Many still live in Fremont county to whom the Indian trails or paths, that wound over the hills and through the vales, from grove to grove and from stream to stream, were as familiar, if not as numerous, as are the roads that accommodate the traveling public now. Indeed their camp fires were still burning when some among us first came to Fremont county. The forks and poles which formed the frames of their dwellings, and the bark which covered them, reminded us often of the singular race that had so recently disappeared. No history, then, of the county would be complete without some account of the native tribes which preceded the white man on this soil.

A feeling of sadness involuntarily steals over us as we contemplate the waning glory of the nations that once with elastic step,proud mien and brave hearts chased over these beautiful prairies herds of innumerable buffaloes, stealthily pursued the bounding deer and graceful antelope, or more leisurely fished in the rivers, streams and lakes, or waylaid the numberless birds of passage that vibrated between their summer and winter homes - nations that displayed their military prowess in sanguinary tribal conflicts on the field of battle. Strong nations have dwindled to insignificant bands in their retreat before the influx of the Anglo-Saxon race, until they may fittingly adopt the poet's sad strain:

The aboriginal tribes of America are so related to each other that a proper idea of one tribe can no more be given without referring to other tribes than can the geology of Fremont county be given without referring to the region around it. Indeed, the very existence of Indians on this continent presents a problem not easy to solve. Its difficulty appears in the variety of answers which have been given. Since the human family was created and cradled in the interior of Asia, the aborigines of America must have reached the western continent in the same way that the islands of the Pacific were reached - that is, by some kind of ocean craft. Indians lined the Atlantic coast from Maine to Georgia when the Pilgrims anchored the Mayflower in Plymouth bay. Four great families of tribes, according to the languages spoken, were then found in the country - the Iroquois, the Algonquin, The Mobilian and the Dakotas. While there were some exceptions, the mass of the Indians would naturally range under one or other of these families. their manners, customs, policy and regulations were such, that alliances and confederations at some times seemed almost to blend in one the different tribes; and again hostilities would break out and not only separate confederacies into the original tribes, but often would divide tribes into bands or clans which, in some instances, seem to have grown into distinct tribes.

The westward march of European emigration and the exploration of new regions of country have brought to light new tribes of Indians, until the Indian commissioner's report for 1874 mentions one hundred and fifty or more different tribes and bands within the United States, numbering in all, excluding those of Alaska, 261,851 as reported by the secretary of the interior in 1882.

The Indian tribes seem to have acted over in America, on a small scale, the incursions, invasions, conflicts and chages which were produced in Europe by the Vandals, the Huns, the Heruli, the Goths and Gauls, and other nations in their irruptions and migrations.

The tribes that have roamed and hunted and fought over the fair fields of Iowa re the Sioux, Winnebagoes, Iowas, Illinois, Sacs and Foxes, and Pottawattamies.

The Winnebagoes were found by Captain Jonathan Carver in 1766, located around Winnebago lake in Wisconsin. they were war friends of the Sioux, not a numerous tribe, and could then raise two hundred warriors. From their traditions, language and customs he judged "that the Winnebagoes originally resided in New Mexico and, being driven from their native country either by intestine divisions or by the extension of the Spanish conquests, they took refuge in these more northern parts, about a century before." This tribe seems to have affiliated with the Iowas, and Sacs and Foxes, and part of it found its way with them into Iowa. From the commissioner's report of 1882, we learn that the Winnebagoes on their reservation in eastern Nebraska, adjoining the Omaha reservation on the north, number 1,422, which are all of the tribe, except about 400 vagabonds, who have returned to Wisconsin, and a few who have joined the Sacs and Foxes in Tama county, Iowa.

The Iowas, from whom our state takes its name, were at one time identified with the Sacs of Rock river, but for some reason separated from them and assumed to be a band by themselves. For a time the Iowas occupied the same hunting grounds with the Sacs and Foxes, and seem to have com with them into Iowa. In the beginning of the present century they had two villages in the state, one on the right bank of the Iowa river, about ten miles above its confluence with the Mississippi, and theh other, which was their principal village, on the Des Moines river on the site of Iowaville in Van Buren county. Here the last great battle was fought between the Iowas and Sacs and Foxes, in which the latter were the assailants. The Iowas were taken altogether by surprise and unarmed. The attck resulted in the burning and complete destruction of the village and slaughter of great numbers of the Iowas, men, women and children. In this fight, which was more of a massacre than a battle, Black Hawk, then a young man, led a detachment of the aggressors.

In 1881 this tribe, numbering one hundred and thirty, is reported as occupying sixteen thousand acres of a reservation in southeastern Nebraska, known as the Great Nemaha Reservation, which is shared by them and the Sacs and Foxes. though greatly reduced in numbers, they are said to be making commendable progress in husbandry, learning and civilization. They have adopted a code of laws, employ a tribal police, and fine every man who gets drunk five dollars. Sixty-three of the Sacs and Foxes of Missouri share the civil regulations and educational advantages with them. They are industrious, thrifty and provident.

At a grand council, held at the great Ojibway village on the shores of Lake superior in 1665, we learned that the Illionis tribe was represented. This tribe, from which the river and state took their name, was at one time numerous and powerful. Their hunting ground extended from Rock river to Ohio, and westward to the Des Moines. Marquette and Joliet, French explorers, and the first Europeans that ever set foot in Iowa, in June 1673, visited three Illinois villages on the bank of a river, supposed to be the Des Moines. They were cordially received, smoked the calumet with their new found friends, and remained with them six days perfecting their acquaintance.

Though the Illinois were at one time a formidable nation, and roamed over ample hunting grounds, pursuing the buffalo and the deer on the vast plains, fishing in the majestic rivers, or gliding over the lakes and streams in their light canoes, yet their pride, cruelty and vengeful spirit transformed friends to foes, and produced a harvest like the sowing of the fabled dragon's teeth, so that enemies beset them round. When the Sacs and Foxes crowded them on the north, the Miamis on the East, Osages and Shawnees on the south and Sioux on the west, they became straitened and cut off on every side. They had a populous village of 6,000 or 7,000 inhabitants on the Illinois river, near the present town of Utica, in La Salle county, where Joliet and Marquette found friendly entertainment of their return from the lower Mississippi in 1673. Tonti, the lieutenant of LaSalle, spent the winter of 1679 and '80, and the following summer, at this large Illinois town.

In September of this year (1680) a bloody battle was fought between the Iroquois and Illinois, on the prairie skirting the timber along the Vermillion river southeast of this village. The Iroquois were victors, and, after the fight, crossed the river and laid the Illinois town in ashes. Soon after, Tonti, being deserted by his men, and attacked by the Indians, took refuge among the Pottawattamies on Lake Michigan. Two years later he, with LaSalle, returned and fortified an almost inaccessible rock on the south bank of the river opposite the site of this village, and named it Fort St. Louis. This place, which Tonti held till 1688, is now known as "Starved Rock;" it rises perpendicularly from the water on the river side to the height of two hundred feet, is level on the top, and can be scaled only on the land side, and at a single point, which is easily defended. It acquired its name and notoriety from the following incident: The Illinois tribe, beset with enemies on every side, wasted by predatory incursions, and slaughtered in sanguinary strife, had become reduced to a mere remnant of its former greatness. The death of the great chieftain, leader and favorite, Pontiac at Cahokia in 1769, by the hand of an Illinois assassin, caused the long gathering cloud of Indian wrath to burst in fury on that devoted nation. Seven cities claimed the nativity of Homer; more than one tribe claimed Pontiac. Parkman writes him an Ottawa chief, Carver a Miami, and others a Sac. His was an eventful life. Born in 1712 - as an ally of the French, he defended Detroit in 1746 - led several hundred Ottawas at Braddock's defeat in 1755 - escorted the English to Detroit in 1760 - conspired against the English settlers in America in 1762 - besieged Detroit for five months in 1763 - submitted to the English in 1766, and was killed in 1769.

The "Conspiracy of Pontiac" is the theme of an interesting volume by Parkman. He was a chief of broad views, great courage and daring, and very extensive influence. He never liked the English, and conceived the idea of destroying all the English on the continent. To accomplish this fondly cherished object he succeeded in enlisting nearly all the prominent tribes in the eastern half of the North American continent. He was artful in diplomacy, skilled in treachery, and cunning, energetic and brave in battle. To effect his object, a simultaneous attack was made on all the frontier settlements from the lakes to the gulf. Many were slain, and more were compelled to flee for their lives. Whole families were massacred, houses burned and happy homes laid waste. No one felt safe to go abroad, and many trembled in their homes. Every one who could went armed. The minister, and all the men of his congregation, went to church armed on Sunday. The pastor stood his loaded rifle behind him when he preached, and families took their places in the pews, while the head of the household sat next the aisle with his ready rifle in easy reach to defend his own. (Thus began the custom of the husband taking the head of the pew, which continues to this day.)

During this time of terror, the following tragic scene occurred on the farm adjoining the writer's native place, as heard by him repeatedly later. A large family of several grown boys and some small children occupied the place. It was in the autumn - wheat sowing time. Two boys with rifles in hand were standing on guard. The father was sowing, and two others with teams were harrowing; when, before they had any knowledge of the presence of Indians, the two on guard were shot down. The others fled - one of the sons hastened to the house, hid the small children, hastily adjusted affairs within, and then ran to the woods and climbed a tree, where he could overlook the proceedings, and while there he saw the Indians pursue, overtake, tomahawk and scalp his father at the door-yard gate. Though the Indians entered the house, the hidden ones were not found. When the survivors of that family gathered again around the home hearth, how lonely! how sad!

A stone house with port holes, which the writer has often seen, was the refuge for that neighborhood in a time of Indian alarm. Such a time of peril must be exceedingly trying; but such our ancestors endured, and fearful times were had all along the western frontiers.

A destructive war was waged by the Miamis, Kickapoos, and Pottawattamies, against the Illinois in 1768. The latter were defeated at the Wabash - at the Blue Island near Joliet, and at Morris. The remnant took refuge on this inaccessible rock - henceforth to be known as "Starved Rock." Here their enemies besieged them until hunger and thirst impelled them, as a last resort, to attempt an escape. On a very dark and stormy night, they broke forth upon their besiegers, when eleven of their number succeeded in escaping down the river. Thus ended a once brave and strong nation. Their name appears no more on the Indian commissioner's report. The tribe of Benjamin is blotted out. Their enemies have glutted their revenge. They vanish before the advancing march of white men.

The Sacs and Foxes, whose hunting grounds in Iowa, in the eighteenth century, extended from the Mississippi to the Missouri, were first heard of in the valley of the St. Lawrence. The confederated Iroquois, or five nations, in New York - the Senecas, Cayugas, Oneidas, Onondagas and Mohawks - to which were afterwards added the Tuscaroras (when they were known as six nations) had become so formidable, aggressive and hostile to neighboring tribes, that many were driven from ancestral homes, preferring exile to constant fear and impending destruction. The Sacs and Foxes were originally two distinct nations, and were crowded westward by the encroachment of their stronger neighbors. The various steps, by which they reached the plains of Iowa, we are not able clearly to trace, but we hear of the Foxes occupying the banks of the Detroit river in 1685. the Sacs were party to a grand council on the shores of Lake Superior in 1665. Friendly to the English and hostile to the French, and instigated by the "six nations," the Foxes attempted to capture the French post at Detroit in 1712. For nineteen days the siege was maintained without success, when they in turn were shut up in their entrenchments by the French and their Indian allies, from which they escaped to Lake St. Clair, where they again entrenched themselves; but were pursued, and after five days' seige were compelled to surrender. the victors massacred all the warriors who bore arms, and many of the rest, whom they attempted in vain to enslave, they afterward put to death. More than a thousand of the Foxes perished in this strife. Exasperated, but not subdued, they rallied their scattered bands on the Fox river in Wisconsin, to take vengeance on the French, by waylaying, robbing and murdering the French traders and travelers in their passage between the lakes and the Mississippi. For a year or two they cut off almost all communication between Canada and Louisiana. Many of the Indian allies of the French also suffered greatly.

This aroused the French in turn, in 1714, to rally their forces and exterminate once and forever so troublesome a foe. The plan, which was to unite all the other tribes under a French commander, soon placed at his behest a force of eight hundred warriors, all pledged not to lay down their arms while a member of the Fox tribe remained on French territory. When the Foxes saw the impending evil, they resolved to sell their lives as dearly as possible, and, in their desperation, selected a strong position near the confluence of the Wolf and Fox rivers (now known as Butte des Mortes, or Hill of the Dead), which they fortified with three rows of oak palisades and a ditch. Here five hundred warriors and three thousand women and children awaited the attack. De Louvigny, the French commander, commenced by cannonading. On the third day the Foxes attacked their enemies with great vigor, but, after a bloody fight, were obliged to capitulate. A treaty of peace was agreed upon, which the Foxes soon violated. The result was that the French again chastised them in 1728, and in 1746 drove them out of their country westward. In their expulsion the Ojibways were the efficient allies of the French.

When first known in Iowa the Foxes were in alliance with the Sacs, and were recognized as the Sac and Fox nations. Exactly when the alliance was formed is not known, but it must have been subsequent to 1746, as at that time the Foxes fought the French alone. It seems probable that the alliance was formed for the conquest of their new hunting grounds west of the Mississippi. Captain Carver, in his travels in 1766, page 25, when speaking of Fox river, says: "This river is remarkable for having been, about eighty years ago, the residence of the united bands of the Ottagaumies (Foxes) and the Saukies (Sacs)."

When, in 1805, soon after the transfer of the Louisiana purchase to the United States, Lieutenant Zebulon M. Pike explored the Mississippi from St. Louis to its source, the Sacs and Foxes hunted on both sides of the river from the Jeffreon river in Missouri to the Iowa river north of Prairie du Chien and west to the Missouri. The Sacs principally resided in four villages - the first on the west bank of the Mississippi at the head of the Des Moines rapids, at or near Montrose; the second on the east bank, sixty miles above, at the mouth of the Henderson river; the third on Rock river, three miles from its mouth; the fourth on the Iowa river.

The Foxes then dwelt mainly in three villages - the first on the west side of the Mississippi river, six miles above the Rock river rapids; the second about twelve miles in the rear of the lead mines, or Dubuque; and the third on Turkey river, a mile and a half from its mouth.

Both Sacs and Foxes engaged in the same wars, maintained the same alliances, and were considered indissoluble in war and in peace. They were efficient aiders and abettors, if not chief parties, in the extermination of the Illinois. They became hostile to the Iowas, whose chief village, on the site of Iowaville on the Des Moines in Van Buren county, they burnt, near the close of the eighteenth century, and slaughtered and well nigh exterminated its inhabitants. In this battle, Black Hawk, who was born at the Sac vilalge on Rock river in 1767, led a band of warriors in the attack, and here began the career for which he afterward became so famous.

Black Hawk was never warmly attached to the Americans. He was dissatisfied when, in 1804, Louisiana was transferred to the United Statess, and never approved of the treaty made at St. Louis, November 3, 1824, by which five chiefs of the Sacs and Foxes ceded to the United States their lands east of the Mississippi, from a point opposite the Jeffreon river in Missouri, to the Wisconsin river. He objected that the chiefs had no authority to cede the lands, that the compensation was inadequate, and that the chiefs were kept drunk while at St. Louis. Black Hawk aided Tecumseh against the United States in 1811, became an ally of England in the war of 1812. On May 13,1816, with twenty-two chiefs and head men he assented to, and signed, the treaty which had been concluded in St. Louis in 1804. In the fall of 1830, on returning from his hunt west of the Mississippi, he found his village occupied by Americans, and his women and children driven out and rendered shelterless by the influx of emigration. This state of things was intolerable, and led to the Black Hawk war, which continued for more than a year and ended in the capture of Black Hawk and the complete rout and slaughter of his forces on August 2, 1832. Seven weeks after his capture, the Sacs and Foxes ceded by treaty to the United States the Black Hawk purchase, a tract fifty miles wide on the west bank of the Mississippi; a reservation of four hundred square miles on the Iowa river made at that time, was ceded back to the United States, September 28, 1836. On October 21, 1837, one million two hundred and fifty thousand acres along the west side of the Black Hawk purchase were ceded. February 21, 1838, all their lands in Iowa, between the Mississippi and Missouri rivers, were ceded, and in 1842 all their lands west of the Mississippi.

Part of them were removed to Kansas in the fall of 1845 and the rest in the spring after.

According to the estimate of the secretary of war in 1825 the entire number of the Sacs and Foxes was four thousand six hundred. the government report for 1881-2 states the number of Sacs and Foxes under the care of the agency in the Indian Territory to five hundred and sixty-two, those on the reserve in Tama county, Iowa, three hundred and fifty-five, and under the care of the great Nemaha agency sixty-three, making a total of nine hundred and eighty. How rapidly they are wasting away!

The Pottawatamies were the last of the red men that lived in Femont county. This tribe, never very powerful or very prominent among the American aborigines, is yet mentioned by the French as gathering from the unexplored recesses of Lake Michigan to learn of Christianity from the Jesuit missionaries early in the seventeenth century (1665-7). Marquette speaks of them at Fox river, Wisconsin, in 1673. Tonti found refuge among them on Lake Michigan in 1680. When, in 1712, the Foxes attempted the capture of the French post at Detroit, the Pottawattamies, with Ottawas and Hurons, were in alliance with the French. They, with Ojibways and Ottawas, formed a confederacy, of which Pontiac was the virtual head. They entered warmly into the Indian conspiracy against the English in 1763, and took an active part in the siege on Detroit in the summer of that year. We find them leagued with the Kickapoos and Miamis against the Illinois in 1768. As the wave of emigration rolled westward, the Pottawattamies with other small tribes were borne on its crest. They probably came into Iowa with their former allies, the Sacs and Foxes. We find them with this tribe and others parties to a treaty formed August 19, 1825, by which the United States was to establish a boundary line between the Sacs and Foxes and the Sioux.

The Pottawattamies were still in Fremont county when the first white settlers came. Shattee, a venerable, hoary-headed chief, with his band of one hundred and fifty or more, had a village in a hollow southwest of Lacy's and about due west from Sidney. Wabonsa's band lived on Wabonsie creek, in Mills county. Government block houses had been erected on the high ground near the descent of the bluffs southeast of James Lambert's residence on the northwest quarter of the southeast quarter of section fourteen, township seventy-one, range forty-three, but were moved at some time prior to 1847 to section twenty-four, township seventy-one, range forty-three, near the residence of John Lambert. The house of Wabonsa, the chief, was bought by a Mr. Cumings. A rude coffin of rough boards rested on the limbs of a tree just across the creek from this log house for a number of years after the whites had taken possession. It was fifteen or twenty feet from the ground, was said to contain an Indian corpse and thus showed the Indian method of disposing of the dead. The treaty by which the Indians were removed was made in the spring of 1847, and permitted them to remain a year, but some of them went to Kansas in the autumn of the same year and some went to the three river county, the forks of the Des Moines, to winter.

About 1876, one thousand four hundred of this tribe became citizens in Kansas and received their land in fee. In 1880 there were four hundred and thirty on a reservation in Kansas and three hundred in the Indian Territory. They are reported to be very desirous to have their children educated and adopt civilized manners. Unless they can be Christianized and civilized they must perish as a race.

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