The Black Hawk War: The Last War East of the Mississippi
By Daniel R. Whitcomb
Length4h 5m
About this audiobook
American treaty makers spent forty years hunting for "the chief" of the Sauk and never found him. A Sauk civil chief could only persuade, a war leader could lead only the young men who chose to follow, and the fields, the lodges and the stored corn belonged to the women. So when a few Sauk and Meskwaki men signed away the Rock River country at St. Louis in 1804, many at Saukenuk, a town of some fourteen hundred people where the Rock meets the Mississippi, never accepted that they had the right.
By 1831 settlers were plowing Saukenuk's fields and its people had been forced across the river. In April 1832 the war leader Black Hawk brought more than a thousand of them, families as much as fighters, back into Illinois. At Stillman's Run, militia fired on men he sent under a white flag, and a standoff became a war. For four months the band was chased up the Rock River and across Wisconsin, until soldiers and a steamboat caught them where the Bad Axe meets the Mississippi, trying to get across.
Black Hawk's rivalry with Keokuk runs through the book, which carries on past the killing to the surrender, the tour of eastern cities that turned a prisoner into a celebrity, the men in the ranks who would one day be president, and the removal that took the Sauk to Kansas. Black Hawk said his people had crossed back to plant corn. By the end of that summer, hundreds of them were dead.
Audiobook details
GenreHistory
Length4 hrs 5 mins
Narrated byListen with 1,000+ voices
FormateBook with Audio
Publish dateSep 18, 2026
LanguageEnglish
Table of contents
1Chapter 1: The River and the Corn
2Chapter 2: A Treaty Nobody Signed
3Chapter 3: Two Chiefs, One People
4Chapter 4: The Crossing
5Chapter 5: Stillman's Run
Show all chaptersShow less
6Chapter 6: Wisconsin Heights
7Chapter 7: Bad Axe
8Chapter 8: The Surrender and the Tour
9Chapter 9: The Men Who Would Be President
10Chapter 10: The Road to Kansas
11Chapter 11: The War That Wasn't a War
12Chapter 12: The River Remembers
13About the Author
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