The Black Hawk War of 1832 by Patrick J. Jung (review)

146 Michigan Historical Review This biography follows the familiar line from Dragnet "Just the facts, Ma'am." Gray diligendy sought out materials in archives scattered across the eastern United States, and he has forged them into a tight narrative of his subject's life?perhaps excessively so. Nicholson's reputation is too thin to draw readers in on its own merits. This biography might have benefited from a larger sense of purpose than Gray gives it. There is plenty of material for a psychological exploration of the relationship between author and creative motivation (for example, Nicholson's father's estrangement from the family and his eventual suicide) or for a cultural history of Indiana's relationship to the broader intellectual trends of the time. But Gray largely eschews analysis, providing instead a chronicle of the author's life, an overview of many of his books, and literary judgments from contemporary reviewers and Nicholson's Hoosier correspondents. Gray's biography will be most useful to literary scholars interested in the evolution of Indiana culture during the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era. The first two-thirds of A Writing Life make this theme admirably clear, and in these pages readers learn about Nicholson's relationship to his fellow Indiana writers and his use of Indiana as a setting for his stories and histories. This work may also prove useful to historians of American foreign affairs who are interested in Franklin Roosevelt's "Good Neighbor" policy as Gray follows Nicholson through a series of ill-fated backwater ambassadorial posts in Paraguay, Venezuela, and Nicaragua. Nicholson stopped writing fiction by the late 1920s, suffered massive losses during the Great Depression, and felt that his life's energy was spent. It is here that Gray's writing falters, becoming somewhat repetitive and too focused on minor details. The reader would benefit from an index, which the book lacks. Reynolds J. Scott-Childress, History Department State University of New York, New Paltz Patrick J. Jung. The Black Hawk War of 1832. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2007. Pp. 288. Bibliography. Illustrations. Index. Maps. Notes. Cloth, $29.95. In this monograph about frontier conflict in the upper Midwest, Patrick Jung argues that the Black Hawk War resulted from a combination of anti-American sentiment and an ongoing series of pan Indian revitalization movements. Despite these unifying impulses, both Book Reviews 147 intra- and inter-tribal competition, combined with an effective United States policy of reliance on militia forces, proved to be Black Hawk's undoing. Although many Native Americans resisted removal both prior to and after the Black Hawk War, the event marks awatershed inwhich the "middle ground" no longer characterized relations between Indians and Euro-Americans in the Great Lakes region. Emphasizing both persistence and change, Jung presents his analysis chronologically. An examination of the war's antecedents reveals that both the 1804 treaty?in which the Sauk and Fox supposedly ceded lands east of the Mississippi to the United States? and pan-Indian efforts during the War of 1812 created the enduring tensions that contributed to the outbreak of violence in 1832. By 1832, however, conflict among Native groups seemed more likely than any serious Indian-white violence. Therefore, Jung concludes that neither Black Hawk and his followers nor U.S. officials anticipated the coming war. Jung contends that a series of misinterpretations provoked open conflict: "Despite the opinions of several federal officials in the region, Black Hawk did not intend to make war when he crossed the Mississippi; in fact, he hoped to avoid it" (p. 73). The author also presents a sophisticated analysis of frontier violence at the Batde of Wisconsin Heights, through which he illustrates the frontier setders' importance in establishing American dominance over the region. Americans alone did not defeat Black Hawk; intertribal relations and the nature of intratribal leadership isolated the Sauk warrior and his followers. Jung concludes The Black Hawk War of 1832 with an analysis of Black Hawk's life after the war and the influence he and his followers had on later Native American efforts to resist removal. A wide range of readers will appreciate Jung's work. Combining military and ethnohistory, he describes the course...