In the mid-1820s some southern and western states demanded that the national government take a larger role in Native American affairs. This process began in Georgia, where the governor and the state legislature tried to pressure Pres. John Quincy Adams to remove Muscogee and Cherokee populations from the state. By the fall of 1827, Illinois Gov. Ninian Edwards had also begun calling on the Adams administration to remove the remaining Native Americans from his state. Because Indigenous groups in Illinois had signed treaties ceding their land within the state decades earlier, Edwards needed only to ask the administration to enforce already existing treaties, not to negotiate new ones. In July 1828 U.S. Secretary of War Peter Porter informed Edwards that the remaining Native Americans had agreed to leave the state by the end of May 1829.

Andrew Jackson, who succeeded Adams as president in March 1829, already had a long history of challenging federal policy regarding Indigenous peoples—as both a general and a commissioner charged with negotiating land cessions. He believed strongly that it was in the interest of both Native Americans and white settlers that any eastern Indigenous groups who wanted to remain a member of a tribe and practice an Indigenous culture should move beyond the Mississippi. Although it met with widespread criticism from the press, the public, and many in Congress, the bill advocated by Jackson that became the Indian Removal Act passed both houses of Congress in May 1830, empowering the president to send commissioners to negotiate removal treaties. Jackson’s administration did not believe, however, that a new treaty with the Sauk and Meskwaki was needed. The two groups had already committed to relocate west of the Mississippi under old treaties (the treaty of 1804 was reaffirmed in 1816 by the Meskwaki and some Sauk), and John Reynolds, the new governor of Illinois, felt confident of federal support for his request that the Sauk and Meskwaki be forced to comply with those old treaties.

In 1828 the agent of the Sauk and Meskwaki, Thomas Forsyth, informed the tribal chiefs that they should begin preparing to abandon their villages and farms east of the Mississippi. The chiefs responded by denying ever having ceded this land, thereby straining relations with both the federal government, which wanted to start selling the land on the Rock River, and the state government. As pressure mounted from William Clark, the former explorer turned federal superintendent of Indian affairs in St. Louis, tensions emerged among the Sauk and Meskwaki. By the spring of 1829, Black Hawk had become a forceful spokesman for the view that the tribes had never knowingly ceded their Illinois lands. Others, notably Black Hawk’s main rival, Keokuk, concluded that because the Sauk and Meskwaki could not possibly resist the United States by force, removal was necessary, if undesirable. In the fall of 1829, Keokuk and his people abandoned their principal settlement, Saukenuk (near modern-day Rock Island, Illinois), and crossed the Mississippi, vowing never to return.

Despite warnings from Keokuk that the tribal council would not support them, Black Hawk and other Sauk and Meskwaki warriors and families returned from their winter quarters in Iowa to Saukenuk in the spring of 1830. The few hundred who returned again in 1831 realized that the white settlers had come to stay but refused to leave the sacred home of their ancestors without being removed by force. Black Hawk’s band also tried to use the 1804 treaty to their advantage, saying that they were entitled to return to the land because it was as yet unsold.

Reynolds, who saw the return of Black Hawk’s band in the spring of 1831 as an invasion, called out a mounted militia of 700 men. Gen. Edward Gaines, commander of the Western Division of the U.S. Army, met in Saukenuk with the Sauk and Meskwaki chiefs but refused to allow them to remain even long enough to harvest their corn. This development, coupled with Gaines’s acceptance of Keokuk’s proposal that the government provide the Sauk and Meskwaki with corn for the winter, led many families to recross the Mississippi. By mid-June, with many of the Sauk and Meskwaki about to leave or already gone, Black Hawk sought support from nearby Kickapoo, Potawatomi, and Ho-Chunk (Winnebago), including a Ho-Chunk prophet, White Cloud.

After Gaines was reinforced by 1,400 Illinois militiamen in late June, the remaining Sauk and Meskwaki recrossed the Mississippi. On June 30 Black Hawk and the chiefs of the “British Band” (so called because they had fought with the British during the War of 1812 and remained on friendly terms with them) were forced to sign “Articles of Agreement and Capitulation.” Under those terms the humiliated Black Hawk agreed not only to remain west of the Mississippi but also to stop visiting British posts in Canada and “to submit to the authority of the friendly Chiefs & Braves,” including Keokuk. Nevertheless, Black Hawk later recalled that when he signed this agreement, he “was determined to live in peace.”

In the summer and fall of 1831, frustrated because the government had failed to provide enough corn for them to survive the winter, a few Sauk and Meskwaki men recrossed the river to harvest whatever corn, beans, and squash they could from their old fields. When combined with the anti-Indigenous sentiment that had swept the West in 1831, Reynolds’s continuing animosity ensured that any new dispute would end in bloodshed. In July 1831 he wrote, “If I am again compelled to call on the Militia of this State, I will place in the field such a force as will exterminate all Indians, who will not let us alone.”