USA > Iowa > Louisa County > History of Louisa County, Iowa, from its earliest settlement to 1912, Volume I > Part 4
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Another tribe which once roamed over our prairies and inhabited our for- ests was that of the Ioways. It is supposed that a descendant of Manhaugan, about 1680 founded a village near the mouth of the Iowa river. Soon after, we hear of the Ioways with the Winnebagoes on Lake Michigan, and later, along Blue Earth river. In 1775 some of this tribe were found on the Ohio river during Dunmore's war, but the main body seem to have come down the Rock river with the Winnebagoes about this same time, passing thence down the Mississippi, probably on both sides of it to the mouth of the Des Moines, and up that river across Iowa to the Missouri.
There has come down an interesting story of the chivalry of this tribe which is worth preserving. About 1819 it seems that a member of the Sac tribe had treacherously killed an Ioway. Some time afterward, Black Hawk having discovered the murderer, decided to deliver him to the Ioways for punishment,
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HISTORY OF LOUISA COUNTY
but the murderer being sick, his brother offered to go in his place. Black Hawk, with a few of his braves, took the voluntary prisoner to the vicinity of the Ioway village, said to be near Iowaville, and the prisoner went forward alone to receive his punishment, chanting his death song as he entered the hostile village. Black Hawk returned, and on his way back was astonished to be overtaken at his first encampment by the prisoner, whom he had just escorted to the village and whom he supposed by that time had met a murderer's fate. It seems that the Iowas were greatly struck with the magnanimity of the Sac who had volunteered to suffer torture and death in the place of his sick brother, and, after many threats of execution, had not only released him but had given him two horses, one for himself and one for his sick brother.
Soon after the date of this incident, Black Hawk, having learned that the Ioways were about to march against his village on Rock river, made a forced march, and reached their village and attacked them while they were celebrating their return from a hunt. The victory of the Sacs and Foxes was complete and resulted in the transfer of the sovereignty of this region from the Ioways to the Sacs and Foxes.
But we of Louisa county are more interested in the history of the Saes and Foxes than of any other tribe, because they were here when the first white men came to stake their claims.
Dr. Pickard, from whose lecture on "Iowa Indians" we have borrowed quite freely, says that there is an authentic tradition that these two tribes were at the mouth of the St. Lawrence river one hundred years before the coming of the French. After a long time and having pursued different routes, it seems that these tribes came together in the region of Green Bay. At that time it seems that the Foxes were called Outagamies, and in 1712 they joined the Eng- lish Iroquois in an attack upon the French at Detroit, but were defeated and driven by the French over the Wisconsin river. As the result of conflicts with the Ottaways and Chippeways on the north, and the Sioux on the west, they moved southward and in about 1734 they crossed the Mississippi river above Dubuque and established themselves in that region. It was probably not long after this that they began to use the region about the mouth of the Iowa river as hunting grounds, for we find that in 1795 they were down as far as Mont- rose, and a half breed of the Sacs and Foxes had planted an apple orchard there. It was about this time that the beautiful and fertile hunting grounds of these Indians began to be coveted for the home of the white man, and in pon- dering over the various wars and treaties by which the aborigines have lost their ancient homes, while we may sympathize with their fate and drop a tear upon the grave of a departed race, we must remember that this land was not in any proper sense owned by these Indian tribes, nor did they themselves so regard it.
Speaking of this question, Roosevelt, in his "Winning of the West," says : "It cannot be too often insisted that they did not own the land; or, at least, that their ownership was merely such as that claimed often by our own white hunters. If the Indians really owned Kentucky in 1775, then in 1776 it was the property of Boone and his associates; and to dispossess one party was as great a wrong as to disposses the other. To recognize the Indian ownership of the limitless prairies and forests of this continent-that is, to consider the
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dozen squalid savages who hunted at long intervals over a territory of a thou- sand square miles as owning it outright-necessarily implies a similar recogni- tion of the claims of every white hunter, squatter, horse-thief, or wandering cattleman."
The best authorities estimate that the total number of Indians in the United States did not exceed at any time during the nineteenth century, more than about three hundred and fifteen thousand; and, if we count five persons to a family, this would give to each Indian family a principality of about forty-eight square miles, or over thirty thousand acres; and, applying this arithmetic to the present limits of the state of Iowa, we would have had a little over five thousand Indians, where we now have more than two and a quarter millions of whites. The truth is that the only title known to the Indian was that of posses- sion, and that this passed from day to day and from tribe to tribe, according to the fortunes of war, or the necessities of the chase. The best and clearest state- ment upon this subject is found in an oration delivered by John Quincy Adams, in December, 1802, and as his theory and arguments seem to have been fol- lowed by our statesmen in their dealings with the Indians, we add a brief quotation from that address: "There are moralists who have questioned the right of Europeans to intrude upon the possessions of the aborigines in any case and under any limitations whatsoever. But have they naturally considered the whole subject? The Indian right of possession itself stands, with regard to the greatest part of the country, upon a questionable foundation. Their cultivated fields, their constructed habitations, a space of ample sufficiency for their subsistence, and whatever they had annexed to themselves by personal labor, was undoubtedly by the laws of nature theirs. But what is the right of a hunstman to the forest of a thousand miles over which he has accidentally ranged in quest of prey? Shall the liberal bounties of Providence to the race of man be monopolized by one of ten thousand for whom they were created? Shall the exuberant bosom of the common mother, amply adequate to the nourishment of millions, be claimed exclusively by a few hundreds of her off- spring? Shall the lordly savage not only disdain the virtues and enjoyments of civilization himself, but shall he control the civilization of a world? Shall he forbid the wilderness to blossom like the rose? Shall he forbid the oaks of the forest to fall before the axe of industry and rise again transformed into the habitation of ease and elegance? Shall he doom an immense region of the globe to perpetual desolation, and to hear the howlings of the tiger and the wolf silence forever the voice of human gladness? Shall the fields and the valleys which a beneficent God has framed to teem with the life of innumerable multitudes be condemned to everlasting barrenness? Shall the mighty rivers. poured out by the hands of nature as channels of communication between numerous nations, roll their waters in sullen silence and eternal solitude to the deep? Have hundreds of commodious harbors, a thousand leagues of coast. and a boundless ocean been spread in the front of this land, and shall every purpose of utility to which they could apply be prohibited by the tenant of the woods? No, generous philanthrophists! Heaven has not been thus inconsistent in the works of its hands. Heaven has not thus placed at irreconcilable strife its moral laws with its physical creation."
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Indeed, the Indians themselves claimed that they did not understand the meaning of the word boundaries, and Mahaska is said to have told Governor Clark, at Prairie du Chien, that he claimed no land in particular.
The first of the Indian treaties that affected the lands of the middle west was made at St. Louis in 1804, by which the Sacs and Foxes were supposed to have ceded to the United States the greater part of their possessions in Illinois, with the right on the part of the Indians to hunt upon all the ceded lands until they were wanted for actual settlement. The Black Hawk war was the direct result of this latter provision, because under it the Indians were not obliged to immediately vacate the land which they had ceded to the government. Within the limits of this cession was the principal village of the Sacs, which was also the home of Black Hawk. In 1816, another treaty was made with these same Indians, which confirmed the treaty of 1804, but Black Hawk did not sign either one of these treaties, and seems to have kept many of the Foxes from assenting to the treaty of 1804, claiming that it was not binding, because nego- tiated by chiefs who were not authorized to make it, but who had been sent to St. Louis merely to secure the release of some Indian prisoners. Black Hawk and his adherents, who were known as the British band, continued to become more and more dissatisfied with the treaty of 1804, and with the loss of the lands which they had so long occupied and which held the graves of so inany of their ancestors. Keokuk and Black Hawk did not agree upon this subject, Keokuk being willing to abide by the treaty and to vacate the lands included in it ; and in about 1829, Keokuk with many of the Sacs, crossed the Mississippi river and settled in this region. Keokuk, Wapello and Poweshiek planted vil- lages on or near the Muscatine slough and the Iowa river. It is probable that Keokuk's first village was located about six miles southwest of Muscatine on the high ground on the west bank of that part of Muscatine slough which has been called Keokuk's lake. At least this is the statement made by Hon. J. P. Walton in the Annals of Iowa, Vol. 2. Page 56. Mr. Walton says that this village occupied nearly fifty acres and that at the time he wrote (1895), there were parties yet living in that vicinity who had seen the framework of the buildings in the Indian village. He also says that this village was probably vacated in the year 1834, but if he means to say that Keokuk had his home there until 1834, he is probably mistaken, because we shall find, when we come to the treaty of 1832 for the "Black Hawk Purchase," that that document locates Keokuk's principal village as being on the west bank of the Iowa river, about twelve miles from its mouth, which would indicate that in 1832 Keokuk was living down the Iowa river, about six miles below Wapello, not far from the old village of Florence.
Wapello undoubtedly settled on the Iowa river, but just at what point his first village was located, it is difficult to say. There is a well recognized site of an old Indian village, on the east bank of the Iowa river a short distance north of Harrison hill, and it is thought this was the first place of residence in this county chosen by Wapello. At the time Lieutenant Lea made his trip through this country in 1835 he seems to have learned that Wapello had a village on the west bank of the Iowa river just north of the present city of Wapello, and probably on the northern part of the land now owned by Mr. E. M. Friend, or a little west of it. Poweshiek settled a little further to the
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HISTORY OF LOUISA COUNTY
north ; possibly his first settlement was not far from the station of Bard. But it is certain that he had a village at the forks of the Iowa and Cedar rivers, which was named Kiskkakosh, and that shortly after establishing this village he moved again further up the river. About this same time another Indian chief, Tama, crossed over from Illinois and established a village on Flint creek, in Des Moines county. But Black Hawk, though repeatedly asked by the officers and the' agents of the government to do so, refused to leave the Rock river country. He still harped upon the fact that the treaty of 1804 was not binding, and also claimed that lands could not be sold. He said: "My reason teaches me that land cannot be sold. Nothing can be sold but such things as can be carried away." At that time Andrew Jackson was president and few men understood the Indian problem better than he. It had undoubtedly long been a favorite idea with Jackson that the Indians should be moved west of the Mississippi river whether they were willing or not, but of course he pre- ferred that they should go peaceably. Jackson's attention had been forcibly drawn to this subject by the attempt of the Cherokee Indians to establish a national government upon the lands they occupied within the state of Georgia. Jackson declared that if the Indians chose to remain within the limits of the various states they could do so only upon condition that they subject themselves to state laws. In that event of course they were to be protected in the enjoy- ment of "those possessions which they had improved by their industry, because," said Jackson, "it seems visionary to me to suppose that claims can be allowed on tracts of country on which they (the Indians) have neither dwelt nor made improvements, merely because they have seen them from the mountains, or passed them in the chase." In 1830 with the authority of congress, Jackson ordered the Indians removed from the lands which they ceded in 1804.
But Black Hawk hated the Americans anyway, and had no notion of reced- ing from the position he had already taken, viz., that the treaty of 1804 did not consent that the land on which his village stood should be ceded to the United States. It detracts much from the glamour that some writers have sought to throw around the character of Black Hawk to know that he could not have been sincere in this claim, because he had, on three separate and solemn occasions, viz : in 1819, 1822 and 1825, "touched the quill" and assented to treaties which reaffirmed that of 1804. Black Hawk's worst adviser was undoubtedly the half Winnebago and half Sac, known as White Cloud, or the Prophet. He was a crafty and reckless mischief maker, who exercised great influence because of his supposed sacred character, and because of his earnest and persuasive speech. Dr. Thwaites, in his essay on the "Black Hawk War." upon which we have drawn freely, gives an interesting account of the Prophet's dress. "In the matter of dress he must at times have been picturesque. An eye witness, who was in attendance on a Potawatomi council wherein the wizard was urging the cause of Black Hawk, describes him as dressed in a faultless white buckskin suit, fringed at the seams; wearing a towering head dress of the same material, capped with a bunch of fine eagle feathers; each ankle girt with a wreath of small sleighbells which jingled at every step, while in his nose and ears were ponderous gold rings gently tinkling one against the other as he shook his ponderons head in the warmth of harangue." The prophet
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and the British agent at Malden, and many others, coincided with Black Hawk, giving him just the advice he wanted.
In the spring of 1830 Black Hawk and his band, after an unsuccessful hunt, came back "to find their town almost completely shattered, many of the graves ploughed over, and the whites more abusive than ever," and encroashing more and more upon the lands at the mouth of Rock river. Things went from bad to worse, when, in the spring of 1831, Black Hawk was officially informed of the order from Washington for him to go to the west side of the Mississippi. It was then, according to Galland's "Iowa Emigrant," that Black Hawk gathered his band around him and made them this speech, which is characteristic of the man, and seems to fully state his view of his grievances :
"Warriors: Sixty summers or more have gone since our fathers sat down here. and our mothers erected their lodges on this spot. On these pastures our horses have fattened; our wives and daughters have cultivated the cornfields, and planted beans and melons and squashes : from these rivers our young men have obtained an abundance of fish. Here, too, you have been protected from your old enemy, the Sioux, by the mighty Mississippi. And here are the bones of our warriors and chiefs and orators. But alas! what do I hear? The birds that have long gladdened these groves with their melody now sing a melancholy song! They say, 'The red man must leave his home, to make room for the white man.' The Long Knives want it for their speculation and greed. They want to live in our houses, plant corn in our fields, and plough up our graves ! They want to fatten their hogs on our dead, not yet mouldered in their graves ! We are ordered to remove to the west bank of the Mississippi; there to erect other houses, and open new fields, of which we shall soon be robbed again by these pale faces! They tell us that our great father, the chief of the Long Knives, has commanded us. his red children, to give this, our greatest town, our greatest graveyard, and our best home, to his white children! I do not believe it. It cannot be true : it is impossible that so great a chief should com- pel us to seek new homes, and prepare new cornfields. and that, too, in a country where our women and children will be in danger of being murdered by our enemies. No! No! Our great father, the chief of the Long Knives, will never do this. I have heard these silly tales for seven winters, that we were to be driven from our homes. You know we offered the Long Knives a large tract of country abounding with lead on the west side of the Mississippi, if they would relinquish their claim to this little spot. We will, therefore, repair our houses which the pale faced vagabonds have torn down and burnt, and we will plant our corn ; and if these white intruders annoy us, we will tell them to depart. We will offer them no violence, except in self-defense. We will not kill their cattle, or destroy any of their property, but their scutah wapo (whiskey) we will search for and destroy, throwing it out upon the earth. wherever we find it. We have asked permission of the intruders to cultivate our own fields, around which they have erected wooden walls. They refuse, and forbid us the privilege of climbing over. We will throw down these walls, and, as these pale-faces seem unwilling to live in the community with us, let them, and not us, depart. The land is ours, not theirs. We inherited it from our fathers; we have never sold it. If some drunken dogs of our people sold lands they did not own, our rights remain. We have no chiefs who are author-
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HISTORY OF LOUISA COUNTY
ized to sell our cornfields, our homes, or the bones of our dead. The great chief of the Long Knives, I believe, is too wise and good to approve acts of robbery and injustice, though I have found true the statement of my British friends in Canada, that the 'Long Knives will always claim the land where they are permitted to make a track with their foot, or mark a tree.' I will not, however, believe that the great chief, who is pleased to call himself our 'Father,' will send his warriors against his children for no other cause than contending to cultivate their own fields, and occupy their own houses. No! I will not believe it. until I see his army. Not until then will I forsake the graves of my ancestors, and the home of my youth!"
In his biography Black Hawk also complains, doubtless with truth, that white people had brought whiskey into the village, and cheated the Indians without mercy. He says that in the case of one man who continued this "fradu- lent practice" openly, he took some of his young braves, went to the man's house, and broke in the head of his whiskey barrel.
At length, confronted by General Gaines, in command of several hundred regulars, and sixteen hundred Illinois volunteers under Governor John Rey- nolds, Black Hawk crossed over to the west side of the Mississippi river, signed another treaty agreeing never again to go on the east side without the permis- sion of the government. and, as it was then too late to raise a crop, he and his followers spent the remainder of the season wandering about, brooding over their wrongs. The following winter he was engaged in making up his war party, much of the time being spent about Fort Madison, and much of the time in this county. The Black Hawk war, like many other notable things, undoubtedly had its beginning in this county.
Dr. Thwaites says: "On the 6th of April, 1832, Black Hawk and Neapope, with about five hundred warriors (chiefly Sauks), their squaws and children, and all their possessions, crossed the Mississippi at Yellow Banks, below the mouth of the Rock, and invaded the state of Illinois."
And William L. Toole, one of our earliest and foremost pioneers, in the January, 1868, number of the "Annals of Iowa," speaking of the Indian trail down the Iowa from Poweshiek's village to Wapello village, then to the village of Chief Keokuk, and then across on the north side of the river to the ancient mounds at Toolesboro, says: "And on this trail the warriors of those villages passed to the Masso-Scpo (Indian for Mississippi) with their ponies, and across it to the upper sand-bank ( New Boston), some going in canoes down the Iowa, taking their arms, ammunition, etc., preparatory to the war of 1832."
Still another authority for the statement that the starting point for Black Hawk's war expedition was in this county, is John B. Newhall, in his "Emi- grants Guide." In speaking of Florence, which was once a flourishing and promising hamlet, supposed to have been located on the very spot where "Kco- kuk's principal village" stood in 1832, Mr. Newhall says: "Florence is un- rivalled in beauty of location. It has one of the best ferries upon the Iowa, and is surrounded by a densely populated settlement. Here the renowned chief, Black Hawk, resided until the Indian hostilities of 1832; and here, 'Beneath this green turf, by the riv'let of sands,' repose the bones of his ancestors, where they have rested in peace for centuries. It was for this sacred spot that he
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gave the warwhoop, and rallied forth his countrymen to the last deadly con- flict, in defense of their homes, and the graves
'Where sleep their warriors, where rival chieftains lay, And mighty tribes swept from the face of day.'
"But they were conquered, and this illustrious chief was doomed to wander a stranger in the land of his forefathers. Ilis lodge was still standing at the time the country was surveyed. The writer lingers with peculiar interest upon this spot, having been among the first (white men) to set landmarks of civiliza- tion upon the 'Keokuk Reserve,' having laid off the town of Florence, and being associated in the ownership of this celebrated 'Indian council house' from its transfer from the Indians. We kept it nearly two years in good state of preservation, and strangers from far and near came to look upon this last monument of Black Hawk. But in an evil hour the sacrilegious work of innova- tion had taken its unsparing sway, and the thoughtless denizens razed it to the earth for the more profitable culture of a cornfield."
We may also cite Jesse Williams' "Iowa," published in 1840: referring to Township 73 North, Range 2 West, which contains both Toolesboro and Flor- ence ; he says: "This Township is one of the most noted in the territory. Here the celebrated Indian Chief Black Hawk resided until the Indian hostilities of 1832,-and it is here where the bones of his ancestors have rested in peace for centuries .- and it was for this spot, this sacred spot, that he gave the warwhoops and rallied forth his countrymen to the last deadly struggle in defense of this, the home of their ancestors. His home was still standing at the time when the surveys were made : it stood on the south bank of the lowa in Section 20. The village of Florence was located on the south fraction of Section 20."
The only valtte of the above quotations from Newhall and Williams is that they associate Black Hawk with the vicinity of Florence in 1832; the rest is too extravagant to be witliin the limits of poetic license. To Black Hawk, the resting place of his ancestors was at the mouth of Rock river, in Illinois ; and even had Florence been the "sacred spot." it and all the land around it, as well as nearly all of Iowa. was in the undisputed possession of the Indians, and it required neither war nor warwhoop to insure them in their possession.
The early opening of this territory to settlement by the whites, is due to Black Hawk's foolhardy war. for had he remained peaceful, he could have spent his life here. And Keokuk evidently so understood the situation, for he did all in his power to prevent the war.
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