Black Hawk and his band, returning from an unsuccessful winter's hunt, found their town demolished and the site ploughed up; the passage states that during the preceding winter, squatters after seven years of illegal occupancy had preempted several quarter sections at the mouth of the Rock covering the village site and the Sac corn fields.

The evidence

• “According to the treaty itself, therefore, since no sales of the land had been made and since the frontier line of homesteads was some fifty miles to the east, this was still Indian land and it was the duty of our government to protect the Indians in their occupancy of that region until the land should be duly surveyed and sold to settlers. In the spring of 1830 Black Hawk and his band, returning from an unsuccessful winter's hunt, found their town demolished and the site ploughed up. During the winter those squatters, after seven years of illegal occupancy, had duly preempted several quarter sections at the mouth of the Rock, covering the disputed ground, namely, the village site and the Sac corn fields.”

  1908-brown-rock-county/03-black-hawk-war.md, Vol. 1, PDF p. 45 / book p. 36

  Brown, William Fiske, editor. Rock County, Wisconsin: A New History of Its Cities, Villages, Towns, Citizens and Varied Interests, from the Earliest Times, Up to Date. Chicago: C. F. Cooper & Co., 1908. 2 vols. archive.org/details/rockcountywiscon01brow, archive.org/details/rockcountywiscon02brow.

  Grade A: Found on a page of one of our sources