This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island. For a nine-year-old cowboy—me in the 1940s—there was no badder bad guy than an Indian. Cap guns blazing, my buddies and I regularly put away dozens of Indians every summer evening, skillfully avoiding a massacre. Contrast this with a real massacre. It's August the 1 st , 1832. In Wisconsin, where the Bad Axe River flows into the Mississippi, several hundred Sauk Indians—men, women, and children—are trapped. They are the remnants of a thousand Sauk under their leader, Black Hawk, who have been fleeing from Federal troops, Rock Island Rangers, and Illinois militia since April, when they violated a treaty never to return to Illinois. They have been chased up the Rock River into southern Wisconsin, and then west to the Mississippi—an event that history would glorify as the Black Hawk War. They are exhausted, and so hungry they have taken to eating tree bark. As they attempt to cross the river, the Sauk are met by the Federal steamboat Warrior, whose