The Battle For The Heart of America

In the spring of 1832, Black Hawk and his Sauk followers, including seven hundred warriors, rose up and defiantly crossed the Mississippi to reclaim their ancestral home in Illinois. The repellion was dashed in just three months, yet no other violent encounter between white America and native people embodies so clearly the U.S. Republic's conflict between exalted ideals of freedom and human dignity and it's insatiable appetite for territory.
Untill 1822, the 6,000-strong Sauk nation had occupied one of North America's largest Indian Settlements, just east of the Mississippi. Supported by hundreds of acres of planted fields, their domain was the envy of white Americans who had already begun to encroach upon the rich land. When conflicts between natives and squatters inevitably turned violent, the Sauks were forced into exile, uprooted and banished to the uncharted west.
Giving new life to the heroic efforts of Black Hawk and his men, Kerry Trask illuminates the tragic history of frontier America through the eyes of those who were cast aside in the persute of manifest destiny.