The Cole Trilogy: The Physician, Shaman, and Matters of Choice (112 page)

A few nights later, Black Hawk led a few men on horseback back to Rock Island. They filled sacks with corn from the fields and broke into a storehouse, taking squashes and pumpkins. Through the terrible winter, a debate raged. Keokuk, the chief, argued that Black Hawk’s action would bring the white armies. The new village wasn’t Sauk-e-nuk, but it could be a good place to live, he argued, and the presence of
mookamonik
across the river meant a market for the furs of Sauk trappers.

Black Hawk said whiteskins would push the Sauks as far as possible and then destroy them. The only choice was to fight. The only hope for all red men was to forget tribal enmities and join together from Canada to Mexico, with the help of the English Father, against the greater enemy, the American.

The Sauks argued at length. By spring most of the People had decided to stay with Keokuk west of the wide river. Only 368 men and their families linked their fate with Black Hawk. Among them was Green Buffalo.

Canoes were laden. Black Hawk, the Prophet, and Neosho, a Sauk medicine man, set out in the lead canoe, then the others pushed off, paddling hard against the mighty current of
Masesibowi
. Black Hawk wanted no destruction or killing unless his force was attacked. As they moved downstream, when they approached a
mookamon
settlement he ordered his people to beat their drums and sing. With women, children, and the old, he had nearly thirteen hundred voices, and settlers fled the terrible sound. In a few settlements they collected food, but they had many mouths to feed and no time to hunt or fish.

Black Hawk had sent runners to Canada to ask the British for help, and to a dozen tribes. The messengers brought back bad news. It wasn’t surprising that old enemies like the Sioux and Chippewa and Osage wouldn’t join with the Sauks against the whiteskins, but neither would their brother nation the Mesquakies, or any other friendly nation. Worse, their British Father sent the Sauks only words of encouragement and wishes for good fortune in war.

Remembering the cannon on warships, Black Hawk took his people off the river, beaching their canoes on the eastern bank from which they had been exiled. Since each scrap of food was precious, everyone became a bearer, even squaws who were big with child, like Union-of-Rivers. They skirted
Rock Island and went up the Rocky River to meet with Potawatomi from whom they hoped to lease land on which to grow a corn crop. It was from the Potawatomi that Black Hawk heard that the Father in Washington had sold the Sauk territory to white investors. The townsite of Sauk-e-nuk and nearly all their fields had been bought by George Davenport, the trader who, pretending he was their friend, had urged them to abandon the land.

Black Hawk ordered a dog feast, for he knew the People needed the help of the
manitous
. The Prophet oversaw the strangling of the dogs, the cleansing and purification of the meat. While it was stewing, Black Hawk set his medicine bags before his men. “Braves and warriors,” he said, “Sauk-e-nuk is no more. Our lands are stolen. White-skinned soldiers have burned our
hedonoso-tes
. They have torn down the fences of our fields. They have plowed up our Place of the Dead and planted corn among our sacred bones. These are the medicine bags of our father, Muk-ataquet, who was the beginning of the Sauk nation. They were handed down to the great war chief of our nation, Na-namakee, who was at war with all the nations of the lakes and all the nations of the plains, and was never disgraced. I expect you all to protect them.”

The warriors ate the sacred flesh and were given courage and strength. It was necessary, for Black Hawk knew the Long Knives would be moving against them. Perhaps it was the
manitous
who allowed Union-of-Rivers to drop her baby at this encampment rather than along the trail. It was a man-child and did as much for the warriors’ spirits as the dog feast, because Green Buffalo named his son Wato-kimita, He-Who-Owns-Land.

Spurred by public hysteria over rumors that Black Hawk and the Sauks were on the warpath, Governor Reynolds of Illinois called for one thousand mounted volunteers. More than twice that number of would-be Indian fighters came forward, and 1,935 untrained men were mustered into military service. They were assembled at Beardstown, merged with 342 regular militiamen, and quickly formed into four regiments and two battalions of scouts. Samuel Whiteside of St. Clair County was declared a brigadier general and placed in command.

Reports from settlers indicated where Black Hawk was, and Whiteside moved his brigade out. It had been an unusually wet spring and they had to swim even the smaller creeks, while ordinary sloughs became bayous through which they floundered. It took them five days of hard travel through trailless country to reach Oquawka, where supplies should have been waiting. But the army had blundered; there were no supplies, and the men long since
had eaten what they had carried in their saddlebags. Undisciplined and cantankerous, they berated their officers like the civilians they actually were, demanding that they be fed. Whiteside sent a dispatch to General Henry Atkinson at Fort Armstrong, and at once Atkinson ordered the steamer
Chieftain
downstream with a cargo of food. Whiteside sent the two battalions of regular militia forward, while for almost a week the main body of volunteers filled their bellies and rested.

They never lost the awareness that they were in a strange and ominous environment. On a mild May morning the bulk of the force, some sixteen hundred mounted men, burned Prophetstown, White Cloud’s deserted village. Having done so, they were inexplicably nervous and gradually became convinced that avenging Indians were behind every hill. Soon nervousness became fear, and terror produced a rout. Abandoning equipment, weapons, supplies, and ammunition, they fled for their lives before a nonexistent enemy, crashing through grasslands, brush, and forest, not stopping until, singly and in small groups, they made their shamefaced way into the settlement of Dixon, ten miles from the place where they had started to run.

The first actual contact took place not long after. Black Hawk and about forty braves were on their way to meet with some Potawatomi from whom they were trying to rent a cornfield. They had made camp on the banks of the Rock River when a runner told them a large force of Long Knives was moving in their direction. At once Black Hawk fixed a white flag to a pole and sent three unarmed Sauks to carry it to the whites and request a meeting between Black Hawk and their commander. Behind them he sent five Sauks on horseback to function as observers.

The troops were inexperienced Indian fighters, terrified at the sight of Sauks. They quickly seized the three men with the truce flag and made them prisoners, and then set out after the five observers, two of whom were overtaken and killed. The other three made it back to their camp, pursued by the militia. When the white soldiers arrived, they were attacked by about thirty-five braves led by a coldly furious Black Hawk, who was willing to die a good death to avenge the whiteskins’ treachery. The soldiers in the vanguard of the cavalry had no idea that the Indians didn’t have a vast army of warriors behind them. They took one glance at the charging Sauks and turned their ponies and fled.

Nothing is so infectious as panic in battle, and within minutes all was chaos within the militia. In the confusion, two of the three Sauks who had been captured with the flag of truce escaped. The third was shot and killed.
The 275 armed and mounted militiamen were gripped by terror and fled as hysterically as had the main body of volunteers, but this time their peril wasn’t imaginary. Black Hawk’s few dozen warriors stampeded them, harried the stragglers, and came away with eleven scalps. Some of the 264 retreating whites didn’t stop their withdrawal until they reached their homes, but most of the soldiers finally straggled into the town of Dixon.

For the rest of her life the girl who was then called Two Skies would remember the joy following the battle. A child felt the hope. News of the victory sped through the red-skinned world, and at once ninety-two Winnebago came to join them. Black Hawk strode about wearing a ruffled white shirt, a leather-bound law book under his arm—both found in a saddlebag abandoned by a fleeing officer. His oratory waxed. They had shown that the
mookamonik
could be defeated, he said, and now the other tribes would send warriors to form the alliance that was his dream.

But the days passed, and no other warriors came. Food dwindled and hunting was bad. Finally Black Hawk sent the Winnebago in one direction and he led the People in another. Against his orders, the Winnebago struck unprotected white homesteads and took scalps, including that of St. Vrain, the Indian agent. Two days in a row the sky turned green-black and the
manitou
Shagwa shook air and earth. Wabokieshiek warned Black Hawk never to travel without sending scouts deep ahead, and Two Skies’ father muttered heavily that it didn’t take a prophet to know bad things were going to happen.

Governor Reynolds was furious. His shame over what had happened to his militia was shared by the populace of every border state. The depredations of the Winnebago were magnified and blamed on Black Hawk. Fresh volunteers poured in, drawn by a rumor that a bounty set by the Illinois legislature in 1814 was still in force—fifty dollars to be paid for every male Indian killed or every squaw or red-skinned child captured. Reynolds had no trouble swearing in three thousand more men. Two thousand nervous soldiers already were camped in forts along the Mississippi, under the command of General Henry Atkinson, Colonel Zachary Taylor second in command. Two companies of infantry were moved into Illinois from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and an army of one thousand regular soldiers was transferred from eastern posts under the command of General Winfield Scott. These troops were afflicted with cholera while steamboats carried them across
the Great Lakes, but even without them, an enormous force, hungry for racial revenge and restored honor, had been set into motion.

For the girl Two Skies the world became small. Always it had seemed enormous during the leisurely journey between the Sauks’ winter camp in Missouri and their summer village on the Rocky River. But now wherever her people turned there were white scouts and there was firing and screaming before they could break away. They took a few scalps and lost a few braves. They were fortunate not to encounter a main body of white-skinned troops. Black Hawk feinted and twisted in his tracks, laying false trails in an attempt to elude the soldiers, but most of his followers were women and children, and it was hard to conceal the movements of so many.

They quickly became fewer. Old people died, and some children. Two Skies’ infant brother grew small-faced and large-eyed. Their mother’s milk didn’t dry up, but the flow slackened and turned thin, so there was never enough to satisfy the child. Two Skies carried her brother most of the time.

Very soon, Black Hawk stopped speaking about driving away the whiteskins. Now he talked of escaping into the far north from which the Sauks had come hundreds of years before. But as the moons passed, many of his followers didn’t have enough faith to stay with him. Lodge by lodge left the Sauk party, slipping off by themselves. Small groups probably wouldn’t survive, but most had made up their minds that the
manitous
weren’t with Black Hawk.

Green Buffalo remained faithful, despite the fact that four moons after they had left Keokuk’s Sauks, Black Hawk’s party had dwindled to a few hundred people trying to keep alive by eating roots and tree bark. They returned to
Masesibowi
, as always taking comfort from the great river. The steamboat
Warrior
came upon most of the Sauks in the shallows at the mouth of the Ouisconsin River, trying to catch fish. As the boat moved toward them, Black Hawk saw the six-pound gun on the bow and knew they could fight no longer. His men waved a white flag, but the boat drew near and a Winnebago mercenary on the deck shouted in their language,
“Run and hide, the whites are going to shoot!”

They had started to splash shoreward, screaming, when the cannon let go canister point-blank, followed by a heavy fire of musketry. Twenty-three Sauks were killed. The others made it into the woods, some of them dragging or carrying the wounded.

That night they talked among themselves. Black Hawk and the Prophet
decided to go to the country of the Chippewa to see if they could live there. Three lodges of people said they would go with them, but the others, including Green Buffalo, had no faith that the Chippewa would give the Sauks cornfields when other tribes wouldn’t, and they determined to rejoin Keokuk’s Sauks. In the morning they said good-bye to the few who were going to the Chippewa, and they started south, toward home.

The steamboat
Warrior
tracked the Indians by following the flocks of carrion crows and vultures downstream. Wherever the Sauks went now, the dead were simply abandoned. Some were old people and children, some were those wounded in the previous attack. When the boat stopped to examine bodies, always the ears and the scalps were taken. It didn’t matter if the patch of dark hair came from a child or the red ear was a woman’s; they would be proudly carried back to small towns as evidence that their owners were Indian fighters.

Those Sauks still alive left
Masesibowi
and moved inland, only to meet the army’s Winnebago hirelings. Behind the Winnebago, lines of soldiers fixed the bayonets that led the Indians to call them Long Knives. As the whites charged, a hoarse animal cry rose from them, deeper than a war whoop but just as savage. They were so many, so intent on killing in order to regain something they believed they had lost. The Sauks could do nothing but fall back, firing. When they reached
Masesibowi
again they tried to fight but were quickly driven into the river. Two Skies was standing next to her mother in waist-deep water when a lead ball tore through Union-of-Rivers’ lower jaw. She dropped into the water facedown. Two Skies had to turn her mother onto her back while holding the infant He-Who-Owns-Land. She managed to do so only with the greatest difficulty; then she understood that Union-of-Rivers was dead. She couldn’t see her father or her sister. The world was gunfire and screams, and when the Sauks waded through the water to a little willow island, she went with them.