Black Hawk War - Aftermath - Treaties and Removals

Treaties and Removals

The Black Hawk War marked the end of Native armed resistance to U.S. expansion in the Old Northwest until the 1862 Dakota War. The war provided an opportunity for American officials such as Andrew Jackson, Lewis Cass, and John Reynolds to compel Native American tribes to sell their lands east of the Mississippi River and move to the West, a policy known as Indian removal. Officials conducted a number of treaties after the war to purchase the remaining Native American land claims in the Old Northwest. The Dakotas and Menominees, who won approval from American officials for their role in the war, largely avoided postwar removal pressure until later decades.

After the war, American officials learned that some Ho-Chunks had aided Black Hawk more than had been previously known. Eight Ho-Chunks were briefly imprisoned at Fort Winnebago for their role in the war, but charges against them were eventually dropped due to a lack of witnesses. In September 1832, General Scott and Governor Reynolds conducted a treaty with the Ho-Chunks at Rock Island. The Ho-Chunks ceded all their land south of the Wisconsin River in exchange for a forty-mile strip of land in Iowa and annual payments of $10,000 for twenty-seven years. The land in Iowa was known as the "Neutral Ground" because it had been designated in 1830 as a buffer zone between the Dakotas and their enemies to the south, the Sauks and Meskwakis. Scott hoped that the settlement of the Ho-Chunks in the Neutral Ground would help keep the peace. Ho-Chunks remaining in Wisconsin were pressured to sign a removal treaty in 1837, even though leaders such as Waukon Decorah had been U.S. allies during the Black Hawk War. General Atkinson was assigned to use the army to forcibly relocate those Ho-Chunks who refused to move to Iowa.

Following the September 1832 treaty with the Ho-Chunks, Scott and Reynolds conducted another with the Sauks and Meskwakis, with Keokuk and Wapello serving as the primary representatives of their tribes. Scott told the assembled chiefs that "if a particular part of a nation goes out of their country, and makes war, the whole nation is responsible". The tribes sold about 6 million acres (24,000 km²) of land in eastern Iowa to the United States for payments of $20,000 per year for thirty years, among other provisions. Keokuk was granted a reservation within the cession and recognized by the Americans as the primary chief of the Sauks and Meskwakis. The tribes sold the reservation to the United States in 1836, and additional land in Iowa the following year. Their last lands in Iowa were sold in 1842, and most of the Natives moved to a reservation in Kansas.

Thanks to the decision of Potawatomi leaders to aid the U.S. during the war, American officials did not seize tribal land as war reparations. Instead, only three individuals accused of leading the Indian Creek massacre were tried in court; they were acquitted. Nevertheless, the drive to purchase Potawatomi land west of the Mississippi began in October 1832, when commissioners in Indiana bought a large amount of Potawatomi land, even though not all Potawatomi bands were represented at the treaty. The tribe was compelled to sell their remaining land west of the Mississippi in a treaty held in Chicago in September 1833.