(SB) - It has been a long winter and I’m sure that you, like me, look forward to Spring and some consistently warm temperatures. This morning, a robin was up on our porch looking for a place to build a nest, so perhaps this interminable winter is at an end. I’ve been giving some thought to how our ancestors survived the long winters (I told Dale that I would have been a lousy pioneer, no doubt dying along the trail!) but I’m grateful that others of our ancestors managed to live through the heat and the cold, starvation and plenty. I’ve also wondered about how the Native Americans survived the difficult challenges of living on the land in the 19th century. Consequently, I consulted my slim volume, History and Legends of Place Names in Iowa, written in 1937 by Leon C.Hills, published by the Omaha School Supply Company. This book would have been one of the few texts available for teachers in the 1930s and was designed to provide information on Iowa history to children, mostly in one-room schools that went no farther than the 8th grade. The history of Iowa provided in such texts would have been the only history of the area that these children would ever have learned.
The tribe Iowa was small and comparatively weak when it migrated to the region in the early part of the 19th century under the leadership of Chief Man-haw-gaw. His son, the most famous chief of the tribe, settled his people in the Des Moines valley where the town of Eldon in Wapello County is currently located. This chief had seven wives which would have made domestic life a challenge and may have been why Chief Mahaska the First fled to Washington in 1824, accompanied by his favorite wife, Rant-che-wai-me, “Female flying pigeon.” Returning from this trip, the wife had plenty to say about the white women she met in Washington.
In 1836, Chief Mahaska’s son, Mahaska the Second was compelled to move his people south to Kansas, accompanied by a small band of Sac Indians. The Iowa tribe never recovered from this move, as to them,” “Iowa” meant “This is the place”. The Iowa tribe’s move was necessitated by the influx of white settlers that began to migrate across the Mississippi in the early 1830s. Leon Hills’ text describes these early settlers as “of excellent quality”. Four-fifths of these settlers were from “native stocks from older states. No mid-western state remained more American than Iowa.” (20) Hills further describes these early settlers as of “high ambition, unbending moral quality, unflagging industry, love of home, insistence on free schools, and loyal to religious ideals.” (20)
The Black Hawk War in 1832 derives its name from Chief Black Hawk who was born in Kaskaskia, Illinois in 1767 and died near what is now the town of Eldon in 1838. He was considered an excellent leader of his tribe, although the early white settlers considered him to be a “public enemy.” Black Hawk became the leader of the Sac in 1788. Black Hawk fought with the British in the War of 1812. His tribe, in the wake of the many broken treaties with the white Americans, preferred the British. Unfortunately, both the British and the Sac Indians were defeated and in the Battle of Bad Axe River, 300 men women and children were “killed like wild animals”. The result of the Black Hawk War was that 200 white settlers perished, while 500 Sac Indians died terrible deaths. One squaw, Nawasa, escaped capture by swimming across the Mississippi with her papoose held in her teeth, much like a mother cat with her kitten. Her son became a chief known as “Two Scar,” presumably for the bite marks inflicted on him as his mother sought to escape the white settlers. Black Hawk made two trips to Washington, meeting both times with the sitting American President. At the end of the Black Hawk war, the chief signed a treaty that opened up Iowa to white settlement. Iowa would no longer be the home of the Native Americans of the time.
Author Leon Hills describes the Sac as “a hardy people.” Indian children “never cry and seldom die of disease, but many were killed by accident.” Missionaries and other white settlers brought both blessings and curses to the Native peoples. One woman of the tribe once offered to trade her four-year-old child for a bottle of whiskey. Yet Native children thrived in missionary schools, despite being stripped of their heritage by being forced to cut their hair, abandon their culture, and train to be servants to the white settlers. The struggle between Native peoples and the white settlers continued well into the 20th century. Leon Hills’ slim volume of Iowa history still contains further information that will interest in a future column.
