EAS Miscellany sat down recently to chat with John Ryan Fischer, author of “‘The Mississippi Was Our River’: Sauk and Meskwaki Geopolitical Strategies on the Nineteenth-Century Prairie,” our featured article from our Fall 2025 issue.
What drew you to focus on the experiences of the Sauk and Meskwaki Nations as they worked to preserve their sovereignty and way of life?
My first book was on Indigenous adaptations to introduced animals – specifically cattle in California and Hawai‘i – and I was always on the lookout for similar stories. One that fascinated me was a George Catlin illustration of a Meskwaki and Sauk ceremony for exchanging horses. It prompted a lot of questions for me, especially since Catlin was writing (and drawing) soon after the Black Hawk War, which involved both groups. It started my thinking about their livestock economies both before and after that war, and how the process of removal west of the Mississippi would impact them. That led me back to Saukenuk, the large Sauk village where Black Hawk had lived. It was a thriving settlement with as many as a thousand inhabitants, significant corn production, and satellite villages throughout Illinois, Iowa, and into Wisconsin. The historiography on Saukenuk seemed thin to me, considering its size and prominence, and I became very interested in its origins, its agriculture and ecology, and its market connections to settler economies.
How did geography and the physical terrain shape the experiences of the Sauk and Meskwaki Nations?
There are some dramatic migrations in Sauk and Meskwaki history, and the one that led to Saukenuk and other settlements along the Upper Mississippi River interested me because of the shift in the ecological setting. Prompted by the Fox Wars with the French Empire, they moved from the woodland terrain of eastern Wisconsin to a warmer, less wooded prairie environment to the southwest. This was at the same time they would have been incorporating horses more into their lives, and when bison were becoming extinct in Wisconsin. They made a partial shift to the sort of horse-focused plains economy we see taking off in so many places around this time, but they kept a lot of their semi-sedentary village lifeways at the same time. One great insight from environmental history is the resource abundance available in an “ecotone” – the areas on the edge of different environments – and this new location seemed to be drawing from an incredibly diverse resource base as far as soil and grass, game and livestock, and even new market opportunities like mining lead and selling it down the river to colonial settlements. The geopolitics of rivers is another part of the story as well. In Wisconsin, they controlled an important portage between the Great Lakes and the Wisconsin river, and they moved to control over a portion of the upper Mississippi.
What do you think is the most illustrative or compelling source you looked at as part of your research process?
The Autobiography of Black Hawk (Mahkatêwe-meshi-kêhkêhkwa) is one of the most famous Native-authored books of its time period, but I felt like I read it with fresh eyes while working on this paper, and it is a powerful statement on Sauk sovereignty. Because it was transcribed by an interpreter and edited by a white journalist, there have been arguments about its authenticity, but it resonates so well with Black Hawk’s life that I think it must have been based on his testimony, even if it’s not accurate in every word.
I also got a lot from the papers of Thomas Forsyth, a U.S. official who lived at Saukenuk for much of the 1820s, and I think that Black Hawk’s voice really helped me find some truth in Forsyth’s accounts about the village despite his settler perspective.
How did you go about reconstructing the lives and motivations of the Sauk and Meskwaki peoples as they, in turn, chose to resist or assimilate to various aspects of colonial culture? What challenges did you face in interpreting their voices?
Most of the Indigenous inhabitants of Saukenuk and surrounding towns didn’t leave behind any writing. The Indigenous voices we do have, like Black Hawk’s, had their words mediated by a white transcriber. That is a tremendous challenge. There are great modern writers like Jonathan Lantz Buffalo from the Meskwaki Nation and Sandra Massey of the Sac and Fox Nation who can provide important insights and help recontextualize those sources with their perspectives, and I do my best to use those perspectives and context to get some insight into what white sources witnessed beyond their limited point of view. For example, I frame the article with a story about a Meskwaki leader named Taimah and his map collection – the story comes wholly from a white source, Major Marston from the nearby Fort Armstrong, and Marston is speaking on Taimah’s intransigence, but I do think we can still see something of Taimah’s vision for his people in Marston’s account.
After reading your article, what do you hope readers will realize about Indigenous survival tactics and settler colonialism?
It is important to emphasize more the innovation and resourcefulness of Indigenous nations in the face of settler colonialism; concepts like Meskwaki lead mining enterprises don’t get much attention, typically. Native Americans often found ways to tap into old and new resources and use settler markets to their own advantage to protect their sovereignty. Debt and dependence that emerge from market participation were problems for Native peoples, but use of force (and the threat of it) to coerce land cessions was the real threat. With these perspectives I think we can also see that internal divisions that used to be framed as accommodation versus resistance, like debates between Sauk leaders Black Hawk and Keokuk, were actually about differing strategies of resistance.
As a scholar of both environmental and indigenous history, how have these two fields evolved over time? What are some of the exciting new developments at the intersections of these two fields?
I may be biased, but Native American history has been perhaps the most exciting field in American history for the past few decades, and we can see how much that is paying off in the recent wave of award-winning syntheses from scholars like Ned Blackhawk, Kathleen DuVal, and Pekka Hämäläinen.
A lot of that has been driven by great work from Indigenous scholars, and from new insights from fields like environmental history. For example, I was thinking a lot about how to frame the shift In terrain that the Sauk and Meskwaki underwent (as discussed in a previous question), and then I tapped into Merle Massie’s Forest Prairie Edge and Robert Morrissey’s People of the Ecotone, and they helped frame things very clearly for me.
John Ryan Fischer is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin – River Falls. He is the author of Cattle Colonialism: An Environmental History of the Conquest of California and Hawai’i (UNC Press, 2015). His current project focuses on the environmental history of Sauk and Meskwaki responses to settler conquest in the Upper Midwest. Readers can follow him on BlueSky at @jryanfish.bsky.social.
Read Fischer’s article “‘The Mississippi Was Our River’: Sauk and Meskwaki Geopolitical Strategies on the Nineteenth-Century Prairie“ in EAS’s Fall 2025 issue.