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1/ August 2 is the anniversary of the 1832 Bad Axe massacre. The U.S. military killed appx. 250 Sauk Indians at the confluence of the Bad Axe River and the Mississippi River in southwestern Wisconsin. The Bad Axe massacre is the most well known event of the Black Hawk War. 
2/ On the 187th anniversary of the Bad Axe massacre, what does this event mean for U.S. history? Often historians see massacres like this as anomalies. Bad Axe had been blamed on “misunderstandings,” “rash members on both sides,” or “blunders” by U.S. army officers.
3/ In my view, Bad Axe was the result of a policy, established at the beginning of the U.S., that Indians that resisted doing something the U.S. demanded them to do (like give up their lands) were justly and legally subject to extermination (details: bit.ly/2ScIl96)
4/ In this case, Sauks rejected the legitimacy of a treaty that had been foisted on them in 1804 that required them to vacate their homes on the eastern bank of the Mississippi (western Illinois).
5/ When Sauks refused to relocate, William Clark (of Lewis and Clark fame) stated that “a war of extermination should be waged against them.” In other words, genocide to enforce removal.
6/ Who was president at the time of the Bad Axe massacre? Oh yes, it was indeed Andrew Jackson, much hated in my corner of twitter (as is his current patron).
7/ But before indulging in more Jackson bashing, let’s note that the 1804 treaty, which for good reason, Sauks and their fellow Mesquakie tribesmen regarded as illegitimate, was imposed on them under the presidency of Thomas Jefferson.
8/ Like other presidents, Jefferson thought that Indians who resisted U.S. demands to do things the U.S. wanted them to do were justly subject to extermination. Jefferson was also an early advocate of the policy of removal.
9/ Jackson often takes all the heat for removal, but Jackson himself said removal was the culmination of policy pursued for 30 years! Remember: when Jefferson purchased Louisiana in 1803, he said it would be a great place to put eastern Indians.
10/ About 500 Sauks and Mesquakies lost their lives during the Black Hawk War. This out of a population of 6,500. That's 8 percent. Maybe 8 percent doesn’t sound like a lot, but it’s equivalent to 26 million of the present-day U.S. population of 327 million. Think about that.
11/ Historians have written about the Black Hawk War and it appears in some U.S. history textbooks, so it’s at least somewhat known.
12/ But what happened to the Sauks and Mesquakies after the Black Hawk War is almost entirely unknown (even though it is recorded in a history of the tribe published in 1958). It’s not in any textbook I know of.
13/ After the Black Hawk War, the United States forced the Sauks and Mesquakies into eastern Iowa, but surprise surprise, white settlers started to come into Iowa. So, the federal government told the Sauks and Mesquakies that they would have to move someplace else.
14/ But the government didn’t have a place to put the Sauks and Mesquakies. What would become Oklahoma had been allocated to tribes expelled from the southeast (Choctaws, Cherokees, Creeks, Seminoles, Chickasaws).
15/ What would become Kansas had been allocated to nations expelled from the north (Potawatomis, Wyandots, Shawnees, Senecas, Ottawas, and others) and to nations Indigenous to the region (Kanzas, Osages, and others)
16/ So, the federal government told the Sauks and Mesquakies they would have to move temporarily to western Iowa while the government figured out a “permanent home” for them.
17/ Finally, the government identified a place in eastern Kansas to squeeze the Sauks and Mesquakies. They went there in 1845-46.
18/ By this time, the Sauks and Mesquakies, a prosperous people in 1830, had been impoverished. This meant that the people were malnourished and vulnerable to multiple diseases every single year. The population declined from 6,000 after the Black Hawk War to 3,000, 50%.
19/ Once in Kansas, the Sauk and Mesquakie population declined further and for the same reasons. On the eve of the Civil War it was only 1,280.
20/ This had nothing to do with the famous “virgin soil epidemics” which supposedly hit non-immune Indigenous people at the moment of “initial contact” and are often emphasized as the main cause of Indigenous depopulation. Not so here. Colonialism had created deadly conditions.
21/ Students of U.S. history should know more about this catastrophe, but we should also remember that Sauks and Mesquakies survived. One of the most famous Indians of all time, the “world’s greatest athlete,” Jim Thorpe, was Sauk.
22/ Jim Thorpe’s grandfather, Hiram Thorpe, was in Kansas in the early 1850s. He was a blacksmith on the Sauk and Mesquakie reservation and earned extra money making cheap coffins for Sauks and Mesquakies who were dying from smallpox and other diseases.
23/ During this time, Hiram married a Sauk woman named No-ten-o-quah (Wind Woman), Jim Thorpe’s grandmother. Later, after the Sauks and Mesquakies were forced to move yet again (this time to what became Oklahoma), Jim Thorpe was born (1887).
24/ I hope I don’t offend any of his descendants in saying so, but I’ve come to think of Jim Thorpe as a survivor of an unknown genocide in the heartland of America. /end
