Black Hawk on the warpath
One of the pieces of American Literature I'll be imposing on my students, is Life of Black Hawk, as narrated by Black Hawk (in 1833) to a translator, and then cleaned up by an editor. This narration took place five years before Black Hawk's death, and soon after his return from an imprisonment that seemed more like a Grand Tour of the East, after the Black Hawk War.
My Dover edition properly deplores the racist Introduction that was attached to the 1916 edition, but leaves it in for historical interest. The 79 pages of primary text are information- and event-packed, and ranks with the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglas for portraying a slice of history from an outsider perspective. Black Hawk frequently comments on the differences between white culture and his culture, but more fascinating are the differences he just doesn't "get." He never seems to grasp that his prisoner-of-war status gave him no rights and no honor. He just thinks that people are engaging in bad manners.
Black Hawk doesn't give many pages to the Black Hawk War, and under-dramatizes it. He spends more time describing his trip to Washington DC, Baltimore, Philadelphia and New York, and all the wonders he saw there.
My St. Louis friends would find much of this material familiar, because Black Hawk frequently visited there, as well as hunting in the area, and visiting most of the forts that are still preserved.
Two things I was a little surprised to learn were a) that the Sauk and Fox were avid sugarers in the winter (I thought this was an Eastern Woodlands thing), and that the sugar camp was Black Hawks favorite time of the year; and b) that the natives mined lead for themselves. I'll have to research this to find out if they used it only for bullets, whether the lead-mining preceded firearms, and whether they sold the lead to the traders.
CBsIP: 2666, Roberto Bolano
The Simple Art of Murder, Raymond Chandler