"The Mississippi Was Our River": Sauk and Meskwaki Geopolitical Strategies on the Nineteenth-Century Prairie.

Following the devastation of Meskwaki people in the Fox Wars of the mid-1700s, the Sauk and Meskwaki Nations cooperated to establish new territorial strategies along a three-hundred mile stretch of the Mississippi from St. Louis to Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin. This region straddled woodland and prairie landscapes, granted access to plains hunting, and allowed the groups to exploit trade relationships with European empires. The large Sauk village of Saukenuk on the Illinois Territory's Rock River was one of the largest in the region, and additional communities stretched along the river above and below it, allowing inhabitants to produce ample crops of corn, hunt extensively for food and pelts to supply the fur trade, and mine lead. At the north end of this corridor was Prairie du Chien, a multiethnic trade center that began as a Meskwaki village and maintained some of its Indigenous character throughout the period. Instead of a binary choice between resistance or assimilation, Sauk and Meskwaki carefully chose aspects of colonial culture that best suited the preservation of their sovereignty and way of life. They interacted with settler markets and chose to utilize some species and goods introduced by Europeans while rejecting others. For instance, they utilized horses to hunt bison in Iowa and Missouri, while they also resisted settler cattle east of their settlements in Illinois, demonstrating their understanding of the animals' importance in undergirding settler colonialism. These careful choices led to a new era of success for Sauk and Meskwaki that challenges declensionist narratives However, the intrusions of settlers and their cattle became intolerable in the era of Removal and led to a Sauk and Meskwaki reevaluation of their geopolitical strategies with some choosing defiance leading to the Black Hawk War of 1832. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]