The Black Hawk War and the Opening of Iowa

In the spring of eighteen thirty-two, a Sauk leader named Black Hawk led a band of roughly one thousand men, women, and children back across the Mississippi River into Illinois. He believed, or claimed to believe, a British alliance would support him. He was wrong. What followed was a four-month campaign that the United States Army and Illinois militia fought with overwhelming force, ending in August at the Bad Axe River in what is now Wisconsin, where soldiers and volunteers fired on Sauk and Meskwaki people trying to cross to safety. Several hundred were killed in the water or on the bank. Black Hawk himself was captured shortly after, taken east, and paraded through Eastern cities as a trophy of conquest.

The aftermath mattered far more to Iowa than the fighting itself. The Black Hawk Purchase of eighteen thirty-two, named with grim irony for the man who had just been defeated, opened a fifty-mile strip of land along the Mississippi's west bank for American settlement. Within two years, settlers were pouring in. Within a decade, virtually every Indigenous nation had been removed from what would become Iowa through a cascading series of treaties, most signed under duress and several later violated by the federal government.

There is one extraordinary exception to this story of removal. The Meskwaki did not go quietly, and they did not stay gone. After being relocated to Kansas in the eighteen forties, a portion of the community returned to Iowa and in eighteen fifty-six Iowa passed a law permitting them to return and buy land, which they did the following year. In eighteen fifty-seven, using money earned and pooled across the community, they bought eighty acres along the Iowa River near what is now Tama, doing something no Native nation in the United States had done before: purchasing their own homeland outright. That settlement grew. Today it covers roughly eight thousand five hundred acres and remains a sovereign Meskwaki homeland inside Iowa, not a reservation granted by the federal government, but land the Meskwaki own outright, bought back acre by acre from the state that had taken it.