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Seven: Vanishing Indians, 1900–1904
- University of Missouri Press
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99 Seven Vanishing Indians, 1900–1904 The Sac, or Sauk (Thakiwa), also known as the People of the Yellow Earth, and the Fox (Meskwaki), or People of the Red Earth, are two individual nations so closely affiliated with one another that by the 1700s many outsiders considered them to be one tribe. Part of the Algonquin language group, the Sac and Fox migrated from the East Coast before European contact, and they first encountered the French in the region of the Great Lakes in the seventeenth century. Wars with the French and the Iroquois pushed them into northeast Missouri and northern Illinois where they lived until 1804. That year William Henry Harrison, a general who would one day become president of the United States, persuaded four low-level Sac and Fox headmen to sign a treaty with the U.S. government in which they ceded land on both sides of the Mississippi stretching from St. Louis north into present-day Wisconsin. The Sac and Fox leader Black Hawk was enraged over the treaty and openly contested its validity for decades.1 During the War of 1812, the tribe divided into bands that the U.S. government labeled the Sac and Fox of the Mississippi and the Sac and Fox of the Missouri. The Mississippi branch of the tribe remained near the contested land ceded in the 1804 treaty. Armed by British traders operating from the region around Green Bay, in present-day Wisconsin, this band joined pro-British members of the Ioway and engaged in skirmishes against the United States. In an effort to pull the Ioway and the Sac and Fox away from the conflict , Superintendent of Indian Affairs William Clark succeeded in 100 Mary Alicia Owen persuading pro-American members of each tribe to settle farther west near a trading post he established around the present-day town of Glasgow, Missouri. This branch of the tribe became known as the Sac and Fox of the Missouri and eventually settled even farther west, near the future site of Joseph Robidoux’s trading post. By the late 1820s, the Sac and Fox of the Missouri were assigned to live near the U.S. government’s Ioway subagency, which was located on the Platte River near the present-day town of Agency, Missouri, in Buchanan County. About that time, the Sac and Fox of the Mississippi were living in the eastern section of present-day Iowa. In 1828, the Sac and Fox headman Black Hawk decided to return to the east side of the Mississippi River to reclaim the land that his people had lost in the treaty of 1804. Black Hawk’s act of resistance resulted in an immediate military buildup of 1,800 American militiamen in the Mississippi River valley and eventually, in 1832, led to an armed conflict known as the Black Hawk War.2 Though short-lived, the so-called war spread the fear of an Indian rebellion throughout American settlements in the Mississippi and Missouri River valleys. Eager to reassure settlers, the military pursued Black Hawk and his impoverished people, who by the summer of 1832 had decided to return to the west side of the Mississippi River. On August 2, 1832, Black Hawk tried to surrender to Captain Throckmorton aboard an American steamboat, the Warrior. Mistaking the surrender for an attack, riflemen aboard the boat killed dozens of Sac and Fox people as they tried to cross the Mississippi River while pro-American members of the Sioux nation killed dozens more who had safely made it to the Iowa side. In all, as many as 300 Sac and Fox people died in what is now known as the Bad Axe Massacre. While Black Hawk survived the massacre, he surrendered to General Henry Atkinson at Prairie du Chien soon afterward.3 The notoriety that Black Hawk gained as an “outlaw” before his surrender earned him the status of a celebrity in American popular culture. After spending the winter of 1832–1833 as a prisoner of the U.S. military in Jefferson Barracks near St. Louis, the Sac and Fox leader, accompanied by a military escort, embarked on a tour of the eastern United States. In the Ohio River towns of Cincinnati and Wheeling, hundreds of people turned out to catch a glimpse of the famous war chief as he sailed past aboard a steamboat. In Wash- [54.210.83.20] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 22:28 GMT) Vanishing Indians 101 ington, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New...