The purpose of this research is to examine the Native American resistance movement centered in the Great Lakes region and known as the Black Hawk War. The plan of the research will be to set forth the historical background and context for the emergence of the movement that led to overt confrontation between the Native American group led by the Sac (Sauk) Chief Black Hawk in Illinois and the United States government, and then to discuss how the salient events began and evaluate the decisive issues in the outcome, not only for the Indians involved but also for the larger, longer-term picture of the relationship between the American government and the Native American population as a whole.
Almost from the earliest days of European settlement in the New World, the colonizing powers were obliged to devise some mode of accommodating preexisting societies that were encountered as the history of Europe in America began to unfold. The need and opportunity for social and governmental organization, whereby problems could be disposed of in an orderly manner, helps explain how the colonial, then nation-state government apparatus found a presence not only among the transplanted Europeans who transplanted and then reshaped European forms of social organization but also among the indigenous peoples whom Euro-American culture, norms, and social structures were displacing from the scene.
To put it another way, the Indians were first and always a problem for a structured, established governmental forms or for the initial establishment of them in areas that, to the European colonizers, were uncharted territory. Coping with tribal rivalry was one aspect of this, especially for the French, whose colonial project included a New World presence for military forces, Jesuits, missionaries, and traders--themselves subject to rival priorities in New France. As it turned out, the great New World territory that was covered by the French--from virtually the ent...