Uncommon Defense: Indian Allies in the Black Hawk War (review)

So rarely are wars named for individuals, yet the label “Black Hawk War” reflects the contemporary and modern insistence on the great man as the active force in politics and history. John Hall’s Uncommon Defense is a departure: native groups allied with the United States rather than the Sauk leader are the focus here. Divided into nine chapters, the book takes the reader from early intercultural interactions in the pay d’en haut through the removal of the Sauk at the conclusion of their struggle to remain in their homelands.

The author makes his case for the relevance of his work, but in doing so he overstates the myopic tendencies of earlier opinions. He claims that the alliance of tribes with the United States is “difficult to understand,” that they have been regarded as “fools who fought on the wrong side of the contest” (2). Yet much of the writing Hall responds to is quite dated (Armstrong, 1887; Keesing, 1939), and he seems to ignore more modern understandings of the sovereign and autonomous nature of native nations. Surely we are beyond the assumption that all natives are bound by blood to see a common cause. The book also rejects the argument made elsewhere that tribes allied with the United States were influenced by the Shawnee-inspired Pan-Indian revival a few decades before the Black Hawk War. Having thus drawn boundaries around his tribes in this area, the author proceeds with a detailed examination of their interactions.

According to Hall, the Indians who fought with the United States did so to strike at traditional enemies, obtain political and material advantage from the United States, and fulfill male gender expectations. The first two points are unlikely to be controversial, since they are part of a scenario that we have seen played out in discussions of many eighteenth-and nineteenth-century native conflicts. Hall’s gender analysis is the most original and unfortunately the weakest part of the book. There is no contextual discussion of traditional gender roles or assessment of how powerful they were in a period described as one of accommodation. Hall’s assessment of warrior masculinity through the eyes of a white observer is unconvincing.

Hall effectively describes the complex and shifting sets of hatreds, slights, alliances, and interests that drove actions in the nineteenth-century Midwest. A useful if overcrowded map helps the reader visualize the tribal entities in Illinois, Wisconsin, and Michigan. Dakota, Sauk, Mesquakie, Ho Chunk, Potawatomi, Kickapoo, Ottawa/Ojibwa, and Miami people populate the complex landscape. Beginning in the eighteenth century, the author lays out the history of native relations with the French, British, and finally American interests in the region. Although Hall describes Americans as “conquerors,” a counterargument could be made that the inexperienced and inept newcomers were driven by the pressures of capitalism and expansion. Later chapters follow the developing, at times deteriorating, relationship between the various tribes and the U.S. government represented by agents and army officers. The U.S. demand for land and resources, such as lead mines, continued to pressure native groups, and intratribal conflict attracted U.S. intervention. Native groups strove to chart a course through the power struggles in the region, but divisions both within and between the groups further complicated their choices. In an oft-repeated pattern, treaties were made with factions and subsequently ignored by many group members. The Sauk split over the appropriate reaction to the cession of their lands east of the Mississippi River, and Black Hawk entered the American saga as an opposition leader.

When Black Hawk crossed the Mississippi River to return to his summer village of Saukenauk in 1831, he sparked a conflict that engulfed the Midwest. Each group had to choose its path through the unfolding violence. For their “own reasons and in their own ways,” Indians, including Ho Chunk, Potawatomi, and Menominee warriors, allied with the United States (146). However, in true native...