Page:History of Iowa From the Earliest Times to the Beginning of the Twentieth Century Volume 1.djvu/135

CHAPTER VIII N the 21st of September, 1832, General Winfield Scott and Governor Reynolds, of Illinois, negotiated a treaty by which there was acquired from these tribes six million acres of land on the west side of the Mississippi, known as the “Black Hawk Purchase.” The treaty was made on the west bank of the river in the present limits of the city of Davenport. The tract thus ceded extended from the northern boundary of Missouri, to the mouth of the Upper Iowa River, and had an average width of fifty miles, westward of the Mississippi.

The consideration to be paid for this grant was an annual sum of twenty thousand dollars for a period of thirty years; and a further sum of fifty thousand dollars to be applied to the payment of debts due from the Indians to traders Davenport and Farnam, at Rock Island. Six thousand bushels of corn, fifty barrels of flour, thirty barrels of pork, thirty-five beef cattle and twelve bushels of salt were also appropriated for the support of the Indian women and children whose husbands and fathers had been killed in the war just closed. It was estimated that the United States paid in money and provisions about nine cents an acre for this munificent grant of lands.

Black Hawk being a prisoner, the treaty was agreed to on part of the Indians by Keokuk, Pashepaho and about thirty other chiefs and warriors of the Sac and Fox nation. There was reserved to the Sacs and Foxes within the limits of this grant, four hundred square miles of land on the Iowa River, including Keokuk's village. This tract was called “Keokuk's Reserve,” and was occupied by the Indians until 1836, when by a treaty negotiated by Governor Henry Dodge, of Wisconsin Territory, it was