Talk:Winnebago War

message: I had to revert the changes in the article in the "Hostilies" section because there was no reasons given especially in the discussion page and the possibility of vandalism to the article.It gets frustrating when people make radical changes to an article without including references/citations or even a legitiment reason for such a change. Thank you-RFD (talk) 12:42, 15 January 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Changes in the Winnebago War article 

message: On the slim chance that anyone watching this page is interested in doing map work, one might take the map in the article and make it into a locator map. The handful of important places mentioned (or that will be mentioned) in the text could be linked on the map, such as Fort Crawford/Prairie du Chien, Fort Snelling, Fort Howard, Fort Winnebago, Jefferson Barracks, Galena, and Prairie la Crosse. It would be a handy visual aid. Any takers? —Kevin Myers 10:15, 18 December 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Locator map 

message: This article is based on modern scholarly accounts. It's too bad that there are not more scholarly sources available for the Winnebago War, since some of the older writings contain errors, and the modern sources are usually focused on the Black Hawk War and don't cover this conflict in detail. If anyone knows of scholarly sources that are not yet cited, please mention them here.
Beware of errors that appear in some accounts of the Winnebago War, especially on the Internet. Mostly these are small details that have been corrected by modern scholars. You'll find accounts that claim, for example, that President Adams pardoned Red Bird, a pardon that came too late, since Red Bird had by then died in prison. On the contrary, the pardon (which still exists and is pictured in the Doty article by Jung) does not mention Red Bird, who died many months earlier. Similarly, some accounts say that the Ho-Chunk delegation convinced President Adams to issue the pardon; on the contrary, the pardon is apparently dated prior to Adams's meeting with the delegation. The purpose of the meeting may have been to present the delegation with a previously arranged pardon. It would be nice to have a modern source that covered these events in greater detail.
Some of the errors are not as trivial. Some writers are unaware that all but one of the people killed by the Ho-Chunks were multiracial, not white. Even Zanger, in an otherwise excellent article, called the Gagniers and the Methodes "white people" (p. 81), but he was writing 30 years ago, when a simplistic "white vs. Indian" approach to Native American history prevailed. In an attempt to make the murder of the Methode family more comprehensible, you'll see claims that they were trespassing on Ho-Chunk land, but in fact they were west of the Mississippi and not on Ho-Chunk land. You'll find accounts that claim that Wabokieshiek (White Cloud) was a major participant in the conflict, but this stems from an unreliable Internet history that conflated White Cloud with a different person.
There are other issues that need exploration by modern scholars. No scholar seems to have put the surrender of Red Bird in a wider context. Historian Patrick Jung focuses on American legal procedures, but not Native American custom. But as Richard White explains in The Middle Ground (p. 93), in the previous century the French and their Indian allies had created a "ritual of surrender and redemption" in which an Indian murderer would be surrendered by his tribe and then pardoned by the French. The surrender and the pardon demonstrated the good faith of each side, thereby strengthening the relationship. The Ho-Chunks seem to be repeatedly enacting this ritual during the Winnebago War, but the Americans were slow to grant the pardon and end the crisis. We can't really point this out in the article until a reliable source does, so keep an eye out for it in the future. —Kevin Myers 00:51, 1 March 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Notes for the future