USA > Wisconsin > Rock County > Rock County, Wisconsin; a new history of its cities, villages, towns, citizens and varied interests, from the earliest times, up to date, Vol. I > Part 4
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ward over all this central southern region, and also to the south- west. When our lead regions, which had formerly been worked by Sauks and Foxes, began to be invaded by white miners in 1821 and 1822 they found that Winnebagoes were in possession and claimed that country. The war with the Indians in 1827, by which the United States gained control of those mines, is called "The Winnebago War."
In this region of Rock county Winnebagoes were undoubtedly the last Indian occupants. Their totem was the turtle and turtle mounds are prominent here. They had a village on the west side of Lake Koshkonong called Tay-e-hee-dah, the ruins of which attracted the attention of United States surveyors of that region in 1834. The other settlement of Winnebagoes within our county, called Turtle village, occupied the site of the present city of Beloit. The chief of this village was Kau-rau-maw-nee, or Walking Turtle, that chief who delivered up Red Bird at the close of the Winnebago war, and the beautiful turtle mound immediately north of the astronomical observatory in the grounds of Beloit college was very probably to him and to his people a sacred meeting place.
Indian Removals.
If this beautiful region suited the Indians and they loved it, why did they leave it? Because they had to. As settlers flocked into the western country the United States government made treaties with the Indians in order to buy their lands, to secure peace after war, and for both those objects combined. The pressure of immigration required that the United States should own the land and by that change of ownership the whole country was benefited.
In the fourteen treaties, which we record, our government sometimes treated the Indians as though they were independent foreign nations and sometimes as if they were dependent wards.
Our first treaty with these western Indians was made at St. Louis November 3, 1804. For $2,254 worth of goods and the promise of a continuous payment of $1,000 worth of goods each year thereafter, the Sacs and Foxes, represented by compara- tively few of their chiefs, ceded to the United States all the land which they claimed east of the Mississippi, and bounded as fol- lows: The north bound was the Wisconsin river to a point
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HISTORY OF ROCK COUNTY
thirty-six miles up stream from its mouth, then a line directly eastward to the outlet of Lake Sakaegan (Lake Pewaukee in Waukesha county), thence down the Fox river to the Illinois and down that to the Mississippi, which was the western bound- ary, thus including all this region of southern Wisconsin. (Moses Strong's History of Wisconsin, page 70, gives Lake Muckwanago as being the treaty lake, Sakaegan. The founder of Milwaukee, Solomon Juneau, however, called Pewaukee lake, Sakaegan or Snail lake, from its shape, and J. A. Rice also concludes that Pewaukee is the old Sakaegan.)
September 12, 1815, United States Commissioners William Clark, Ninian Edwards and Auguste Chouteaux made two treaties, one with the Sacs and the other with the Foxes, both confirming the treaty of 1804, but neither of them signed by Black Hawk. May 13, 1816, however, the same commissioners made at St. Louis a treaty with the Sacs of Rock river, also con- firming the treaty of 1804 and signed by twenty-two Sac chiefs and warriors, among whom was Ma-ka-tai-mo-he-kia-kiak (Black Sparrow Hawk). Although Black Hawk acknowledged that he "touched the quill" to this treaty he afterwards claimed that he did not understand it as the United States did and that, therefore, it was not binding on the Sacs of Rock river. By that treaty the Sac and Fox nations were allowed the privilege of living and hunting upon the ceded lands in Wisconsin so long as they remained the property of the United States. Black Hawk said he understood that to mean "so long as the rule of the United States over that region continued." The commissioners meant, however, "so long as the title to the land remained with the government." Whenever and wherever that title was trans- ferred to actual settlers those Indian rights would cease. It was this radical difference of opinion about the meaning of that treaty which afterwards led to the Black Hawk war.
August 20-24, 1816, the Chippewa, Ottawa and Pottawattomie tribes, who claimed the west shore of Lake Michigan as far west as Rock river and Green bay, ceded to the United States a tract of land three leagues square at the mouth of the Wisconsin river, including both banks, and another tract five leagues square on or near the Wisconsin and Mississippi rivers, and all their lands in Illinois; and in return the United States ceded to them all the old Sac and Fox lands between the Mississippi river and
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THE PICTURE MOUND BUILDERS
Lake Michigan and north of the south end of that lake. That cession made this region Indian country again.
Then, about ten years later, came the Winnebago war. After the Sacs and Foxes left the lead regions of southwestern Wiscon- sin in 1804, Winnebagoes, Ottawas, Chippewas and Pottawatto- mies "squatted" on the land, worked the mines and had certain half breeds take the lead to St. Louis and sell it there. This started the coming of white miners from the south, who gradu- ally drifted into the lead region and, in 1822, were working the mines under the protection of United States troops. The Winne- bagoes elaimed possession over other Indians and so, in 1825, a treaty of peace was made at Prairie du Chien to settle the boun- daries between Winnebagoes, Sacs, Foxes, Chippewas, Iowas, Ottawas and Pottawattomies. But during the year 1827 mining at Fever river, Illinois, was extended into the Winnebago coun- try and caused an Indian uprising that year. In 1828 Colonel Henry Dodge and 130 men were digging ore thirty miles within Wisconsin lands, removing the ore across the line by night. The Indians discovered and resented this. More troops having been sent, the result was the Winnebago war between Colonel Dodge and Chief Red Bird, the latter nobly giving himself up to death as a sacrifice for his people. August 25, 1828, the United States, by Lewis Cass and Pierre Minard, at Green bay, made a provis- ional treaty with the Winnebago, Chippewa, Ottawa and Potta- wattomie Indians, the latter having only "squatter's rights," for lands which were permanently eeded later. Then, by our eighth treaty, made at Prairie du Chien, July 29, 1829, the Chip- pewas, Ottawas and Pottawattomies ceded to the United States all their land south of the Wisconsin river and covered by the Sac and Fox cession of 1804, including therefore the lead regions and also the whole of this county. By the treaty of August 1, 1829, Winnebagoes ceded the lead regions. It is said that the lead fever of 1828 was like the gold fever of 1849 and 1850 for intensity, and caused a permanent settlement of southwestern Wisconsin several years before the eastern counties were occu- pied. Then the Black Hawk war of 1832 widely advertised this Rock river country and turned immigration toward south Wis- consin and northern Illinois.
September 15, 1832, at Ft. Armstrong, Rock Island, the Winnebagoes ceded all their land west of Rock river, beginning
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HISTORY OF ROCK COUNTY
at the mouth of the Pecatonic and extending up to the Wisconsin and to the Fox river of Green bay. (That covered the west half of Rock county.)
September 26, 1833, the Ottawas, Chippewas and Pottawatto- mies ceded all east of that tract to Lake Michigan and north to the head of the Milwaukee river and a line reaching thence to the south end of Lake Winnebago. (This covers the east half of Rock county a second time.)
In 1836 the Chippewa and Ottawa Indians ceded land east of Green Bay (not touching us), and the Menomonees ceded a traet along the Wisconsin river, three miles in width east side, and extending forty-eight miles in a straight line up the river above the Grignon tract (about from Stevens Point to Wausau. In a Wisconsin map of 1839 the Grignon saw mills are located about ten miles further north than the north end of Lake Winnebago.) This opened the way for the lumbering operations of our early Beloit and Janesville lumbermen.
By the treaty of 1837, our thirteenth, at Washington, D. C., the Sioux ceded to the United States all their land east of the Mississippi, which perhaps may have sometime included this county.
In the same year, November 1, 1837, General Henry Dodge secured a treaty whereby the Winnebagoes ceded to the United States all their land east of the Mississippi and southeast of the Black river and of the Wisconsin, thus covering Rock county again, this time the whole of it.
Their Actual Removals.
Article XI. of the treaty of September 15, 1832, reads, "No band (of Winnebagoes) shall plant, fish, reside or hunt, after June 1, 1833, on any portion of the country ceded herein to the United States." (That covered the west half of Rock county.) The Indians were to have left at that date and were to have thirty days of soldier's rations, not exceeding 60,000 rations in all. They were also given a tract of land west of the Mississippi and promised, after they had moved, $10,000 each year for the next twenty-seven years. By 1834 Winnebagoes to the number of 4,591 had settled north of the Wisconsin river, being unwil- ling to cross the Mississippi to their new Iowa reservation from fear of the Sioux. In 1835 about 1,000 Chippewas, Ottawas and
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John Thompson
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THE PICTURE MOUND BUILDERS
Pottawattomies were removed from Wisconsin, leaving some 7,000 in our territory. In 1836 the United States appropriated $40,000 to defray the expense of removing the Winnebagoes, who still remained south of the Wisconsin river. It was one of those bands of Winnebagoes, gathered for removal, who were camped on the west bank of Rock river opposite Turtle village when Caleb Blodgett came here in 1836 and who helped him build his double log cabin. In the treaty of 1837 they had agreed to re- move within eight months, but by October, 1839, had not yet made any general effort to do so. Therefore in 1840 General Atkinson with two and a half regiments of United States soldiers forcibly moved 4,500 of them to the west side of the Mississippi. Some 300 Winnebagoes, however, did not leave our territory, and from 1840 to 1848 six companies of United States soldiers were kept in Wisconsin to protect the citizens and remove the renegades, but the latter effort failed.
In 1846 some 1,250 Winnebagoes came back from Iowa and settled along the Fox and Wisconsin and the Kickapoo and Lemonweir valleys. The process of removal was continued up to 1853, when from 700 to 900 still remained. In my early boy- hood of those years, in Beloit, I remember seeing often little bands of those Indians in our streets. Those Winnebago or Tur- tle Indians dearly loved this spot, the home of their ancestors, as the many turtle totem mounds show, and paid us only too friendly visits with their squaws, babies, young bucks, naked children, dogs and all. Blanketed, painted and befeathered, they were not so stolid as they looked. The men would bring their bows and arrows to the government landing and ask white men for a mark to shoot at. Put up a big copper cent and they would shoot all around it. But let anyone set up a three-cent piece or better still a bright dime, and whack, some one would hit it the first shot.
In 1864 350 Pottawattomies came back from Kansas, so that, by 1870, northern Wisconsin had about a thousand Winnebagoes and Pottawattomies, who lived by hunting and berry picking and who were tolerated because they kept down the too abund- ant wild animals of that region. (While a home missionary at Black River Falls, Jackson county, in 1871 and 1872, I often saw them as they brought skins and blueberries to that place
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HISTORY OF ROCK COUNTY
for sale, and thought them quite industrious and orderly, for Indians.)
In 1874 about 860 were deported. Then in 1881 congress enacted that those Winnebagoes, who had settled homesteads on Wisconsin lands, should be protected in their rights and pay no taxes for twenty years. In 1893 a school for Indian children was provided at Tomah, Wis. In 1895 the state had about 930 Winnebagoes, of whom some 360 had taken up homestead claims.
According to the Indian commissioner's report for 1903, there were then in northern Wisconsin 1,402 Winnebagoes, 565 of them being in the neighborhood of Black River Falls. And on seven reservations, covering 583,135 acres, were 6,778 other Indians, Oneidas, Menomonees, Stockbridges and Chippewas. In noticing the large variety of nations who are represented in our Wiscon- sin population, we cannot overlook, therefore, our more than 8,000 Indians.
III
THE BLACK HAWK WAR. By W. F. B.
As an important event, which advertised this region and led to its early settlement by eastern people, the Black Hawk war deserves some fitting notice here. When the war of 1812 began the Sac chief, Black Hawk, naturally took the side of Tecumseh and the British. Accompanied by a band of 200 Sac braves he served under Tecumseh and was with that great Shawanee chief when the latter was killed at the battle of the Thames, October 5, 1813. Black Hawk and his warriors then returned to their Rock river home, but kept making forays along the upper Mis- sissippi and did not cease until about a year and a half after Great Britain and the United States had made their treaty of peace at Ghent. His village, where he had been born and then lived, was on the north bank of Rock river, about three miles above its mouth, and the same distance south of Rock Island in the Mississippi. It was occupied by about 500 families and con- tained also the chief cemetery of his nation.
Being a friend of the British and hating Americans, Black Hawk led his followers to entertain the same feeling, and they were popularly known as "the British band." After burying the hatchet in 1816, however, the chief led a comparatively peace- ful life for six years. Then in the winter of 1822-1823, in some difficulty with white men he, or some say his son, was given a cruel beating, which renewed and increased his hatred of all Americans. In the summer of 1823 squatters began taking pos- session of the rich land occupied by these Sacs toward the mouth of Rock river. While the band were away on their winter's hunt Americans fenced in various Indian corn fields and claimed that land, which included Black Hawk's village. The head Sac chief, Keokuk, and the United States Indian agent at Fort Arm-
35
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HISTORY OF ROCK COUNTY
strong, which had been built on Rock Island about 1816, both advised Black Hawk to make a peaceful retreat across the Mis- sissippi, but he refused to leave the home and graves of his an- cestors. Afterwards, in his old age, he remarked, not without dignity, "I loved that Rock river country. I loved my corn fields. I fought for them." He claimed also that their village had never been sold to the whites. The treaty of 1804, reaffirmed in 1816, made no such exception. It simply guaranteed to the Indians the use of the ceded territory so long as the lands re- mained the property of the United States and were not sold to individuals. Technically the squatters, not having bought those yet unsurveyed lands, were not actual but only prospective set- tlers. According to the treaty itself. therefore, since no sales of the land had been made and since the frontier line of home- steads was some fifty miles to the east, this was still Indian land and it was the duty of our government to protect the Indians in their occupancy of that region until the land should be duly sur- veyed and sold to settlers. In the spring of 1830 Black Hawk and his band, returning from an unsuccessful winter's hunt, found their town demolished and the site ploughed up. During the winter those squatters, after seven years of illegal occupancy, had duly preempted several quarter sections at the mouth of the Rock, covering the disputed ground, namely, the village site and the Sac corn fields. This placed them technically in the right. So when Black Hawk returned to the village in the spring of 1831, after another unsuccessful hunting season and ordered the settlers to leave that locality or he would remove them by force, they confidently appealed to the governor of Illinois, John Rey- nolds, for protection. In his biography, written at his dictation in after life by Editor Patterson, Black Hawk claimed that he did not mean bloodshed or war, but simply the use of physical force. The whites, however, understood his order as threatening their lives and so did the governor. Reynolds therefore called out a mounted force "to repel the invasion of the British band," and about 1,600 volunteers responded. These, with ten com- panies of regulars under General E. P. Gaines made a demon- stration before Black Hawk's village June 25, 1831, which led those Indians to withdraw that night to the west bank of the Mississippi. June 30 they signed a treaty of peace with General Gaines and Governor Reynolds, agreeing never to return to the
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THE BLACK HAWK WAR
east side of the river without express permission of the United States government. This is not numbered among the formal treaties between the Indians and our government, because it was merely a local agreement for the sake of peace. In view of it, however, Black Hawk's later expedition into Illinois and Wisconsin became a doubly illegal invasion.
Another cause of trouble was this. During the year 1830 a party of Menomonees and Sioux had murdered some of the Brit- ish band of Sacs. So in 1831, soon after the treaty, Black Hawk and his war party, according to Indian custom, retaliated by at- tacking and killing twenty-seven Menomonees near Fort Craw- ford, Prairie du Chien. General Joseph Street, the United States Indian agent there, on complaint of the Menomonees, demanded the surrender of those Sac murderers for trial under existing treaty provisions. Black Hawk refused to give them up, claim- ing that his bloody reprisal was justified by the usages of savage warfare. By this refusal he thus placed his band in an attitude of rebellion against the United States authority as represented by its Indian agency.
At this time, also, the shrewd chief or prophet, White Cloud, half Winnebago, half Sac, persuaded Black Hawk that not only Winnebagoes, Ottawas, Chippewas and Pottawatomies, but also the British themselves would help him to regain his village.
At that time the northern part of Illinois and this southern part of Wisconsin, the territory ceded in the Sac and Fox treaties of 1804 and 1816, was still largely an unknown wilderness of prairies, oak groves, rivers, lakes and marshes. Little of it had been surveyed or even explored by white men. There were min- ing settlements in the lead regions about Galena and Mineral Point. An Indian trail along the east bank of the Mississippi connected the former place with Fort Armstrong on Rock Island, and a wagon road, opened in 1827 and called Kellogg's trail, connected Galena with Peoria and other settlements in southern Illinois. A mail coach traversed this road every day and was often crowded with people going to or from the mines, the regu- lar freight outlet from which, however, was down the Mississippi. Indian trails between the various Indian villages and their hunt- ing and fishing grounds were used as public thoroughfares by the reds and whites alike. One of these trails connected Galena with Chicago by the way of Big Foot's Pottawatomie village at
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HISTORY OF ROCK COUNTY
the head of what is now Lake Geneva. The various mining set- tlements were connected by trails and two well traveled ways led respectively to Fort Winnebago (now Portage, Wis.) and to Fort Howard, Green bay, on the lower Fox river. In Illinois was the great Sac trail extending directly across the state east from Black Hawk's village to the south shore of Lake Michigan and onward to the British agency at Malden. Between Galena and the Illinois river the largest settlement consisted of some thirty families on Bureau creek, and there were little clusters of cabins at Peru, La Salle, South Ottawa, Newark, Holderman's Grove, and on Indian creek. The lead mining colonies in Michigan territory (now Wisconsin) were at Mineral Point and Dodge- ville. At the mouth of the Milwaukee river the fur trader, Solo- mon Juneau, had started a settlement, and at Chicago 200 or 300 people were living under the shelter of Fort Dearborn. Squat- ters were more numerous than homesteaders and metes and bounds were still indefinite, yet the white population had in- creased so rapidly that in 1830 it is said to have numbered about 155,000.
Black Hawk claimed that his band had a right to hunt and fish in this region as long as it belonged to the United States, that is, was not under the authority of any other power. This interpretation of the theaty of 1804, renewed in 1816, he seems to have determined to secure by a hunting expedition up the Rock river, which would serve as a precedent in any future negotiations. That it was not at first a war party is plain from the fact that their squaws and children went with them.
April 6, 1832, Black Hawk and his second in command, Nea- pope, with about 450 mounted warriors and fifty in canoes, with their squaws, children and belongings, crossed the Mississippi into Illinois near the mouth of Rock river and started up it. His avowed intention was to proceed to the village of the Indian prophet, White Cloud, about thirty-five miles up that stream, and unite with the Rock river Winnebagoes in raising a crop of corn. After getting that supply of food in hand they would in the fall be ready for the warpath. At least this was the idea of the expedition which was quickly spread abroad among the whites.
A friendly Pottawatomie chief, Shaubena, carried notice of the raid to the settlements in the Illinois and Rock river valleys
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THE BLACK HAWK WAR
and on east as far as Chicago. The news spread like a prairie fire. Settlers gathered at the larger towns or at more convenient points, where they built rude stockade forts and formed them- selves into garrisons. At Fort Armstrong, on Rock Island, Gen- eral Atkinson, who had arrived there that spring with a com- pany of regulars to support the demand of the Indian depart- ment for those Sac murderers, immediately began arranging a campaign against the British band. He first assured himself that the rest of the Sacs and Foxes were not hostile and then sent a message to Black Hawk by two different messengers ordering him to peaceably return and withdraw to the west bank of the Mississippi or be driven there by force of arms. One of these managers was Henry Gratiot, Indian agent for the " Rock river band of Winnebagoes. It was his father, Charles Gratiot, who at Cahokia and Kaskaskia generously supplied George Rogers Clarke in 1778 and 1779 with the means which enabled him to make his memorable campaign a success. So now his equally generous and honorable son, Henry, who had always dealt kindly and fairly with the Indians, risked his life for them in this effort to prevent a war.
Four Winnebago chiefs, one of whom may well have been White Crow, whose village was at Lake Koshkonong, had per- sonally warned him that on account of the encroachments of the whites they could no longer restrain their young men from making war.
At General Atkinson's request, however, he undertook this dangerous mission to Black Hawk, having with him the five friendly Winnebago chiefs, Broken Shoulder, Whirling Thunder, White Crow, Little Medicine Man and Little Priest. Immediately on their arrival at the prophet's village they were all violently seized and made prisoners and the young warriors clamored for their scalps. The prophet could only protect these envoys for a couple of days. The message of peace was rejected. Gratiot and the Winnebagoes, by the prophet's advice, gained their canoes in the night, were pursued down the river and, barely escaping with their lives, reached Rock Island the next day.
In the meantime Governor Reynolds' published call for vol- unteers had brought together a force of about 1,600, all but 300 being horsemen. Among these was one company who had chosen as their captain young Abraham Lincoln. In his brief autobiog-
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HISTORY OF ROCK COUNTY
raphy, written after he became famous, Lincoln says: "Then came the Black Hawk War, and I was elected a captain of vol- unteers, a success which gave me more pleasure than any I have had since." General Atkinson's force included 400 regular in- fantry gathered from Forts Crawford (Prairie du Chien) and Leavenworth, under the command of Colonel Zachary Taylor, afterwards president of the United States. Major William S. Harney, the hero of Cerro Gordo, also served with these regulars. A young lieutenant of Company B, First United States Infantry, Jefferson Davis, afterwards president of the Confederacy, was stationed at Fort Crawford in January and February, 1832, but he is marked on the rolls as "absent on detached service at the Dubuque mines." (From March 26 to August 18, 1832, he was absent from his company on furlough, so that he seems to have taken no part in the Black Hawk War; but he escorted that chief to Jefferson Barracks when the war was ended.)
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