INDIANS. 197 



opportunity to bring out the hero. Besides the part they had 

 in this savage warfare, they had joined the French in their 

 successive w^ars of this period, and had seen the mihtary art 

 in its scientific and formidable shapes, w^ith the aid of tactics 

 and strategy, and its attendants of cannon and all the weapons 

 of civilized war. Pontiac was made of the metal to improve 

 under this teaching, and he accordingly came out of it as good 

 a specimen of the Indian hero, as any other, perhaps, of 

 whom we have knowledge. 



Muckatah Mishakiahkiah (the Black Sparrow Hawk), the 

 Sauk chief known in our day, usually called Black Hawk, 

 was in person below the middle size, of that nervous tempe- 

 rament which unites strength with activity, and crowns the 

 union of these faculties with courage and a spirit that seems 

 never exliausted, and cannot be subdued. At the age of fif- 

 teen, on an occasion of some outrage committed upon a por- 

 tion of the Sauks by some Indians of a neighboring tribe, he 

 followed the band of avengers, who pursued and chastised 

 the foe, and entitled himself to the rank of a brave. He was 

 frequently engaged in hostile encounters, and had become the 

 first warrior of the nation. Not liking the treaty of 1830, by 

 which the chiefs of the Sauks had ceded their lands east of 

 the Missisippi, and having other causes of irritation, as already 

 mentioned, he commenced that system of hostility known as 

 the Black Hawk War, the result of which is given in the 

 historical part of this volume. He seems not to have been 

 cruel or treacherous, but to have tempered his courage with 

 generosity and humanity. He had less opportunity than Pon- 

 tiac to display before the whites his heroism, as he had also 

 not so great a school in which to leam the art of war. He 

 was probably the more amiable man of the two. A strong 

 attachment to their friends was common to both. A high 

 order of intellect belongs to the Sauk tribe, and a man could 



