The Black Hawk War

From the time the Europeans arrived in the new World, the colonists sought to find some way to accommodate the societies already established here. The Native Americans had a thriving civil society and one much larger than the early European settlements, making accommodation and conciliation a necessity for the security of the settlers. What was needed was a social and governmental organization which could dispose of problems in an orderly manner. The settlers thus tried to institute the sort of colonial, then nation-state, government apparatus they had known in Europe.

The Europeans found the Native Americans to be a problem for any structured, established governmental forms, forms which challenged the tribal structure the Native Americans had developed for themselves. The French found tribal rivalries especially difficult to handle, and the French method of c

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n of the concept of sovereignty with Indians. It is on the basis of the progressive deterioration of sovereignty of the Indian nations over the centuries, marked by the conversion of Indian lands to non-Indian uses, that causes Snipp to say that the concept of captive nations really has meaning only if one refers to "internal colonies" (Snipp 466). Equally, it can be said that the judicial sanction for the taking of Indian lands underlies such events as the Black Hawk War, which occurred in 1832. The Black Hawk War is grouped with the so-called Indian Wars, the name given to a whole series of wars between Indians and the U.S. Army from the post-Revolutionary to post-Reconstruction periods, marked by Indian resistance to white expansion over former Indian lands. Black Hawk, a chief of the Sac born a year after Pontiac's uprising, was an exact contemporary of Tecumseh, a chief of the Shawnee in Ohio, although apparently not a party to Tecumseh's confederation. The Sac lived in the fertile northern prairie area of southern Wisconsin and northern Illinois (including the area around present-day Chicago), as did a neighboring people known as the Fox. In 1804 (one year after the Louisiana Purchase), the U.S. government proffered a
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 2306
Approximate Pages = 9 (250 words per page)

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