A retelling of the Black Hawk War that brings into focus the forces struggling for control over the American frontier. Until 1822, the Sauk Nation occupied one of North America's largest and most prosperous Indian settlements, the envy of white Americans who had already begun to encroach upon the rich Indian land. When the inevitable conflicts turned violent, the Sauks were forced into exile, banished forever from the east side of the Mississippi River. Black Hawk and his followers rose up in the spring of 1832 and defiantly crossed the Mississippi from Iowa to Illinois to reclaim their ancestral home. Though the war lasted only three months, no other violent encounter between white America and native peoples embodies so clearly the essence of the Republic's inner conflict between its belief in freedom and human rights and its insatiable appetite for new territory.--From publisher description.

In 1832, facing white expansion, the Sauk warrior Black Hawk attempted to forge a pan-Indian alliance to preserve the homelands of the confederated Sauk and Fox tribes on the eastern bank of the Mississippi. Here, Patrick J. Jung re-examines the causes, course, and consequences of the ensuing war with the United States, a conflict that decimated Black Hawk's band. Correcting mistakes that plagued previous histories, and drawing on recent ethnohistorical interpretations, Jung shows that the outcome can be understood only by discussing the complexity of intertribal rivalry, military ineptitude, and racial dynamics.

Historians have traditionally viewed the Creek War of 1836 as a minor police action centered on rounding up the Creek Indians for removal to Indian Territory. Using extensive archival research, John T. Ellisor demonstrates that in fact the Second Creek War was neither brief nor small. Indeed, armed conflict continued long after peace was declared and the majority of Creeks had been sent west. Ellisor’s study also broadly illuminates southern society just before the Indian removals, a time when many blacks, whites, and Natives lived in close proximity in the Old Southwest. In the Creek country, also called New Alabama, these ethnic groups began to develop a pluralistic society. When the 1830s cotton boom placed a premium on Creek land, however, dispossession of the Natives became an economic priority. Dispossessed and impoverished, some Creeks rose in armed revolt both to resist removal west and to drive the oppressors from their ancient homeland. Yet the resulting Second Creek War that raged over three states was fueled both by Native determination and by economic competition and was intensified not least by the massive government-sponsored land grab that constituted Indian removal. Because these circumstances also created fissures throughout southern society, both whites and blacks found it in their best interests to help the Creek insurgents. This first book-length examination of the Second Creek War shows how interethnic collusion and conflict characterized southern society during the 1830s.

Sauk Indian chief Black Hawk tells his life story from his childhood to fighting the Black Hawk War and finally living in peace with the white man.