"I will defend this land!" he shouted.
As long as he lived, he would give his blood to this earth.
Afterword
The reader may suspect the author of a bit of frontier-style exaggeration, with one President and three future Presidents—two of the United States and one of the Confederacy—playing parts in this novel. But it's a historic fact that Colonel Zachary Taylor and Lieutenant Jefferson Davis were among the regular Army officers who pursued Black Hawk's people. The two ultimately drew even closer, when Davis married Taylor's daughter Sarah. Davis resigned from the military and took his new bride back to Mississippi, where they settled on a plantation. But the daughter of U.S. President Zachary Taylor was not to be First Lady of the Confederacy; she died of malaria a few months after the wedding. And after the Civil War Jefferson Davis saw the inside of Fort Monroe once again—as a prisoner.
The meeting of Andrew Jackson and Black Hawk in the President's House—as the White House was known in 1832—is also an actual historical incident. When Sharp Knife sent the Sauk leaders on a tour of major Eastern cities, including Baltimore, Philadelphia and New York, the crowds that came to see Black Hawk greeted him as if he was a conquering hero, somewhat to Jackson's chagrin. But "King Andrew," as his political opponents called him, handily won the election of 1832. During the second four years of his reign Congress enacted into law his policy of forcing all Native American tribes in the U.S. to move west of the Mississippi. Even though the Winnebago and the Potawatomi remained neutral or actively helped the Americans, they also had to give up their land in Illinois and Wisconsin and move westward.
Abraham Lincoln, aged twenty-three, joined the Illinois militia in April 1832, and was promptly elected captain of the Sangamon County company of volunteers. In May, Lincoln was one of those who helped bury the slain militiamen at Old Man's Creek. When his company was disbanded, the men having served their four weeks' enlistment, Lincoln signed up for two more short hitches. He served them as a private, and was finally mustered out in July. His horse was stolen, and he and a friend walked and canoed 250 miles southward to their home, in New Salem, Illinois. Though Black Hawk War veterans tended to make much of their exploits, Lincoln was content to say afterward that the only combat he saw was against flies and mosquitoes. Thomas Ford, Auguste's attorney, served as governor of Illinois from 1842 to 1846. His History of Illinois, written in 1847, is one of the sources for this novel.
Other than Black Hawk himself, the most historically prominent Sauk in these pages is He Who Moves Alertly. For the sake of consistency I've translated all the Native American names in the novel into English. Otherwise you'd have met He Who Moves Alertly under the name he's better known by—Keokuk. And I would have referred to Shooting Star, the Shawnee war chief mentioned in Chapters Five and Sixteen, as Tecumseh. But then I'd have had to call Black Hawk by his Sauk name, Makataimeshekiakiak. No wonder Emerson called consistency a hobgoblin.
Also an unfamiliar name today is Michigan Territory as a term for the land north of Illinois through which Black Hawk and his people made their final trek from the Trembling Lands to the mouth of the Bad Axe. That land would soon become the state of Wisconsin. After achieving statehood in 1848, Wisconsin promptly laid claim to the prosperous northern portion of Illinois, including Chicago; but Illinois politicians knew all about clout even then, and beat the Badgers back.