Large parts of Illinois and Wisconsin were lands previously occupied by the Sauk and Fox. In the seventeenth century the Sauk migrated from Canada, driven by wars with the Iroquois, down into what is today eastern Wisconsin. During the eighteenth century they formed a confederacy with the Fox and moved into the southwestern part of Wisconsin and northern Illinois. In Black Hawk's time there were about four thousand Sauk and sixteen hundred Fox, living in villages along the Wisconsin (earlier spelled Ouisconsin) and Mississippi rivers and at the mouth of the Rock River.
With the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, the U.S. took charge of the Sauk and Fox homeland. In 1804 white settlers attacked a party of Sauk men, women and children, and three whites were killed. As territorial Governor William Henry Harrison demanded, a delegation of five Sauk and Fox chiefs brought one of the accused killers to St. Louis. Harrison used the occasion to negotiate a treaty in which the Sauk and Fox ceded to the U.S. all their land east of the Mississippi, including what is today northwestern Illinois and southwestern Wisconsin, as well as a portion of Missouri. All together the Sauk gave up 51 million acres. For this they got $2234.50 and an annual payment of $1000 worth of goods. Later one of the chiefs who had signed the treaty said that the delegation had been drunk most of the time they were in St. Louis. The prisoner the chiefs had delivered to Harrison was "killed while trying to escape."
Black Hawk never recognized this treaty or later confirmations of it. In defiance, he led his people back to Saukenuk every spring.
There is a gaudy rural playground area in south-central Wisconsin known as the Wisconsin Dells, where local folks will show tourists a cave in which, they swear, Black Hawk was hiding when captured by two Winnebago warriors named Chaetar and One Eye Decorah. But Dr. Nancy O. Lurie of the Milwaukee Public Museum has unearthed a different account of Black Hawk's surrender, written by John Blackhawk, grandson of a Winnebago chief and no relation to the Sauk leader. I find the John Blackhawk version much more probable than the Wisconsin Dells story, and it's the one I've followed, adding, inevitably, my own fictional elaborations. Be it noted that the incident of the small boy who commits Black Hawk's party to surrendering by smoking Wave's peace pipe is not my invention, but is reported in the John Blackhawk manuscript. Tobacco was that sacred to the Native Americans of those times.
Another matter on which historians disagree is the origin of the expression "O.K.," which made its appearance in the American language in the 1830s. Here I propose an explanation (see page [239]) that I haven't seen anywhere else, but that, like John Blackhawk's story, makes sense to me. People at that time attached the adjective "old" to anyone or anything they felt affectionate about—Old Glory, Old Ironsides, Old Hickory. By the time he got around to running for President, Zachary Taylor was "Old Rough and Ready." The most popular alcoholic beverage in early nineteenth-century America was whiskey, and the best whiskey was distilled in Kentucky and widely known as Old Kaintuck. It was a jug of Old Kaintuck that Raoul grudgingly shared with Abe Lincoln. It seems likely enough that the nickname Old Kaintuck would in time be shortened to "O.K."—easier to say after you've had a few—and come to mean the good stuff in any area of life.
About the Author
Robert Shea is the co-author of the epic fantasy The Illuminatus! Trilogy and author of the two-volume Shike, among other novels. For many years he worked for magazines, and he has been writing novels full-time since 1977. He lives in Glencoe, Illinois.
SHAMAN
A man of potent magic and mystical vision