This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island.
Life can be counted on to take strange twists and turns. Had it not been for one small kindness amid the horrors of an Indian massacre, we might never know what the Sauk warrior Black Hawk looked like.
There he is today, looking out from his portrait hanging in the Field Museum of Natural History. The portrait was painted by the famous artist, George Catlin, in September of 1832 in the prison at Jefferson Barracks near St. Louis. Black Hawk, his sons, and several other Sauk leaders had been captured in Wisconsin at the conclusion of the Black Hawk War that August and taken to the prison.
George Catlin had come to St. Louis to catch a steamboat up the Mississippi River to paint Indian tribes in Wisconsin and Minnesota. It was part of his lifelong work to record in words and paint the rapidly vanishing true life of the American Indian before it disappeared.
And so, Catlin's portrait shows Black Hawk as a proud warrior, not the abject prisoner or degenerate beast easterners expected Indians to be, nor as the noble savage, a Romanesque figure in a toga, as the romantics wished. None of Catlin's portraits of the Sauk at Jefferson Barracks is full length, so as not to show the balls and chains and leg irons.
Instead, Black Hawk is shown in fringed buckskin, with strings of wampum through his ears and around his neck. He is holding his medicine bag—made from the skin of a black hawk, and a fan made of tail feathers. He is regal but showing his forty-five years.
And the act of kindness? In 1778 during the Revolutionary War, a party of Iroquois fighting on the British side surrounded a small settlement in the Wyoming Valley in northeast Pennsylvania. The killed the settlers, looted and burned their homes. They took one captive, a seven-year-old girl, kept her safe from harm, and eventually released her.
That girl became George Catlin's mother, and it was her stories told to her young son, stories of her admiration for the Iroquois and how decently they treated her, that first shaped her son's feeling toward Indians, and eventually sent him on a mission that included the Sauk at Jefferson Barracks.
Rock Island Lines with Roald Tweet is underwritten by the Scott County Regional Authority, with additional funding from the Illinois Arts Council and Augustana College, Rock Island.
