Battle of Bad Axe

On August 1 and 2, 1832, regulars of the United States Army together with militia forces killed Sauk (Sac) and Meskwaki (Fox) people in what has become known as the Bad Axe Massacre. Fought near what is now Victory, Wisconsin, this violent episode brought the Black Hawk War to its close, ending the conflict pitting settlers and militiamen from Illinois and Michigan Territory against the Sauk and Meskwaki tribes led by the warrior Black Hawk.

The clash unfolded after the Battle of Wisconsin Heights, when Black Hawk's followers tried to escape militia forces on their trail. Pursuers overtook them along the Mississippi's eastern shore, not far downstream from where the Bad Axe River empties into it. Since the 1850s, scholars have consistently described the encounter as a massacre rather than a battle. Violence continued across both days, and the steamboat Warrior remained on the scene throughout. By the time the second day arrived, Black Hawk along with most of the tribal leadership had already slipped away, leaving a considerable portion of the band behind to face the assault. What resulted was a harsh and overwhelming triumph for the United States, one that closed out the war and cleared the way for extensive new settlement across Illinois and the Wisconsin region.

Background

The roots of this conflict trace back to an 1804 agreement struck between the governor of Indiana Territory and a delegation of Sauk and Meskwaki leaders. Under its terms, the tribes gave up 50 million acres (200,000 km2) to the United States in exchange for $2,234.50 plus a yearly payment of $1,000, with a provision permitting them to stay on their lands until settlers actually purchased them. This arrangement stirred lasting controversy. Black Hawk, a Sauk war leader, along with others, argued the agreement was invalid, claiming that the full councils of the tribes had never been consulted and that those who negotiated lacked any real authority to sign away tribal territory.

Matters worsened once lead deposits were found near Galena, Illinois, in the 1820s, drawing miners into the very lands the 1804 treaty had ceded. Returning from their winter hunting grounds in 1829, the Sauk and Meskwaki discovered white settlers occupying their homes and were compelled to withdraw across the Mississippi.

Furious over losing the place of his birth, Black Hawk staged several crossings back into Illinois during 1830 and 1831, though each time he was talked into retreating westward without violence. By April 1832, buoyed by hopes of support from other tribes and the British, he brought his so-called "British Band," numbering roughly 1,000 warriors and civilians, into Illinois once more. When no allies materialized, he tried to lead his people back over the Mississippi into what is now Iowa. Poor discipline among the Illinois Militia, however, produced an unexpected triumph for Black Hawk at the Battle of Stillman's Run. Further clashes followed, prompting both the Michigan Territory militia and Illinois state forces to mobilize in pursuit of his band. This wider struggle came to be remembered as the Black Hawk War.

The weeks separating Stillman's Run in May from the assault on Sinsinawa Mound in late June brought constant fighting. Between mid-May and the end of June 1832, violence erupted at Buffalo Grove, at the Plum River settlement, at Fort Blue Mounds, and in the war's most notorious episode, the Indian Creek massacre. Two decisive engagements, one fought at Horseshoe Bend on June 16 and another at Waddams Grove on June 18, helped reshape how the public viewed the militia following its earlier embarrassment at Stillman's Run. That pivotal week for the settlers closed with the Battle of Apple River Fort on June 24, a 45-minute exchange of gunfire between the fort's defenders and Sauk and Meskwaki fighters under Black Hawk's command.

The following day brought an inconclusive clash at Kellogg's Grove, after which Black Hawk's band pushed on through present-day Wisconsin with militia forces close behind. Five days after the fight at Apple River Fort, on June 29, the raid at Sinsinawa Mound took place. As the militia continued its pursuit, the fleeing band passed through the areas that would become Beloit and Janesville, then traced the Rock River toward Horicon Marsh before turning west toward the Four Lakes area near what is now Madison. Finally, on July 21, 1832, militia forces overtook Black Hawk's people as they tried to cross the Wisconsin River near the modern Town of Roxbury in Dane County, giving rise to the Battle of Wisconsin Heights.

Prelude

In the small hours past midnight on July 22, as Black Hawk's followers took their rest atop a rise on the Wisconsin Heights Battlefield, Neapope, one of the chief figures traveling with Black Hawk, tried to make the militia officers nearby understand that his people sought nothing more than an end to hostilities and safe passage back over the Mississippi. He called out in a "loud shrill voice," offering words of peace in his own Ho-Chunk tongue, under the mistaken belief that Pauquette and his Ho-Chunk scouts remained stationed with the militia at Wisconsin Heights. His message fell on uncomprehending ears, since the Sauk allies who might have translated had already left the field. With his overture rebuffed, Neapope gave up the fight altogether and made his way to a Ho-Chunk village close by. By this point in the conflict, the British Band had been steadily falling apart for months; by the time of the Battle of Bad Axe, nearly all the Ho-Chunk and Potawatomi who had once joined the cause had drifted away. Others, particularly the very young and the old, perished from hunger as the group struggled through the marshlands near Lake Koshkonong while militia forces pressed close behind.

Once the fighting at Wisconsin Heights ended, the militia opted to hold off pursuit until daylight. Although they caught the sound of Neapope's nighttime speech, its meaning escaped them entirely, and come morning they discovered their quarry had vanished. Despite dealing a heavy military blow to the British Band, the clash had inadvertently given much of the group a chance to slip across the Wisconsin River to brief safety. That relief did not last for everyone, however; a party of Meskwaki women and children who tried to flee downriver afterward were either seized by tribes allied with the United States or gunned down by soldiers stationed farther along the waterway. Under cover of darkness, as the noncombatants made their escape by canoe, Black Hawk and his remaining fighters forded the river near what is now Prairie du Sac, Wisconsin. From there the band pushed westward across harsh terrain toward the Mississippi, holding a week's advantage over the militia trailing them.

As the band pressed on toward the west, Commanding General Henry Atkinson pared his force down to a few hundred soldiers and moved to link up with militia leaders Henry Dodge and James D. Henry, planning to regroup and restock supplies at Fort Blue Mounds. With Atkinson in overall command, some 1,300 troops drawn from the units of Henry, Dodge, Alexander Posey, and Milton Alexander made their way across the Wisconsin River between July 27 and 28, near present day Helena, Wisconsin. This militia force, now rested and properly fed, rediscovered Black Hawk's trail on July 28 close to present-day Spring Green, Wisconsin, and began closing in swiftly on the starving, exhausted Native Americans. By August 1, Black Hawk's group, numbering roughly 500 men, women, and children, reached the Mississippi's eastern shore a short distance below where the Bad Axe River empties into it. Once there, Black Hawk and the other leaders convened a council to determine their next course of action.

Battle

On August 1, 1832, near where the Bad Axe River meets the Mississippi, Black Hawk and the Winnebago prophet White Cloud, who shared leadership of the British Band, counseled against pausing to construct rafts for a river crossing. American troops were approaching too fast, they warned, and the wiser course was to head north and take shelter among the Ho-Chunk. The majority of the band nonetheless pressed forward with plans to cross.

Some members did manage to reach the far shore that afternoon, but their escape was cut short when the steamboat Warrior, under Captain Joseph Throckmorton, arrived and blocked further passage. Black Hawk raised a white flag in an attempt to surrender, but once again the gesture went unrecognized by the soldiers, and violence broke out instead. Those warriors left standing after the first volley scrambled for cover and began firing back, sparking a firefight that lasted two hours. Running low on fuel, the Warrior eventually pulled back to Fort Crawford in Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin.

Newspapers of the period put the Native American death toll at 23, among them a young woman believed to be about 19. She had been standing with her child in her arms, watching the fighting unfold, when a bullet passed through both her and the infant's upper arm. Lieutenant Robert Anderson recovered the baby once the shooting stopped and brought him to a surgical tent, where doctors amputated the injured arm. The child was later taken to Prairie du Chien and is thought to have survived. This encounter left Black Hawk convinced that safety lay northward rather than across the Mississippi to the west. In what became one of his final acts leading the British Band, he begged his people to follow him north. Not everyone heeded the call; late that same day, Black Hawk, White Cloud, and roughly three dozen followers broke away and fled north, while the bulk of the remaining warriors and non-combatants stayed on the river's eastern side. The Warrior itself came away with just one casualty, a retired soldier from Fort Snelling shot in the knee.

By two in the morning on August 2, Atkinson's troops were stirring and breaking camp, moving out before daybreak. They had traveled only a short distance when they encountered the rear guard of scouts protecting the remaining Sauk and Meskwaki. These scouts tried, with some initial success, to draw the pursuing forces away from the main body. The assembled American units then formed for combat, with Generals Alexander and Posey commanding the right wing, Henry leading the left, and Dodge alongside the regular troops holding the center. As the Native Americans fell back toward the river, the militia's left wing found itself trailing behind without direction. One regiment stumbled upon the main path leading to the camp, forcing the scouts into a fighting retreat, their only hope being to buy time for others to escape the militia's advance, even as the Sauk and Meskwaki continued withdrawing toward the water. Meanwhile the Warrior, having taken on fresh wood at Prairie du Chien, had departed the refueling stop around midnight and reached Bad Axe by roughly ten in the morning. What followed was eight straight hours of carnage.

Henry's men, comprising the whole left wing, moved down a bluff straight into several hundred Sauk and Meskwaki warriors, touching off brutal close combat with bayonets and muskets. Women and children ran toward the river to escape, and many drowned there almost instantly. Half an hour into this engagement, Atkinson arrived with Dodge's center force, sealing off escape routes for much of the remaining Native resistance. A number of warriors managed to reach a willow island, though the Warrior kept it under steady fire from canister shot and small arms.

Anyone attempting to flee toward cover or swim the river was shot down by the soldiers, without regard to age or sex. The death toll at the site exceeded 150, a slaughter that many who took part in it would later call a massacre. Afterward, soldiers scalped most of the fallen and stripped flesh from some bodies to use as razor strops. Another 75 Native Americans were taken captive. Of the estimated 400 to 500 Sauk and Meskwaki present at Bad Axe that day, the vast majority died there, while a smaller number made it across the river. Even that escape proved short lived for many, since Sioux warriors allied with the army hunted down and killed a number of them afterward. In the weeks that followed, the Sioux delivered 68 scalps and 22 pris

Context

The morning after the fighting ended, on August 3, 1832, Indian Agent Street sent William Clark a letter recounting what had unfolded at Bad Axe. According to his telling, the vast majority of Sauk and Meskwaki people met their end either shot while in the river or drowned attempting to escape across the Mississippi.

A few years later, in 1834, Major John Allen Wakefield brought out a published narrative of the conflict that touched on this engagement. He framed the deaths of women and children as an unintended tragedy, writing that some squaws were killed by mistake during the fighting, and lamenting that these miserable squaws and children never got the chance to carry out what they had reportedly intended that morning, namely approaching the soldiers to give themselves up as prisoners. He described watching wounded children suffer terribly as a horrifying sight, noting that even though they belonged to what he called the savage enemy, the scene remained disturbing.

Black Hawk himself, despite being absent from the fighting on its second day, described what happened as a massacre in his own retelling. Subsequent historical works kept condemning how the whites had behaved at Bad Axe. Perry A. Armstrong's 1887 volume, The Sauks and the Black Hawk War, branded Throckmorton's conduct as inhuman and dastardly, going so far as to liken him to a second Nero or Calligula. When the battle's sixty-sixth anniversary was marked in 1898, Reuben Gold Thwaites stood at the site itself and used the word massacre to describe the clash, a characterization he would return to in a collection of essays he wrote in 1903.

Historians writing in more recent times have kept describing the encounter as an outright massacre. Mark Grimsley, who teaches history at Ohio State University, arrived at this same conclusion in 2005, drawing on other contemporary scholarship to argue that massacre was the more fitting label for what happened at Bad Axe. Kerry A. Trask, in his 2007 book Black Hawk: The Battle for the Heart of America, cited Wakefield's own words as proof that skewed notions of heroism and exaggerated manliness drove American troops to embrace and carry out the extermination of the Sauk and Meskwaki people. Trask argued that Wakefield's confession, that the experience filled his heart with gratitude and joy at having helped rid his country of those merciless savages and restore peace to homes and firesides, reflected sentiments shared by nearly every member of the militia.

Aftermath

The toll from the 1832 conflict ran heavy on both sides. At least 70 settlers and soldiers lost their lives, while hundreds within Black Hawk's band perished as well. Beyond those killed in direct fighting, General Winfield Scott's relief force endured its own ordeal, with hundreds of men either deserting or dying, cholera claiming many of them. Once the fighting concluded at Bad Axe, the prospect of widespread Native American resistance in northwest Illinois came to a close, clearing the way for settlers to push further into Illinois and the territories that would become Iowa and Wisconsin.

Losses among the British Band and the various peoples who joined them during the conflict, including Meskwaki, Kickapoo, Sauk, Ho-Chunk, and Potawatomi fighters, remain impossible to count with any precision. Combat took some lives, but Sioux, Menominee, Ho-Chunk, and other native groups hunted down and killed others afterward. Starvation and drowning claimed still more as the band made its grueling journey up the Rock River toward the Bad Axe's mouth. Not everyone in the British Band met their end at Bad Axe, however; a number of survivors eventually made their way back to their home villages. For the Potawatomi and Ho-Chunk members, this homecoming came fairly easily. Sauk and Meskwaki survivors faced a harder road back, and although some made it home without incident, the army detained others in custody. Fort Armstrong, near what is now Rock Island, Illinois, became the destination for captives, both those seized during the Battle of Bad Axe and others rounded up by tribes allied with the United States in the weeks that followed. Roughly 120 captives, including men, women, and children, remained held there until General Winfield Scott finally ordered their release at the end of August.

Black Hawk and the bulk of his band's leadership evaded capture even after the fighting had ended. On August 20, Keokuk's Sauk and Meskwaki followers delivered Neapope and several other chiefs from the British Band into Winfield Scott's hands at Fort Armstrong. Black Hawk himself proved harder to find. Having escaped the battlefield alongside White Cloud and a handful of warriors, he pushed northeast toward the source of the La Crosse River. The group settled into camp for several days, and a party of Ho-Chunk, among them White Cloud's own brother, eventually urged them to give themselves up. Their resistance to this counsel did not last, and the group made their way to the Ho-Chunk village at La Crosse to arrange their surrender. There, on August 27, 1832, Black Hawk, White Cloud, and what remained of the British Band gave themselves up to Joseph M. Street at Prairie du Chien.