Bad Axe by Mitch McNeil

I grew up on the river bluffs and ravines of the Mississippi, near the confluence of the Rock R: ancestral homeland of the Sauk/Fox tribes. Their town, SAUKENUK, had streets and longhouses in orderly rows. Blackhawk was their leader.They fished/hunted/grew crops/foraged. It was Eden for them ... until the anglos came and chased them off and destroyed the town in 1832. Along with every other tribe, The Indian Removal Act declared that the Sauk/Fox had to relocate west of the Mississippi.

In one of the very last defiant acts by any tribe E of the Mississippi, Blackhawk took his people and headed NE, up the Rock R valley ... a band of about 700; mostly women/children/elderly. They were chased by army regiments and companies of hell-bent militia, eager to collect "trophies" of scalps, body parts, skin, etc. A young Abe Lincoln, eyeing a political career, headed up one company out of Springfield. The Indians fought a rearguard action at Stilman's Run (near Dixon), made it to what's now Madison, then headed W into the Wisc R valley, fought another rearguard action there (Wisconsin Heights), and eventually got hemmed in at BAD AXE (the Bad Axe R empties into the Miss SW of Madison): Their final stand. The army and militia finally had their day.

Blackhawk has since graciously lent his name to hockey teams, dry cleaners, bowling alleys, liquor stores, etc.

From the wind-and-wave-swept shores of the mighty sweet water sea they call Michigan, Alewife's guitarist/composer/arranger steps out to forge his own cathartic sounds. He looks to ancient and folkloric musical traditions, and brings them into the modern realm of ambience and sonic possibility.

Alewife