I recently had a discussion with an archaeologist about the original grave of Chief Black Hawk, which hasn't been located since the 1800's. It was depicted on the first plat in 1844 of section 2 as shown below (This survey was rejected and re-done, with the later plat not showing as many features).
The topographic feature doesn't look right to me. I tried to interpret it as a hillside, but the USGS topo shows only a few feet of elevation change over a half-mile in any direction on the NE side of the river.
What do you think the shaded feature is? If it is a hill, does the downward direction make sense near the river?
That's an interesting historical notation on the GLO plat. GLO plats are notoriously stylistic in nature. Pinning down the grave on the line between Lots 2 and 3 is at best a starting point to look of it.
I take the shading as a bluff or high bank above the alluvial plain. But, how it looks on the ground could be widely different. The grave on the crest of a bank above the river and kinda close to the lot line. If it's like most of the GLO plat information I've dealt with, it's correct for information, not very close for location.
Early form of a GIS map.
Of course, there really is no high bluff, as that area is quite flat. I don't know if his notes were too hard to read and the office got it in the wrong place, or if it was fiction. The fact that his survey was rejected makes me suspicious of the latter in which case the grave location could be off by a half-section or totally wrong. The surveyor would not have needed to get close to that point.
The stories vary widely. I was surprised that most of them do put it on the NE side of the river. I thought native burials were most often on high ground overlooking a river, and there certainly is that on the SW side.
An important step, which I don't know if the archaeologist has done, is to check what land his friend who supposedly buried him bought after the second survey was done, most of a decade after the burial.
I'd also look at older quads if they are available. Sometimes those old 1905 or even older ones have interesting info on them.
A cemetery does show up to the east on an older quad, on the other side of the RR at about the same northing as the grave shown on the GLO plat. That's almost a mile east and probably has little to do with the grave site on the plat.
is this the same Chief Black Hawk?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Hawk_(Sauk_leader)
died, buried on North Bank of river, remains stolen, brought back to the Iowa Historical Society which burned down.
Makes for interesting reading.
That's the guy, and one or more of the various stories of his remains. Note that the 1844 plat does not place the grave on the north bank of the river, but over a quarter mile away, but some stories do put him near the river.
There is a memorial for Black Hawk in the Iowaville Cemetery, and it depends on which story you believe on whether any of his remains are there. The Wikipedia picture of the memorial is mine.
Read about the "Black Hawk War" that made him famous, which was mostly the militia (including some who became famous later) chasing the Sauk away from their traditional home near the Rock River upstream from the Mississippi, and killing quite a few in the process.