Black Hawk State Historic Site: Saukenuk, the Largest Village

On this bluff above the Rock River sat Saukenuk, once the largest Native American settlement in North America. The Sauk and Meskwaki tribes were living in the village here by about seventeen fifty, and at its peak it held an estimated six to seven thousand people. Saukenuk was the birthplace of Black Hawk, the Sauk war chief who resisted American expansion through the War of eighteen twelve and the Black Hawk War of eighteen thirty-two.

The site is now Black Hawk State Historic Site, preserved as park land since nineteen twenty-seven. The John Hauberg Museum of Native American Life, on the grounds, interprets four seasons of Sauk and Meskwaki lifeways through artifacts and exhibits. The Rock River below has flowed past this bluff for twelve thousand years of human occupation.