ifty
million acres, be ceded to the government, the consideration being the
cancellation of a debt of $2,400, which the Indians owed trader Choteau,
of Saint Louis, and a perpetual annuity of $1,000 thereafter. It was
also tacitly agreed that the imprisoned Indian should be released. This
part of the program was carried out, but the poor fellow had not gone
three hundred feet before he was shot dead. We are sorry to say that
General William Henry Harrison was the chief representative of the
government in this one-sided treaty, though, of course, he knew nothing
of the predetermined killing of the Indian prisoner. This treaty, made
without due authority on the part of Quashquamme, was not accepted by
the Sauks till 1816, when its ratification was made a side issue in an
agreement which the government negotiated between the Sauks and the
Osages or Sioux.

Black Hawk always claimed that he had never consented to the sale of
Saukenuk; and it is but fair to Quashquamme to say that he always
insisted that his cession of land went only to the Rock--and therefore
did not include Saukenuk--and not to the Wisconsin, as the whites
asserted. I have been thus explicit, as the disagreement about this
treaty led to the final conflict between the Sauks and the whites.

One proposition of the original paper was that the Indians should be
allowed to occupy all the territory as aforetime until it was surveyed
and sold to settlers. Along in the '20's the frontier line rapidly
approached the great river; and about 1823, when still fifty miles
distant, squatters began to settle on the Indian lands at Saukenuk.
Protest was made against this to the commander of Fort Armstrong (which
was built on Rock Island in 1816) and to the government, but without
avail.

The squatters, relying for protection on the troops near by, perpetrated
outrages of the most exasperating character. They turned their horses
into the Indian cornfields, threw down fences, whipped one young woman
who had pulled a few corn suckers from one of their fields to eat, while
on her way to work, and finally two ruffians met Black Hawk himself one
day as he was hunting on the river bottom and accused him of shooting
their hogs. He indignantly denied it, but they snatched his rifle from
his hand, wrenched the flint out, and then beat the old man with a
hickory stick till the blood ran down his back, and he could not leave
his house for days. Doubtless this indignity surpassed al