Who was Black Hawk?
His portrait is included in our online Museum Painting Collection, and a page explaining the war and linking to books, articles, manuscripts, letters, and paintings is at Turning Points in Wisconsin History. The eyewitness accounts there include descriptions of the war by both white and Indian participants. Also included in Turning Points is a long series of recollections of Black Hawk by people who knew him after his return to Iowa. In these you can get a sense of who he was as a person, and begin to understand his motives and character. Over the next few months we’ll trace the course of the tragedy that unfolded during the summer of 1832 in Odd Wisconsin, on the anniversaries of the Black Hawk War’s major events.
