In 1736 it was reported that sixty or eighty Outagamie warriors were still alive.[356] Their women, who when hard pushed would fight like furies, were relatively numerous and tolerably prolific, and their villages were full of sturdy boys, likely to be dangerous in a few years. Feeling their losses and their weakness, the survivors of the tribe incorporated themselves with their kindred and neighbors, the Sacs, Sakis, or Saukies, the two forming henceforth one tribe, afterwards known to the Americans as the Sacs and Foxes. Early in the nineteenth century they were settled on both banks of the upper Mississippi. Brave and restless like their forefathers, they were a continual menace to the American frontiersmen, and in 1832 they rose in open war, under their famous chief, Blackhawk, displaying their hereditary prowess both on foot and on horseback, and more than once defeating superior numbers of American mounted militia. In the next year that excellent artist, Charles Bodmer, painted a group of them from life,--grim-visaged savages, armed with war-club, spear, or rifle, and wrapped in red, green, or brown blankets, their heads close shaven except the erect and bristling scalp-lock, adorned with long eagle-plumes, while both heads and faces are painted with fantastic figures in blue, white, yellow, black, and vermilion.[357]
Three or four years after, a party of their chiefs and warriors was conducted through the country by order of the Washington government, in order to impress them with the number and power of the whites. At Boston they danced a war-dance on the Common in full costume, to the delight of the boy spectators, of whom I was one.
[320] Rameau, _Notes historiques sur la Colonie Canadienne du Detroit_.
[321] See "La Salle and the Discovery of the Great West," 315.
[322] "Ce poste, le premier de tous par droit d'antiquité."--_Journal historique_, 403 (ed. 1744).
[323] The old parish registers of Kaskaskia are full of records of these mixed marriages. See Edward G. Mason, _Illinois in the Eighteenth Century_.
[324] The two other members were La Loire des Ursins, director of the Mississippi Company, and Michel Chassin, its commissary,--he who wrote the curious letter to Ponchartrain, asking for a wife, quoted in the last chapter, pp. 317-318.