Chapter IV: Part 4

The French traders themselves mined a good deal of it for their own use, and shipped it in their canoes to other parts of the West, where there were no lead mines, but where both white men and Indians needed bullets. For in a remarkably short period nearly all the Indians had turned from their old pursuits of raising maize and pumpkins, and killing just enough game with slings and arrows to supply themselves with skins for their clothing and flesh for their food. They had now become persistent hunters for skins, which they might exchange with white men for European-made guns, ammunition, kettles, spears, cloths, and ornaments.

Some of the Indians in the neighborhood of the lead mines found it more profitable to mine lead for other hunters, than to hunt; hence we find that, at an early date, the mines came to be regarded as the particular property of the Indians, a fact which had considerable influence upon the history of the region. With the French, most of our Wisconsin Indians were quite friendly. The French were kind and obliging, often married and settled among them, and had no thought of driving them away. They throve upon the fur trade with the Indians, and in general did not care to become farmers. The English and the Americans, on the contrary, felt a contempt for the savages, and did not disguise it; the aim of the Americans, in particular, was gradually to clear the forest, to make farms, and to build villages. In the American scheme of civilization the Indian had no part. Therefore we find that Frenchmen were quite free to work the lead mines in company with the savages; but the Anglo-Saxons, when they arrived on the scene, were obliged to fight for this right. In the end they banished the Indians from the "diggings."

Marquette and Joliet had heard of the lead mines, and of the Frenchmen working at them, when they made their famous canoe trip through Wisconsin, in 1673. Through the rest of the seventeenth century, wherever we pick up any French books of travel in these regions, or any maps of the Upper Mississippi country, we are sure to find frequent, though rather vague, mention of the lead mines.

The first official exploration of them appears to have been made in 1693 by Le Sueur, the French military commandant at Chequamegon Bay, on Lake Superior. He was so impressed by the "mines of lead, copper, and blue and green earth" which he found all along the banks of the Upper Mississippi, that he went to France to tell the king about his great discoveries, and seek permission to work them. It was forbidden to do anything in New France without the consent of the great French king, although the free and independent fur traders did very much as they pleased out here in the wilderness. But Le Sueur was a soldier, and had to ask permission. Obtaining it, he returned at great expense with thirty miners, who proceeded up the Mississippi from New Orleans; but somehow nothing came of these extensive preparations.

Several French speculators, in succeeding years, thought to make money out of supposed mines of gold, silver, lead, and copper along the upper waters of the Mississippi. Some of them came over from France with bands of miners and little companies of soldiers to guard them; but, like Le Sueur, they spent most of their time and money in exploration, not content with those lead mines that were well known to exist, and invariably left the country in disgust, their money and patience exhausted. Now and then a more practical man came quietly upon the scene, and seemed well satisfied with lead when he could not find gold; most of such miners were French, but a few were Spanish, for Spain then owned all the country lying westward of the Mississippi River.

Occasionally the French commandant at Mackinac or Detroit would come to the mines, and with the aid of his soldiers and the Indians, get out a considerable quantity of the ore, and take it home with him in his fleet of canoes; or a fur trader would do the same, for the purposes of his own trade with the savages. The little French village of Ste. Genevieve, near St. Louis, had become, by the opening of our Revolutionary War, a considerable lead market, from which shipments were made in flatboats and bateaux down the Mississippi to New Orleans, or up the Ohio to Pittsburg. Lead was, next to peltries, the most important export of the Upper Mississippi region, and throughout the West served as currency.

During the Revolutionary War, the British were at first in command of the upper reaches of the great river, and guarded jealously the approach to the lead mines, for bullets were necessary to the success of the fast growing Kentucky settlements; American military operations against the little British garrisons at Vincennes, Kaskaskia, Cahokia, and Detroit would be powerless without lead. Gradually the influence of the American fur trade grew among the Indians, and it was not long before the Americans in the West were able to obtain through them all the lead they wanted.

Toward the close of the war, Julien Dubuque, a very energetic French miner, bought up large claims from the Spaniards, in Missouri and Iowa, and for about a quarter of a century was the principal man in the lead region. He was remarkably successful in dealing with the Indians, whom he employed to do the principal work. His mining and trading operations were not confined to the Spanish side of the river, but were carried on in American territory as well, and his influence with the savages for a time prevented American miners and fur traders from obtaining a foothold.

When at last (1804) the United States obtained possession of the lands west of the Mississippi, numerous enterprising Americans forced their way into the lead district. They managed to mine a good deal of the metal, here and there, but frequently met with armed opposition from the Indians. It was fifteen years before the Americans equaled the French Canadians in number. In 1819, the Indian claims to the mining country having at last been purchased by the federal government, there was a general inrush of Americans. Among the earliest and most prominent of these was James W. Shull, the founder of Shullsburg, in Iowa county. Another man of note was Colonel James Johnson, of Kentucky, who brought negro slaves into the region, to do his heaviest labor, and maintained a fleet of flatboats to carry lead ore from Galena River to St. Louis, New Orleans, and Pittsburg.

At first the operations of Johnson, Shull, and others had to be carried on under military protection; for the Indians, although they had sold their claims, persisted in annoying the newcomers, being urged on by the French miners and traders who were still numerous in the mining country. But so soon as the news spread that a large trade in lead was fast springing up, other Americans began to pour in; mining claims were entered in great numbers, a federal land office was opened, and by 1826 two thousand men, including negro slaves brought in by Kentucky and Missouri operators, were engaged in and about the mines. The following year the town of Galena was founded, and in 1829 there was a stampede thither.

Henceforth, for many years, the lead trade of southwestern Wisconsin, northwestern Illinois, and parts of Missouri and Iowa was the chief interest in the West. By this time the fur trade had almost died out, and the old French Canadian element had become but a small proportion of the population of the Mississippi valley. In those days, Galena, Mineral Point, and other lead mining towns were of much more importance than Chicago or Milwaukee, and their citizens entertained high hopes of the future. The lead trade with St. Louis and New Orleans was very large; but the East also wanted the lead, and the air was filled with projects to secure routes by which lead might be carried to vessels plying on the Great Lakes, which could transport it to Buffalo and other far away ports.

For a time the most popular of these projects was the old fur trade route of the Wisconsin and Fox rivers. A canal was dug along the famous carrying trail at Portage, and the federal government was induced to deepen Fox River, which is naturally very shallow, and to attempt to create a permanent channel in the Wisconsin River. But, although much money has been spent on these schemes, from that day to this, the Fox-Wisconsin route is still impracticable save to boats of exceptionally light draft; and in our time the project of connecting the Mississippi River with Lake Michigan, by the way of Portage and Green Bay, is almost wholly abandoned. Another scheme was the proposed Milwaukee and Rock River canal, by which Milwaukee was to be connected with the Rock River, which joins the Mississippi at Rock Island; but this plan died a still earlier death. It was the struggle to connect the port of Milwaukee with the lead region that finally led to the building of the railroad between that city and Prairie du Chien.

More immediately effective for the benefit of the lead trade, was the opening of a wagon road from the lead mining towns, through Madison, to Milwaukee, along which great canvas-covered caravans of ore-laden "prairie schooners" toiled slowly from the mines to the Lake Michigan docks, a distance of about a hundred and fifty miles. Other roads led to Galena and Prairie du Chien, where the Mississippi River boats awaited similar fleets of "schooners" from the interior. A good deal of the lead was sent by similar conveyances to Helena, a little village on the Wisconsin River, where a shot tower had been built against the face of a high cliff; from here, shallow-draft boats took the shot to Green Bay, by way of the Portage Canal and Fox River, or descended the Wisconsin to Prairie du Chien.

From various causes, the lead trade of the Upper Mississippi region had sadly declined by 1857. Among these causes was the finding of gold in California (1849), which attracted large numbers of the miners to a more profitable field; again, the surface or shallow diggings having been exhausted, much more capital was required to operate in the lower levels; more serious was the lack of sufficient transportation facilities, and these did not come until the great silver mines of the Rocky Mountains had been opened, lead being thenceforth more profitably produced in connection with silver.

The effect of the lead industry upon the development of Wisconsin was important. Many years before farmers would naturally have sought southern Wisconsin in their pushing westward for fresh lands, the opening of the mines brought thither a large and energetic industrial population, and a considerable capital, and awakened popular interest in land and water transportation routes.

THE WINNEBAGO WAR

The world over, white men, representing a higher type of civilization, have wrested, or are still wresting, the land from the original savage occupants. This seems to be inevitable. It is one of the means by which civilization is being extended over the entire globe. We glory in the progress of civilization; but we are apt to ignore the hardship which this brings to the aborigines. While not relaxing our endeavor to plant the world with progressive men who shall make the most of life, we should see to it that the savage races are pushed to the wall with as kindly and forbearing a hand as possible; that we apply to them humane methods, and give them credit for possessing the sentiments of men who, like us, dearly love their old homes, and are willing to fight for them. These sentiments have certainly not often been applied in the past, by our Anglo-Saxon race, to the Indians of North America.

We have failed to appreciate that the Indian, in being driven from his lands, has retaliated from motives of patriotism. His methods of fighting are often cruel and treacherous; but it must be remembered that he is in a stage of development akin to that of the child, and that white men upon the frontier have often been quite as cruel and treacherous toward the Indian as he was toward them, for such are ever the methods of the weak and the primitive. The Indian is blamed for his custom of wreaking vengeance upon all white men, when but an individual has injured him; yet, on the border, it has always been seen that white men have retaliated on the Indians in exactly the same spirit. "The only good Indian is a dead Indian," has been their motto, the offense of one Indian being considered the offense of all. Our dealings with the red men, both as individuals and as a nation, have, for over a hundred years, often been such as we should blush for. We are doing better now than formerly; but our treatment of the weak and unfortunate aborigines is still far from being to our credit.

The story of the Winnebago War, in Wisconsin, is illustrative of the old-time method of treating our barbaric predecessors. No doubt it would have been better if the United States had, from the first, held all the Indians to be subjects, and forced them to obey our laws. But the tribes were considered in theory to be distinct nations, over whom we exercised supervision, and with whom we held treaties. This at first seemed necessary, owing to the patriarchal system among the Indians, by which heads of families or clans are supposed to control the younger members, all affairs being decided upon in councils, in which these wise old men participate. It was thought that, through the chiefs, binding agreements could be made with entire tribes. It was not then generally understood that each Indian is, according to the customs of those people, really a law unto himself; that the chiefs, in signing a treaty, are seldom representative in the sense that we use the word, and that they generally represent no one but themselves; that the only way in which they can commit their tribes is through the respect or fear which they may foster in the minds of their followers.

In the month of August, 1825, when Wisconsin was still a part of Michigan Territory, there was a treaty signed at Prairie du Chien between the United States and the Indians of what are now Illinois, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. The treaty set boundaries between the quarrelsome tribes, and agreed on a general peace upon the border. Like most Indian treaties, this document was drawn up by the officers of the general government; and the chiefs, knowing little of its contents, were simply invited to sign their names to it. They signed as requested, but went home in bad temper, because the American commissioners would not make them costly presents of guns, ammunition, beads, hatchets, cloths, and rum, as the British in Canada always did; and the savages were not even allowed to celebrate the treaty by a roistering feast. The Americans, from their cold, businesslike conduct, impressed the Indians as being "stingy old women."

Nobody on the frontier, the following winter, seemed to pay the slightest attention to the terms of the treaty. The Sioux, who lived west of the Mississippi, the Winnebagoes in southern and western Wisconsin, and the Chippewas in the north, quarreled with one another and scalped one another as freely as ever; while French traders, in British employ, stirred up the red men, and told them that Great Britain would soon have the whole country back again. The Winnebagoes, in particular, were irritated because two of their braves had been imprisoned for thieving, at Fort Crawford, in Prairie du Chien. They held numerous councils in the woods, and resolved to stand by the British when the war should break out. In the midst of this uneasiness, the troops at Fort Crawford were suddenly withdrawn to Fort Snelling, on the Upper Mississippi River, near where St. Paul now is. This was supposed by the Indians to mean that the American soldiers were afraid of them.

The spring of 1827 arrived. A half-breed named Methode was making maple sugar upon the Yellow River, in Iowa, a dozen miles north of Prairie du Chien. With him were his wife and five children; all were set upon by some Winnebagoes and killed, scalped, and burned. Naturally there was an uproar all along the Upper Mississippi. Excitement was at its height, when word was brought in by Sioux visitors to the village of Red Bird, a petty Winnebago chief, that the two men of his tribe who had been imprisoned in Fort Crawford had been hung when the troops reached Fort Snelling. The wily Sioux suggested vengeance. The Winnebago code was two lives for one. Inflamed with rage, Red Bird set out at once upon the warpath to take four white scalps.

Meanwhile the clouds were gathering for a general storm. The American Indian agent at Prairie du Chien, with singular indiscretion, was not treating his Winnebago visitors with kindness. English and French fur traders were, on behalf of Great Britain, making liberal promises for the future. Winnebagoes were being brutally driven from the lead mines by the white miners, who were now swarming into southwest Wisconsin. The Sioux along the west bank of the Mississippi, in Minnesota, were encouraging the Winnebagoes to revolt; and were displaying a bad temper toward Americans, whom they thought cowardly because apparently unwilling to use military force to keep the Indians in order.

One day in June, Red Bird, a friend named Wekau, and two other Winnebagoes, appeared at the door of a log cabin owned by Registre Gagnier, a French settler living on the edge of Prairie du Chien village. Gagnier was an old friend of Red Bird, and invited the four Indians in to take dinner with him and his family. For several hours the guests stayed, eating and smoking in apparent good humor, until at last their chance came. Gagnier and his serving man, Lipcap, were instantly shot down; an infant of eighteen months was torn from the arms of Madame Gagnier, stabbed and scalped before her eyes, and thrown to the floor as dead; but the woman herself with her little boy, ten years of age, escaped to the woods and gave the alarm to the neighbors. The Indians slunk into the forest and disappeared. The villagers buried Gagnier and Lipcap, and, finding the infant girl alive, restored her to her mother. Curiously enough, the scalped child recovered and grew to robust womanhood.

According to the Winnebago code, four white scalps must be taken in return for the two Indians supposed to have been killed at Fort Snelling. Red Bird had now secured three, those of Gagnier, Lipcap, and the infant; a fourth was necessary before he could properly return to his people in the capacity of an avenger, the proudest title which an Indian can bear. How he obtained these scalps was, to the mind of his race, unimportant; the one idea was to get them.

On the afternoon of the third day after the massacre, Red Bird and his friends were visiting at a camp of their people, near the mouth of the Bad Ax River, some forty miles north of Prairie du Chien. A drunken feast was in progress, in honor of the scalp taking, when two keel boats appeared on their way down the Mississippi from Fort Snelling to St. Louis. The Sioux, at what is now Winona, had threatened the crews, but had not attempted to harm them. The Winnebagoes now appeared on the bank and raised the war whoop, but the crew of the foremost boat thought it only bluster, so in a spirit of bravado ran their craft toward shore. When it was within thirty yards of the bank, the Indians, led by Red Bird, poured a volley of rifle balls into the boat. The crew were well armed, and, rushing below, answered by shooting through the portholes. The boat ran on a bar, and a sharp fire lasted through three hours, until dusk, when the craft was finally worked off the bar, and dropped downstream in the dark. Although seven hundred bullets penetrated the hull, only two of the crew were killed outright, two others dying later from wounds, and two others were slightly wounded. The Indians lost seven killed and fourteen wounded.

The "battle of the keel boats" was the signal for military activity. In July a battalion of troops from Fort Snelling came down to Prairie du Chien; and a little later a full regiment from St. Louis followed. General Henry Atkinson was in command, and early in August he ordered Major William Whistler, then in charge of Fort Howard, to proceed up Fox River with a company of troops, in search of the fugitives Red Bird and Wekau. At a council held with the Winnebagoes, at Butte des Morts, the chiefs were notified that nothing short of the surrender of the leaders of the disturbance would satisfy the government for the attack on the boats; were they not delivered up, the entire tribe should be hunted like wild animals.

Great consternation prevailed among the tribesmen, as the runners sent out from the Butte des Morts council carried the terrible threat to all the camps of the Winnebagoes, in the deep forests, in the pleasant oak groves, and upon the broad prairies throughout southern Wisconsin. Whistler had reached the ridge flanking the old portage trail between the Fox and Wisconsin rivers, but had not fully completed the arrangements of his camp when an Indian runner appeared in hot haste, saying that Red Bird and Wekau would surrender themselves at three o'clock in the afternoon of the following day, that the tribe might be saved.

Whistler and his officers, as true soldiers, were prompt to appreciate bravery. They were broad enough to judge these savages by the standards of savagery, not by those of a civilization from which the Indian is removed by centuries of human progress. They knew full well that the culprits were but carrying out the law of their race in seeking white scalps in vengeance for the Winnebagoes supposed to have been slain at Fort Snelling. Whistler knew that the Indians considered Red Bird and Wekau as heroes, and could feel no pangs of conscience, because treachery toward enemies was the customary method of Indian warfare. Realizing these facts, the American officers recognized that it required a fine type of heroism on the part of these simple natives thus to offer themselves up to probable death, to redeem their tribe from destruction.

For this reason the soldiers were brought out on parade; and when, prompt to the hour named, Red Bird and Wekau, accompanied by a party of their friends, came marching into camp, clad in ceremonial dress, and singing their death songs, they were received with military honors. The native ceremony of surrender was highly impressive. Red Bird conducted himself with a dignity which won the admiration of all. Wekau, on the contrary, was an indifferent looking fellow, and commanded little respect.

Red Bird made but one request, that, although sentenced to death, he should not be placed in chains. This was granted; and while, during his subsequent imprisonment at Prairie du Chien, he had frequent opportunities to escape, he declined to take advantage of them. A few months later he fell an easy victim to an epidemic then raging in the village, thus relieving the government from embarrassment, for it was felt that he was altogether too good an Indian to hang; indeed, his execution might have brought on a general border war.

The murderers of Methode were also apprehended and given a death sentence; but upon the Winnebagoes promising to relinquish forever their hold upon the lead mines of southwestern Wisconsin and northwestern Illinois, President Adams pardoned all the prisoners then living. The following year (1828), a fort was erected at the Fox-Wisconsin portage, near the scene of Red Bird's surrender; being in the heart of that tribe's territory, it was called Fort Winnebago. Thereafter the Winnebagoes were kept in entire subjection. Indeed, the three forts, Howard at Green Bay, Winnebago at Portage, and Crawford at Prairie du Chien, now gave the United States, for the first time, firm grasp upon the whole of what is now Wisconsin.

THE BLACK HAWK WAR

In November, 1804, the Sac and Fox Indians, in return for a paltry annuity of a thousand dollars, ceded to the United States fifty million acres of land in eastern Missouri, northwestern Illinois, and southwestern Wisconsin. There was an unfortunate clause in this compact, which quite unexpectedly became one of the chief causes of the Black Hawk War of 1832; instead of obliging the Indians at once to vacate the ceded territory, it was stipulated that, "as long as the lands which are now ceded to the United States remain their property, the Indians belonging to said tribes shall enjoy the privilege of living and hunting on them."

Within the limits of the cession was the chief seat of Sac power, a village lying on the north side of Rock River, three miles above its mouth. It was picturesquely situated on fertile ground, contained the principal cemetery of the tribe, and was inhabited by about five hundred families, being one of the largest Indian towns on the continent.

From the beginning of the nineteenth century, the principal character in this village was Black Hawk, who was born here in 1767. Black Hawk was neither an hereditary nor an elected chief, but was, by common consent, the village headman. He was a restless, ambitious, handsome savage; was possessed of some of the qualities of successful leadership, was much of a demagogue, and aroused the passions of his people by appeals to their prejudices and superstitions. It is probable that he was never, in the exercise of this policy, dishonest in his motives. A too confiding disposition was ever leading his judgment astray; he was readily duped by those who, white or red, were interested in deceiving him. The effect of his daily communication with the Americans was often to shock rudely his high sense of honor; while the studied courtesy accorded him upon his annual begging visit to the British military agent at Malden, in Canada, contrasted strangely, in his eyes, with his experiences with many of the inhabitants on the Illinois border.

At the outbreak of hostilities between Great Britain and the United States in 1812, Black Hawk naturally allied himself with Tecumseh and the British. After burying the hatchet, he settled down into the customary routine of savage life, hunting in winter and loafing about his village in summer, improvidently existing from hand to mouth, although surrounded with abundance. Occasionally he varied the monotony by visits to Malden, whence he would return laden with provisions, arms, ammunition, and trinkets, his stock of vanity increased by wily flattery, and his bitterness against the Americans correspondingly intensified. It is not at all surprising that he hated the Americans. They brought him naught but evil. The even tenor of his life was continually being disturbed by them; and a cruel and causeless beating which some white settlers gave him, in the winter of 1822-23, was an insult which he treasured up against the entire American people.

In the summer of 1823, squatters, covetous of the rich fields cultivated by the "British band," as Black Hawk's people were often called, began to take possession of them. The treaty of 1804 had guaranteed to the Indians the use of the ceded territory so long as the lands remained the property of the United States and were not sold to individuals. The frontier line of homestead settlement was still fifty or sixty miles to the east; the country between had not yet been surveyed, and much of it not explored. The squatters had no rights in this territory, and it was clearly the duty of the general government to protect the Indians within it so long as no sales were made.

The Sacs would not have complained had the squatters settled in other portions of the tract, and not sought to steal the village which was their birthplace and contained the cemetery of their tribe. There were outrages of the most flagrant nature. Indian cornfields were fenced in by the intruders, squaws and children were whipped for venturing beyond the bounds thus set, lodges were burned over the heads of the occupants. A reign of terror ensued, in which the frequent remonstrances of Black Hawk to the white authorities were in vain. Year by year the evil grew. When the Indians returned each spring from the winter's hunt, they found their village more of a wreck than when they had left it in the fall. It is surprising, in view of their native love of revenge, that they acted so peaceably while the victims of such harsh treatment.

Returning to his village in the spring of 1831, after a gloomy and profitless winter's hunt, Black Hawk was fiercely warned away by the whites; but, in a firm and dignified manner, he notified the settlers that, if they did not themselves remove, he should use force. This announcement was construed by the whites as a threat against their lives. Petitions and messages were showered in by them upon Governor John Reynolds, of Illinois, setting forth the situation in exaggerated terms that would be amusing, were it not that they were the prelude to one of the darkest tragedies in the history of our Western border.

The governor caught the spirit of the occasion, and at once issued a flaming proclamation calling out a mounted volunteer force to "repel the invasion of the British band." These volunteers, sixteen hundred strong, cooperated with ten companies of regulars in a demonstration before Black Hawk's village on the 25th of June. During that night the Indians, in the face of this superior force, quietly withdrew to the west bank of the Mississippi, whither they had previously been ordered. On the 30th they signed a treaty of capitulation and peace, solemnly agreeing never to return to the east side of the river without express permission of the United States government.

The rest of the summer was spent by the evicted savages in a state of misery. It being now too late to raise another crop of corn and beans, they suffered for want of the actual necessaries of life. White Cloud, the eloquent and crafty Prophet of the Winnebagoes, was Black Hawk's evil genius. He was half Sac and half Winnebago, a hater of the whites, an inveterate mischief maker, and, being a "medicine man," possessed much influence over both tribes. He was at the head of a Winnebago village some thirty-five miles above the mouth of the Rock, on the east side of the Mississippi; and to this village he invited Black Hawk, advising him to raise a crop of corn there, with the assurance that in the autumn the Winnebagoes and Pottawattomies would join him in a general movement against the whites in the valley of the Rock.

Relying on these rose-colored promises, Black Hawk spent the winter on the west bank of the Mississippi, recruiting his band, and on the 6th of April, 1832, crossed the great river at Yellow Banks, below the mouth of the Rock. Thus he invaded the State of Illinois, in the face of his solemn treaty of the year before. With him were his second in command, Neapope, a wily scoundrel, who was White Cloud's tool, and about five hundred Sac warriors with their women and children, and all their belongings. Their design was to carry out the advice of the Prophet, in regard to the corn planting, and if possible to take up the hatchet in the autumn.

But it became evident to Black Hawk, before he reached the Prophet's town, that the main body of the Pottawattomies, now controlled by the peace loving Chief Shaubena, did not intend to go to war; and that the rascally Winnebagoes, while cajoling him, were preparing as usual to play double. He tells us in his autobiography that, crestfallen, he was planning to return peacefully to the west side of the Mississippi, when of a sudden he became aware that the whites had raised an army against him, and he was confronted with a war not in the time and manner of his asking.

The news of his second invasion had spread like wildfire throughout the Illinois and Wisconsin settlements. The United States was appealed to for a regiment of troops; and meanwhile, under another fiery proclamation from the governor of Illinois, an army of eighteen hundred militiamen was quickly mustered. Amid intense popular excitement, during which many settlers fled from the country, and others hastily threw up log forts, the army was mobilized by General Atkinson, who appeared at the rendezvous with three hundred regulars. There were many notable men upon this expedition: Abraham Lincoln, then a rawboned young fellow, was captain of a company of Illinois rangers; Zachary Taylor, famous for his bluff manner, was a colonel of regulars; and Jefferson Davis, who was wooing Taylor's daughter, was one of his lieutenants; also of the regulars, was Major William S. Harney, afterward the hero of Cerro Gordo in the Mexican War; and the mustering-in officer was Lieutenant Robert Anderson, who was to become famous in connection with Fort Sumter.

Black Hawk was foolish enough to send a message of defiance to General Atkinson, and, retreating up the Rock, he came to a stand at Stillman's Creek. Here he repented, and sent out runners with a flag of truce, to inform the white chief that he would surrender; but the drunken pickets of the militia advance wantonly killed these messengers of peace. This so angered the Hawk that with a mere handful of thirty-five braves, on foot, and hid in the hazel brush, he turned in fury upon the two hundred seventy-five horsemen who were now rushing upon him. The cowardly rangers, who fled at the first volley of the savages, without returning it, were haunted by the genius of fear, and, dashing madly through swamps and creeks, did not stop until they had reached Dixon, twenty-five miles away. Many kept on at a keen gallop till they reached their own firesides, fifty or more miles farther, carrying the absurd report that Black Hawk and two thousand bloodthirsty warriors were sweeping northern Illinois with the besom of destruction.

Rich in supplies captured in this first encounter, and naturally encouraged at the result of his valor, the Hawk thought that so long as the whites were determined to make him fight, he would show his claws in earnest. Removing the women and children to far-away swamps on the headwaters of the Rock River, in Wisconsin, he thence descended with his braves for a general raid through northern Illinois. The borderers flew like chickens to cover, on the warning of the Hawk's foray. There was consternation throughout the entire West. Exaggerated reports of his forces, and of the nature of his expedition, were spread throughout the land. His name became coupled with fabulous tales of savage cunning and cruelty, and served as a household bugaboo the country over. The effect on the Illinois militia was singular enough, considering their haste in taking the field; in a frenzy of fear, they instantly disbanded!

A fresh levy was soon raised, but in the interval there were irregular hostilities all along the Illinois-Wisconsin border, in which Black Hawk and a few Winnebago and Pottawattomie allies succeeded in making life miserable enough for the frontier farmers of northern Illinois and the lead miners of southwest Wisconsin. In these border strifes fully two hundred whites and nearly as many Indians lost their lives; and there were numerous instances of romantic heroism on the part of the settlers, men and women alike.

In about three weeks after Stillman's defeat the reorganized militia took the field, reenforced by the regulars under Atkinson. Black Hawk was forced to fly to the swampy region of the upper Rock; but, when the pursuit became too warm, he hastily withdrew with his entire band westward to the Wisconsin River. Closely following upon his trail were a brigade of Illinois troops under General James D. Henry, and a battalion of Wisconsin lead mine rangers under Major Henry Dodge, afterwards governor of Wisconsin Territory.

The pursuers came up with the savages at Prairie du Sac. Here the south bank of the Wisconsin consists of steep, grassy bluffs, three hundred feet in height; hence the encounter which ensued is known in history as the Battle of the Wisconsin Heights. With consummate skill, Black Hawk made a stand on the summit of the heights, and with a small party of warriors held the whites in check until the noncombatants had crossed the broad river bottoms below, and gained shelter upon the willow-grown shore opposite. The loss on either side was slight, the action being notable only for the Sac leader's superior management.

During the night, the passage of the river was accomplished by the fugitives. A large party was sent downstream upon a raft, and in canoes begged from the Winnebagoes; but those who took this method of escape were brutally fired upon near the mouth of the river by a detachment from the garrison at Prairie du Chien, and fifteen were killed in cold blood. The rest of the pursued, headed by Black Hawk, who had again made an attempt to surrender his forces, but had failed for lack of an interpreter, pushed across country, guided by Winnebagoes, to the mouth of the Bad Ax, a little stream emptying into the Mississippi about forty miles above the mouth of the Wisconsin River. His intention was to get his people as quickly as possible on the west bank of the Mississippi, in the hope that they would there be allowed to remain in peace.

The Indians were followed, three days behind, by the united army of regulars, who steadily gained on them. The country between Wisconsin Heights and the Mississippi is rough and forbidding in character; there are numerous swamps and rivers between the steep, thickly wooded hills. The uneven pathway was strewn with the corpses of Sacs who had died of wounds and starvation; and there were frequent evidences that the fleeing wretches were sustaining life on the bark of trees and the flesh of their fagged-out ponies.

On Wednesday, the 1st of August, Black Hawk and his now sadly depleted and almost famished band reached the junction of the Bad Ax with the Mississippi. There were only two or three canoes to be had, and the crossing of the Father of Waters progressed slowly and with frequent loss of life. That afternoon there appeared upon the scene a government supply steamer, the _Warrior_, from Fort Crawford (Prairie du Chien), at the mouth of the Wisconsin. The Indians a third time tried to surrender, but their white flag was deliberately fired at, and round after round of canister swept the camp.

The next day the pursuing troops arrived on the heights above the river bench, the _Warrior_ again opened its attack, and thus, caught between two galling fires, the little army of savages soon melted away. But fifty remained alive on the spot to be taken prisoners. Some three hundred weaklings had reached the Iowa shore through the hail of iron and lead. Of these three hundred helpless, half-starved, unarmed noncombatants, over a half were slaughtered by a party of Sioux, under Wabashaw, who had been sent out by our government to waylay them. So that out of the band of a thousand Indians who had crossed the Mississippi over into Illinois in April, not more than a hundred and fifty, all told, lived to tell the tragic story of the Black Hawk War, a tale that stains the American name with dishonor.

The rest can soon be told. The Winnebago guerrillas, who had played fast and loose during the campaign, delivered to the whites at Fort Crawford the unfortunate Black Hawk, who had fled from the Bad Ax to the Dells of the Wisconsin River, to seek an asylum with his false friends. The proud old man, shorn of all his strength, was presented to the President at Washington, imprisoned in Fortress Monroe, forced to sign articles of perpetual peace, and then turned over for safe keeping to the Sac chief, Keokuk, his hated rival. He died on a small reservation in Iowa, in 1838. But he was not even then at peace, for his bones were stolen by an Illinois physician, for exhibition purposes, and finally were accidentally consumed by fire in 1853.

Black Hawk, with all the limitations of his race, had in his character a strength and manliness of fiber that were most remarkable, and displayed throughout his brief campaign a positive genius for military evolutions. He may be safely ranked as one of the most interesting specimens of the North American savage to be met with in history. He was an indiscreet man. His troubles were brought about by a lack of mental balance, aided largely by unfortunate circumstances. His was a highly romantic temperament. He was carried away by mere sentiment, and allowed himself to be deceived by tricksters. But he was honest, and was more honorable than many of his conquerors were. He was, above all things, a patriot. The year before his death, in a speech to a party of whites who were making a holiday hero of him, he thus forcibly defended his motives: "Rock River was a beautiful country. I liked my town, my cornfields, and the home of my people. I fought for them." No poet could have penned for him a more touching epitaph.

THE STORY OF CHEQUAMEGON BAY

Chequamegon Bay, of Lake Superior, has had a long and an interesting history. Nearly two and a half centuries ago, in the early winter months of 1659, two adventurous French traders, Radisson and Groseilliers, built a little palisade here, to protect the stock of goods which they exchanged with the Indians for furs. This was on the southwestern shore of the bay, a few miles west of the present city of Ashland, and in the neighborhood of Whittlesey's Creek.

These men did not tarry long at Chequamegon Bay. For the most part, they merely kept their stock of goods hid in a _cache_ there, while for some ten months they traveled through the woods, far and wide, in search of trade with the dusky natives. But they made the region known to Frenchmen in the settlements at Quebec and Montreal, as a favorite meeting-place for many tribes of Indians who came to the bay to fish.

The first Jesuit mission on Lake Superior was conducted by Father Rene Menard, at Keweenaw Bay; but he lost his life in the forest in 1661. In 1665 the Jesuits determined to reopen their mission on the great lake, and for that purpose sent Father Claude Allouez. Having heard of the advantages of Chequamegon Bay, Allouez proceeded thither, and erected his little chapel in an Indian village upon the mainland, not far from Radisson's old palisade, and possibly at the mouth of Vanderventer's Creek. He called his mission La Pointe.

Conversions were few at La Pointe, and Allouez soon longed for a broader field. He was relieved in 1669 by Father Jacques Marquette, a young and earnest priest. But it was not long before the Sioux of Minnesota quarreled with the Indians of Chequamegon Bay; and the latter, with Marquette, were driven eastward as far as Mackinac.

Although the missionaries had deserted La Pointe, fur traders soon came to be numerous there. One of the most prominent of these was Daniel Grayson Duluth, for whom the modern lake city of Minnesota was named. For several years he had a small palisaded fort upon Chequamegon Bay, and, with a lively crew of well-armed boatmen, roamed all over the surrounding country, north, west, and south of Lake Superior, trading with far-away bands of savages. He had two favorite routes between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River. One was by way of the narrow and turbulent Bois Brule, then much choked by fallen trees and beaver dams; a portage trail of a mile and a half from its headwaters to those of the St. Croix River; and thence, through foaming rapids, and deep, cool lakes, down into the Father of Waters. The other, an easier, but longer way, was up the rugged St. Louis River, which separates Wisconsin from Minnesota on the northwest, over into the Sand Lake country, and thence, through watery labyrinths, into feeders of the Mississippi.

Another adventurous French forest trader, who quartered on Chequamegon Bay, was Le Sueur, who, in 1693, built a fort upon Madelaine Island. During the old Fox War the valleys of the Fox and the Wisconsin were closed to Frenchmen by the enraged Indians. This, the most popular route between the Great Lakes and the great river, being now unavailable, it became necessary to keep open Duluth's old routes from Lake Superior over to the Upper Mississippi. This was why Le Sueur was sent to Chequamegon Bay, to overawe the Indians of that region. He thought that his fort would be safer from attack upon the island, than upon the mainland. As La Pointe had now come to be the general name of this entire neighborhood, the island fort bore the same name as the old headquarters on land. It is well to remember that the history of Madelaine Island, the La Pointe of to-day, dates from Le Sueur; that the old La Pointe of Radisson, Allouez, Marquette, and probably Duluth, was on the mainland several miles to the southwest.

In connection with the La Pointe fort protecting the northern approach to Duluth's trading routes, Le Sueur erected another stockade to guard the southern end, the location of this latter being on an island in the Mississippi, near the present Red Wing, Minnesota. The fort in the Mississippi soon became "the center of commerce for the Western parts"; and the station at La Pointe also soon rose to importance, for the Chippewas, who had drifted far inland with the growing scarcity of game, were led by the presence of traders to return to Chequamegon Bay, and mass themselves in a large village on the southwest shore.

Although Le Sueur was not many years in command at the bay, we catch frequent glimpses thereafter of fur trade stations here, French, English, and American in turn, most of them doubtless being on Madelaine Island. We know, for instance, that there was a French trader at La Pointe in 1717; also, that the year following, a French officer was sent there, with a few soldiers, to patch up and garrison the old stockade. Whether a garrisoned fort was kept up at the bay, from that time till the downfall of New France (1763), we cannot say; but it seems probable, for the geographical position was one of great importance in the development of the fur trade.

We first hear of copper in the vicinity, in 1730, when an Indian brought a nugget to the La Pointe post; but the whereabouts of the mine was concealed by the savages, because of their superstitions relative to mineral deposits.

The commandant of La Pointe, at this time, was La Ronde, the chief fur trader in the Lake Superior country. He and his son, who was his partner, built for their trade a sailing vessel of forty tons burden, without doubt the first one of the kind upon the great lake. We find evidences of the La Rondes, father and son, down as late as 1744; a curious old map of that year gives the name of "Isle de la Ronde" to what we now know as Madelaine.

We find nothing more of importance concerning Chequamegon Bay until about 1756, when Beaubassin was the French officer in charge of the fort. The English colonists were harassing the French along the St. Lawrence River; and Beaubassin, with hundreds of other officers of wilderness forts, was ordered down with his Indian allies to the settlements of Montreal, Three Rivers, and Quebec, to defend New France. The Chippewas, with other Wisconsin tribes, actuated by extravagant promises of presents, booty, and scalps, eagerly flocked to the banner of France, and in painted swarms appeared in fighting array on the banks of the St. Lawrence. But they helped the British more than the French, for they would not fight, yet with large appetites ate up the provisions of their allies.

The garrison being withdrawn from La Pointe, Madelaine Island became a camping-ground for unlicensed traders, who had freedom to plunder the country at their will, for New France, tottering to her fall, could no longer police the upper lakes. In the autumn of 1760 one of these parties encamped upon the island. By the time winter had set in upon them, all had left for their wintering grounds in the forests of the far West and Northwest, save a clerk named Joseph, who remained in charge of the goods and what local trade there was. With him were his wife, his small son, and a manservant. Traditions differ as to the cause of the servant's action; some have it, a desire for plunder; others, his detection in a series of petty thefts, which Joseph threatened to report. However that may be, the servant murdered first the clerk, then the wife, and in a few days, stung by the child's piteous cries, killed him also. When the spring came, and the traders returned to Chequamegon, they inquired for Joseph and his family. The servant's reply was at first unsatisfactory; but when pushed for an explanation, he confessed to his terrible deed. The story goes, that in horror the traders dismantled the old French fort, now overgrown with underbrush, as a thing accursed, sunk the cannon in a neighboring pool, and so destroyed the palisade that to-day certain mysterious grassy mounds alone remain to testify of the tragedy. They carried their prisoner with them on their return voyage to Montreal, but he is said to have escaped to the Huron Indians, among whom he boasted of his act, only to be killed by them as too cruel to be a companion even for savages.

Five years later a great English trader, Alexander Henry, who had obtained the exclusive trade on Lake Superior, wintered on the mainland opposite Madelaine Island. His partner was Jean Baptiste Cadotte, a thrifty Frenchman, who for many years thereafter was one of the most prominent characters on the upper lakes. Soon after this, a Scotch trader named John Johnston established himself on the island, and married a comely Chippewa maiden, whose father was chief of the native village situated four miles across the water, on the site of the Bayfield of to-day.

About the beginning of the nineteenth century, Michel, a son of old Jean Baptiste Cadotte, took up his abode on the island; and from that time to the present there has been a continuous settlement there, which bears the name La Pointe. Michel, himself the child of a Chippewa mother, but educated at Montreal, married Equaysayway, the daughter of White Crane, the village chief on the island, and became a person of much importance thereabout. For over a quarter of a century this island nabob lived at his ease; here he cultivated a little farm, commanded a variable but far-reaching fur trade, first as agent of the Northwest Company, and, later, of the American Fur Company, and reared a large family. His sons were educated at Montreal, and become the heads of families of traders, interpreters, and _voyageurs_.

To this little paradise of the Cadottes there came (in 1818) two sturdy, fairly educated young men from Massachusetts, Lyman Marcus Warren, and his younger brother, Truman Warren. Engaging in the fur trade, these two brothers, of old Puritan stock, married two half-breed daughters of Michel Cadotte. In time they bought out Michel's interests, and managed the American Fur Company's stations at many far-distant places, such as Lac Flambeau, Lac Court Oreilles, and the St. Croix. The Warrens were the last of the great La Pointe fur traders, Truman dying in 1825, and Lyman twenty-two years later.

Lyman Warren, although possessed of a Catholic wife, was a Presbyterian. Not since the days of Marquette had there been an ordained minister at La Pointe, and the Catholics were not just then ready to reenter the long-neglected field. Warren was eager to have religious instruction on the island, for both Indians and whites; and in 1831 succeeded in inducing the American Home Missionary Society to send hither, from Mackinac, the Rev. Sherman Hall and wife, as missionary and teacher. These were the first Protestant missionaries upon the shores of Lake Superior. For many years their modest little church building at La Pointe was the center of a considerable and prosperous mission, both island and mainland, which did much to improve the condition of the Chippewa tribe. In later years the mission was moved to Odanah.