Ronald Reagan

Reagan Defines Home

Home was an elusive concept for young Ronald Reagan. The only president born in Illinois, his childhood was marked by continual displacement. As his father sought work, Reagan’s family changed homes an astounding 7 times in 5 years—moving from Tampico to Chicago to Galesburg to Monmouth and back to Tampico, before finally finding stability in Dixon.

White suburban Dixon became Reagan’s ideal home. He immersed himself in community life and his gregarious personality made him a popular resident. In high school and later at Eureka College, Reagan dove into extracurriculars, becoming captain of his football team and working as a community lifeguard. This idyllic, aspirational image of a white, middle-class life shaped his view of America and future politics. Reagan later called small town Illinois “a small universe where I learned standards and values that would guide me for the rest of my life.”

Joseph Jordan

Pullman, a Home for Workers

Joseph Jordan decided to leave behind the violent racism of the Jim Crow South. In the 1880s, he led his family out of Virginia and found work as a teamster for the Pullman Palace Car Company. Joseph, his wife Martha, and their children made their home in a rowhouse in the town of Pullman.

Company founder George Pullman created the town to rent homes to workers like Jordan who enjoyed access to parks, schools, and entertainment. The town even had indoor plumbing with a sewage system that made Pullman one of the cleanest towns in America. George Pullman envisioned the town as an idyllic home for workers. The town fell short of this vision during the economic depression of 1893, as Pullman decreased wages without lowering rents. His refusal to meet with a delegation of workers resulted in a nationwide strike in 1894. Though not perfect, Pullman was home to Joseph and Martha Jordan for the rest of their lives—Martha passed in 1923 and Joseph followed in 1940 at the age of 79.

Ritta DeFreitas

Madeira's Central Illinois Exiles

In the mid-1800s, hundreds of Portuguese residents on the island of Madeira, off the coast of Morocco, converted to Presbyterianism. This created conflicts with their Catholic neighbors, so they set out to build a safer community in the English Protestant colony of Trinidad. They soon began looking for a less tropical location where they could live more independently. Central Illinoisans, especially in Springfield and Jacksonville, offered them a new home.

Among the Madeira exiles in Springfield was young seamstress Ritta de Silva. In 1856, she married Francisco (Frank) DeFreitas, a painter and fellow Portuguese Protestant.  DeFreitas' clients included the Lincolns and she appears to have grown close to the future First Family—borrowing money and receiving two items from their home when they moved to Washington. Ritta and her fellow exiles carved out homes for themselves in Central Illinois and many of their descendants remain here today.

Jean Baptiste Point de Sable

Chicago, Home in a Contested Space

Jean Baptiste Point de Sable was the first permanent non-Native settler of what is now called Chicago. A free, Haitian-born descendent of an enslaved African mother and a French father, he moved to the Chicago area from what is now Peoria in the 1780s. At his new home he cultivated a farm consisting of 30 head of livestock and nine buildings, including a chicken house and a dairy. By 1790, Point de Sable and his Potawatomi wife, Kitihawa (also known as Catherine), had created a prosperous home on the northern bank of the Chicago River.

Point de Sable constructed his home during the Revolution Era when Chicago was a contested space. He navigated a complicated existence between Native nations and the French, British, and upstart American empires. His kinship through marriage to the Potawatomi made his home a regional hub that welcomed both Native and European traders. Point de Sable likely foresaw the collapse of this cosmopolitan existence as the United States asserted its growing power in the region, and he sold his home in 1800, moving to French territory on the west bank of the Mississippi.

Benjamin Driggs

The Mormon Quest for Home

Throughout their history, the Latter-day Saints have searched for a home where they are free to practice their faith. In 1839, they fled persecution in Missouri to create such a place in Nauvoo, Illinois. Led by Joseph Smith, the Mormons formed a local government and set about building a massive temple. In all, they spent a million dollars on the structure. Yet it was never completed because less than a decade later internal and external forces had pushed them out of Nauvoo.

Three generations of the Driggs family lived in Nauvoo during its short time as a Mormon sanctuary. Young Benjamin Driggs grew up there while his father Shadrach built wagons to help families moving further west. Benjamin became a folk hero for donating his own treasured wagon—made by his father—to workers building the temple. Like his fellow Mormons, Benjamin eventually fled his home in Nauvoo, living for a brief time in Iowa before settling in Utah.

"Free" Frank McWorter

Building a Free Home

Among the many freedoms stripped from enslaved Black Americans was a stable sense of home. Indeed, the very concept of home became contorted as enslaved families faced harsh living conditions and the constant threat of forced separation and removal. Yet, despite these obstacles, some people took risks to secure their freedom and build a home

“Free" Frank McWorter was one such person. Enslaved until his 42^nd year, he earned enough money “hiring out” himself to purchase his freedom. Over time, more and more members of the family earned their freedom in this way and then in turn purchased freedom for others. McWorter moved from Kentucky to Illinois in 1830 and settled on 80 acres in Pike County. He did well, eventually expanding his holdings and apportioning part of them into the community of New Philadelphia—the first American town legally platted by a Black person. The biracial community McWorter built offered the same sense of freedom and home to others that he had carved out for his own family.

R. Buckminster Fuller

Less is More

It took seven hours to build R. Buckminster “Bucky” Fuller’s home in Carbondale. The new home used the conservationist design that had made Fuller famous – a geodesic dome that was easy to build, could withstand great weights, and required few resources. Comprised of 60 isosceles-triangle plywood panels, Fuller’s unique Carbondale home was the only dome he ever lived in and owned. The one downside to the geodesic home, his wife Anne claimed, was that “you could not hang paintings because they would be just sort of dangling out from the curve.”

Though Fuller’s design is most recognized as the key feature of Walt Disney’s Epcot Center, the geodesic dome was only part of Fuller’s larger vision for humanity. He was adamant that “man can be a success on this planet” and Earth’s resources were adequate to take care of everyone who called it home for generations to come.

Margaret Burroughs

The Home of Black History

In the time when white supremacy renders other histories invisible, they need to find unconventional homes. In 1961, Margaret Burroughs and her husband Charles transformed their Chicago home into such a place – the first iteration of the DuSable Museum. At that time, there were few outlets for Black Americans to explore art and history from their perspective, and Burroughs paved the way by carving her own path.

Born in Louisiana, Burroughs moved to Chicago as a child, eventually earned degrees at Chicago Normal College (now Chicago State University) and the Art Institute. Making her career as an artist and educator, Burroughs immersed herself in the broader Black intellectual activist community. Grounded in her activism to help form the South Side Community Art Center and her insistence on the teaching of Black History, Burroughs established the Ebony Museum of Negro History and Art (now DuSable Museum) in her home, which had once been a boardinghouse for African American rail workers. From the Museum’s beginning, Burroughs focused on collecting the material culture of Black History and would often place ads in The Chicago Defender soliciting artifacts. Burroughs’s pioneering work establishing the DuSable Museum became a roadmap for other Black History museums to follow, eventually leading her to co-found the Association of African American Museums.

Fred Francis

Envisioning Accessibility

Fred Francis designed and built Woodland Palace in the 1890s as a home for him and his wife, Jeanette. He endeavored to make the house accessible for Jeanette, who suffered from tuberculosis, and since fresh air was considered important for treating her disease, he built Illinois’s first ever air conditioner. In the solarium, a room Fred dedicated to Jeanette, he created a system that cycled the air every minute.

Indeed, Woodland Palace sprang from a place of love, but it was also a testament to Fred’s imagination. A mathematical and engineering genius, Fred created a refrigeration room that never rose above 50 degrees and designed a complex water filtration system that purified rainwater as it flowed underground through sand, gravel, and charcoal before reaching Woodland’s cistern. Above all, Woodland was a place for Fred and Jeanette to grow old together. When Jeanette passed, Fred honored her memory by installing a marble sculpture in the solarium.

Robert Todd Lincoln

Robert Retires

In 1903, Robert Todd Lincoln purchased a 392-acre estate near Manchester, Vermont. The only one of Abraham Lincoln’s four children to survive to adulthood, Robert had lived a busy life in the shadow of his father’s reputation and his family’s enormous grief. All these factors made home an elusive idea for Robert, as his personal and professional obligations often forced him into an exceptionally itinerate life.

The estate, which he called Hildene (old English for hill and valley with stream), became Robert’s refuge for the remainder of his life. There he found the privacy he had always sought, overlooking his favorite golf course. Yet Robert also found solace in claiming one of America’s founding myths—the nobility of the farmer. Although a large estate with a Georgian-revival mansion, Robert defined his new home as a farm, where he owned about 40 cows. As he pointedly told a friend, “I am now a Vermont farmer! and beginning to enjoy life.”

Susan Lawrence Dana

Heiress of the Prairie (Style)

Susan Lawrence Dana’s extravagant lifestyle was fueled by heartache. She became an heiress upon the 1901 death of her beloved father and chose to renovate his Springfield home to cater to her progressive lifestyle. For that, Dana hired burgeoning architect Frank Lloyd Wright and he transformed the structure into a masterpiece of modernity. The grandiose result embodied their partnership and Dana’s multifaceted identity as she hosted women’s rights activists, orphans for story time, and local celebrities at parties.

Wright’s vision and architectural style are apparent throughout the entire home, but each room was built to complement Dana’s passions, ideals, and unlimited budget. From the local lumber used to structure the home to the motif of butterflies—referencing her as a “social butterfly”—neatly woven throughout the house, Dana’s various roles are constantly apparent to visitors. Wright captured the essence of the Midwestern landscape through his Prairie Style and Dana’s progressivism in the home’s design.

Michelle Obama

“We Were Their Investment”

Michelle Robinson Obama called the White House her home from 2009-2017 but grew up in an apartment of less than 800 square feet on Chicago’s South Shore. It was the second story of her Great Aunt Robbie’s house. Robbie was a piano teacher, and the sound of her students playing often filled the home. Michelle and her brother Craig shared a room with a makeshift partition providing limited privacy.

Yet the smallness of the Robinson home in part reflected a choice made by Michelle’s parents, Fraser and Marian. Instead of investing their modest income in a house, they chose to invest in their children. Michelle and Craig thrived in this environment, with both eventually attending Princeton University. After receiving a law degree at Harvard, Michelle returned home to Chicago where she worked as a lawyer and later invested in her own family.

Cahokia Commoner

The Mississippian Home

Between about 700-1200 CE, a group of Indigenous tribes – now commonly referred to as Mississippians – built a vast trading network across the Mississippi Valley and American Southeast. The hubs for this network were communities built around earthen mounds, potentially housing thousands of people. The largest was Cahokia, located near present-day Collinsville. At its peak between 100-1150. As many as 40,000 people lived there and in the surrounding communities, making it one of the largest cities in the world.

Women ran Cahokia homes cooperatively. Their houses often surrounded plazas and courtyards, indicating they traversed the lines between households easily, and nearby residents intermingled with and supported each other. Thus, the people of Cahokia likely viewed their homes as extending outside their walls to the broader community. In doing so, they provide one of our earliest glimpses of people conceptualizing living spaces in the Illinois Country.

Lowney Handy

The Handy Writers Colony

Lowney Handy of Robinson was one of the most influential literary mentors of the mid-20^th century but her approach to teaching the craft of writing involved a unique concept of home. Having mentored and shared an adulterous relationship with James Jones while he wrote From Here to Eternity in the aftermath of World War 2, Handy then founded a “writers colony” in nearby Marshall to mentor young aspiring authors.

Handy immersed her all-male colony residents in a spartan, masculine world of writing. They lived on strict daily schedules, with only limited weekly “leave” from the grounds. After weeks of copying literary works by famed authors, the men then split the afternoons. Through its 1950s lifespan, the colony’s unique concept of home – shaped almost entirely by Handy’s vision of an ideal, rugged male writer – produced over a dozen books, including four adapted into Hollywood films. The colony ended with Handy’s death in 1964.

Jane Addams

The Heart of Hull-House

Hull-House stands as a testament to the progressive social campaigns that its affluent co-founder Jane Addams orchestrated. A converted mansion, which eventually expanded into a 13-building settlement complex housing low-income, mostly European immigrant Chicagoans, Hull-House also provided women with skills and education to break into male-dominated fields and support for low-income mothers. Hull-House staff advocated for women’s right to work and a safe home environment, which were vital components of Addams’s identity as she helped shift conversations about poverty away from moral rebuke to focus more of social welfare.

A queer woman, Addams carved an unconventional path for herself by maintaining a long-term relationship with fellow Hull-House benefactor Mary Rozet Smith. For Addams, home was a person and where she could be herself completely. Outside of her home, there was always a risk of society rejecting her for who she loved. Addams’s private domesticity and her philanthropic work show how she believed women should be loved and respected within their own home, regardless of status or sexual orientation.

Elizabeth “Buffie” Ives

Siblings Fashion a Home

Elizabeth “Buffie” Ives had always been close with her brother Adlai Stevenson, even at their childhood home in Bloomington. Early in life while their father was often away, they found a sense of home in each other. Even the lifelong nickname “Buffie” grew from Adlai’s childhood mispronunciation of her name. After Buffie married Earnest Ives, she and Adlai remained close confidantes. It was a relationship built on an unbreakable foundation.

When Adlai became Illinois’s governor in 1949, his marriage was already under stress and completely fell apart later that year. Buffie stepped in to fulfill the formal duties of first lady as her brother’s hostess, spending much of her time at the Illinois Governor’s Mansion. A major part of this role included furnishing and redecorating the Mansion. Her eye for decorating added comfort to their new surroundings, but the enduring bond between sister and brother made it a home.

Richard Pryor

The Absurdity of Racism

In his early days as a comic, Richard Pryor would joke about his childhood in mid-20^th century Peoria and its unofficial color line. “Peoria’s a model city,” he would say. “That means they’ve got the Negroes under control.” His experiences in Peoria were unique, but also exemplified the second-class status forced on many Black families in the Midwest.

Pryor’s parents, a pimp and a prostitute, divorced when he was young. He then lived with his grandmother, Marie Carter, who owned three houses in the city – two brothels and a nightclub. While there is hardship embedded in his story, Pryor was acutely aware of the absurdity inherent in it and its broader context, especially that his skin color could deny him the same rights as a white person. Pryor’s comedy career pushed boundaries to expose the absurdity and made him one of the most influential comics in history.

Mary Lincoln

Mary Adrift

The idea of home looms large in Mary Lincoln’s story. Growing up in relative opulence due to profits from the labor of enslaved people in Lexington, Kentucky, Mary spent much of her adult life trying to reclaim that sense of comfort and position. She and Abraham’s Springfield home became an expression of Mary’s ambition and domestic priorities—literally growing the longer she lived in it, including the addition of an entire second floor.

In Washington, Mary obsessed over the Executive Mansion and worked hard to make its appearance match its status after years of neglect. Yet Abraham’s assassination disrupted everything, and Mary never again reclaimed her sense of domesticity and stability. Mary resented the unwanted attention drawn by her widowhood and as a figure of controversy. To escape her immense grief and anxiety, Mary even relocated to Europe. Yet the comforts of home continued to elude her as she continued to move from place to place, including a tragic, forced stay in an insane asylum.

Hazel Johnson

The Mother of Environmental Justice

Hazel Johnson, her husband John, and their seven children lived in the Altgeld Gardens public housing project on Chicago’s South Side. Their homelife was shattered by John’s death in 1969 from lung cancer at 41 years old. Johnson’s children, as well as neighbors, suffered from a variety of illnesses that made her suspect the factories surrounding their home were endangering their health.

After conducting her own research, Johnson discovered that not only was Altgeld Gardens built on a toxic industrial waste dump and surrounded by 50 landfills (as she called it, the “toxic doughnut"), but that political leaders refused to intervene on behalf of low-income Black families anywhere in the city. Johnson founded the People for Community Recovery (PCR) initially to address tenant issues but pivoted after discovering that her community had the highest cancer rates in the region. She organized her neighbors against polluting companies and the Chicago Housing Authority, which resulted in key victories, such as the new health clinic, asbestos removal, a moratorium on new or expanding landfills in Chicago, and extending water and sewage service. Johnson mentored young activists, including her daughter Cheryl, who now serves as PCR’s executive director, and President Barack Obama.

Betty Friedan

“The Problem that had No Name”

Betty Friedan grew up in Peoria the daughter of a jeweler and a stay-at-home mom. When she married in 1947, the breadwinner husband and wife with kids at home was still widely considered the middle-class ideal.

Friedan began interrogating this ideal after the birth of her second child while also balancing her career as a journalist. She surveyed her Smith College classmates and Friedan’s findings led her to write The Feminine Mystique, in which she critiqued white, middle-class women’s roles in 1960s society. In her book she asks, “Who knows what women can be when they are finally free to become themselves? Who knows what women’s intelligence will contribute when it can be nourished without denying love?” The book became a sensation, causing women around the world to reexamine their own ideas of home and limited gender roles. Friedan’s activism led her to join with Pauli Murray and Aileen Hernandez in establishing the National Organization for Women (NOW) in 1966.

Tina Turner

Tina Turner Breaks Free

Anna Mae Bullock arrived in St. Louis in 1956. She was 16 – the perfect age to jump into the thriving Black nightclub scene across the Mississippi. “East St. Louis had action” she would later recall. “It never seemed to stop.” Bullock became part of that action when she pushed her way onto the stage during a performance by Ike Turner’s band – immediately becoming its new lead singer.

Ike and Anna’s partnership shaped the direction of American music but also immersed Anna – renamed Tina Turner to better market the act – in a horrifying home life dominated by Ike’s physical, sexual and psychological abuse. Tina tried to build a family home with Ike and their four children, but his abuse only grew until she walked out in 1976. Tina had to restart her career but soon reemerged as one of America’s biggest music stars and set about building a happier and healthier home life.

Louisa Phifer

For All the World Be Careful

For most of America’s history, only men could serve as combat soldiers – often making wartime homes the province of women. In the final year of the Civil War, 39-year-old Louisa Phifer balanced caring for her 7 children (including patriotically named newborn Atlanta Sherman) with managing the family’s farm near Vandalia, as her husband George served in the 32^nd Illinois Infantry. The couple wrote frequently, and Louisa’s letters are a mix of anxiety over George’s fortunes and updates on the farm.

In one letter, Louisa frets she will become a widow if George doesn’t keep himself safe. In his reply, he can only encourage her to “show the spirit of a soldiers wide.” Yet Louisa’s effective management of their home is also clear as she reports on crop yields, well repairs, and sale prices. Like many women on the home front, Louisa’s life was a constant series of challenges to avoid personal or economic disaster.

Oscar Micheaux

The Homesteader

The quest for home consumed Oscar Micheaux, a writer, filmmaker, and creator of the first Black-owned independent film company. Born in Metropolis, a de facto Jim Crow town in a Northern state, Micheaux left for Chicago as a young man in 1902. He found work as a Pullman railway porter, and as he traveled the country, the vast prairies tugged at his imagination. He admired the “fine country homes so characteristic of the great middle west” and claimed a homestead in South Dakota. For ten years, Micheaux farmed and battled the elements before losing his home to foreclosure.

Micheaux had turned to his new passions – writing and filmmaking – and the search for home haunted his work. Micheaux’s first book, The Conquest, explores his experience in South Dakota. His films, often informed by his years homesteading, cathartically grapple with racism in the United States but maintain hope for the future. The name Oscar Micheaux now resides on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

Mieczyslaw Haiman

Forging a Polish America

Mieczyslaw Haiman spent his life forging the idea of the United States as a second Polish homeland. Born near Lviv in the former Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1888, Haiman emigrated to the United States in 1913. After years of writing poetry and editing Polish language newspapers, he embarked upon a career mapping the historical connections between his ancestral homeland and the U.S as librarian for the Polish Roman Catholic Union of America (PRCUA). As he grew the PRCUA’s collection, he became the founder, first archivist, and curator of the Polish Museum of America in Chicago.

As archivist and curator, Haiman seized an opportunity to physically link Poland to his new American home. In September 1939, five months into the New York World’s Fair, the cloud of war loomed over the festivities as Germany invaded Poland. Determined to preserve the Polish items at the Fair, Haiman and his colleagues purchased three-fourths of the Polish Pavilion’s exhibits. They remain in the Polish Museum’s collection where Haiman continued his work identifying objects and writing to ensure the storied of Polonia were preserved and widely shared.

Don Alonzo Spaulding

Remaking Places

Don Alonzo Spaulding spent much of the 1830s traveling and surveying land in Illinois – dividing it based on the grid system. This survey method created townships and ranges split into 640-acre sections that ignored natural boundaries and artificially flattened territory to make it easier to understand for prospective settler colonizers.

Native nations like the Potawatomie had made Illinois home for generations before the existence of a single 640-acre square on a survey map. These maps helped rationalize Native places into unoccupied territory ready to be claimed by white settler colonizers. Spaulding was part of this process. He prepared land for white settler colonization in the wake of the violent removal of Native peoples.

Martha Douglas

Enslaving the Home

Martha Martin grew up the daughter of Robert Martin – Congressman and one of the richest enslavers in North Carolina, claiming more than 800 African America people as property. The enormous wealth accrued from forced labor afforded Martha a robust education and access to some of the most powerful suitors in America. Among them was Stephen A. Douglas of Quincy – a fast-rising-star when he married her at her father’s North Carolina slave labor camp in 1847.

The Martins also oppressed and enslaved Black people at their Mississippi slave labor camp, which they offered to Douglas as a dowry. Douglas declined because of the political implications, but Martha claimed as inheritance the Mississippi slave labor camp the following year. Neither Stephen nor Martha ever lived there, but Stephen was an active participant in its maintenance – including supervising the violent oppression and sale of enslaved people. Their situation presents a stark image of an antebellum white enslaver’s conception of home as a remote location where residents were claimed as mere chattel property.

Lorraine Hansberry

Exposing Chicago’s South Side

Lorraine Hansberry was only 8 years old when a brick burst through the window of her South Side home, almost striking her. Angry white neighbors had thrown it to stop her family from desegregating Chicago’s Washington Park subdivision. A lawsuit was filed against the Hansberrys. The case concerned racially restrictive housing covenants, which barred Black Americans from leasing or purchasing land in the subdivision – a common tool of de facto racial segregation reinforced by banks and real estate agents. The dispute reached the U.S. Supreme Court in 1939, which affirmed the Hansberry’s right to live in the neighborhood.

This struggle traumatized Lorraine and she later poured that trauma into the script of “A Raisin in the Sun.” Set entirely in a South Side apartment, it tells the story of a Chicago South Side family navigating the inherent racism of 20^th Century American life and the affect it has on the Black community. In 1959, it became the first play written by a Black Woman to be staged on Broadway and later as a Hollywood film – exposing thousands of audience members to the reality of Black home life in urban America.

Charles Gibbs

Witness a House Divided

Recognized as one of the most prominent Black lawyers in Central Illinois, Tennessee-born Charles S. Gibbs made Springfield his home for nearly half his life after working as a coal miner in Kentucky and Southern Illinois. Labor activism led him to pursue a career in law. Gibbs passed the bar exam in 1908 and established his office above Harry Loper’s restaurant on South 5^th Street. Weeks later, Loper’s became the first business targeted by white aggressors during the 1908 Springfield Race Riots.

Mere blocks from the house Gibbs rented for his family on North 14^th Street, rioters attempted to suppress the economic advancement of Black residents by looting and burning homes or prosperous families. After experiencing the terror of the riots, Gibbs remained in Springfield to fight for justice for all in Abraham Lincoln’s hometown. In 1929, Gibbs would join a local group to combat the Ku Klux Klan, a terrorist organization Gibbs denounced as a “menace to the administration of justice in the courts.”

Harvey Clark

A Home Denied

Chicagoans Harvey and Johnetta Clark planned to make a home in the suburbs in the summer of 1951. As Black Americans moving into an apartment in all-white Cicero, a process known as pioneering, they walked into a storm of hate and intimidation. The Clarks’ new neighbors stood across the street shouting racial slurs and throwing rocks. The next night the couple fled, and while the apartment sat vacant, a mob of approximately 4,000 white people ransacked the Clarks’ new home.

It took three days for the National Guard to put down the mob that rioted against the Clark family, but only the Clarks’ landlord and the rental agent were indicted, both for inciting a riot by renting a home to a Black family. The Clark family’s ordeal served as a reminder of northern hostility to migrating African Americans and echoed Illinois’s long history of “sundown towns” – places that violently enforced Black exclusion. Towns like Anna, Pekin, and Villa Grove often had warning signs, sirens, or a strong Klan presence that indicated that Black people should leave by sunset. Other places like Cicero posted no sign but enforced the racist policies just the same.

Black Hawk

Resisting Cultural Genocide

Black Hawk stood watching his followers cross the Mississippi River eastward. The Sauk leader might have used that moment to reflect on his years in Saukenuk, a village near present day Rock Island where his people had lived since before the American Revolution. During the 1820s, white American colonizers increasingly pressured the Sauk to leave their home and move west of the Mississippi River. The U.S. government warned them not to return the Saukenuk after their winter hunt. Nevertheless, on this spring day in 1832, Black Hawk was coming home.

Knowing that Black Hawk disputed the U.S.’s claim to Saukenuk, Governor John Reynolds of Illinois expected conflict and called up the state militia. This assumption of hostility put Black Hawk and the U.S. military on a collision course. Months of fighting ensued and led to Black Hawk’s surrender. While imprisoned, he dictated his autobiography, arguing that “land cannot be sold. The Great Spirit gave it to his children to live upon, and cultivate, as far as is necessary for their subsistence; and so long as they occupy and cultivate it, they have the right to the soil.”