Forgottonia's Forgotten Conflict: The Black Hawk War and the Settlement of Central Illinois

By: Harry Bulkeley

What do you think of when you hear the word "Frontier"? The Wild West? Army forts? The Indian Wars? Those may sound like they happened in places far away, but there was a time when Forgottonia was The Wild Frontier.

From the European settlement of this country to the Native Americans who came before them, conflict has existed. Beginning on the East Coast, American history is a continuing saga of pioneers moving west and driving out the people who had been living on the land.

In the 1820s and 30s, that expansion had reached the Illinois River. Farmers were pouring into the state from the south and east, eyeing the rich farm ground between the Illinois and Mississippi rivers. That is what we now call Forgottonia, but back then, it was the land of the Sauk, Meskwaki, and Potawatomi. 

In an all-too-familiar story, a treaty was negotiated in St. Louis in 1804 by future (short-time) president William Henry Harrison. In it, the Indians ceded their land to the United States in exchange for $2200 down plus $1000 per year. The treaty allowed the tribes to keep their land until it was sold by the United States to incoming settlers. 

There were lots of problems, the main one being that the Indians who negotiated the treaty and pocketed the money were not authorized by their tribes to make such a deal. As white people began moving in, the friction got worse.

One prominent leader among them was an Indian man with the familiar name of Keokuk. He felt the treaty had cheated his people but, after seeing the numbers of people coming out here, realized that war would be futile. He became an advocate for a peaceful resolution of the problem by having the tribes move across the Mississippi River into what would become Iowa. Most people followed him, but a few wanted to stay and fight. They were led by a 60-year-old warrior named Black Hawk.

He first led an incursion into Illinois in 1830, hoping to reclaim the Sauk's main settlement near present-day Rock Island. The U.S. Army and the Illinois militia drove them out, but only temporarily. The following year, Black Hawk crossed the river at Yellow Banks (now Oquawka) with a band of 500 Sauk, Meskwaki, and Ho-Chunk. (Some of those names are now on Iowa casinos) The Army sent General Henry Atkinson (another familiar name) to stop the incursion. He took 220 men up the Mississippi to Fort Armstrong (Rock Island) and in a strange coincidence, the Army's boat crossed paths with the Indians as they were coming into the state.

The Indians retreated again but came back in 1832. The "battles" were really just skirmishes, with the overwhelming power of the U.S. Army eventually prevailing. That was not before the ineptitude of the amateur soldiers got so bad that the governor of Illinois allowed the militia to vote to disband. The commanding officer cast the deciding vote to quit. 

Nonetheless, the Americans captured Black Hawk and some other leaders and took them to St. Louis as prisoners. In a strange twist, Black Hawk was released but under the condition that he travel east to New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. He attended dinners and plays and was received as a celebrity. He became a symbol of Indian resistance to encroachment by the white man, but his war marked the end of the Indian Wars east of the Mississippi.

Eventually the land east and west of the rivers was sold to the United States and the tribes moved further west. That left Forgottonia open to settlement and people poured in. Most towns in the area were founded after 1832, when it was considered safe to live here. An old history of Galesburg interviewed a man who remembered coming to Fort Farmington in 1828. He awoke to find an entire Indian village had silently sprung up overnight just outside the fort's walls.

The battles of the Black Hawk War may not be memorable or epic, but many future famous people passed through Forgottonia on their way to stardom. Abraham Lincoln's very brief military career played out here. Another future president, Zachary Taylor, was here. The Confederate president Jefferson Davis was one of the guards who took Black Hawk down the river to St. Louis. The other one was Robert Anderson, who would be the commander at Fort Sumter when Davis ordered it attacked 30 years later. General Winfield Scott commanded troops in the field before he got so fat that he had to be lifted onto his horse. One of Alexander Hamilton's sons was in the Army as well.

The legality of the treaties and other deals can be debated, but regardless of the niceties, with the threat over, settlers poured into the land between the rivers and planted the seeds that grew into Forgottonia.