fs brought one of the accused killers to St. Louis. Harrison
used the occasion to negotiate a treaty in which the Sauk and Fox ceded
to the U.S. all their land east of the Mississippi, including what is
today northwestern Illinois and southwestern Wisconsin, as well as a
portion of Missouri. All together the Sauk gave up 51 million acres. For
this they got $2234.50 and an annual payment of $1000 worth of goods.
Later one of the chiefs who had signed the treaty said that the
delegation had been drunk most of the time they were in St. Louis. The
prisoner the chiefs had delivered to Harrison was "killed while trying
to escape."

Black Hawk never recognized this treaty or later confirmations of it. In
defiance, he led his people back to Saukenuk every spring.

There is a gaudy rural playground area in south-central Wisconsin known
as the Wisconsin Dells, where local folks will show tourists a cave in
which, they swear, Black Hawk was hiding when captured by two Winnebago
warriors named Chaetar and One Eye Decorah. But Dr. Nancy O. Lurie of
the Milwaukee Public Museum has unearthed a different account of Black
Hawk's surrender, written by John Blackhawk, grandson of a Winnebago
chief and no relation to the Sauk leader. I find the John Blackhawk
version much more probable than the Wisconsin Dells story, and it's the
one I've followed, adding, inevitably, my own fictional elaborations. Be
it noted that the incident of the small boy who commits Black Hawk's
party to surrendering by smoking Wave's peace pipe is not my invention,
but is reported in the John Blackhawk manuscript. Tobacco was that
sacred to the Native Americans of those times.

Another matter on which historians disagree is the origin of the
expression "O.K.," which made its appearance in the American language in
the 1830s. Here I propose an explanation (see page 239) that I haven't
seen anywhere else, but that, like John Blackhawk's story, makes sense
to me. People at that time attached the adjective "old" to anyone or
anything they felt affectionate about--Old Glory, Old Ironsides, Old
Hickory. By the time he got around to running for President, Zachary
Taylor was "Old Rough and Ready." The most popular alcoholic beverage in
early nineteenth-century America was whiskey, and the best whiskey was
distilled in Kentucky and widely known as Old Kaintuck. It was a jug of
Old Kaintuck that Raoul grudgingly shared with Abe Lincoln. It seems
likely enough that the nickn