Americans in the East were great fans of Black Hawk, whose popularity on tour overtook that of Andrew Jackson's parallel tour of the Northeast. Undoubtedly, then, Black Hawk was a celebrity. He remained popular even in 1837, when he attended Catlin's gallery opening in New York, which included his 1832 painting of Black Hawk. Black Hawk may also have been a conduit through which white women could imagine escape from the confining and "polite" parlors of eastern cities that Black Hawk toured. To these female fans Black Hawk may not have been just Jackson's official symbol to show that savagery could no longer threaten the civilization of America and its right to internally colonize the North American continent. But no matter how his female fans actually felt, their identities were used to further a political, nationalist agenda that actively denied miscegenation as a method for becoming a unified American culture. As part of that agenda, Black Hawk's identity was also constructed, commodified, circulated, and consumed through the culture via newspaper editors and his own autobiographical response. The relationship between celebrity and fans is, at least in Black Hawk's case, culturally important as a public manifestation circulated through the media. (Contains 2 figures and 46 notes.)