Black Hawk statue is seen from the west side of the Rock River on Wednesday, July 16, 2014, at Lowden State Park in Oregon. MAX GERSH/RRSTAR.COM

•August 29, 2018•

By Chuck Sweeny
Of the Rockford Register Star

First, let’s get his name straight. It was Ma-ka-tai-me-she-kia-kiak. In English, he was Black Hawk, war chief of the Sac and Fox tribe who lived most of his life in the Rock River Valley in northern Illinois.
Black Hawk was born in 1767 in Saukenuk, a Sac and Fox village on the Rock River in northwestern Illinois. He built his reputation as a war fighter leading his tribe in skirmishes against the Osage tribe.
In the late 1700s and early 1800s, a new enemy appeared — Americans, relentlessly moving west from the Eastern states, claiming the land for themselves as they went, building homes and villages and fencing off the fields.
The U.S. Army and state militias accompanied the settlers and protected them against the people who had been there for thousands of years. Treaty after treaty was made between the native people and the U.S. government, and they were regularly broken.
One of those documents was the Treaty of 1804, signed in St. Louis by representatives of the Sac and Fox tribe and U.S. officials. Black Hawk, who had not been at the signing, thought the treaty merely ceded some of the tribe’s ancestral hunting grounds to the American settlers.     Login or Subscribe to read the rest of this story.