Battle of Wisconsin Heights
Near Baraboo, Wisconsin
The bluffs above the Wisconsin River just west of here were the site of one of the last desperate stands of the Black Hawk War, a conflict that effectively ended Native American resistance to American settlement in the Great Lakes region.
The Black Hawk War of eighteen thirty-two began in April when a Sauk leader named Black Hawk led roughly one thousand men, women, and children back across the Mississippi River into Illinois, land the Sauk had ceded in an eighteen oh four treaty that many Sauk disputed as fraudulent. Black Hawk expected British support and hoped for allied tribes to join his cause. Neither came. What followed was a summer of skirmishes and pursuit as American militia and federal troops chased the band northward into Wisconsin.
By July twenty-first, eighteen thirty-two, the band had been reduced by disease, starvation, and combat. Black Hawk had perhaps one hundred warriors left and roughly five hundred civilians, including the aged and children, desperately trying to reach the Mississippi and cross back to safety in Iowa. Seven hundred fifty Illinois and Wisconsin militiamen under General James Henry and Colonel Henry Dodge caught up to the band's rearguard on the heights above the Wisconsin River, in what is now Dane County.
In a steady rain that July afternoon, Black Hawk, who was sixty-five years old, personally led a fighting withdrawal. His warriors volleyed from the ravines below the bluffs, keeping the militia off-balance and on the defensive as the main body of civilians crossed or descended the Wisconsin River. When darkness and rain ended the fighting, approximately sixty-seven of Black Hawk's remaining warriors were dead. But roughly five hundred civilians had escaped.
That escape was temporary. Twelve days later, the band was overtaken at the mouth of the Bad Axe River while trying to cross the Mississippi. American troops and Sioux warriors killed perhaps two hundred fifty people, many of them women and children in the water. The Black Hawk War ended there, and with it the last sustained resistance east of the Mississippi.
