General Winfield Scott & The Black Hawk Purchase

Winfield Scott in 1812

When General Winfield Scott reached Fort Armstrong, the Black Hawk War was over. The shooting had stopped. The militia had gone home. What remained was the uneasy quiet that settles in after a storm. Scott hadn’t come to win a battle. He had come to draw the new lines that followed one.

He was supposed to arrive at the height of the campaign with a fresh army behind him. Instead, cholera ripped his force apart as it moved along the Great Lakes. Soldiers died fast—sometimes within hours. One volunteer wrote, “Death travels faster than the soldier.” Scott burned contaminated gear, quarantined entire units, and marched on through the sickness anyway.

 

By late July, he reached Illinois with what one newspaper called “a column of survivors rather than an army.” And by then, Black Hawk had been defeated at the Bad Axe River. The war had closed its own curtain.

 

But Washington wanted more than peace. Officials wanted land—security for settlers, control of the Mississippi, and a treaty that would keep Native nations from returning to Illinois. If the war had been fought with bullets, the settlement would be finished with signatures.

Chief Keokuk

Keokuk (George Catlin, 1834-1836)

Keokuk was born into chaos.

Everything around him was collapsing — the land, the treaties, the tribes themselves. The frontier was spilling over its banks, and white cabins were rising like weeds along every river bend. The whiskey flowed cheaply and steadily. Guns changed hands faster than words. The Americans were coming, whether or not anyone liked it.

He was born somewhere near Rock River, back when the Sac and Fox still owned the world between the Mississippi and the Des Moines. He grew into a tall, broad man with a deep voice and steady eyes. He fought young, killed early, and learned fast. In his first battle, he killed a Sioux warrior with a spear while on horseback. The elders feasted him that night and named him a brave.

That was how it started — his first taste of power, his first applause. He liked both.

By the time the War of 1812 came, Keokuk understood glory was good, but survival was better. Black Hawk didn’t. The old warrior and his “British Band” went off to fight for the King, leaving the tribe’s villages empty and exposed. When they came back, they found Keokuk sitting in the council lodge as a chief.

Moses Keokuk Son of Chief Keokuk

In 1852, Wunagisa went to Washington to meet the people who decided who would be considered chiefs and such things. The Commissioner of Indian Affairs told him his father had been made a chief because he was “a good man and a true friend to the whites.” He said General Winfield Scott had approved it, and that if Wunagisa was as good as his father, he could remain chief.

That was the rule. Keep the peace. Be the kind of man who didn’t cause trouble.

Years later, Wunagisa became a Baptist. He took the name Moses Keokuk and began trying to live in a way the white men would approve. He gave up one of his wives, stopped drinking, stopped gambling. He moved out of his wigwam, stopped painting his face, and gave up the ceremonies his father had led.

Many in his tribe couldn’t understand it. The old Moses had been a man of color and noise—his hair shaved in bright stripes, his clothes loud, his laugh louder. He raced horses, made bets, and stood at the center of things. “He wore the most gaudy apparel he could find,” said Jacob Carter, the government agent.

Artist George Catlin on the Iowa Frontier

George Catlin

George Catlin moved upriver in the summer of 1832, chasing something he couldn’t name. The steamboat thumped against the current, smoke rolling over the deck, the air thick with mosquitoes and gunpowder residue. The Black Hawk War was over. The army said peace had returned to the frontier. Catlin didn’t see peace. He saw silence—the kind that comes after something irreversible.

He was heading for Fort Armstrong, a log-and-stone post on Rock Island, Illinois. Across the river lay the territory that would become Iowa. The Army held it now, but the land still belonged to the people who had lived and died there.

 

Catlin was an unlikely witness. He was a painter—a thin, restless man who believed he could record an entire world before it disappeared. “I have flown to the rescue of their looks, manners, and customs,” he wrote, “from the grasp of civilization, which will destroy them.”

Black Hawk Sauk War Chief

Born in 1767, Black Hawk was older than the United States. His father was a war  chief, and though it was never certain, Ma-ka-tai-me-she-Kia-kiak, or Black  Sparrow Hawk, became the best-known chief of the Sacs. After the Black Hawk  War, he met President Andrew Jackson in Washington and told him, “I am one  man. You are another.”

Colonel Henry Dodge Frontier Ranger Black Hawk War

Henry Dodge

Henry Dodge stood on a ridge overlooking the Wisconsin River, coat streaked with mud and gunpowder, watching his men reload. The air smelled like wet leaves and blood. Below them, the Sauk lay scattered through the brush. It was July 21, 1832. Nobody said the words, but everyone knew it—the war was dying.

 Two months earlier, everything had gone to hell. Black Hawk had crossed the Mississippi with his people—warriors, mothers, old men, kids—all of them walking straight back into the land they used to call home. The settlers panicked like prairie chickens in a thunderstorm. Militias sprang up overnight. Dodge didn’t wait for anyone to tell him what to do. He just saddled his horse and rode toward the smoke.

 

His men came from the lead mines—farmers, drifters, gamblers, men who smelled like sweat and whiskey and knew how to shoot by instinct. They didn’t have uniforms. Some didn’t even have boots. They slept in the mud and ate whatever didn’t crawl away first. Orders came slowly; rumors came fast. Every campfire burned with the same stories—raids, burned cabins, families gone missing. Dodge rode into it like a man chasing lightning.

Fort Madison in the Iowa Country

Fort Madison

They came up the river in the summer of 1808, sixty men, led by Lieutenant Alpha Kingsley, a thin, sunburned man with orders that looked clean on paper and smelled like death in the field. The Mississippi rolled brown and heavy beside them. Every splash of an oar felt like a signal. Every treeline whispered, don't stay.

 They built the fort anyway.

 

Logs hacked from the bluffs. Mud and sweat sealing the seams. The air thick with mosquitoes and dread. They called it Fort Madison, named for a president who’d never seen the place. The Sauk and Fox watched from the timberline. Quiet. Patient. 

 

Kingsley said the view was “commanding.” What he meant was exposed. There was a ridge behind the walls, a perfect perch for anyone wanting to shoot down at them. The men knew it. They built anyway, because that’s what soldiers do.

Battle of Credit Island War of 1812

Major Zachary Taylor

September 1814 — Near Credit Island, Upper Mississippi: They went upriver chasing ghosts. Eight keelboats, heavy and slow, grinding through the brown current under a blistering sun. The soldiers called it “Taylor’s little war.” Major Zachary Taylor—thirty years old, square-jawed—was supposed to punish the Sac and Fox for embarrassing the United States that summer.

Governor William Clark had sent him north to settle the score. Burn the villages, flatten the corn, and show the flag. It sounded easy enough when they launched from Cape au Gris, Missouri, on August 23. Three hundred thirty-four men, a few light cannon, and enough arrogance to make the river laugh.

The Mississippi wasn’t buying it. For almost two weeks they fought it mile by mile, rowing through mud and heat and clouds of mosquitoes thick enough to choke on. The river kept shifting under them—sandbars one day, deep channels the next. Everything felt uncertain except the current.

They reached the mouth of the Rock River somewhere close to September 5. The air was heavy, and the wind came out of nowhere—sheets of rain, boats colliding, men shouting just to hear themselves. By nightfall, the flotilla was smashed up on a spit of mud and willows called Credit Island. It wasn’t part of the plan.

At dawn, the fog thinned, and they saw figures moving in the trees across the water, watching. Sac and Fox warriors. Hundreds of them, with painted faces, rifles in hand, quiet as smoke. Taylor pulled his men into line, trying to look calm. Captain James Rector rolled a small cannon ashore and set it facing upriver.