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The Battle of Bad Axe

This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island.

For a nine-year-old cowboy—me in the 1940s—there was no badder bad guy than an Indian. Cap guns blazing, my buddies and I regularly put away dozens of Indians every summer evening, skillfully avoiding a massacre.

Contrast this with a real massacre. It's August the 1st, 1832. In Wisconsin, where the Bad Axe River flows into the Mississippi, several hundred Sauk Indians—men, women, and children—are trapped. They are the remnants of a thousand Sauk under their leader, Black Hawk, who have been fleeing from Federal troops, Rock Island Rangers, and Illinois militia since April, when they violated a treaty never to return to Illinois.

They have been chased up the Rock River into southern Wisconsin, and then west to the Mississippi—an event that history would glorify as the Black Hawk War. They are exhausted, and so hungry they have taken to eating tree bark.

As they attempt to cross the river, the Sauk are met by the Federal steamboat Warrior, whose captain refuses their white surrender flag, and opens fire with the boat's guns.

That evening, surrounded by American troops, Black Hawk, White Cloud, and several warriors abandon the rest and flee toward the Wisconsin Dells. The next morning, the remnant are forced onto and island in the Mississippi to face the steamboat on one side and infantry on the other. One hundred and fifty men, women and children are mowed down by gunfire. Others are drowned attempting to swim the river.

Only three hundred Sauk make it to the Iowa shore—where they are ambushed by Sioux Indians, who had been warned of their arrival by the Americans. Of the thousand Sauk who began the trek in April, fewer than 150 escaped alive.

American casualties were seventeen killed and twelve wounded.

The Black Hawk War opened the area around Rock Island to American settlement, which soon followed. But it raises an old, and perhaps even tired question: How can people do these things to other people?

People, of course, includes me. Inside this old and wrinkled liberal, there is still somewhere, a nine-year-old with a cap gun.

Rock Island Lines with Roald Tweet is underwritten by Augustana College, Rock Island, Illinois.

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Beginning 1995, historian and folklorist Dr. Roald Tweet spun his stories of the Mississippi Valley to a devoted audience on WVIK. Dr. Tweet published three books as well as numerous literary articles and recorded segments of "Rock Island Lines." His inspiration was that "kidney-shaped limestone island plunked down in the middle of the Mississippi River," a logical site for a storyteller like Dr. Tweet.