Black Hawk (Ma-ka-tai-me-she-kia-kiak) was an influential Sauk chief who took exception to an 1804 treaty whereby the Sauk and Fox tribes of Illinois and Wisconsin agreed to leave fifty million acres of land east of the Mississippi River at that point in the future when white settlers should begin moving onto them. While resenting the treaty's terms, Black Hawk and his dissident allies also challenged the agreement's validity, because the tribal representatives at St. Louis had been intoxicated when they signed the treaty.

Valid or not, the agreement had to be implemented in the 1820s, as more and more settlers streamed into the area in question,. The bulk of the Sauk and Fox tribes affected had moved across the Mississippi River by the early 1830s. Black Hawk and his followers were among those forced to migrate, but they bridled at the resettlement and kept returning to Illinois. For a period outright war was avoided, but hostilities finally broke out in early 1832. Unfortunately for Black Hawk, the Indian allies and British assistance from Canada that he was hoping would assist him in this struggle never materialized. By late summer, the uprising was crushed, and Black Hawk was a prisoner. After traveling to Washington where he met President Andrew Jackson, he was sent to Iowa to live out his final days. In many respects the story of the Black Hawk War is typical of the multitude of conflicts that resulted from tribal displacement during the period of westward expansion. Today his autobiography, Life of Ma-ka-tai-me-she-kia-kiak, dictated while he was in prison and published in 1833, is a classic in American literature.

The Armed Forces gallery at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History tells more about the armed conflicts--including the Black Hawk War--that resulted from the clash of Native American and European cultures. In addition, the exhibition "After the Revolution" takes an in-depth look at the customs and social structures of the Seneca Nation, an eastern woodland tribe that inhabited what is now western New York State.