When news reached New Salem, Illinois, in March 1832 that the Sac Indian chief Black Hawk was crossing the Mississippi River, coming back into the state in defiance of a treaty signed during Thomas Jefferson’s first administration, Abraham Lincoln was twenty-three and unemployed. Lincoln had set out three years earlier on his own as a flatboatman, riding down the Mississippi with a freedom he couldn’t believe, freedom from the farming life he didn’t want and the father he couldn’t abide. In New Orleans, at the far end of his first journey, he’d witnessed a slave auction that left him with a lifelong revulsion for the customs and apparatus of human bondage. After his return upriver to New Salem, he had settled in as storekeeper, a position that gave him authority over two assistants and the prospect of owning his own establishment should the shipments of sugar, molasses, and other sought-after Southern commodities continue their northward flow.
New Salem was a rough, rowdy, alcohol-soaked town, and here Lincoln hit his stride. A figure of amusement and respect, he was known for his honesty in dealing with customers, for his prowess in wrestling matches and other contests of athletic skill, and for his vast cache of situational jokes full of shitting, farting, and drinking. All the while Lincoln set about a self-improvement program, studying deep into each night after his workday was over, cultivating his knowledge of grammar and history, reading Poe and Shakespeare, and nurturing a growing interest in the machinations of political races.
The habit gave him hope for the future and satisfied his intellectual needs in the present, but then the shop closed, thanks to a neglectful owner, and the company warehouse emptied for good. Lincoln needed something to do, and with Black Hawk crossing the river the state needed men. Sixty-seven residents of New Salem volunteered, and when Lincoln was elected captain of the rough-and-ready Fourth Illinois Regiment of Mounted Volunteers, he discovered that he liked the taste of electoral success. Going north, he and his men soon found themselves part of a horde of militia, over a thousand soldiers under the command of General Henry Atkinson, a veteran treaty negotiator with little experience in fighting Indians. Three tours of duty gave Lincoln several encounters with the scalped and decapitated bodies of soldiers and settlers, but no battle. Almost all of the New Salem men went home after the first tour, but Lincoln stayed on for two more; as he later wrote, “I was out of work, and there being no more danger of fighting, I could do nothing better.” When, years later, he made a joke about fighting only mosquitoes, he was not far off. For six more weeks he rode around northern Illinois, running messages and listening for rumors of Black Hawk, until he too mustered out in mid-July. He walked most of the way home, as his horse had been stolen.
Had Lincoln left the service just a few weeks later, he might have taken part in the Battle of Bad Axe. For two days fresh recruits under General Atkinson fired on the remnants of the Sac and Fox as they retreated across the Mississippi River, killing more than a hundred men, women, and children who were attempting to swim or paddle canoes toward the western shore. Many of the white soldiers later spoke of their own actions with disgust: as one, coincidentally named John Wakefield, later wrote, “It was a horrid sight to witness little children, wounded and suffering the most excruciating pain, although they were of the savage enemy, and the common enemy of the country.” Other militia wrote of coming across the bodies of Indian warriors and repaying their opponents by scalping them and cutting their skin into razor strops. By the time Lincoln was back in New Salem and launching his first run for the state legislature, seventy-five Indians had been taken prisoner, perhaps two hundred had been killed, and another two hundred were fleeing across Iowa and heading for their villages near the Cedar River.
It wasn’t enough for the white commanders, however, to clear Illinois and Wisconsin of the last vestiges of Indian resistance. A series of councils now occurred between American generals and other Indian tribes already in the region, traditional enemies of the Sac and Fox, in order to finish off the fleeing enemy. Friendly Ho-Chunks from Wisconsin, kin of the small band living across the Mississippi River, were enlisted to chase Black Hawk, who had moved north to elude the militia forces massing along the river. And to follow the two hundred fleeing Sac and Fox across Iowa, white authorities turned to the Dakota.
Many weeks before the Battle of Bad Axe, two American commanders had traveled up the Mississippi to Wabasha’s village to enlist as many Mdewakanton warriors as would agree to come. In the years before the first treaties governing the Minnesota Territory were signed, the Eastern Dakota, including Little Crow’s father and grandfather, had fought the Sac and Fox to the east and south every bit as fiercely as they had fought the Ojibwe to the north. The enmities were centuries old, involving hunting rights to the very lands over which Lincoln had so recently ridden. What promises of payment or gifts of enticement were made to the Dakota are unknown, but the offer met with success, and several dozen of the most notable Mdewakanton warriors rode south. Two of them in particular catch our attention: Jack Frazer, the trader, scout, and hunter famous among whites in the region for his exploits in the West and notorious among the Dakota for his casual adherence to their spiritual and cultural traditions; and the future Little Crow, Taoyateduta, Frazer’s boon companion, fellow entrepreneur, and partner in dissolute living.
Among Frazer’s many regular hunting and trading partners, white and Indian, was the fur trader Henry Hastings Sibley. During the Dakota War, Frazer, spared by Little Crow, became a guard and defender at Fort Ridgely, ran messages, fought alongside white soldiers at Birch Coulee, and acted as a scout for the American forces. Following the Dakota War, Sibley collected his previous notes and observations of Iron Face, one of the many names by which Frazer was known, and published a short biography in a series of newspaper columns.
In chapter 13, “The Black Hawk War,” Sibley told the story of how Frazer and Taoyateduta rode down to Prairie du Chien in southern Wisconsin after their councils with the American officers, at which point the older men in their party turned back, leaving nearly one hundred young warriors to act as scouts and sharpshooters for General Atkinson. During this period, beginning in June 1832 and lasting perhaps a month, Lincoln and Little Crow moved in proximity, one a popular frontiersman leading a company of white soldiers and the other a village chief’s son in a party of Dakota warriors. Perhaps they rode through the same towns, along the same river trails, up to the same high bluffs overlooking the Mississippi, days or even hours apart. Perhaps they even crossed paths along a road or clearing and eyed each other curiously, white and Indian, two very different peoples fighting in the same war and on the same side for entirely different reasons.
After Bad Axe, wrote Sibley, Atkinson sent a messenger to the nearby Dakota, who arrived on the battlefield one day later and expressed their desire to follow the escaped Sac and Fox across the river and chase them across the prairie. Atkinson agreed, aware of everything his decision implied, but before he could deliver his message, Frazer and Taoyateduta had already crossed the Mississippi. For two days and nights one hundred Dakota warriors pursued the Sac and Fox across northeastern Iowa, closing in fast on two hundred exhausted women and children and warriors who thought they were heading for the asylum of their own lands.
At dawn on August 5, three days after the Battle of Bad Axe, Taoyateduta and the other warriors overtook the party and a battle ensued, one that quickly turned into a bloodbath. Sibley portrayed Frazer as the voice of mercy, a stay against madness who dashed about to save as many women and children as he could before he was made insensible from a wound. Of Taoyateduta’s actions Sibley wrote nothing. But in the end, between 60 and 160 more Sac and Fox were dead on the prairie, old and young, men, women, and children. The Dakota men, nearly unscathed, returned to the Mississippi Valley and presented the Ho-Chunk agent with 22 prisoners and 68 scalps. By that time the Black Hawk War had been declared a success, the remaining militia disbanded, and the lands of the Sac and Fox declared forfeit.
Two massacres had taken place that week. One, conducted by white soldiers along the eastern bank of the Mississippi River, would soon be denounced by some of the very men who had shot at Indian women and children desperately trying to cross to the opposite shore. The second, along the eastern bank of the Cedar River, would earn little space in contemporary newspapers and none in American history textbooks. Abraham Lincoln, late of the Black Hawk War, would years later stand in the East Room of the White House and explain to a party of tribal chiefs how his “red brethren” were “disposed to fight and kill one another” in a way whites were not. The nearly constant employ of Indian tribes as valued mercenaries in American wars, from pre-Revolutionary times through the Civil War, seems to prove the depth of white belief in Lincoln’s statement. Savagery was to be condemned, it seems, unless it could be turned to one’s particular advantage.
Abraham Lincoln’s yarns about his service in the Black Hawk War were designed to do little more than demonstrate his capacity to laugh at himself. When he told the story of his grandfather’s death, however, his purposes were clearly more complex and the emotional currents much darker. If he’d grown up penniless, Indians were in part to blame. But there was also the matter of his uncle Mordecai, who inherited what Lincoln family money there was and left his younger brothers, Josiah and Thomas, to fend for themselves. Mordecai was the future president’s savior, the man whose shot had saved Thomas from oblivion, and he was characterized by many observers as a remarkable raconteur in the Lincolnian mode, full of profane jokes and anecdotes. But he was also a haunted man, prone to especially dark moods his cousins called “the horrors,” episodes of severe drink or depression when he would go silent, sitting in one place for hours with a grim visage or pacing the house with his fiddle in his hands.
It seems that Mordecai was full of hatreds he could not control. And most of all he hated Indians. William T. Clagett, who lived near Mordecai and his family during their short stay in Grayson County, Kentucky, told William Herndon of a time when “there came a few Indians through there and old Mordecai heard of them passing through mounted on his horse and took his rifle gun on his shoulder and followed on after the Indians and was gone two days when he returned he said he left one lying in a sink hole for the Indians had killed his father and he was determined to have satisfaction.” It was not the only time that Abraham Lincoln’s uncle had engaged in his own brand of faceless retribution. Augustus H. Chapman, who married one of Lincoln’s many Hanks cousins, remembered that “young Mord Lincoln swore eternal vengeance on all Indians an oath which he faithful kept as he afterwards during times of profound peace with the Indians killed several of them in fact he invariably done so when he could without it being known that he was the person that done the deed.”
This was solitary, cruel, indiscriminate violence—by another name, savagery—and it laid bare the taut, tangled knot at the heart of the unanswerable “Indian question.” The pattern was so consistent as to seem inviolable: failures of law, failures of policy, and failures of justice created deep and lasting personal grievances on all sides that overwhelmed all attempts at systemic reform. Five months before violence erupted along the Minnesota River Valley, Henry Whipple wrote to Abraham Lincoln that “a nation which sowed robbery would reap a harvest of blood.” Six weeks of war in the Northwest left hundreds dead and set off a chain reaction that would kill thousands more, white and Indian, most of whom could not begin to understand how they had become the targets of such all-consuming hatred. By the end of the nineteenth century, millions of words—legal, legislative, literary, journalistic, theological, and personal—would be devoted to the Dakota War and its aftermath. But in the end, it seems, “private revenge” spoke the loudest.