Page:History of Iowa From the Earliest Times to the Beginning of the Twentieth Century Volume 1.djvu/122



Saukenuk. This was for more than fifty years the largest village of the Sacs and contained in 1825 a population of not less than eight thousand. The houses were substantially built, and were from thirty to one hundred feet in length and from sixteen to forty feet in width. They were made with a frame of poles covered with sheathing of elm bark fastened on with thongs of buckskin. The doorways were three feet by six and before them were suspended buffalo skins. These houses were divided into rooms separated by a hall extending the length of the building. Fire-pits were provided with openings for the smoke. The beds were made of skins of animals thrown over elevated frames of elastic poles. Half a mile east of the town is a bold promontory rising two hundred feet from the bed of Rock River. This was known as “Black Hawk's Watch Tower,” and was the favorite resort of the great Sac chieftain. here he would sit smoking his pipe, enjoying the grand scenery spread out before him; the beautiful valley of Rock River, the mighty current of the Mississippi and the bluffs of the Iowa shore fringed with forests. Here he was born and it was the home of his father, Py-e-sa, one of the great Sac chiefs. It is to his credit that he clung to his old home and fought his last hopeless battles against overwhelming numbers of well-equipped white troops in defense of his native land.

On the 27th of June, 1804, William H. Harrison, governor of Indiana Territory and of the Louisiana District, being also superintendent of Indian affairs, was instructed by President Jefferson to negotiate with the Sacs and Foxes for a portion of their lands. In November Harrison met five Sac and Fox chiefs at St. Louis, and obtained their signatures to a treaty which granted to the United States fifty-one million acres of their land, embracing a region east of the Mississippi River extending from a point nearly opposite St. Louis to the Wisconsin River, for the insignificant sum of $2,234 worth of goods and one thousand dollars in money a year.