Only a few years before Mark Twain's family settled in northeast Missouri, the area was still home to scattered bands of the Sac and Fox tribe, headed by the great warrior Black Hawk. The tribe used it not only for hunts but also--in earlier times--for assemblies at the council grounds near the modern town of Palmyra.
If Europeans treated Black Hawk well, he left them in peace. If anyone offended him, his response was brutal and swift. His men were renowned for their prowess as hunters and were feared for their merciless treatment of enemies. Until the nineteenth century the tribe directed most of their violence against other tribes who dared to encroach on their hunting grounds. But then the Europeans began to be a problem.
Settlers in Illinois and Missouri frequently clashed with the Indians and, finally, when the chief of the Sac and Fox was in his 60s, a full-scale war broke out. There were atrocities on both sides in what came to be called the Black Hawk War of 1832. At a pioneer village near Galena, Illinois, several children were found hacked to death and their mothers strung up by the feet. A St. Louis paper demanded 100 Indian dead for each settler killed, and an Illinois paper called for a “war of extermination until there shall be no Indian (with his scalp on) left in the north part of Illinois.”
A young Kentuckian who had recently moved to Illinois–Abraham Lincoln–commanded a militia company in the war. Lincoln spent most of his military service in fruitless pursuit of the enemy, and joked later that he wasted a lot of time “in charges upon wild onions” and “bloody experiences with the mosquitoes.”
He did witness, however, the gruesome results of a few skirmishes, including one in which Black Hawk and his men ambushed five settlers and left their scalped bodies rotting in the sun. Lincoln helped to bury the dead and never forgot what he had seen, later recalling that each man “had a round, red spot on top of his head, about as big as a dollar where the redskins had taken his scalp.”
In a few months the fighting ended and proud Black Hawk was taken prisoner by Winnebago warriors hoping to collect reward money. Colonel Zachary Taylor, the future president, placed the chief on a steamboat and sent him to Jefferson Barracks, outside St. Louis, where he was put in chains. The officer who escorted him to St. Louis was Colonel Taylor’s future son-in-law, and Abraham Lincoln’s future enemy, Lieutenant Jefferson Davis.
Only three years after the conclusion of this short but bloody war, Samuel L. Clemens was born in Missouri on land that had once belonged to Black Hawk and his people.
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