American Indian Culture and Research Journal

On 19 June 1916, one hundred thousand tourists gathered together in Rock Island, Illinois, to watch an “Old Indian Village” go up in flames. President Wilson foreshadowed this theater of genocide earlier that evening. From the oval office, Wilson pushed a button that resulted in the electrification of the Fort Armstrong Centennial Celebration. The following morning celebrants woke up from this awesome display of regeneration through violence and attended a historical pageant named Progress. Members of the Red Men of Davenport and the Ladies Auxiliary reenacted the 1780 battle in which George Rogers Clark descended on a Sac Indian village on the Rock River and destroyed it. After the 1916 reenactment, The Rock Island Argus reported that as the village smoldered, “an Indian prophet rose proclaiming the early close of the supremacy of the red man and the approach of the day when the white would rule.” The newspaper promoted the event with a headline that read: “Tribal Ceremonies Exemplified, After Which Whites Attack and Leave Place Mass of Ruins.” At first glance, the Fort Armstrong Centennial Celebration confirms the scientific racism of the age. But the Progress exhibit could not have taken place without the help of Meskwaki tribal members who were paid to build the Old Indian Village that later went up in flames. The Fort Armstrong Centennial Celebration was just one event in a series of field days, powwows, and pageants in which Native and non-Native worlds came together. Far from evidence of the inevitable decline of American Indians, Meskwaki participants used events such as the centennial celebration to make a case for community survival even as advocates of allotment and boarding schools sought to diminish tribal sovereignty. By 1916, the Meskwaki people had grown accustomed to hosting a range of Christian missionaries, anthropologists, hobbyists, and tourists who began traveling to their settlement during the last decade of the nineteenth century.