Small Wonders--Battle of Pecatonica

There’s some debate about motive—why Chief Blackhawk left Iowa in 1832 and crossed the mighty Mississippi. What he claimed was that he and his band were robbed of their homeland in a treaty. All he ever wanted was to return to the land where his ancestors were buried.

That claim may have been deceptive. Some historians believe he wanted to build a Native Confederacy. More and more white faces were showing up on land that once belonged to the Natives who trapped and hunted throughout the lush woodlands along the Rock, the Pecatonica, and the mighty Mississip.

He his people left Iowa that year for peaceful purposes, but the crowd that formed around him was a who’s who of local tribes—his own Sauks, some Fox and Kickapoo and Potawatomi, a few Ho-Chunks, and even some angry Winnebagos.

Blackhawk’s band swelled to a thousand. Their elderly came along, as well as the women and children, more than enough warm bodies to make white settlers scared silly.

Then came Stillman’s Run, a battle named that way not because Mr. Stillman ran the table in the fight, but because he and 275 Illinois militia high-tailed it when they mistook a handful of Blackhawk’s warriors for an entire army. When Stillman ran, white folks took a beating psychologically as well as militarily.

There’s a little county park in Lafayette County, Wisconsin, not all that far from Dubuque, a quiet place where the road through hardwoods leads down to a little oxbow lake—water still as glass. The road needs some work. Picnic tables sit out in open spaces and camping sites in the trees are clearly marked—you’re on your honor to pay.

It’s a county park so funding, I suppose, is always a question. No water slides. No concession stands. The place probably doesn’t get much business—I may be wrong.

If you want to camp, a hand-painted sign says you can’t take the open spot around the monument. You know--show some respect because the monument proclaims what happened right there where you’re standing.

After Stillman’s Run, separate bands of Blackhawks’ United Nations of Natives roamed hither and yon throughout the region, raising cane, scaring the wits out of the miners and their families. After all, a whole militia had turned and run once they saw the savages.

So right there at the monument a newly constituted militia went through that deathly still water after some Kickapoo members of Blackhawk’s rebels. They marched into the woods on the other side where the warriors hid behind trees. Vicious hand to hand combat went on right there, the militia killing every last one of the rebels. 

It was the kind of win white people needed after the Stillman embarrassment, so historians say what happened at the Battle of Pecatonica was a turning point in Blackhawk’s War—just a few months would pass before those few of his people who stayed alive crossed back into to Iowa, following the terms of the treaty he hated.

Blackhawk led an insurgency that failed. That’s what the monument says—the one you can’t camp beside. It was set there by the Daughters of the American Revolution in 1922, almost a century ago. It tells the whole story, maybe fifty feet—no more—from the ox-bow, right there where that bloody fighting occurred.

I’m not sure why the DAR put quotes around this line, but they’re there: “The annals of Indian warfare offer no parallel to this battle,” it says, a quote. That line is clearly overstated. To me, the quotes make no sense. But then, the DAR was never a patriotic, not a literary organization.

There’s more. “Of the twenty-one soldiers engaged, three were mortally and one seriously wounded,” it proclaims. Then, “The seventeen Indians were slain”—which is to say, all of them.

Finally, this: “Thus was our land made safe for settlement.”

Couldn’t be more true. That’s the way the DAR saw it in 1922, when the monument was erected right there at the edge of the oxbow.

But it’s clear that that monument’s plaque was once unmistakably defaced. The our in “Thus was our land made safe for settlement is blackened. It looks to me as if someone once tried to paint that word out, to delete it; it is, afterall, still a little more than shadowy. You can’t help but see it, the only word on the sacred plaque that’s blackened.

That helps. Somehow that blackened our helps tell the story.