What the White "Squaws" Want from Black Hawk: Gendering the Fan

:KDWWKH:KLWH6TXDZV:DQWIURP%ODFN+DZN*HQGHULQJ WKH)DQ&HOHEULW\5HODWLRQVKLS 7HQD/+HOWRQ The American Indian Quarterly, Volume 34, Number 4, Fall 2010, pp. 498-520 (Article) 3XEOLVKHGE\8QLYHUVLW\RI1HEUDVND3UHVV For additional information about this article http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/aiq/summary/v034/34.4.helton.html Access provided by University of Illinois Springfield (7 Mar 2016 19:31 GMT) What the White “Squaws” Want from Black Hawk Gendering the Fan-Celebrity Relationship tena l. helton Although his study focuses on twentieth-century celebrity culture, David P. Marshall’s contention in Celebrity and Power that the celebrity lives in a symbolic and commodifi ed world is relevant to discussions of celebrity in the early nineteenth century.1 During the years preceding the Civil War, Americans became more entranced with particular fi g- ures and their renown. Thomas Baker shows in his book about famed nineteenth-century writer and publisher Nathaniel Parker Willis that the early nineteenth century was a time in which celebrity culture was not just emerging but fl ourishing. Because the “market for access to renown” was growing and establishing “the groundwork for our modern condition, in which fame is both a durable commodity and inseparable from public attention to personality,” we can consider the similarities between antebellum and modern celebrity cultures, in particular, the public’s desire for celebrity gossip and scandal that might be refl ected in periodicals.2 Other popular fi gures of the midcentury, including P. T. Barnum and Buffalo Bill, capitalized on the apparent hunger for spec- tacle and celebrity in American culture.3 For a few months in 1833 Black Hawk and his band were the celebrities of the day; they were commodifi ed and symbolically consumed by the American public through newspaper renditions of them and their movements. Black Hawk, as he was known in English, was a Sauk Indian war chief who disputed the lawfulness of a treaty signed in 1804 by Indiana gov- ernor William Henry Harrison and chiefs of the Sauk and Fox nations. Black Hawk maintained that the treaty was unlawful because the full councils of the nations had not been consulted and, later, that those who had signed did not have the authority to cede the land of the Saukenuk (in modern-day Illinois). He began to fi ght the Americans soon there- after, and he fought on the side of the British during the War of 1812. At the end of the war in 1815 the Sauk and Fox nations signed a peace treaty in which the cession of land in 1804 was reaffi rmed. Black Hawk nevertheless disputed the lawfulness of those actions. Although Black Hawk and his “British Band” of about fi ve hundred warriors and a thousand women, children, and old men attempted to move back to their original land from where they had been resettled west of the Mississippi River in 1828, they were never able to retake the land. Americans then began settling upon the lands of the Sauk and Fox in Illinois. With promises of alliances, Black Hawk attempted again to return to Illinois, but once he had arrived near the nation’s original lands, the alliances never ma- terialized. As he returned toward the Mississippi River and Iowa, Black Hawk’s band was attacked by the Illinois militia. This precipitated the Black Hawk War of 1832. After the fi ghting was over, Black Hawk and the remnants of his band were captured and held outside of St. Louis in Jef- ferson Barracks. Black Hawk’s capture provided a political opportunity for Andrew Jackson’s government, and so Black Hawk and the remnants of his band were put to use in the East as examples of defeated Indians. Although Black Hawk and his band served a purpose as captive celebrities, the circulation of their celebrity could not be completely contained or ma- nipulated as a pro-Jackson political message.4 Black Hawk and his com- panions became celebrities who rivaled Jackson’s own tour of the East. Yet Black Hawk’s celebrity was highly malleable, often used to further editors’ own political or social viewpoints. For example, on July 30, 1833, after the end of Black Hawk’s “tour,” the Commonwealth, a Frankfort, Kentucky, newspaper, reported that during one of his many interactions with society, Black Hawk had responded to the intense interest of Wash- ington, DC, “ladies” with a cutting remark, “Debilinchibison Jekorre Manitou,” which was translated as “What in the devil’s name do these squaws want of me!”5 Orlando Brown, the editor of this newspaper, further circulated the “Blackhawkiana” and excerpted the already extant information from the New York Courier and Enquirer that had been reported in the New-York Mirror on July 13, 1833, along with a retrospec- tive biographical sketch and a woodcut print. We could speculate that female fans of Black Hawk wanted a brush with the exotic, a hint of miscegenation, and a bit of the transgressive— Helton: What the White “Squaws” Want 499 an imagined sexual and political freedom wrought from the bodies of Black Hawk and his fellow Sauk Indians. However, we have no direct evidence of exactly how particular fans responded to Black Hawk and his good-looking son. Nevertheless, Black Hawk’s and his female fans’ identities were created through sexualized rhetoric circulated in the newspapers. This rhetoric and its (re)constitutive effects upon Indian and female identities diminished for some Americans the potential dan- ger of a disruptive force on the western borders; supposedly, it further “defeated” the “defeated Sauk and Fox Indians” and, by extension, all western tribes. black hawk as captive celebrity In the early nineteenth century rhetorical strategies used to indicate that a person was a celebrity included direct references to his or her popular- ity as well as circulation rhetorically through media and cultural outlets. Besides being reported upon in newspapers or magazines, the celebrity might become the butt of jokes; have his or her likeness parodied in the theater, at a party, or in a magazine; be linked to circus acts, freak shows, and parades; or have a ship or a racehorse named after her or him.6 Each and all of these occurred in conjunction with Black Hawk’s “tour” of the East Coast in the spring and summer of 1833—and a bit beyond his journey. Eastern newspapers were well aware of his celebrity. The New York Courier, as reported in the Georgia Telegraph, even affi xed some numbers: Whereever [sic] they go, great numbers are sure to follow them, wherever they stop, hundreds and sometimes thousands, besiege them. If they had been kept as a “show,” (which of course would have been a shameful degradation,) we verily believe that $100,000 might have been collected, in the course of a few days for the privi- lege of seeing them.7 Interestingly, the payment would be a “degradation,” but the parading of the Indians was not. If these strategies seem similar to those of the twentieth and twenty-fi rst centuries, it is because they are. Celebrity is not a modern phenomenon.8 In addition to Black Hawk, the “tour” group included “the Prophet,” Wabokieshiek; Neapope, known as “the brother”; the Prophet’s adopted 500 american indian quarterly/fall 2010/vol. 34, no. 4 son, Pamaho (which means “fast-swimming fi sh”); and Black Hawk’s eldest son, Nasheaskuk (which means “the whirling thunder”). In the eastern newspapers the group was often spoken of as an aggregate ver- sion of Black Hawk himself. The Prophet often spoke at their public ap- pearances, although few of his words are actually reported. Black Hawk’s son was reported as handsome, exotic, and admired by the women. He was described in a number of eastern papers as “a perfect Apollo” and by the Cincinnati Mirror as “a monarch among princes”: “Had there not been wanting in his countenance that peculiar expression which ema- nates from a cultivated intellect . we could have looked upon him as the living personifi cation of our beau ideal of manly beauty and perfec- tion.”9 Any headlines, however, usually subsumed such descriptions and labeled the descriptions “Black Hawk” or “Blackhawkiana.” The son was usually not named in these accounts; he became simply a derivative of Black Hawk himself as “Black Hawk’s son.” Only rarely was the Prophet singled out. For all intents and purposes, the group was one. In April 1833 Andrew Jackson informed the group, who had been im- prisoned for an entire winter in St. Louis, that they were to be trans- ferred to Fort Monroe at Old Point Comfort, Virginia. According to information reprinted in Niles’ Weekly Register from an April 27, 1833, issue of the Globe, the president said he wanted peace among all the tribes, and “when the tribes had learned that the power they attempted to con- tend with, was equally able and disposed to protect the peaceful and to punish the violence of aggressors—when his information assured him that their people in particular, were convinced of this . then [the prisoners] would be restored to their families.”10 According to the National Intelligencer on April 30, 1833, the “prisoners” were unaware of their sta- tus, thinking they were “guests” until that point. J. Gerald Kennedy in his introduction to the most recent edition of the Life of Black Hawk or Mà- ka-tai-me-she-kià-kiàk argues that the tour had at least three purposes: “to humiliate the Indians by placing them on display as trophy captives, to convince them of the uselessness of warring with a far more numer- ous and powerful people, and to demonstrate to the American public Jackson’s control over his Indian policy.”11 Donald Jackson, in his 1964 introduction to Black Hawk’s text, describes the group as “defeated In- dians” with whom the government no longer needed to exact exemplary vengeance.12 According to the New-London Gazette, when the group arrived in New York, this sentiment was further exemplifi ed in a portion Helton: What the White “Squaws” Want 501 of a speech by Mr.

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