More people know about Rock Island than younger people think.

Up until 1980, a major railroad company named Rock Island had tracks all over the central part of the United States. Its familiar red-and-yellow cars, later becoming the “bankrupt blue” light blue-and-white, with the company name in large letters on its engines gave curiosity to wonder what Rock Island was. It’s one of the Quad Cities (now the smallest of the four behind Bettendorf), and even its neighbor to the east, Moline, had name recognition in agriculture machines.

****LINK to the Flickr photo album for this post**** – It will help you visually along this writing!

The name that many people don’t know about the Quad Cities is a town named Saukenauk. Long before a group of four cities, Saukenauk was a single town of Sauk (Sac) Native Americans, first settled in the 1760s by those who pushed further west from British Canada. Saukenauk is where Rock Island is today.

The most famous of the Sauk chiefs, Black Hawk, is one of the most widely known in American history, thanks to his unsuccessful struggle to keep his tribe’s lands away from the expanding scope of the United States. Black Hawk was born in c. 1767 in Saukenauk, and was 65 when his cause folded with the American victory in the Black Hawk War of 1832 (which saw a young Abraham Lincoln serve as a soldier).

Saukenauk went and Rock Island came. However, Rock Island didn’t forget about Saukenauk. along the south edge of town is the large Black Hawk State Historic Site, which consists of a large forest and a Depression-era lodge that houses a museum of Sauk tribe history, including some of Black Hawk.

The place is interesting for several reasons.

John Hauberg Museum of Native American Life

Without Saukenauk, there likely wouldn’t have been a Rock Island. How did Rock Island become a thing? It had to do with Saukenauk. Understanding Rock Island’s origins (or the entire Quad Cities’ for that matter) isn’t complete with understanding the origins and history of Saukenauk.

The Black Hawk Museum and Lodge is the primary building on the site. One of the attractions it has is the John Hauberg Museum of Native American Life, named after a noted local historian. Attractions include a diorama of what the village used to look like at its peak – once one of the largest settlements in Illinois at the American Revolution (more on that in a moment), a graph of westward movements of tribes from British Canada, local artifacts from the former community, a dugout canoe and photos of descendants of Black Hawk. Kids can check out animal displays, try on furs that were reminiscent of what Natives hunted for at the time, and learn about what the insides of community structures looked like.

I mention the structures in particular because most people growing up have an assumption that all Natives lived in triangular-cone teepees. Saukenauk’s structures were more like a small one-room ranch house. They were in grids, just like a city block of today. This is shown in the large diorama of the community.

The dugout canoe is the second one I’ve come across, after seeing my first at the Dickison Mounds Museum in Lewistown, Illinois a couple of years ago. I’m a large man, and the width of these canoes is only a little larger than a large couch’s armrest. Did they really fit in that, you ask? It was a much different time then, and a much healthier one, too.

The photos of Black Hawk’s descendants presented me with a curiosity. His great-great-granddaughter is named Mary Mack. The surname Mack is a noted one in northern Illinois Native American history. Stephen Mack was a fur trader who controlled business along the Rock River; his headquarters was in Grand Detour. Mr. Mack would later marry a native Ho-Chunk from the Rockton area, Hononegah. If her name sounds familiar, it’s also that of the high school in Rockton. Given the generational gap between Black Hawk and Mr. Mack and Hononegah, it’s unlikely that there is a relation somewhere, but bringing up Hononegah and her husband to the curator piqued our interests for a while. Macktown Historic District near Rockton is another neat place to visit if you’re ever near Rockford.

Nod to recent history

It’s not just Native Americans that are the subject of history on a trip to the lodge – which had to be built by a dedicated team of workers.

The lodge was a project of the Civilian Conservation Corps, a program part of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal to recover from the Great Depression. The CCC put men to work to help beautify the nation’s natural appearance and landscape.

Saukenauk had disappeared at the end of the Black Hawk War, but it had been put to other uses by Rock Island in the nearly 100 years since, an amusement park being one of them. A lodge later replaced the amusement park, but its fourth version of a building fell by the wayside once the plan to preserve the forest and build a lodge visually harmonious with the surroundings came to light. The lodge is made of limestone rock, dug from a quarry from nearby LeClaire, Iowa.

The CCC typically employed young, able-bodied men who could be relied upon to make projects happen. However, the establishment of the Black Hawk State Historic Site was the result of men older than the typical young adult: They were veterans of the Great War (retroactively named World War I).

Initially, the CCC did not include these veterans, who would have been in their 30s and 40s, but a dispute over veteran’s bonuses changed that. Look up the history of the Bonus March of 1932, and find out how they were initially mistreated by the government that owned them their bonuses. Including them in CCC projects helped ease such a worry.

Exhibits, historical displays and a short video – all about the CCC – are in a room on the opposite end of the Native American Museum. The stories of how the place was built and what corps members had to deal with in their daily lives highlight the exhibits.

The CCC connection is important to me because my great-grandfather Cutter was involved with a CCC project in southeast South Dakota, where he grew up. I kind of got a feeling of some of the times he went through at that time. He later moved to Rock Falls, Illinois to start his family and came there via the Quad Cities – an interesting family story that I will share one day.

The building’s crown jewel is the large open room with its large ceilings and drop lighting, reminiscent of a ski lodge. Several large events are hosted there.

Rock Island’s connection to the American Revolution

Did you know that the westernmost conflict of the Revolutionary War happened in Rock Island?

Even through Illinois wasn’t one of the original 13 colonies, one of the objects of the American Revolution was also to claim land between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi River. The colonies had, at first, extended their borders westward by, typically, taking their northern- and southern-most points and stretching them across. The establishment of the Northwest Territory in 1787 eliminated each colony’s claims. Illinois became a state in 1818.

In the effort to control territory east of the Mississippi, the Colonial soldiers had to rid of British threats along the river – and this included British-aligned tribes such as the Sauk. In 1780, not long after a British-Native attempt to recapture Cahokia in southern Illinois, Col. George Rogers Clark ordered retaliation on the Natives. A force led by Col. John Montgomery sailed up the Mississippi and burned Saukenauk. A young Black Hawk would have been a teenager at that time – and who knows, that could have given him some thoughts.

A pair of historical markers notes Saukenauk as a Revolutionary War site. The Quad Cities Area has two War of 1812 sites, and the nearest Civil War site is a couple of hundred miles downstream on the Mississippi in Cape Girardeau, Missouri (I visited in 2018).

Be honest, did you know the Quad Cities had a Revolutionary connection? Now you know, in the 250th anniversary since the war’s beginning; 2026 will mark the nation’s semiquincentennial of 250 years.

The site also has a large statue of Black Hawk. He is not buried there. He died in 1838 and his remains were taken to the Burlington, Iowa area, which is the last known location of them before they were vandalized.

Live in the Quad Cities Area didn’t start with the White man. The Black Hawk State Historic Site tells a much older story of the true origins of what made the QCA happen.

Black Hawk State Historic Site
1510 46th Ave., Rock Island, IL
Lodge and museum is open from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Wednesday through Sunday, with an hourlong lunch break at noon (hours may differ off-season and on holidays)
309-788-0177 (park office), 309-788-9536 (museum), 309-230-8885 (event rental)
Web: Blackhawkpark.org