Historical articles

Fort Madison was poorly placed from the start. It sat at the base of a bluff next to a ravine, ground from which attackers could fire down into the post. About sixty soldiers held a five-cornered fort roughly 120 by 160 feet.

By September 1812 the War of 1812 had reached the Upper Mississippi. About two hundred Ho-Chunk and Sauk warriors attacked the fort for four days, firing from a river bank thirty paces from the walls and a wooded spring run that gave them cover the garrison could not clear. Their aim was to burn the post out. The soldiers answered with muskets and a howitzer and burned their own trading house outside the walls rather than leave it as cover, and the attackers withdrew when their ammunition ran out.

It was a reprieve, not a victory. The garrison would hold on for another year before the situation became impossible.

The Sauk leader Black Hawk took part in the attacks on Fort Madison. In his own account he shot the halyard in two and brought the fort's flag down, and the garrison recorded the same moment from inside the walls, an image that stuck in the memory of the conflict.

Black Hawk's account is one of the few first-person windows we have into these events from the side that besieged the fort. After the soldiers evacuated and burned the post in November 1813, he said nothing was left standing but the chimneys.

Reckoning honestly with the fort means telling the whole story, including the Sauk and the wider Native nations whose lands these posts pushed into.

For more than a century the fort lived only in records and memory. Then, in 1965, archaeological work in a factory parking lot exposed the fort's central blockhouse and the foundations of the officers' quarters. The ground still held the building's outline.

That discovery anchored everything that followed. The site was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1973, and a replica fort was built nearby in the mid-1980s, much of it by volunteers, including inmates from the Iowa State Penitentiary.

What the dig proved is simple and worth holding onto: the fort was real, it was here, and the evidence was still in the soil.