The first three decades of the nineteenth century were a period of tremendous population growth in Illinois. In 1800, there were so few permanent American settlers in what would become Illinois that federal census takers did not even bother to count them. A decade later, the non-Native American population was still barely over twelve thousand. But the end of the War of 1812 brought a huge influx of settlers to Illinois, which became a state in late 1818. By 1820, the population had more than quadrupled to fifty-five thousand. The vast majority of these settlers, however, lived in the southern and eastern parts of the state, far from the Sauks and Foxes in the north and west.

Over the course of the 1820s, Illinois' non-Native American population nearly tripled, topping one-hundred-and-fifty-seven thousand in 1830. During these years, moreover, the area of settlement spread across the state with new land offices opening every few years to sell more of the surrounding countryside. As American settlers swept north and west across the states, more and more native groups abandoned their villages and farms for new lands west of the Mississippi. By the late 1820s, the Sauk and Fox villages in the northwestern corner of the state were in the last significant area of native settlement.

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Why did the settlers come to Illinois?

Cheap and fertile farmland was not the only thing that drew American settlers to Illinois after the War of 1812, however. The other major attraction was lead. It brought American miners onto lands actually occupied by the Sauks and Foxes on both sides of the Mississippi. The Sauks and Foxes had worked these mines for decades, obtaining lead for their own purposes and to trade with, at different times, the French, Spanish, British, and Americans. On the eve of the war, American miners had tried to take over the Foxes' lead mines west of the river (near what is now Dubuque, Iowa), but they had been driven off by the Foxes.

After the war, the federal government issued leases to lead miners for lands claimed by the Sauks and Foxes. In the summer of 1822, hundreds of miners swarmed into the areas around Galena in northwestern Illinois. The Sauk and Fox chiefs protested strongly, but the U.S. government supported the miners. While the constant state of tension between the American and Native American miners occasionally erupted into violence during the 1820s, more Americans flocked to the region, overwhelming and, whenever possible, ignoring the native presence.

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How did they view Black Hawk, the Sauks and Foxes, and the other Illinois Indians?

This new, mostly white, population viewed the old, mostly Native American, population with great concern. At the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century, men such as presidents George Washington and Thomas Jefferson and their secretaries of war Henry Knox and Henry Dearborn had believed that Native Americans would adopt the culture of white Americans (in their thinking, becoming "civilized") and merge into white society. Even at that time, most western settlers rejected this belief. By the 1820s and early 1830s, white Americans throughout the country were increasingly likely to see Native Americans as racially rather than culturally inferior. Cultural problems--how they dressed, what they ate, how they spent their time, how they spoke--might be corrected. But racial inferiority was viewed as permanent and uncorrectable.

Even as most Illinoians saw Native Americans as permanently inferior, they also considered them dangerous. Settlers whose farms and villages were isolated from each other and often far from army posts worried about Native American raids and attacks. These fears were not entirely unjustified. It had not been that long since Illinois tribes had attacked frontier settlements and federal forts during the War of 1812. Personal violence between natives and whites (as well as among natives and among whites) was common. Fueled by liquor and unrestrained by law, men fought, and even killed, each other over a wide range of issues.

At a time when Native Americans were being pushed from land that they considered their own by the influx of settlers and the force of treaties, tensions remained high. Settlers saw signs of an approaching uprising whenever Native Americans passed through land that was no longer their own or assembled in groups that were larger than expected or stole a horse or shot a cow that had wandered onto their lands or fought a group of miners at a lead dig. During these war scares, white settlers often temporarily abandoned their homes, fleeing to larger towns and cities or to army forts.

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