What the White "Squaws" Want from Black Hawk: Gendering the Fan-Celebrity Relationship

Although his study focuses on twentieth-century celebrity culture, David P. Marshall's contention in Celebrity and Power that the celebrity lives in a symbolic and commodified world is relevant to discussions of celebrity in the early nineteenth century.¹ During the years preceding the Civil War, Americans became more entranced with particular figures and their renown. Thomas Baker shows in his book about famed nineteenth-century writer and publisher Nathaniel Parker Willis that the early nineteenth century was a time in which celebrity culture was not just emerging but flourishing. Because the "market for access to renown" was growing and establishing "the groundwork for our modern condition, in which fame is both a durable commodity and inseparable from public attention to personality," we can consider the similarities between antebellum and modern celebrity cultures, in particular, the public's desire for celebrity gossip and scandal that might be reflected in periodicals.² Other popular figures of the midcentury, including P. T. Barnum and Buffalo Bill, capitalized on the apparent hunger for spectacle and celebrity in American culture.³ For a few months in 1833 Black Hawk and his band were the celebrities of the day; they were commodified and symbolically consumed by the American public through newspaper renditions of them and their movements.

Black Hawk, as he was known in English, was a Sauk Indian war chief who disputed the lawfulness of a treaty signed in 1804 by Indiana governor William Henry Harrison and chiefs of the Sauk and Fox nations. Black Hawk maintained that the treaty was unlawful because the full councils of the nations had not been consulted and, later, that those who had signed did not have the authority to cede the land of the Saukenuk (in modern-day Illinois). He began to fight the Americans soon thereafter, and he fought on the side of the British during the War of 1812. At the end of the war in 1815 the Sauk and Fox nations signed a peace treaty in which the cession of land in 1804 was reaffirmed. Black Hawk nevertheless disputed the lawfulness of those actions. Although Black Hawk and his "British Band" of about five hundred warriors and a thousand women, children, and old men attempted to move back to their original land from where they had been resettled west of the Mississippi River in 1828, they were never able to retake the land. Americans then began settling upon the lands of the Sauk and Fox in Illinois. With promises of alliances, Black Hawk attempted again to return to Illinois, but once he had arrived near the nation's original lands, the alliances never materialized. As he returned toward the Mississippi River and Iowa, Black Hawk's band was attacked by the Illinois militia. This precipitated the Black Hawk War of 1832. After the fighting was over, Black Hawk and the remnants of his band were captured and held outside of St. Louis in Jefferson Barracks.

Black Hawk's capture provided a political opportunity for Andrew Jackson's government, and so Black Hawk and the remnants of his band were put to use in the East as examples of defeated Indians. Although Black Hawk and his band served a purpose as captive celebrities, the circulation of their celebrity could not be completely contained or manipulated as a pro-Jackson political message.⁴ Black Hawk and his companions became celebrities who rivaled Jackson's own tour of the East. Yet Black Hawk's celebrity was highly malleable, often used to further editors' own political or social viewpoints. For example, on July 30, 1833, after the end of Black Hawk's "tour," the Commonwealth, a Frankfort, Kentucky, newspaper, reported that during one of his many interactions with society, Black Hawk had responded to the intense interest of Washington, DC, "ladies" with a cutting remark, "Debilinchibison Jekorre Manitou," which was translated as "What in the devil's name do these squaws want of me!"⁵ Orlando Brown, the editor of this newspaper, further circulated the "Blackhawkiana" and excerpted the already extant information from the New York Courier...