Hoocak

The Hoocak were a Siouan-speaking people of Wisconsin and the upper Mississippi. They lived in permanent villages, grew maize, beans and squash, and gathered wild rice.

Disease and conflict reduced their population in the seventeenth century, and a smallpox epidemic caused further losses in 1836. In the Black Hawk War of 1832 some warriors raided American settlements while most Hoocak tried to avoid the conflict. They ceded Wisconsin lands to the United States in 1829, 1832 and 1837.