Photo courtesy of Rock Island Arsenal Museum
Antoine LeClaire, an early area settler, Illinois Gov. John Reynolds and Gen. Winfield Scott, at the table, are depicted in this mural of the signing of Black Hawk Purchase Treaty of 1832. Agreed to in the wake of the Black Hawk War, the sale conveyed Sauk lands in Iowa to the United States.

•October 24, 2018•

By Roger Ruthhart
IP Guest Columnist

Saukenuk was well-known as one of the largest Native American villages in North America, but one of its residents, the warrior Black Hawk, was even better known.
Although born in Saukenuk, which was located where Rock Island stands today, his father Pyesa and mother Summer Rain and other relatives could trace their ancestry back thousands of years. According to their oral traditions, both the Sauk and Meskwaki tribes were living in Canada 12,000 years ago at the time of the last glacial retreat. Many centuries later they were displaced from their Canadian home by the Iroquois.
The Sauk and Meskwaki migrated through New England and New York to the area near Niagara Falls. By 1640, the Meskwaki had settled at the west end of Lake Erie, near present-day Detroit, and the Sauk near Saginaw Bay in Michigan.
In 1701, the decades-long war began between the French and the Meskwaki, which almost led to the tribe’s extinction. Weakened, they joined the Sauk and together they migrated to the Mississippi River, where for nearly 100 years the tribes lived in their own villages and farmed, hunted and traded.     Login or Subscribe to read the rest of this story.