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The Black Hawk War of 1832. By Patrick J. Jung. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2007. Pp. 275. Cloth $29.95.)
Reviewed by Andrew K. Frank
In 1832, nearly 1,100 Indians in the trans- Appalachian West followed the elder Sauk warrior Black Hawk and defied a federal order to remain to the west of the Mississippi River and away from their recently vacated lands in Illinois. Black Hawk and the others did not necessarily intend a violent protest of this manifestation of the American policy of Indian removal, but anxieties within the United States made the war inevitable and divisions within the Native American communities made it disastrous. More than half of Black Hawk's followers died in the subsequent and short-lived war, and the resistance movement came to a crashing halt when the United States ruthlessly assaulted the remaining supporters near Bad Axe, Wisconsin. In this carefully researched volume, Patrick J. Jung contends that competing and overlapping dynamics - American expansion, rampant anti- Americanism, intratribal factions, and intertribal warfare - defined the path that led to the war and shaped its outcome.
Jung begins his analysis in the decades that preceded the war, demonstrating a "propensity of the Sauks and Foxes to resist political and cultural domination" and their long history of resistance and mistrust of the United States and other imperial powers (13). Assaults on their culture in the name of civilization, a controversial treaty in 1804 with the United States, and forced land cessions further created the fertile ground for the nativist awakening that reshaped the region in the early nineteenth century....