“THEY POISON THE HEART”

“THEY POISON THE HEART”

by Michelle Brooke Deadmond

(an excerpt)

This is how it was, the mud and the rivers running red with the blood of the innocents, their many death screams filling the air. This is what it had come to, but it all needn’t have been.

In 1832, after being cheated repeatedly on promised land deals and erroneous settlements, Black Sparrow Hawk led the remainder of his people—by now starving and sick, at least half of them women and children—out of Iowa and crossed the Mississippi River one last time back into the Illinois prairie lands. Lands which had been taken unjustly, the land of his ancestors. Together, these dying bedraggled few would be hunted relentlessly and yet would continue to elude capture for several months, until meeting their tragic end. Before that, came the

~~ Prelude ~~

The scandalous treaty in question was struck in the year 1804 and dictated that the Sauk American Indian tribe vacate their land when eventually it sold, which it did a quarter of a century later in 1829. One of the stipulations concerning their move was that the tribe be given enough maize to get them through that first winter, but the government did not honor its promises; the Indians were forced to comply, to leave their Illinois side and be pushed westward across the river into those unorganized territories known today as Iowa, having little say against the overwhelming military might shown. But an old Sauk warrior called Ma-ka-tai-me-she-kia-kiak (translated as “Be a large black hawk”) disputed the validity of the original treaty, saying the full tribal councils had not been consulted in 1804, would in fact have never given their authorization for such a ridiculously one-sided deal. A decorated veteran of the War of 1812, in which he fought alongside the British in their campaigns against the invading white Americans, Black Hawk as he was simply known was not a hereditary tribal leader but rather an appointed war chief. Angered by the loss of his birthplace, met with famine and the hostile Sioux to the west and believing the entire land-ceding treaty was fraudulent to begin with, the aging Indian warrior captained a band of around 1,200 followers back over to the east side of the Mississippi River in the spring of 1831—to reclaim their native heritage.

What they found was the Illinois heartland in ruins, former fields of corn trampled by cattle, the plains fenced off by settlers. All was lost, everything they’d ever known, the sacred places wherein their hearts still resided. Gone.

This untimely invasion caused a panic among the squatters there, and the Indians were driven back across the river’s currents without real incident and with very little bloodshed to speak of. Within four short months, however, the Sauk band and their families were back, in desperate hopes of reoccupying their old lands. They were said to have killed a few dozen Menominee Indians this time, their sworn hereditary enemy, and panic-stricken white settlers began imploring the government for help. Again, the dogged band was persuaded west without much bloodshed. But in April of 1832, faced with an aching starvation in their bellies and led by 65-year-old Chief Black Hawk, the Sauk Indians crossed the Mississippi once more and moved into their ancient tribal territories along the Rock River. The Governor of Illinois saw these entries into the state as a military invasion—even though it was widely noted that no American Indian tribe in history had ever gone on the warpath taking their women, children, and elders along with them.

The band of Sauk, now down to well under a thousand, made camp overnight at what is present-day Blackwater Valley. Their mood was upbeat and content as they talked long into the night and shared tales of former glory around the fires. At sunrise they struck out north and headed upriver, following the gentle promise of the haunted, shimmering Rock. Unbeknownst to them, their days were irrevocably numbered by this point, for an order of ‘extermination’ had already been sent from the Governor’s office to the Secretary of War . . .