Knowledge Box

Influences and Conflicts Combining to Create Black Hawk's Narrative Voice

HSB 211

This paper explicates various factors that combine to create Black Hawk’s voice in Life of Black Hawk, including the political climate, a government translator, a publisher’s agenda, and Black Hawk’s own experience of war and captivity. Antoine LeClair, the translator, and J.B. Patterson, the publisher, certainly influenced the text. Published in 1835, the narrative tells of Black Hawk’s dispute of the Treaty of 1804 through his role in the Black Hawk War of 1832 and his subsequent capture, imprisonment, and release. While Black Hawk’s response to his past struggle with President Andrew Jackson’s politics certainly drives much of his narrative, I argue that the voice that reaches the reader is made up of much more; it is his internal struggle with his own identity as well as an outward struggle with his own captivity, all filtered through the translation of Antoine LeClair and motives of J.B. Patterson’s publishing company.