Black Hawk

Black Hawk was a member of the Sauk Indians. He lived in the village of Saukenuk. This was the largest village. It was between the Rock River and the Mississippi River in Illinois. Black Hawk's father was Chief Pyesa.
The Sauk Indians stampeded the buffalo into the rocky walls of a canyon to kill them. Each spring the men hunted for buffalo and elk. The women planted corn and beans. They also gathered fruit, nuts, and berries. Black Hawk wanted to go hunting with the men, but he was too young.
After one big hunt the Sauks were attacked by a band of Osage Indians. Black Hawk killed his enemy with his hatchet. Black Hawk was considered a warrior after fighting so well. He could sit among the men at the council fire after that. Black Hawk could now fight against his enemies: the Cherokee, the Osage, and the Sioux. When Chief Pyesa died the Indians made Black Hawk their new chief.
Each year Black Hawk went to St. Louis to trade with the Spanish. In 1804 when he went to trade the Spanish had moved out of St. Louis and the Americans had moved in. Black Hawk had heard bad things about the Americans.
After returning to his home Black Hawk decided to go to Canada and see if the English would trade for gunpowder. While Black Hawk was away the American soldiers came up the Mississippi River with swords. The Sauks sent four chiefs to St. Louis to make peace. They signed a treaty giving the Americans all the Sauk territories. They did not know what they were signing.
The American soldiers came into the Sauk territory and built a strong fort. When Black Hawk returned from Canada he was angry after seeing the fort. He attacked the fort with burning arrows. The Americans had cannons at the fort causing Black Hawk to draw back.
Black Hawk continued to trade with the English. When the War of 1812 started President James Madison offered Black Hawk gunpowder if he would agree not to help the English. Black Hawk agreed. He did not want to fight. When Black Hawk went to the fort to get the gunpowder he was given tobacco, food, and blankets, but no gunpowder.
When Black Hawk returned to his village an English trader brought him gunpowder and the news that many Indian Nations were going to attack the forts to the north and east. After four years of fighting the English lost.
Chief Keokuk told the Americans that he was Supreme Chief. Keokuk had given away some of the Sauk lands to the U.S. government. Later Black Hawk signed a peace treaty in May 1816. Black Hawk signed away the Sauk land east of the Mississippi without knowing it.
One summer when Black Hawk returned from hunting he found settlers living in his village. By 1830, Keokuk moved many of the Sauk and Fox Indians across the Mississippi to a reservation in Iowa.
In the fall of 1831 Black Hawk was forced by the soldiers to take the remaining Indians to the reservation in Iowa. After a bad winter Black Hawk took 400 warriors and their families back across the Mississippi River. The Americans began to fight Black Hawk over this in battles called the Black Hawk War.
Black Hawk knew he could not win this war. He sent three messengers with a flag of truce to the American camp. The Americans shot them down. After the messengers were killed Black Hawk rushed into the American camp. The Americans ran in panic. As Black Hawk and his men were starting to head back across the Mississippi River they were caught between the American steamboat Warrior and the American troops. Two hundred Indians died that day. Black Hawk was held prisoner after his surrender. The Americans then took all the land from the Atlantic Ocean to the Mississippi River.

Sequoyah

Sequoyah's mother was Cherokee and his father was a white trader. Sequoyah lived with his mother near the Cherokee village of Taskigi in the Smoky Mountains of Tennessee. The medicine men taught Sequoyah how to find the special herbs and roots they used to heal the sick.
When Sequoyah went to other villages to trade he saw silversmiths. Sequoyah brought tools home to use in shaping silver. Sequoyah became very good with shaping the silver. He made beautiful knives, spoons, and jewelry.
Sequoyah was sad because the white men were coming more and more to the Indian land. The Indians were taking up the white men's ways. After Sequoyah's mother died he wandered from village to village for two years. He finally settled down in Alabama in the village of Coosa. In Coosa Sequoyah married a Cherokee woman. He started working as a blacksmith and a silversmith.
Sequoyah had a dream that he could take each Cherokee word and write it down. Sequoyah felt writing down the Cherokee language was important because the white men were making treaties on paper that the Indians could not read.
In 1812 Sequoyah went to war on the side of the Americans. After returning home from the war Sequoyah spent most of his time working on the Cherokee alphabet. After Sequoyah's home filled up with piles of pictures Sequoyah learned he would have to find an easier way to write. One day while walking with his daughter Ah-yo-ka Sequoyah learned by listening to the birds that words where made up of sounds and that some words had the same sounds.
The Indians remembered Sequoyah spending time with the medicine men. They thought that he was making bad spells. One day while Sequoyah was walking in the woods with Ah-yo-ka, the Indians set fire to Sequoyah's cabin. When Sequoyah returned and found his cabin burned he carefully wrote his Cherokee alphabet on a large piece of buckskin. Sequoyah knew he must leave Alabama. He and Ah-yo-ka traveled west to the Oklahoma and Arkansas territory. On the way west Sequoyah and Ah-yo-ka meet a Cherokee women named Sally. She believed in Sequoyah's dream.
Sequoyah built a cabin in the wilderness. He continued to work on his alphabet. When it was completed, the alphabet contained 86 symbols. Sequoyah decided to return to the East and show his completed alphabet to the Tribal Council. When Sequoyah showed the men of the Tribal Council his alphabet they thought that he and Ah-yo-ka were trying to trick them. Sequoyah said he would prove to the men that he was not tricking them. He told the Indians to take Ah-yo-ka to the other side of the village. They could then tell him something to write down. Ah-yo-ka would then come in and read it to the Tribal Council. When Ah-yo-ka returned she read the words and the Tribal Council believed in Sequoyah's alphabet.
Everyone wanted to learn how to read and write. Sequoyah and Ah-yo-ka spent many months teaching the Indians. After almost all the Cherokees had learned to read and write they started their own newspaper called the Cherokee Phoenix. The Tribal Council gave Sequoyah a silver medal with two crossed pipes carved on it. The symbols showed how Sequoyah had brought Eastern and Western Cherokees together.
Sequoyah was the first person in history to invent a written language alone. The Cherokee people were able to use the written language to write down the old stories. The alphabet helped the people understand each other better. In 1830 gold was discovered in the eastern territory. The white men forced the Cherokees to move westward onto new lands. One-third of the Indians died in their travels west known as the "Trail of Tears".

Pocahontas

Pocahontas was a member of the Algonquian group of Native Americans.One day the Pamunkey tribe brought a white man named John Smith to Powhatan's village.Chief Powhatan felt that danger might come from the white men living on his land. The white men carried fire-sticks. Pocahontas thought the Indians should not be afraid of John Smith. She thought he looked like a friend.
Powhatan said that the Indians must enjoy a feast before talking. After the feast John Smith tried to tell the Chief that his people had come in peace and that there was much land to share. Powhatan said Smith must die. As one of the warriors raised a stone club to kill Smith, Pocahontas asked her father to give Smith to her. In Pocahontas's tribe women could save a prisoner by asking for the prisoner to be given to them. Powhatan let Pocahontas have Smith because he thought the white men might attack if they killed him.
Powhatan's tribe adopted Captain Smith and gave him an Indian name Nantaquoud. They listened to him talk about his King and homeland.
After many days Powhatan picked twelve braves to take Captain Smith to his people in Jamestown. The people of Jamestown were growing sick because they had little to eat. They did not know how to find food. Pocahontas helped John Smith's people by bringing food. The settlers sent bells, mirrors, bright copper, and beads for the food. Powhatan was not pleased with these gifts because he wanted guns.
The English King wanted to make friends with Powhatan. He sent gifts of a huge bed, a red silk cape, and a copper crown. When Powhatan refused to give the setters at Jamestown any more food Captain Smith and his men lifted their muskets. The Chief was angry. He gave the settlers food, but he said he would not forget this.
Pocahontas heard her father say they would attack the white men after dark. Pocahontas ran through the woods to warn Captain Smith of her father's plan. As time went by the setters in Jamestown learned how the hunt and plant the fields from the friendly Indians, but Powhatan had forbidden Pocahontas to visit Jamestown.
Captain Smith returned to England when he was badly wounded from a gunpowder explosion. The Indians moved deeper into the woods that winter so they would be away from the white man. The people of Jamestown had a hard winter. They went from 500 to 600 people to only 60 by the end of the winter.
Two small boats came in May to Jamestown. After seeing the empty houses they had decided to abandon Jamestown. The people changed their minds on June 7 when a large ship came with food, supplies, and new settlers.
In the next few years more and more settlers came to Jamestown. The settlers brought supplies and craftsmen to help them in the new land. Pocahontas went up the Potomac River to another Indian village. Captain Samuel Argall was the new leader at Jamestown.
In December 1613 Captain Argall sailed up the Potomac River to a far Indian village to trade with the Indians. Pocahontas. He traded a copper kettle for Pocahontas. The colonists hoped that Powhatan would trade the Indian prisoners and the guns he had taken for Pocahontas. Powhatan sent back many prisoners and promised friendship and corn, but he did not send back the guns. Captain Argall did not send Pocahontas back to her father because of this.
Even though she was held hostage, Pocahontas was free to go from house to house. She was given a warm room, pretty clothes, and food to eat. Pocahontas fell in love with John Rolfe. In April they were married.
For the next eight years the white men and the Indians were at peace. Pocahontas and John were very happy. They had a baby and named him Thomas. Rolfe invented new ways of planting and curing tobacco. He planned to send the tobacco to the Old World. In 1616 John and Pocahontas sailed to England to talk to King James about the sale of tobacco in England.
The people in England loved Pocahontas and followed her everywhere. Pocahontas ran into John Smith while in England. She was so upset she could not talk for hours. She thought Smith had been dead. Pocahontas missed her home. England had so much fog and sickness.Rolfe decided it was time to take Pocahontas home. On her way home Pocahontas died at the age of only 22. John and Thomas returned to the New World to live.

Sitting Bull

Sitting Bull
Tatanka-Iyotanka (1831-1890)
A Hunkpapa Lakota chief and holy man under whom the Lakota tribes united in their struggle for survival on the northern plains, Sitting Bull remained defiant toward American military power and contemptuous of American promises to the end.
Born around 1831 on the Grand River in present-day South Dakota, at a place the Lakota called "Many Caches" for the number of food storage pits they had dug there, Sitting Bull was given the name Tatanka-Iyotanka, which describes a buffalo bull sitting intractably on its haunches. It was a name he would live up to throughout his life.
As a young man, Sitting Bull became a leader of the Strong Heart warrior society and, later, a distinguished member of the Silent Eaters, a group concerned with tribal welfare. He first went to battle at age 14, in a raid on the Crow, and saw his first encounter with American soldiers in June 1863, when the army mounted a broad campaign in retaliation for the Santee Rebellion in Minnesota, in which Sitting Bull's people played no part. The next year Sitting Bull fought U.S. troops again, at the Battle of Killdeer Mountain, and in 1865 he led a siege against the newly established Fort Rice in present-day North Dakota. Widely respected for his bravery and insight, he became head chief of the Lakota nation about 1868.
Sitting Bull's courage was legendary. Once, in 1872, during a battle with soldiers protecting railroad workers on the Yellowstone River, Sitting Bull led four other warriors out between the lines, sat calmly sharing a pipe with them as bullets buzzed around, carefully reamed the pipe out when they were finished, and then casually walked away.
The stage was set for war between Sitting Bull and the U.S. Army in 1874, when an expedition led by General George Armstrong Custer confirmed that gold had been discovered in the Black Hills of Dakota Territory, an area sacred to many tribes and placed off-limits to white settlement by the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868. Despite this ban, prospectors began a rush to the Black Hills, provoking the Lakota to defend their land. When government efforts to purchase the Black Hills failed, the Fort Laramie Treaty was set aside and the commissioner of Indian Affairs decreed that all Lakota not settled on reservations by January 31, 1876, would be considered hostile. Sitting Bull and his people held their ground.
In March, as three columns of federal troops under General George Crook, General Alfred Terry and Colonel John Gibbon moved into the area, Sitting Bull summoned the Lakota, Cheyenne and Arapaho to his camp on Rosebud Creek in Montana Territory. There he led them in the sun dance ritual, offering prayers to Wakan Tanka, their Great Spirit, and slashing his arms one hundred times as a sign of sacrifice. During this ceremony, Sitting Bull had a vision in which he saw soldiers falling into the Lakota camp like grasshoppers falling from the sky.
Inspired by this vision, the Oglala Lakota war chief, Crazy Horse, set out for battle with a band of 500 warriors, and on June 17 he surprised Crook's troops and forced them to retreat at the Battle of the Rosebud. To celebrate this victory, the Lakota moved their camp to the valley of the Little Bighorn River, where they were joined by 3,000 more Indians who had left the reservations to follow Sitting Bull. Here they were attacked on June 25 by the Seventh Cavalry under George Armstrong Custer, whose badly outnumbered troops first rushed the encampment, as if in fulfillment of Sitting Bull's vision, and then made a stand on a nearby ridge, where they were destroyed.
Public outrage at this military catastrophe brought thousands more cavalrymen to the area, and over the next year they relentlessly pursued the Lakota, who had split up after the Custer fight, forcing chief after chief to surrender. But Sitting Bull remained defiant. In May 1877 he led his band across the border into Canada, beyond the reach of the U.S. Army, and when General Terry traveled north to offer him a pardon in exchange for settling on a reservation, Sitting Bull angrily sent him away.
Four years later, however, finding it impossible to feed his people in a world where the buffalo was almost extinct, Sitting Bull finally came south to surrender. On July 19, 1881, he had his young son hand his rifle to the commanding officer of Fort Buford in Montana, explaining that in this way he hoped to teach the boy "that he has become a friend of the Americans." Yet at the same time, Sitting Bull said, "I wish it to be remembered that I was the last man of my tribe to surrender my rifle." He asked for the right to cross back and forth into Canada whenever he wished, and for a reservation of his own on the Little Missouri River near the Black Hills. Instead he was sent to Standing Rock Reservation, and when his reception there raised fears that he might inspire a fresh uprising, sent further down the Missouri River to Fort Randall, where he and his followers were held for nearly two years as prisoners of war.
Finally, on May 10, 1883, Sitting Bull rejoined his tribe at Standing Rock. The Indian agent in charge of the reservation, James McLaughlin, was determined to deny the great chief any special privileges, even forcing him to work in the fields, hoe in hand. But Sitting Bull still knew his own authority, and when a delegation of U.S. Senators came to discuss opening part of the reservation to white settlers, he spoke forcefully, though futilely, against their plan.
In 1885 Sitting Bull was allowed to leave the reservation to join Buffalo Bill's Wild West, earning $50 a week for riding once around the arena, in addition to whatever he could charge for his autograph and picture. He stayed with the show only four months, unable to tolerate white society any longer, though in that time he did manage to shake hands with President Grover Cleveland, which he took as evidence that he was still regarded as a great chief.
Returning to Standing Rock, Sitting Bull lived in a cabin on the Grand River, near where he had been born. He refused to give up his old ways as the reservation's rules required, still living with two wives and rejecting Christianity, though he sent his children to a nearby Christian school in the belief that the next generation of Lakota would need to be able to read and write.
Soon after his return, Sitting Bull had another mystical vision, like the one that had foretold Custer's defeat. This time he saw a meadowlark alight on a hillock beside him, and heard it say, "Your own people, Lakotas, will kill you." Nearly five years later, this vision also proved true.
In the fall of 1890, a Miniconjou Lakota named Kicking Bear came to Sitting Bull with news of the Ghost Dance, a ceremony that promised to rid the land of white people and restore the Indians' way of life. Lakota had already adopted the ceremony at the Pine Ridge and Rosebud Reservations, and Indian agents there had already called for troops to bring the growing movement under control. At Standing Rock, the authorities feared that Sitting Bull, still revered as a spiritual leader, would join the Ghost Dancers as well, and they sent 43 Lakota policemen to bring him in. Before dawn on December 15, 1890, the policemen burst into Sitting Bull's cabin and dragged him outside, where his followers were gathering to protect him. In the gunfight that followed, one of the Lakota policemen put a bullet through Sitting Bull's head.
Sitting Bull was buried at Fort Yates in North Dakota, and in 1953 his remains were moved to Mobridge, South Dakota, where a granite shaft marks his grave. He was remembered among the Lakota not only as an inspirational leader and fearless warrior but as a loving father, a gifted singer, a man always affable and friendly toward others, whose deep religious faith gave him prophetic insight and lent special power to his prayers.