Black Hawk: The Battle for the Heart of America

I purchased this book for my history buff husband. He loved it. Great writing.

This book gives detailed information related to the causes, effects, and events leading up to, and including the BLACK HAWK WAR. While the title suggests the book is a biography of Black Hawk's life, it is not that at all--and this did not disappoint me in the least. Trask tells the story with just the right amount of depth, and in a contemporary, reader-friendly style. I had read a few other books about the BLACK HAWK WAR and Black Hawk's autobiography, but this book was more thorough, and easily understood. There are ample footnotes and resources listed in the apppendix for those who desire further research.

Like some of the previous reviewers, I grew up in Black Hawk country. As a result, I have read many accounts of the Black Hawk War, and this is one of the best. Black Hawk : The Battle for the Heart of America is fair and balanced (and not in a Fox News kind of way). Trask documents the rapacity of the government and the businessmen who cheated the Sauk and Fox out of their lands. He discusses the Indian culture in which internecine warfare, including revenge murders and mutilations, was considered to be an essential element of manhood, and how this reputation led to panic among the whites and the subsequent overreaction to the Sauk incursion into Illinois. He explains how a similar macho culture among the white frontiersmen led many of them to feel they had to prove their own manhood by going out and killing a few Indians. He points out not only Black Hawk's qualities as a leader but also the flaws that eventually contributed to the destruction of his people in a tragic precursor to the massacres at Sand Creek and Wounded Knee. Trask's book tends to concentrate more on the social and cultural issues behind the conflict rather than on the military campaign. This is appropriate and after reading the book, I feel I have a much better understanding of the background of this significant episode in American history. However, I would have liked to have seen a little more detail about such military events as the Battle of Stillman's Run in which Black Hawk led 40 Sauk warriors against 300 Illinois Militiamen and completely routed them. I was also annoyed by the fact that Trask chose to end this otherwise excellent book with a rather silly and specious analysis of why so many things in northern Illinois and southern Wisconsin are named after Black Hawk. It's guilt; he says. I disagree. People everywhere like to identify with famous people that lived in their area. In central Illinois, things are named after Abraham Lincoln, and across the Mississippi in northern Missouri, after Mark Twain. In my area, it's Black Hawk. If the people south of us feel guilty about Abe and Mark, that's their problem. Around here Black Hawk is the only famous and heroic figure we've got, so we build strip malls and bowling alleys in his honor. And if that theory sounds silly and specious to you, well I have an excuse-I don't know what I'm talking about.

I came upon this book entirely by accident while killing time waiting for a flight. I spent my first 21 years in Northwest Illinois, and while I only became interested in U.S. history 30 years after moving away, as Trask states at the end of this book, people from that part of the Midwest can't really get away from Black Hawk. It was certainly one of our myths, tangential to history, growing up there. I had no idea that Alexander Hamilton's son, sometime Indian fighter, had a fort within ten miles of my hometown and Henry Dodge, founder of Dodgeville, became a frontier hero in a nearby skirmish. Author Trask is dead-on contrasting today's sleepy Illinois-Wisconsin towns with their brief brushes with Black Hawk during the summer of 1832. The whole story fits nicely, or maybe awkwardly, into white America's concept of settling North America. I found the book fascinating and an artful mix of history and perspective. There is just enough analysis of white and native interaction and perspective to keep this anything but a dry historical account. The research seems meticulous, the writing and editing superb, and the narrative strong enough to make the book a page turner. It is hard for me to imagine better coverage of the Black Hawk War. I'll have to disagree with another reviewer who thinks Trask goes to far with naive, modernist analysis. I hate pedantic, term-paper analysis and frankly, I found very little here. I liked his Trickster analogy and was most happy this book was not a rote recital of historical events.

Though I came to the subject of Black Hawk and this book as a result of my constant reading about the life of Abraham Lincoln (he was a militia captain at age 23 in the Black Hawk War), I soon found that there was much more to this story than first meets the eye. As the sub-title suggests, in many ways a battle for the heart of America, both figuratively and literally, was taking place in the first half of the 19th century. Americans continued their westward expansion into the lands that Native Americans called their own, leading inevitably to bloodshed. The Black Hawk War is perhaps generally unknown, but, as masterfully laid out here by Kerry A. Trask, it will never be forgotten once you read this book. You will gain an understanding of life on the frontier from both the Native American and "White" points of view. Once gained, this knowledge is quickly put to use as Trask details the various battles and encounters that took place during the War, as well as the rationale for them. Many of the individuals on both sides are vividly brought to life, Henry Dodge on the American side certainly comes to mind, but it's Black Hawk himself, much an enigma, who will keep you enthralled.