ORIGINAL, CONTEMPORANEOUS PORTRAIT OF BLACK HAWK (MA-KA-TAI-ME-SHE-KIA-KIAK), DRAWN FROM LIFE AFTER THE CHIEF’S EASTERN TOUR AND PRESENTED BY THE SITTER TO JOHN CARROLL WALSH OF FORT MADISON, IOWA, CIRCA 1835-36

UNPUBLISHED, RECENTLY DISCOVERED SOURCE FOR THE CELEBRATED 1887 FORT MADISON OIL

A historic and deeply personal portrait of Black Hawk, the Sauk leader whose life and legacy became inseparable from the conflict now known as the Black Hawk War (1832), the history of Indigenous dispossession and resistance in the Upper Mississippi Valley, and the broader history of Native American history in the United States.

Provenance: A gift from the sitter to John Carroll Walsh (1816-1894), Fort Madison, Iowa, and later Jerusalem Mills, Maryland, circa 1835-36; by descent in the Walsh family, including Jean “Jeanie” Lindsay Walsh, granddaughter of the above; present owner and consignor, 2025. 

Ink and watercolor on paper, approximately 2½ x 3 in., framed under glass in a period gilt and ebonized frame approximately 5 x 5½ in. The frame verso is inscribed in two hands, the principal inscription reading, “Portrait of Black Hawk given to his friend John Carol [sic] Walsh,” with a secondary notation in another hand, “Written by Harold Walsh.” Accompanied by a calling card of Jean (Jeanie) Lindsay Walsh, granddaughter of John Carroll Walsh. The reverse of the miniature bears two penciled phonetic variants of Black Hawk’s name, together with a further faded pencil inscription and a partially effaced ink inscription.

A remarkably intimate and hitherto unpublished likeness of Black Hawk, the portrait appears to be the very drawing long remembered by John Carroll Walsh as a “pen-and-ink sketch” of the Sauk leader, made by “a gentleman in St. Louis” after Black Hawk’s celebrated eastern tour and given to Walsh by the chief shortly before the latter left Fort Madison in the mid-1830s. In 1887 Walsh used this portrait as the model for the much larger oil portrait of Black Hawk painted by J. F. Fisher of Washington and ceremonially presented by Walsh to the city of Fort Madison. That oil, still preserved in Fort Madison and long central to the city’s public memory of Black Hawk, was later shown at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, installed in the Carnegie Memorial Library, and in 1976 loaned to the Des Moines Art Center for an exhibition of American portraits in Iowa collections.

Long described in family and local tradition as a pen-and-ink sketch, the portrait is sparingly heightened in watercolor and retains the immediacy of notation from life. Black Hawk is shown in crisp left profile, the head tersely but assuredly characterized. The artist records identifying particulars consistent with contemporary descriptions and known early likenesses of the chief, including the pronounced cranial dome, the aquiline nose, the slightly parted mouth, the split earlobe, and a hanging ear ornament. The miniature lacks the rhetorical finish of later commemorative portraits, instead it preserves the directness of a personal encounter. Significantly, the unstable phonetic spellings of Black Hawk’s name on the reverse closely echo the variant spellings used in Walsh’s own 1887 remarks and in the nineteenth-century press accounts that repeated his story.

Walsh himself was not a distant antiquarian or collector, but a youthful frontier intimate of Black Hawk’s circle. A Baltimore-born, Georgetown-educated young man, he went west as a teenager and was remembered in later Iowa accounts as one of the earliest settlers of Fort Madison. By 1834, he and his partner Pise had opened the first store in the settlement, at the foot of Pine Street, serving emigrants and Native customers alike. Black Hawk, stripped of power after the war and returned from his much-publicized eastern tour of 1833, spent extended periods with his family in Lee County, especially near Devil Creek and the site of present-day Fort Madison. Contemporary newspaper notices place the chief in Baltimore during the eastern tour and in St. Louis again in 1834 and 1835, aligning with Walsh’s later recollection of a likeness made for him in St. Louis in the immediate postwar years. In the speech accompanying his 1887 gift, Walsh recalled Black Hawk’s household with unusual specificity- his wife Moh-wah-e-quah, his sons, and his daughter Nan-ne-sah, suggesting familiarity born of sustained acquaintance. His admiration of Black Hawk’s son as a figure worthy of classical sculpture even finds an echo in eastern newspaper descriptions of the young man’s extraordinary beauty during the 1833 tour.

That closeness is reinforced by repeated frontier reminiscences and county histories which record that Walsh formed a serious attachment to one of Black Hawk’s daughters, remembered in later sources under variant forms including Nan-ne-sah, Nauasia, and Nanasau. The attachment, ostensibly, was serious enough that marriage was openly contemplated- an extraordinary possibility in the social climate of the 1830s. Walsh himself was warned by friends that his courtship of the chief’s daughter would see him forever known, using the coarse language preserved in the sources, as “the squaw man from Baltimore.” Whether through social pressure, hesitation, or simple circumstance, the match never came to pass. Namequa ultimately married within her own community, and the episode passed into the folklore of the Mississippi frontier.

However embroidered in the telling, the story recurs in multiple independent accounts and helps explain why Black Hawk might have given Walsh so personal a token, described in the 1887 Baltimore press as a gesture of friendship. Later Maryland family tradition held that, after his return east, Walsh named his Harford County estate “The Mound,” and in later memory “Nanasau Mound,” in recollection of the Indian village, happiness of his western youth, and perhaps a lost love that was never realized. Although he resumed life in Maryland, later becoming a prominent landowner and politician, Walsh never wholly severed his western ties and retained frontier land interests into the 1840s. The chronology is not perfectly uniform across the sources: some later notices place Walsh’s permanent return to Maryland somewhat later, while his own recollections imply departure in 1835 or 1836. Yet the sources are consistent on the essential point that the drawing was an early frontier possession, received from Black Hawk and preserved by Walsh thereafter.

The later physical history of the object accords with this account. Walsh evidently kept the sketch among his papers in Maryland until rediscovering it in the 1880s, when he commissioned Fisher’s oil and returned to Fort Madison in August 1887 to present the enlarged version at the Lee County Old Settlers’ reunion. The oil showed Black Hawk in the blue frock coat with brass buttons, frilled white shirt, black stock, and blanket that Walsh and later Fort Madison accounts described as the chief’s ceremonial dress after the eastern tour, clothing Black Hawk was said to prize and ultimately to be buried in. The frame’s secondary notation, “Written by Harold Walsh,” very likely refers to Walsh’s son Harold Walsh, the Harford County lawyer and steward of the family homestead, and offers a plausible explanation for the miniature’s preservation in the Maryland branch of the family. The accompanying card of Jean “Jeanie” Lindsay Walsh, granddaughter of John Carroll Walsh, provides further evidence of descent. Although a later family note telescopes events, confusing Fort Madison, Iowa, with Madison, Illinois, and reversing the direction of copying between the miniature and the later oil, the combined evidence of Walsh’s own letters and speeches, nineteenth-century newspaper accounts, Lee County histories, family tradition, and the object’s inscriptions supports the conclusion that the present sheet is the original, contemporaneous likeness from which the famous Fort Madison oil portrait was derived.

Selected references

Lee County History, Iowa. Compiled and written by the Iowa Writers’ Program of the Work Projects Administration in the State of Iowa. 1942.

The History of Lee County, Iowa. Western Historical Company, 1879.

Taylor, Hawkins. “History of Lee County, Iowa.” Annals of Iowa, April 1874.

Walsh, John Carroll. Letter to Dr. A. C. Roberts, reproduced in “A Portrait of Black Hawk.” Southern Aegis (Baltimore, MD), March 11, 1887.

“Black Hawk.” Rock Island Daily Argus, August 25, 1887.

“Correspondence of the Baltimore Sun.” The Sun (Baltimore, MD), August 29, 1887.

“Death of Col. John Carroll Walsh.” The Aegis and Intelligencer, December 7, 1894.

“Around the Town.” Fort-Madison Evening Democrat, July 13, 1942.

“Young American Meets Old One.” Burlington Hawk-Eye Gazette, January 24, 1953.