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Black Hawk War Refugee Encampments
Source

A photograph of the replica of Fort Dearborn from the 1933 World’s Fair. The refugee encampments in the Blackhawk War were just outside of the fort.

During the summer of 1832, Sauk leader Black Hawk and his community of mostly women and children returned to their ancestral homeland in northern Illinois from Iowa Indian Territory. Having faced severe oppression and the destruction of their crops in Iowa, Black Hawk and his followers returned home to plant corn. Neshnabé peoples were split over whether to support Black Hawk’s defiance of U.S. removal orders. Some housed and sheltered his people; others saw him as a threat to their already tenuous relationship with the Americans, and worried that an alliance with him would lead to their forced removal without compensation. Over the course of the summer, the fear and resentment already present among settlers since the War of 1812 built to a fever pitch. The State of Illinois formed a militia to hunt Black Hawk joined by settlers like Abraham Lincoln but also Neshnabé people like Billy Caldwell and Alexander Robinson. In the end, General Winfield Scott brought American troops from Virginia to hunt Black Hawk. His troops pursued the band and routed them back to the Mississippi River where they were massacred while trying to flee. This conflict has come to be known as the Black Hawk War.

During the months of conflict, Neshnabé people and settlers alike fled to Chicago in fear of being caught up in the conflict. Others were ordered to leave their homes and go to the refugee camp to avoid being identified as “hostile Indians” and killed. Many of these refugees camped as close as possible to Fort Dearborn as they waited for the US military to arrive. When Winfield Scott’s troops arrived in July, they brought cholera to Chicago for the first time, a water-born disease that would kill thousands of Chicagoans over the course of the 1800s. The refugees camping outside of Fort Dearborn faced danger from both war and disease.

Though the events of the Black Hawk War occurred outside Chicago, the war had a significant impact on the subsequent removal of Neshnabé people and the founding of Chicago. American leaders used the violence of the war as justification for why all Native people must be removed and threatened that if Neshnabé people did not negotiate treaties for removal, they could face violence. In the wake of the recent massacre of Black Hawk’s community, Native leaders knew these threats to be sincere.

There is a duplicate point for this site on the Downtown Walking Tour

Sources:

Ann Durkin Keating, Rising Up From Indian Country: The Battle of Fort Dearborn and the Birth of Chicago. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 227. Ann Durkin Keating and Kathleen Brosnon. “Cholera and the Evolution of Early Chicago." In eds. William C. Barnett, Kathleen A. Brosnan, Ann Durkin Keating. City of Lake and Prairie : Chicago's Environmental History (Pittsburgh, Pa.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020).

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Re-Thinking Chicago's Founding icon Re-Thinking Chicago's Founding

Mainstream narratives of Chicago’s founding have primarily featured European and American settlers. But stories of René-Robert Cavelier Sieur de La Salle, Jacques Marquette, and Louis Jolliet as visionary adventurers and John Kinzie and Jean Baptiste Point Du Sable as founding settlers have concealed a much more complicated reality. In fact, Indigenous people lived on the land now called Chicago a long time before Europeans set foot here, and many remain here today. Indigenous people used this area for seasonal and more permanent village sites, to gather food sources like wild rice and wild onions (or ramps), and to travel to other parts of the larger Great Lakes and Mississippi River networks. The first European settlers entered into an already existing network of trade and familial relationships created before their arrival. How does this change the way we understand the founding of Chicago as a city? This City Story re-centers Indigenous people to encourage a re-thinking of the familiar “founding” myths. It casts aside unnecessary superlatives like “first” settlers and “last” Native peoples in order to understand the more complicated origins of Chicago. Sources <br> Alfred Theodore Andreas, *History of Chicago: From the Earliest Period to the Present Time* (Chicago: A. T. Andreas, 1884)<br> Ann Durkin Keating, *Rising up from Indian Country: The Battle of Fort Dearborn and the Birth of Chicago* (Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 2012)<br> Juliette Kinzie, *Wau-Bun, the “Early Day” in the North-West* (New York: Derby & Jackson, 1856) <br> Jean M. O'Brien, *Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians Out of Existence in New England* (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010) <br> Terry Straus, ed., *Indians of the Chicago Area* (Chicago, Ill: NAES College, 1990).