Black Hawk (1767 - October 3, 1838)

Black Hawk, a Sauk chief, lent his name to the frontier war that gave Abraham Lincoln his one experience in soldiering. Born near Rock Island, Illinois, the future war chief grew up during the period of Spanish ascendancy in the Mississippi Valley. Hostile to American fur traders who manned the trading posts at St. Louis when the United States took over that area in 1804, Black Hawk refused to recognize the Treaty of St. Louis in which Sauk and Fox tribes relinquished their claim to all lands east of the Mississippi. During the War of 1812, Black Hawk (whose Indian name was Makataimeshekiakiak) fought for the British under the leadership of the famous Tecumseh. Continuing to brood over the injustice of the Treaty of St. Louis, he attempted, between 1816 and 1829, to enlist. In 1832 he led two hundred warriors and their families back across the Mississippi. Disappointed when no help was offered by neighboring tribes, he was on the verge of seeking a truce precipitating the Black Hawk War. On August 2, 1832, the Indians were overwhelmed at Bad Axe River, Wisconsin, and Black Hawk was taken prisoner. When President Andrew Jackson ordered Black Hawk brought east in 1833, the Sauk chief became a celebrity and attracted great crowds. Black Hawk lived with the Sauk along the Iowa River and later the Des Moines River near Iowaville in what is now southeast Iowa. He died on October 3, 1838, after a two week illness and was buried on the farm of his friend James Jordan on the north bank of the Des Moines River in Davis County, Iowa. In July 1839 his remains were stolen by James Turner who prepared his skeleton for exhibition. Black Hawk’s sons Nashashuk and Gamesett went to Governor Robert Lucas of the Iowa Territory, who used his influence to bring the bones to security in his offices in Burlington. With the permission of Black Hawk's sons, the remains were held by the Burlington Geological and Historical Society. When the Society's building burned down in 1855, Black Hawk’s remains were destroyed. An alternative story is that Lucas passed Black Hawk's bones to a Burlington physician, Enos Lowe, who left them to his partner, a Dr. McLaurens. Eventually, workers found the bones left by McLaurens after he moved to California. They buried the remains in a potter's grave in Aspen Grove Cemetery in Burlington.