Shaman, Robert Shea [new ebook reader .txt] 📗

pale eyes that had driven his people from their homes. Whence, too, had come his father and one of his grandfathers.

The last Sauk shaman this side of the Great River held up his knife so the sun glinted from it.

"I will defend this land!" he shouted.

As long as he lived, he would give his blood to this earth.

[517]

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'[518] 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.

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[519] 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.

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