The Battle of Wisconsin Heights, 1832 by Patrick J Jung

Author:Patrick J Jung
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
Published: 2013-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

Sketch of an Indian with a scalp lock. From George Catlin, Letters and Notes on the Manners, Customs, Condition of the North American Indians, 1841.

There were several instances during the war where Black Hawk’s warriors and their Winnebago and Potawatomi allies took the scalps of those they killed, both Indian and white. For example, Black Hawk’s warriors scalped the fallen members of Stillman’s battalion after the first battle of the war. The Potwatomis who participated in the Big Indian Creek Massacre scalped their white victims as well, and the Winnebagos who committed assaults during the war did the same. Indians who assisted the United States also scalped their Indian foes; this included a small number of Santee Sioux, Menominees and Winnebagos who served under one of Dodge’s subordinates and who scalped the dead Sauks after the conclusion of the Battle of Pecatonica.96

Whites like Philleo, on several occasions during the Black Hawk War, also took the scalps of Indians they killed, although this was not rooted in the Euro-American way of war. Instead, it was done partially in retaliation for the scalping of whites by Indians, but it also illustrated what white Americans sought to accomplish during Indian wars. Indian hating was an American frontier tradition that stretched all the way back to Jamestown and Plymouth. Frontiersmen, who saw Indians as competitors for land and resources at best and potential enemies at worst, viewed the native inhabitants as little more than vermin deserving of extermination. Americans on the eastern seaboard, in comparison, while they often entertained rather negative and ethnocentric views concerning America’s aboriginal inhabitants, rarely had contact with Indians and thus did not feel threatened by them as did their frontier kin. Easterners viewed Indians as “noble savages” who were not threats but curiosities. The frontiersmen who served as volunteers in Atkinson’s army during the summer of 1832 believed that Black Hawk and his people had to be punished for their crimes. Just as important, they had to be made examples to other Indian communities that might have the temerity to rise up and attempt to turn back the inevitable tide of American expansion. The cruelties exacted on the fallen members of the British Band thus were a means by which both of these objectives, in the minds of white frontiersmen, found expression. That is why, as they made their way to the Wisconsin River in pursuit of Black Hawk’s followers, the volunteer army of Dodge and Henry had as its motto “no quarter!”97

After killing the second straggler, the volunteers came into increasing contact with the warriors who formed the rearguard of the British Band. It was now about 3:00 p.m., and the overcast skies began to release a steady rain that cooled the summer air. Napope commanded the rearguard, which had about twenty warriors divided into two parties, which posted themselves on either side of the trail that the British Band had followed and upon which the Americans were traveling in pursuit. The rearguard performed admirably by harassing the volunteers with heavy gunfire from the hilltops where it was posted.

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