This story is told in the words of a tragic figure in American
history - a hook-nosed, hollow-cheeked old Sauk warrior who lived
under four flags while the Mississippi Valley was being wrested
from his people.The author is Black Hawk himself - once pursued by
an army whose members included Captain Abraham Lincoln and
Lieutenant Jefferson Davis. Perhaps no Indian ever saw so much of
American expansion or fought harder to prevent that expansion from
driving his people to exile and death.He knew Zebulon Pike, William
Clark, Henry Schoolcraft, George Catlin, Winfield Scott, and such
figures in American government as President Andrew Jackson and
Secretary of State Lewis Cass. He knew Chicago when it was a
cluster of log houses around a fort, and he was in St. Louis the
day the American flag went up and the French flag came down.He saw
crowds gather to cheer him in Philadelphia, Baltimore, and New York
- and to stone the driver of his carriage in Albany - during a
fantastic tour sponsored by the government.And at last he dies in
1838, bitter in the knowledge that he had led men, women, and
children of his tribe to slaughter on the banks of the
Mississippi.After his capture at the end of the Black Hawk War, he
was imprisoned for a time and then released to live in the
territory that is now Iowa. He dictated his autobiography to a
government interpreter, Antoine LeClaire, and the story was put
into written form by J. B. Patterson, a young Illinois
newspaperman. Since its first appearance in 1833, the autobiography
has become known as an American classic.
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