Describes the shared traditions that linked the Sac and Fox tribes and held them together when they were pushed westward, while recounting the last efforts of Sac war chief Black Hawk to defend Native American territory
This is the saga of the Fox (or Mesquakie) Indians' struggle to maintain their identity in the face of colonial New France during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The Foxes occupied central Wisconsin, where for a long time they had warred with the Sioux and, more recently, had opposed the extension of the French firearm-and-fur trade with their western enemies. Caught between the Sioux anvil and the French hammer, the Foxes enlisted other tribes' support and maintained their independence until the late 1720s. Then the French treacherously offered them peace before launching a campaign of annihilation against them. The Foxes resisted valiantly, but finally were overwhelmed and took sanctuary among the Sac Indians, with whom they are closely associated to this day.
Reproduced in this two-volume set are hundreds of treaties and agreements made by Indian nations--with, among others, the Continental Congress; England, Spain, and other foreign countries; the ephemeral Republic of Texas and the Confederate States; railroad companies seeking rights-of-way across Indian land; and other Indian nations. Many were made with the United States but either remained unratified by Congress or were rejected by the Indians themselves after the Senate amended them unacceptably. Many others are "agreements" made after the official--but hardly de facto--end of U.S. treaty making in 1871. With the help of chapter introductions that concisely set each type of treaty in its historical and political context, these documents effectively trace the evolution of American Indian diplomacy in the United States.