Wisconsin Heights: The Last Stand Before the Bad Axe

The field here was the site of the penultimate battle of the Black Hawk War, fought on July twenty-first, eighteen thirty-two, and what happened here would seal the fate of the Sauk people.

Black Hawk had led a band of Sauk and Meskwaki men, women, and children back into Illinois in April of that year in what he called a peaceful attempt to reclaim ancestral lands ceded under a disputed treaty. The United States government and the Illinois militia saw it as an invasion. A three-month chase across Illinois and into what is now Wisconsin followed.

By late July, Black Hawk's band was desperate, trying to reach the Mississippi River and escape to safety west of it. Somewhere between six hundred and seven hundred fifty militia troops under General James Henry and Colonel Henry Dodge caught up with them here on the bluffs above the Wisconsin River. What stood between the militia and the river crossing was a rearguard of roughly fifty to eighty warriors.

Despite being outnumbered more than ten to one, the warriors fought a delaying action through the drizzly afternoon and into the evening. Their goal was not to win but to buy time. The fighting was fierce enough that the militia, though it lost only one man killed and eight wounded, could not force a crossing before dark. The Sauk and Meskwaki civilians used that time to get across the Wisconsin River.

Black Hawk's fighters managed to cross the river that night and the band pushed west toward the Mississippi. They did not escape. Two weeks later, on August first and second, the militia and United States Army caught them at the Bad Axe River and killed the majority of those who remained, including many women and children who were shot while trying to swim across the Mississippi.

Wisconsin Heights was added to the National Register of Historic Places in two thousand two. The battlefield stands as a marker for what the Black Hawk War actually was: not a military campaign but a pursuit that ended in a massacre.