“Wan-i-ga and Chick-hong-sic were sentenced to be executed on the 26th of December.”
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[Illustration: MILITARY TRACT OF ILLINOIS.]
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THE MILITARY TRACT–PERILS OF FRONTIER LIFE–GATHERING SETTLEMENTS ABOUT BLACK HAWK’S VILLAGE–FRICTION–ATTEMPTED COMPROMISE–CORRESPONDENCE–GAINES AT FORT ARMSTRONG.
It may be possible that this fresh outbreak was superinduced by the gradual appearance of the hated American further and further northward toward Black Hawk’s village, but, if true, the act was indefensible as it was meddlesome. He deliberately assisted in precipitating the trouble between Red Bird (who was a remarkably decent Indian) and the Americans, without the slightest provocation.
By acts of Congress[63] bounty land warrants were voted to the soldiers of the war of “’twelve,” and for their especial benefit the so-called “Military Tract” was erected in the State of Illinois, comprising the territory between the Illinois and Mississippi rivers, 169 miles north to a line drawn from the great bend of the river above Peru to the Mississippi, containing 5,360,000 acres.[64] Into this, two classes of settlers poured–as Catlin aptly put it, “the overwhelming torrent of emigration to the ‘Far West.’”
From the conclusion of the first peace with Great Britain, the native white population increased at a ratio astonishing to the observer and writer of those days, particularly James Hall, and with the advent of the “twenties” the overflow was moving into this “Military Tract.” One class comprised the soldier, who was the beneficiary, with his family, while the other was composed of families from Kentucky and Tennessee, the purchasers of those warrants, which had been gradually working northward from the beginning of the century, and which up to this time largely predominated in the population of Illinois. In both of these classes were the Indian fighters; men whose homes had been desolated or whose fathers and mothers had been murdered by blood-thirsty savages; men whose bodies carried lead placed there by Indian muskets, and who, from sad experience, were not likely to receive with composure the raids of bandit Sacs. These men were tired of tilling the soil with rifles lashed to the plowbeam and of being constantly called away from the field to awful scenes of carnage, where perhaps neighbor or wife or child had just been burned at the stake. Gen. A.C. Dodge, who was a pioneer by birth, a man whose honesty of purpose and soundness of judgment on Indian questions have never yet been questioned, forcibly illustrated those conditions in a speech at the semi-centennial of Burlington, Iowa: “In the settlement of Kentucky five of my father’s uncles fell under the Indian hatchet. Among the incidents of his very earliest recollection was to have seen the dead and bleeding body of one of those uncles borne in the arms of another on horseback to the stockade fort in which they lived. My own brother, Henry LaFayette Dodge, * * * was captured and burned to death at the stake.”