Peace, Friendship, and Financial Panic: Reading the Mark of Black Hawk in Life of Ma-Ka-Tai-Me-She-Kia-Kiak

Abstract

Black Hawk, a Sauk chief in frequent negotiation with the US in the decades before the disastrous Black Hawk War, tells us in his autobiography Life of Ma-Ka-Tai-Me-She-Kia-Kiak (1833) that he never accepts or wears a US peace medal.2 The medals were based on a design commissioned by Thomas Jefferson after the 1803 Louisiana Purchase and were maintained through the administration of Zachary Taylor. On the obverse appears the image of the sitting president, like that of President Martin Van Buren (see Figure 1), and on the reverse appears (see Figure 2) the treaty motto of “Peace and Friendship,” a crossed tomahawk and calumet, and two hands, one of a uniformed officer and the other of a braceleted Indian, clasping each other in ostensible accord.