Antonga Black Hawk

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For other uses of Blackhawk/Black Hawk, see Black Hawk.

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Antonga Black Hawk was a Ute Indian born in Spring Lake, Utah around 1830. He died in 1869-70 from a gunshot wound he received during a battle three or four years before at Gravelly Fort, Utah. By his own preference, Blackhawk made peace with the "pale-faces" before he died. Before he died he visited every village from Cedar City to Payson to plead with the whites to forgive him for the sufferings that he and his people had caused them. His ambition was that they could coexist in peace.

The Black Hawk War in Utah began in 1865 and ended in 1872. It was a triangle between the Federal Government seeking to destroy the Mormons, the Mormons fighting for control over the government in a place the whites called "Zion", and the Native Indians were caught in the middle fighting to reconcile both sides for survival and their ancestral land. The government played the Indian against the Mormons, while the Mormons played the Indian against the government. In the end, church and government join hands and removed the Indian from his ancestral land.

Historian John Alton Peterson describes Chief Black Hawk as having, "remarkable vision and capacity. Given the circumstances under which he operated, he put together an imposing war machine and masterminded a sophisticated strategy that suggest he had a keen grasp of the economic, political, and geographic contexts in which he operated. Comparable to Cochise, Sitting Bull and Geronimo, Black Hawk fostered an extraordinary pan-regional movement that enabled him to operate in an enormous section of country and establish a three-front war. Black Hawk worked to establish a barrier to white expansion and actually succeeded in collapsing the line of Mormon settlement, causing scores of villages in over a half dozen counties to be abandoned. For almost a decade the tide of white expansion in Utah came to a dead stop and in most of the territory actually receded. Like other defenders of Indian rights, though, Black Hawk found he could not hold his position, and his efforts eventually crumbled."

External link

["Black Hawk War" by John A. Peterson on website Utah History to Go (official Utah state website)]

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