".'

 p132  The Council gathers. For the projection of the white man's 'Finger', the theatre (Prairie du Chien) is set. The Sioux and other tribes are there. But where are the Sauks, the Foxes, the Ioways? Late! Keokuk has had the arranging. A late entry is a strong entry. Naked to the breech-clout, painted to the eyebrows, singing loud their war songs, come at length in a train of canoes the Sauks, the Foxes, the Ioways. Children, announces General Clark, we 'propose to you to make peace together and to agree upon fixed boundaries for your Country within which each tribe should hunt and over which, others shall not pass without their consent'. My Father, protests a Chippewa, 'I wish to live in peace — But in running marks round our country or in giving it to our enemies it may make new disturbances and breed new wars'.92

Up rises Waneta, a Yankton — a Yankton so primeval that he is a Yanktonai. 'You see', he says, 'my cloathing — this is the way I have been raised — I live furthest off of any of my nation — I am from the plains'. He wears a buffalo skin of a fine white color set off with tufts of owl feathers, a necklace of sixty claws of the grizzly bear, leggings, jacket, and moccasins decked with human hair. His own hair, pierced by nine smooth red sticks, falls forward in two plaited tresses, and his hand holds a large fan of turkey feathers.

 p133  The claim of Waneta does not touch the present Iowa, but there steps forward a Sioux — Tarsagee — who lays hold upon Ioway greedily. 'I will now point out', he says, 'the boundary of the land where I was born. It commences at the raccoon fork of the Red Cedar River thence to the forks of the Des Moins River at the Mouth of Raccoon River; thence up to a small Lake the source of Bear [Boyer] River and thence following Bear River to its entrance into the Missouri a little below the Council Bluffs'.

Peemashkee, a Fox, is spokesman for the Sauks, the Foxes, and Ioways. 'The Line [for us, against the Sioux]', he says, 'commences at the Mouth of the River Iowa on the West side of the Mississippi; from the mouth of the Iowa up to the source of the left fork of the Iowa River and from there to the fork [of] Calumet River and from there following the same to its entrance into the Missouri and from there to the boundary line, including in this claim the claim of the Iowa Indians'.

Keokuk follows. 'You see', he says, 'how it is. . . . We claim the Fork of the Calumet [Big Sioux] River — It is unnecessary to say by what title we claim it — You know we got it — This is the line for which my mouth has spoken so much'. An orator is Keokuk — and a poseur. His blanket scarlet; his neck clasped by claws of the grizzly bear; his leggings a‑tinkle with little  p134 bells; his gesture bold; his utterance 'rapid, clean, clear' — so is he.

Ioways themselves take part in the Council, but it is a modest part. 'I claim', says Chief Mahaska, 'no lands in particular. . . . I go upon the lands of our friends the Socs and Foxes — we alternately go upon each others land — Why should we quarrel about Lands'? Another Ioway chief speaks — a jolly King Cole sort of chief. 'My Fathers', he chortles, 'My heart is [in] the right place — I live with my relations the Socs and Foxes — I have no reason to deny my Brethern'.​93 Wherewith advancing, he presents a map drawn by Mahaska. Now this Ioway — this man of mirth — who by name is he? Why, 'Pumpkin'. And why not Pumpkin, unless 'Green Corn'? In days yet Indian in Ioway there was pumpkin for the frost; fodder for the shock.

The Neutral Line was fixed in 1825. In 1830 there was spread on either side of it a Neutral Strip or a Neutral Ground, •twenty miles wide. To convert the whole into a 'Finger', a white Finger, there remained to vitalize it by a survey; and this was undertaken by Nathan Boone, son of Daniel, in 1832.

 p135  Black Hawk the Sauk
How He Feared God and Followed the Prophet

The War of 'Twelve was over. In the West it had been a war for land, and the British had won. The land (so the British had promised) was to be forever Indian land. A buffer area, a neutral zone. Yes, but the Treaty of Ghent! By it, all conquests on the part of the British were to be restored. America, loser of Mackinac, loser of Prairie du Chien, loser of the upper Mississippi, was to stand where it had stood before. But could this really be? Black Hawk would find out; he would see his British Father; he would go to Malden — Malden or Drummond Island.

Malden was in Ontario just east of the Detroit River; Drummond Island was at the east end of the upper Michigan peninsula. At both points the British kept great establishments. As soon after the war as 1817 Sauks began trooping to Drummond Island. 'At the Island', wrote the American agent at Mackinac, 'very extensive presents have been given to the Sauks, Foxes, Winnebagoes, and Potawatomies; particularly large supplies of ammunition and arms'.94

Black Hawk had gone to his British Father to 'find out'. And he had found out, he thought. The British  p136 might still be counted on to fight the Americans. True, the British Father had said that there never again would be war between England and America. But English, like the Americans, 'wore hats'. Might they not now be talking through them? Hostile intent was disclaimed. But the gifts — was it not they that spake?95

A harried leader turns to God — God the Mystery, God the Manitou, God the Wakanda. Between the Mystery and man plies the seer — the Prophet. 'Back! the Prophet warns, 'back to your pristine isolation; back to your pristine virtues; guard the land; hurl the intruder forth!' Was there a Prophet for Black Hawk?

Up Rock River •some thirty-five miles were the Winnebagoes, and among them dwelt a Prophet — part Winnebago, part Sauk — Wabokieshiek or Light Cloud. •Nearly six feet tall, he was at the same time stout. He had a broad face, short nose, large mouth, thick lips, and shaggy hair — a 'full suit' of it. Withal he was dandified. He wore white buckskin, a great feather head-dress, anklets of bells, and in his ears and nose gold rings that 'gently tinkled' as he 'swung his ponderous head'.

'I then started', says Black Hawk in 1830, 'by way of Rock River, to see the Prophet, believing that he was a man of great knowledge. When we met, I explained  p137 to him everything as it was. He at once agreed that I was right, and advised me [he had dreamed a dream] never to give up our village, for the whites to plow up the bones of our people'.​96 Henceforth Black Hawk was the Prophet's own.

General Gaines

Early in June of the year 1831 there arrived at Fort Armstrong from St. Louis, General Edmund P. Gaines with a force of United States regulars to 'protect the frontier'.

General Gaines: 'You [Black Hawk's band] — You go to visit your old friends in Malden, and run after the British for a little money and goods. We do not wish to injure you, but you must not interfere with the whites. When will you be ready to move? You must go soon'.

Black Hawk: 'My Braves and people are unanimous to remain on their old fields — we wish to raise our corn, and will do it peaceably — Have no evil [purpose] against the Whites. Perhaps [with a gleam of cunning] the Whites have found something valuable in the land, and wish us to remove'.

Suddenly one morning (June 26th) Black Hawk with his band is gone. He has transferred himself to the west side, the Ioway side, of the Mississippi.

 p138  At the 'Grand Mascotin' and on the 'Ioway'

Then there is Keokuk's band. They, too, by this time have in part gone to the west side of Mississippi — to 'the Grand Mascotin and to the Ioway'.​97 Keokuk, younger than Black Hawk by perhaps twenty years, has by virtue of his mother, Lalotte, a Caucasian slant. His cheek bones are flat, his eyes are blue, his foot is small. He loves women and tippling and money.​98 From Ioway, says Black Hawk, 'communication was kept up between myself and the Prophet'. A medicine man, Nahpope, was henchman. His report, carried to Black Hawk secretly at night, was that the British would 'stand by and assist'. 'Happy!' 'Happy!' A paean was it that the old chief and Nahpope sang together in Ioway that night. Then while Nahpope got ready to return across the Mississippi to Rock River, Black Hawk (for the night was now advanced) lay down to sleep. To sleep? Perchance, like the Prophet, to dream. During the night, he says, 'I determined to follow the advice of the prophet 'to hold the Sauk village, and sent by Nahpope word 'that I would get all my braves together, explain everything that I had heard to them, and recruit as many as I could from the different villages'.

Rally of the Sauks

'Warriors!' chanted Black Hawk, 'the birds sing a  p139 melancholy song. We have been driven from our lands where lie the graves of our fathers. The white man would plant corn on these graves; he would fatten hogs on the bodies of our dead. . . . Warriors! One day I was hunting and met three white men. They took my gun and beat me with sticks. A white man beat one of our women. Two white men beat one of our young men and he died. . . . Warriors! Our fathers sleep on the hills around our village. It was long their home. Never will I consent to leave our country to the white man. . . . I, Black Hawk — Black Hawk the Sauk — met the great war chief [General Gaines]. The Council house was opened. We entered, singing our war song. We were not afraid. . . . Warriors! Our brothers, the Ottawas, the Chippewas, the Pottowattomies, the Winnebagoes, will fight for us. . . . The British Father will fight for us. . . . The Prophet has said it. I have done'.99

Roused to fury by Black Hawk, the wild circle was sobered by Keokuk. 'Fight!' he said. 'Fight! and I will lead you! But remember that the British Father on whom you rely is at peace with the Great Father; he will not help you. They who say he will [Nahpope and the Prophet] are liars. Remember that the Indians [of Illinois] on whom you rely to flock to you, neither will they help you. If they meant to do so  p140 they would be here tonight — Waubonsie, The Red Devil, Big Thunder Shaata, Meachelle'.

In 1832 in April Black Hawk from camp at Fort Madison crossed the Mississippi to Yellow Bank (now Oquawka). He had with him his own band, some two or three hundred warriors with their families. Below Rock River he was met by the Prophet who told him of the arrival opposite the present town of Keokuk of General Henry Atkinson with 220 United States troops. 'Follow us', said the Prophet, 'and act like braves, and we have nothing to fear and much to gain. The American war chief may come, but will not, nor dare not interfere with us so long as we act peaceably. We are not ready to act otherwise. We must wait until we ascend Rock river and receive our reinforcements, and we will then be able to withstand any army'.100

At the river Bad Axe in Wisconsin, Black Hawk, on August 2, 1832, was overwhelmed and his band dispersed. He himself, his two sons (Nasheakusk, 'beau ideal of manly beauty', and Gamesett), Light Cloud the Prophet, Nahpope and several warriors, all gave themselves up and were taken first to Fort Armstrong and then to St. Louis. The party was in charge of Lieutenant Jefferson Davis of whom Black Hawk speaks with warmth.​a He knew, says the fallen Sauk,  p141 what his own feelings would have been had he [fore-gleams of Appomattox!] been placed in a similar situation.

Cutting Marsh

In 1833 Black Hawk was conducted through the East. He met the Great Father Andrew Jackson. 'I am a man', was the Chief's greeting, 'and you are another'. On his return he was paroled to Keokuk at the latter's village on the river Iowa. This village, writes Cutting Marsh, a New England missionary, 'contains between 40 & 50 lodges, some however are 40 or 50 feet in length, constructed of bark. . . . There were probably as many as four or five hundred souls in it. . . . Upon entering the village . . . my attention was particularly attracted by Black Hawk's lodge at the upper end of it. This was enclosed by a neat fence made of poles embracing an area of four or five rods square in a circular form. A little gate led into it, and all around the inside melon vines had been planted and cultivated in the nicest manner. Between these and the lodge which was also constructed in a circular form and of peeled bark there was an aisle in which a weed was not to be seen'.

The lodge, Marsh goes on to say, 'was perfectly tight except a small hole at the top for the smoke to pass out at. As there was no floor a layer of clay  p142 had been spread over and trodden down which was almost as hard, and at the sides places were built up about three feet from the ground all around, and mats spread over upon which they usually sat and slept. It was also furnished with some dining-chairs, a thing which I saw at none of the other lodges in the nation'.

Marsh records that he was received politely by the children of Black Hawk — Black Hawk himself and his wife being absent. He declares that he had never before witnessed such neatness and good order in any Indian's lodge.

Referring to the lodge of Keokuk, Marsh says that it was 'about 50 feet long'. Here he found Keokuk 'sitting with prince-like dignity in one corner surrounded by his young men and wives, which were no less than five. He appeared very distant and not at all disposed to converse, but treated me with politeness and hospitality, and ordered his young men to put out the horses and supper to be prepared'.

The Me‑Shaum

Marsh, Christian missionary though he was, quickly learned that neither Fox nor Sauk respected Christianity. Keokuk made light of it. Poweshiek said that the Manitou 'made the red man different from the white man. . . . The Great Spirit has given us our Me‑shaum [Medicine Bag or Sacred Bundle] . . . A  p143 great while ago [in the era of the Fox wars in Wisconsin] . . . all of the nations leagued against us and we were almost all cut off, only a few lodges remained . . . and our Meshaum was all that saved us'.

I showed to some young men, says Marsh, specimens of Ojibway writing; and I inquired if they would like to learn, would like to have someone come to teach them. 'No', they answered, 'we do not want to learn for we want to kill Sioux'. Thus the voice of Ioway — aboriginal Iowa — in 1834.

Appanoose: Modernist

But it was age that spake — Keokuk, Wapello, Poweshiek. In Ioway in 1834 one chief only was young. This was the Sauk Appanoose — 'chief while yet a child'.​101 Marsh found him on the lower Des Moines (Keoshahquah) River, in a village of eight lodges containing 250 souls. He is 'aspiring', says Marsh, and possessed of 'an excellent, inquisitive mind'.​b

Descanting upon life after death, Appanoose said: 'My body is a substance animated in some way by the air, and at death the breath will go out of it and that will be the end of me and I shall be the same as before'.​102 He inquired, says Marsh, 'if there was anybody now living who had seen this God [of the Christians] who came down from heaven and heard him speak all these things [about a final judgment, etc.]'.  p144 'Our Me‑shaum', said Appanoose, 'is the same to us when we open it as the Book [Bible] is to the white people. . . . From respect and civility to my people I follow the Me‑shaum, but I do not believe in it'.103

In 1837 Keokuk left the Iowa River where, he said, the white man was 'crowding him' and moved to the Des Moines at Iowaville, near the present Eldon. In 1838 on July 4th the embryo town of Fort Madison held a celebration and entertained Black Hawk as its guest of honor. The old warrior made a speech. 'I have eaten with my white friends', he said. 'The earth is our mother — we are now on it — with the Great Spirit [Mystery] above us — it is good. . . . Rock river was a beautiful country. . . . I fought for it. . . . I was once a great warrior — I am now poor. Keokuk has been the cause of my present situation — but do not attach blame to him. I am now old. I have looked upon the Mississippi since I have been a child. I love the Great river. I have dwelt upon its banks from the time I was an infant. I look upon it now. I shake hands with you'.

On October 3, 1838, Black Hawk died at the age of seventy-one years. During his life he had received medals and tokens, and with these about him he was placed full length on a tilted slab of wood beneath an inverted V‑shaped covering of slabs. At Black Hawk's  p145 tomb no steed was immolated as was customary at the tombs of the Keokuks. The Black Hawks, unlike the Keokuks, were not cavaliers: they must fare to the spirit realm on foot.104

Skull and Bones

During the winter of 1838 the head of Black Hawk, semi-erect in his sepulchre, dropped off and fell into his lap. Dr. James Turner, who lived near, thought if he could only steal Black Hawk's head he could make a fortune out of it by taking it East and putting it on exhibition. After two weeks watching he succeeded in getting it. He got it at four o'clock in the morning and hid it till the afternoon when he cooked the flesh off the skull. But the Indians demanded their ruler's head and for three weeks there was dread of an outbreak.105

But what of it all? Was Black Hawk, headless, to haunt forever the Iowa prairies? Was the stolen head ever to be recovered? Was the lash of retribution ever to be felt by Dr. James Turner? On December 10, 1840, the Burlington Hawk-Eye announced that the bones of Black Hawk had been recovered and were in the Governor's office. They had been taken to St. Louis and there cleaned, polished, and varnished. Then they had been sent to Quincy to a dentist to be put up and wired previous to being sent to the East. The  p146 dentist had been cautioned not to deliver them to anyone until a re­quisition should be made by Governor Lucas.

The recovery of the bones followed upon a plea for them made to Governor Lucas by Nasheakusk, Black Hawk's towering son, at a council held at Burlington in January, 1840. The recital by Nasheakusk sent a thrill of horror through the whole assembly. When recovered, the bones were visited by Black Hawk's spouse. The widow, writes an observer, then advanced, picked up in her fingers bone after bone and examined each with the seeming curiosity of a child. She would, she said, leave the bones under the Governor's care and protection.​106 They were accordingly placed by Governor Chambers in the rooms of the Burlington Geological and Historical Society, and there in 1855 they were consumed by fire. So, to Black Hawk, vale! Even to his bones.

---

The Author's Notes:

86 This point was about ten miles above the Platte and about ten miles below the present city of Council Bluffs. — David C. Mott's The Lewis and Clark Expedition in its Relation to Iowa History and Geography in the Annals of Iowa (Third Series), Vol. XIII, p168.

87 Mott's The Lewis and Clark Expedition in its Relation to Iowa History and Geography in the Annals of Iowa (Third Series), Vol. XIII, pp168, 169.

88 Zebulon M. Pike's Expeditions to the Headwaters of the Mississippi River (Coues's edition), Vol. I, p339.

89 Van der Zee's The Half-Breed Tract in The Iowa Journal of History and Politics, Vol. XIII, pp151 et seq.; Van der Zee's The Neutral Ground in The Iowa Journal of History and Politics, Vol. XIII, pp311 et seq.; Alonzo Abernethy's Early Iowa Indian Treaties and Boundaries in the Annals of Iowa (Third Series), Vol. XI, pp241, (p423)358; B. L. Wick's The Struggle for the Half-Breed Tract in the Annals of Iowa (Third Series), Vol. VII, p16.

90 It is the recollection of Augustin Grignon that an old friend, Mr. Fily, had told him many years ago that the mother of Keokuk's wife was the daughter, by a Sauk mother, of Pierre Paul Marin (Morand). — Wisconsin Historical Collections, Vol. III, p211.

It is perhaps more likely that the daughter of Marin was the grandmother of Keokuk himself.

91 Dr. Galland's Account of the Half-Breed Tract in the Annals of Iowa (Third Series), Vol. X, p455.

92 Bruce E. Mahan's The Great Council of 1825 in The Palimpsest, Vol. VI, pp305 et seq.; Journal of Thomas Biddle, secretary to the Council, manuscript copy in the library of the State Historical Society of Iowa.

93 Journal of Thomas Biddle.

Relations between the Ioways and the Sauks and the Foxes had, it is said, become strained because of a bloody battle fought on the site of Iowaville in 1821 or 1823 — as told to A. W. Harlan by Pashepaho himself. But this would seem to be an error. Black Hawk in his Autobiography makes no mention of a battle, and at the time of the Council of 1825 the relations of the Ioways to the Sauks and to the Foxes were of the most cordial kind. — Iowa Historical Record, Vol. VII, pp190, 191; Annals of Iowa, Vol. III, pp483‑487, Vol. X, p296; see also comment by Van der Zee in The Iowa Journal of History and Politics, Vol. XIV, p499 note 40.

94 Rand McNally's Commercial Atlas of America, 1921, p191.

95 Isaac Brock, administrator of Upper Canada, spoke in 1811 of 'our [British] cold attempt to dissuade [the Indians from making war on the Americans] after giving such manifest indications of a contrary sentiment by the liberal quantity of military stores with which they were dismissed'. C. B. Coleman's The Ohio Valley in the Preliminaries of the War of 1812 in The Mississippi Valley Historical Review, Vol. VII, p45.

96 Black Hawk's Autobiography, 1882, p72.

(p424) 97 Stevens's The Black Hawk War, pp80, 96, 97.

98 The Keokuk Register of June 12th, on the death of Keokuk in Kansas in 1848, appraises him thus: 'Profligate, fond of regal splendor, unscrupulous, dishonest, he lavished with reckless profusion the money as chief of the tribe upon himself which he should have scrupulously distributed'. Keokuk, it may be added, had at command (when he chose) very passable English.

'Taking Keokuk aside, and alone', says Caleb Atwater, in 1829, 'I told him in plain English, all I wanted of him, what I would do for him, and what I expected from him and his good offices. He replied in good English, "I understand you sir, perfectly, and it shall all be done." ' — Tour to Prairie du Chien, p70.

99 Not the exact words of Black Hawk, but adapted from a speech made by him in 1831. The speech of 1831 may be found in Galland's Iowa Emigrant, 1840, as reprinted in the Annals of Iowa (Third Series), Vol. XII, pp503 et seq.

Armstrong gives a version of both the Black Hawk and Keokuk speeches at the rally. — The Sauks and the Black Hawk War, pp259‑264.

100 Black Hawk's Autobiography, 1882, p93.

101 Appanoose is said by some early writers (for example, Atwater) to have been the son of the able and much respected Fox chief Taimah.

102 It will be observed that Appanoose was a philosopher. Indian philosophers there have been. Both Tecumseh and Black Hawk show not unfavorably in what may be called political thinking. On the deeper philosophy of Appanoose, light is shed by Paul Radin in his book Primitive Man as Philosopher. Dr. Radin, according to his reviewer, Clark Wissler, may be considered to have proved philosophical aptitude on the part of a few Indian minds.

103 Wisconsin Historical Collections, Vol. XV, pp116, 117, 128, 129, 135, 140.

'Sitting by the fire in the middle of the rush‑mat-covered lodge of Chief Pu‑ci-to-nig‑wa, with his counsellors and interpreters, I found around me much of what we are so often told in narratives of (p425)travelers through the west more than two hundred years ago'. — John F. Steward's Lost Maramech and Earliest Chicago, p343.

'The Me‑Shaum', notes Marsh, 'is a parcel or bundle in which are recorded by knots in strings, stones, &c. [ancient events and revelations]'. — Wisconsin Historical Collections, Vol. XV, p129.

104 Annals of Iowa, Vol. III, p490; Annals of Iowa (Third Series), Vol. VIII, p269, Vol. XIII, pp129, 130.

105 Annals of Iowa (Third Series), Vol. XIII, pp129, 130, 444.

106 Annals of Iowa, Vol. III, p491.

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Thayer's Notes:

a The respect between Jefferson Davis and Black Hawk was mutual: the interesting details are given in "The Northwestern Career of Jefferson Davis" (J. Ill. S. H. S., Vol. XVI, pp10‑12).

b Chief Appanoose left a remarkable impression on the whites who met him. See the chapter (by John Beach, who knew him well) on the Indian Agency in History of Wapello County, Iowa, p42 f., and passim.

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