[Indigenous drumming and singing]
My name is Ma-ka-tai-me-she-kia-kiak. The white people call me Black Hawk.
I collected a party of 30 brave. We started in canoes and descended the
Mississippi, until we arrived near the
place where Fort Madison had once been. It
had been abandoned by the white and
burnt. Nothing remained but the chimneys.
We were pleased to see that the white
people had retired from our country.
[Indigenous drumming and singing]
[harmonica music]
20 years later, the frontier had changed.
Black Hawk was a prisoner of war,
dictating his autobiography. Many of his
people were dead - massacred. And his
people's land west of the Mississippi
was to become the Iowa Territory. One of
the river towns was named Fort Madison,
built beside the rubble of the old
frontier outpost. Fort Madison was built
in 1808 to stem the growing tide of
British influence in American territory.
Winter quarters the first year had few
buildings and had a temporary stockade
of ten posts with many gaps and only five
feet high. The fort protected a United
States government trading post, part of a
network of trading posts established by
the government to sell inexpensive trade
goods to the Indians and win their
allegiance away from the British.
But many things went wrong at Fort
Madison. The fur trade was mishandled.
Administrative problems occurred, and the fort itself was poorly planned. Then the
war of 1812 renewed the conflict between
Great Britain and the United States. For
a time, Indians, led by the British, swept
over the American frontier, attacking the
forts and capturing them one by one.
Fort Madison stood isolated and
withstood Indian attacks, but in 1813 the
soldiers abandoned the fort,
leaving it in flames behind them. They
retreated to St. Louis.
Gradually, traces of the old fort
disappeared. The face of the landscape
changed, and the old fort became mere
legend. Even its location was no longer
certain, and many believed that the
charred ruins were destroyed or covered
by the waters of the Mississippi.
For the river too had changed, rising
behind locks and dams. But there was a
tradition remembered in the town of Fort
Madison that the fort had been near the
center of town, buried under the parking
lot of the Sheaffer Pen Company. In 1965,
construction workers in the parking lot
were cutting deep trenches to lay new
lines and tanks. An archaeologist was
there to see if any trace of the old
fort was present. A limestone foundation
was emerging. It was made of limestone
rubble laid together without mortar,
without cement. Each layer of lock was
set in tightly with packed clay and
another layer was added. It was an old
foundation. As archaeologists cleared away
more earth from the rock, looking away
from the outside walls, they found the
stones formed a cellar, 20 feet square. It
was a small building, but a  substantial
one. But could it be the fort?
In size, the cellar might be either of
two block houses lying on a north-south
diagonal, but no records had ever
mentioned cellars under the fort
buildings. Fort Madison was an old river
city, established in 1833.
Buildings have
been set up, torn down, rebuilt, filled in.
Perhaps this was, after all, a building
from a later period. Then, bronze buttons
were found. These uniform buttons confirmed the identification of Fort Madison.
This button is marked "1R", meaning first
regiment. The insignia of the First
United States Infantry Regiment, part of
the garrison. Special buttons like these
were not used later by the army. This
button, showing a cannon, probably dropped
off an artillery man's uniform.
Charred beams were clearly visible on
the cellar floor. They had fallen in from
the upper floor of the block house, and
in the thick smoke and collapsed debris,
had not completely burned. Lower beams
ran parallel to the cellar walls, and the
upper beams ran diagonally. The study of
beams showed that the block house had a
diagonally set second-story. This replica,
built from the archaeological plans, shows
the type of construction. At one side of
the cellar of the block house, there was
a door sill and a clay step with a
small retaining wall extending away from
the foundation. It was a cellar entryway
reached by an outside set of stairs. A
vertical door hung from pintle hinges
and swung inward. An iron strap held a
drawbar for locking the door from the
inside.
Clinched nails show plank thickness.
Other hinges found by the entryway
supported a cellar storm door to keep
rain from running down the stairs into
the cellar. The clinched nails show the
door was 2 inches thick. There was also evidence of intense fire
when the fort burned. Pieces of glass had
melted in the heat of the huge beams
burning. This teapot, shattered in the
destruction of the block house, had
served the men on duty.
This present for writing well is
inscribed with a pun. It's an inkwell.
There were handmade nails, made by a
blacksmith. These were stamped nails,
made in a press and shipped up by the
King to the fort. And there were puddles
of lead, which had dripped down into the
basement during the fire.
The Fox Indians mined tons of lead,
bartering it at the Trading Post. Trade
beads for sale to the Indians. This
bullet mold is not military issue. The
small caliber ball fits a Kentucky rifle
for hunting. Rusted shut now, it once
opened like a pair of pliers. Lead balls
of various calibers were found. A broken
English gun flint. Triangular files,
perhaps for gun repairs.
Meanwhile, archaeological crews were
finding traces of other buildings and
remains. Charred stumps of the west
stockade appeared. The posts were set in
a trench, which was then refilled. The
shovel marks of the original trench can
be seen along the irregular sides. A
foundation for one of the fireplaces in
the enlisted men's barracks occurred
right next to the modern highway, under a
sidewalk. Construction for modern sewer
lines cut through the foundation of the
officers' quarters. Like the back block
house it had a storage cellar and an
outside set of stairs. Inside the
foundations of the officers' cellar,
interesting artifacts were found. One
officer's wife brought her fine English
china to the frontier. There were many
fragments of English china, cottage wares,
and transfer wares.
A carved bone handle for an officer's
sword or large knife.
Silverware left behind when the fort was
abandoned. This child's marble was lost
or left behind. Stoneware crocks stored
some of the officers food. Fragments of
clay pipes were very common.
Thin glass from window panes. A lead base held a spindle, part of office equipment.
Stylus tips for wax tablets, used instead
of scratch paper. A brass tip for an
officer's gold grain. A wine bottle.
Medicine bottle. A whetstone fragment for sharpening. Broken scissors. Only the
officers' quarters were plastered. A
cobblestone sidewalk led around the
officers' quarters, and there was a
cobblestone veranda in front. Back of the
kitchen was a privy.
The block houses and stockade at the
front of the fort
lay by coincidence under a narrow strip
of land between the railroad tracks
and highway. A chimney monument erected
by the Daughters of the American
Revolution years before on the
approximate site of the old fort had
since been arbitrarily moved to the
strip of ground. Digging in its shadow,
the crew was able to locate and identify
the limestone footings of the front
block house.
The earth from the cellars was screened
with water so nothing would be lost. The
bits of crockery, nails, and other remains
were the debris of human history. When
the town of Fort Madison was settled in
1833, the cobblestone walkways could
still be seen. An early visitor lost this
large cent piece, little worn and dated
1830. It was lying between two
cobblestones. From the study of the ruins,
it was now possible to reconstruct the
exact appearance of the fort. A cardboard
model was made to provide perspective,
and a final drawing of the fort was
made as it appeared in 1810. The officers'
quarters, officers' kitchens, barracks, gate,
front block houses, guardhouse, powder
magazine. The 15-foot high stockade must
have had a rifle platform inside for the
soldiers to stand on. The rear block
house. which had a cellar. The Trading
Post was outside the rear wicket gate.
The block house was on the back bridge
to help protect the rear of the fort.
We didn't excavate all of these
buildings. How do we know what they
looked like? The buildings which we
studied provide us architectural
patterns, but time had run out. The
underground construction project was
nearing completion and the archaeological 
excavations were refilled. The
foundations were covered with sheets of
plastic to help preserve them, for this
was the first American fort in the Upper
Mississippi Valley, and for five years
one of the most distant outposts on the
frontier.
[McKusick] I'm the State Archaeologist of Iowa, and I
directed excavations at the runs in 1965.
Many foundations remain unexplored under
the parking lot. I hope someday that the
fort can be permanently uncovered and
preserved, rising again from its grave as
part of the American frontier heritage.
This film was made under a grant from
the National Endowment for the
Humanities. Washington, D.C.
