Indian Removal Act forced the departure of local Native Americans

November is Native American Heritage Month, fitting because of the history behind the celebration of the Thanksgiving holiday. After all, if not for the help of Native Americans, the Pilgrim Fathers probably would have starved to death after only a few years.

Unfortunately, the President, apparently still harboring a grudge against Native Americans because of casino deals gone bad and reportedly at the behest of rich Republican donors, decided to proclaim November as “National American History and Founders Month.” Fortunately, though, there’s been no noticeable effect. Major museums and organizations are still commemorating the month that honors the people who greeted those first Europeans when they stepped ashore.

These days, the long occupation of the Fox River Valley by Native People is only dimly recalled through the names of places, geographical features, roads, and buildings. The story of what happened to those first residents of our region of northern Illinois begins with the arrival of the first European explorers.

Jolliet and Marquette explored the Illinois River Valley in 1673 and found the related tribes of the Illinois Confederacy living here.

In 1673, the governor of New France, which included Canada and much of the northern U.S. west of the Appalachian Mountains, commissioned an exploration expedition of the Mississippi River watershed. Rumor had it that the Mississippi ran southwesterly, possibly to the Pacific Ocean, meaning it could provide a water highway to the Pacific Ocean. Those speculations proved untrue, but the expedition’s leaders, geographer Louis Jolliet and Jesuit missionary Father Jacques Marquette, did leave us the first written descriptions of central Illinois.

From those accounts and others, we know that at that time Illinois was occupied by the six main tribal groups comprising the Illinois Confederation. Calling themselves the Illiniwek (which meant “the men”) and “Illinois” by the French, the Kaskaskia, Cahokia, Michigamea, Peoria, Moingwena, and Tamaroa, primarily made their summer homes along the Illinois River, which was named for them. The confederacy’s family groups used Kendall County and other areas along the Illinois’ tributaries as hunting grounds and winter quarters.

Beginning about 1660, the Iroquois Confederacy, whose home was in upstate New York, began a series of military campaigns all the way west into Illinois in a quest to seize control of the lucrative trade in furs—primarily beaver pelts—with the Europeans. Although sometimes playing both sides against each other, in general the Iroquois favored the British while the tribes of Algonquian stock living in the western Great Lakes were allied with the French.

LaSalle and Tonti established a trade fort atop Starved Rock where the Fox River joins the Illinois, drawing several thousand Native Americans to the area for protection against their enemies.

The turmoil, called the Beaver Wars by historians, drove the Illinois west of the Mississippi for several years and they had probably just returned in 1673 when Marquette and Joliet encountered them. Then in September 1680, the Iroquois attacked again, crushing the Illiniwek in a series of battles.

By 1683, the constant Iroquois threat to French economic interests led adventurer, entrepreneur, and explorer Robert Cavelier de laSalle to fortify Starved Rock and gather several thousand Indians to that vicinity for mutual protection. A 1684 map shows the Fox Valley occupied by a number of Indian groups connected by trade and security understandings with LaSalle’s Starved Rock venture. After the area’s resources were exhausted some years later, LaSalle’s principal lieutenant, Henri de Tonti, abandoned Starved Rock, and relocated the entire fur trading and regional security operation south to Lake Peoria. Eventually, most of the French moved even farther south to Kaskaskia and Cahokia along the Mississippi in southern Illinois. With that move went the remnant of the Illiniwek, creating a strategic vacuum in the Fox Valley.

The culturally related Fox, Mascouten, and Kickapoo tribes unsuccessfully attempted to occupy the region following the French war of extermination waged against the Fox in the 1720s and 1730s, and the Fox Valley was again considered part of the Illinois’ domain. However, in 1746, interrelated bands of the Pottawatomi, Ottawa, and Chippewa tribes—who called themselves the Three Fires Confederacy—began to move into northern Illinois from their homes in Michigan, Indiana, and Wisconsin. They were being pushed west by other tribes who were, in an ethnic and economic chain reaction, trying to escape further depredations of the grimly efficient Iroquois.

Gradually, the Three Fires pushed out the other tribes then attempting to claim northern Illinois. Since the last Illinois bands had been eliminated from the Fox Valley for several years, the Three Fires claimed the area as their own.

During the French and Indian War of the early 1760s, the Three Fires continued their long-time support of the French. Even after the British won the war, the Pottawatomi remained loyal to their French friends. They killed several British fur traders and participated in the western tribes’ attempt to force the British back west of the Appalachian Mountains in the brief war called Pontiac’s Rebellion.

Waubonsee was one of the principal war chiefs of the Three Fires Confederacy. His village was located along the Fox River between Oswego and Batavia.

By the time of the Revolutionary War, however, the Three Fires had transferred their loyalty to the British, and fought against the Americans, who had begun to encroach on territory the tribes considered their own. Three Fires villages located up and down the Fox River also supported the British during the War of 1812, with many of them taking part in the destruction of Ft. Dearborn—now Chicago—in 1812. That year, according to U.S. Indian Agent Thomas Forsyth, the Three Fires could muster some 600 warriors. Forsyth reported that year that Chiefs Waubonsee and Main Poche both had villages located on the Fox River from where war parties participated in raids and battles against the Americans.

After the War of 1812 solidified the United States’ hold on the Illinois Country, the Three Fires tried to protect through diplomacy what they had failed to protect through military action. They were, however, unsuccessful in this, and were forced into a number of key land cessions during the next two decades.

President Thomas Jefferson had established a policy in 1803 for the removal of Indians to lands west of the Mississippi River to open land between the Appalachians and the Mississippi River for settlement. In 1830 the policy became law with passage of the Indian Removal Act, which was strongly supported by the southern states and by President Andrew Jackson.

In the aftermath of the brief Winnebago War of 1827 and the much more serious Black Hawk War of 1832, Illinois settlers clamored for the removal of all the native tribes from the state. In spite of the Three Fires’ general support for the U.S. during both upheavals the Winnebago and Black Hawk wars, the U.S. government readily agreed with the sentiment of the settlers who were trying to establish new homes and the land speculators who were eager to make profits.

President Andrew Jackson championed the removal of Native People from the area east of the Mississippi. While the “Trail of Tears” suffered by the Five Civilized Tribes is the best-known of the removals, the tribulations of the Three Fires Confederacy were just as harrowing.

In the fall of 1835, under orders from the federal government, the first large group of the Three Fires left from near Chicago and were removed to a region in northwestern Missouri called the Platte Country or the Platte Purchase. Two years later, the rest of the Fox Valley bands of the Three Fires were sent west in October, traveling through near continual rain and mud, across the Mississippi at Quincy before arriving in the Platte Country in mid-November. While the infamous “Trail of Tears” suffered by the Five Civilized Tribes (Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole) is the best known story of the disasters suffered through the Indian removal policy, the removals of Native People from northern Illinois were just as brutal.

But by the time the Three Fires arrived in the Platte Country, settlers had already started to filter into the area. So the tired and bedraggled Three Fires people were almost immediately forced by the U.S. Army to move farther west onto the shortgrass prairie near Council Bluffs in what would soon become western Iowa. It was wholly unfamiliar country for them and they strongly disliked due to its lack of timber, not to mention the arrival, again, of increasing numbers of white settlers.

So finally, in late 1837, they were removed one last time to what was hoped would be their final home on the Marais des Cygnes River in Kansas. And so it proved to be.

Despite strong government pressure, some Three Fires families had refused to move. After seeing the lands they were assigned in Iowa and farther west, others who had moved slowly drifted back to Illinois, only to be rounded up by the government and sent back again. The last of the Fox Valley’s Indian residents weren’t permanently moved west until 1838.

And that finally brought the Native American presence in the area to a close after 120 centuries of continuous habitation along the banks of the Fox River, something it might be worthwhile to think about as we observe Native American Heritage Month.

Two wars’ major effects on Kendall County history…

I hadn’t really thought about the structure of Kendall County’s history–and that of Oswego, too–until we started working on developing the new core exhibit down at the Little White School Museum.

Back in 2017, the Oswegoland Heritage Association Board decided we needed to do a complete makeover of the permanent exhibit in the museum room. So we hired museum consultant Lance Tawzer to come in and help us figure out what to do. The first thing we learned is that our museum room was not a museum room, it was our museum gallery, which was cool. We also learned our permanent exhibit was not a permanent exhibit, but rather our museum’s core exhibit. “Permanent,” Lance explained, makes the statement that it’s never going to change while “core” establishes the idea that what is on exhibit there is really the basis for your whole interpretation of local history.

The Little White School Museum’s new core exhibit opened March 24, 2019.

And, we also learned that what museums do is exhibit artifacts, photos, and documents, they don’t display them. An exhibit includes interpretation of whatever is being shown to the public—its history, who owned it, and why it’s important to whatever the museum is trying to explain to visitors. Antique shops have displays, museums shouldn’t—but unfortunately, all too many do.

Anyway, when we got to discussing how we wanted to organize the story of Oswego‘s history for the new core exhibit, it suddenly occurred to me that two of the nation’s major wars—the Civil War and World War II—not only had major effects on the entire community (not to mention the whole nation), but that they really divided local history into three convenient eras. Those would be the area’s prehistory and the settlement era to 1861 and the start of the Civil War; the post-Civil War era up to 1941 and the start of World War II; and, finally, the post-World War II era that drastically changed Oswego from a small, sleepy farm town into one of the fastest growing communities in the nation.

Since we’re observing Veterans’ Day this week, I thought it might be a good time to revisit the major impacts those two wars had on Kendall County as a whole, with the Oswego area seeing so much change.

White pioneers settled Kendall County starting in the late 1820s. By the late 1830s, the nine townships that would one day become Kendall County were split between Kane County (Oswego, Bristol, Little Rock) and LaSalle County (NaAuSay, Kendall, Fox, Big Grove, Seward, Lisbon). In 1840 there was sufficient support to create a new county out of those nine townships that petitions were entertained by the Illinois General Assembly to do just that. Kendall County was established by an act of the General Assembly in February 1841.

The new county, already growing quickly, experienced even faster growth. By 1860, its population had reached 13,074, up 69 percent from its 1850 population of 7,730. By 1860, the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad’s main line had been running through the northern part of the county for just seven years, but it had already resulted in the creation of a fast-growing town, Plano, in Little Rock Township. Plano, in fact, was quickly becoming an industrial center as the Hollister brothers and others tinkered with machines like grain harvesters with a view towards manufacturing them, making use of the CB&Q’s rails to bring in raw materials and ship out finished goods.

John Blake enlisted as a substitute for wealthy Kendall County farmer Sheldon Wheeler, and was paid more than $400 to take Wheeler’s place. Blake was one of more than 1,200 Kendall County men who served in the Civil War. (Little White School Museum collection)

Then in 1861, the Civil War broke out, and men and boys from all over Kendall County rushed to join the Union Army to fight against the South’s treason in defense of slavery. By the end of the war, 1,251 county residents, nearly 10 percent of the county’s total 1860 population, had served in the fight, first to preserve the Union against Southern treason and then to eliminate slavery. Of those who served, 247—20 percent—died. Of the one in five men and boys who marched off to war and who never came home, 70 were killed in action, seven died as Confederate prisoners of war, and the rest succumbed to disease and wounds.

The war may have ended in 1865, but it continued to have profound effects on those who served, the communities they came from, and the county as a whole. The overwhelmingly young group of men—some as young as 13—who marched bravely off to war were changed in ways they never expected and which those who were left at home had problems understanding. Some, who had been given great responsibilities leading large numbers of men as commissioned and non-commissioned officers found it difficult to return to menial jobs and to the back-breaking work that farming was in 1865. After spending up to four years of continuous travel sometimes punctuated by vicious combat, many found their horizons had shifted.

The Homestead Act of 1862 offered an outlet for these restless souls as did new opportunities available in the Reconstruction South.

The result was a sharp decline in Kendall County’s population. By 1870, the county’s population had dropped to 12,399, and it continued to steadily decline thereafter as whole families packed up and headed west or south. Oswego Township’s population followed the same trend. It didn’t exceed its 1860 population until 1950.

The completion of the Fox River Branch of the CB&Q in 1870, linking the railroad’s mainline with Oswego, Yorkville, Millington, and Ottawa, offered not only a way for people to get to Kendall County towns, but also a way for families to leave, drawn by cheap land in the West and the restlessness of so many former soldiers. Throughout those years, the families leaving the county for what they saw were greener pastures elsewhere were chronicled in the local press.

Oswego’s CB&Q Depot was built at Jackson and South Adams Street in 1870, along with three side tracks. (Little White School Museum collection)

On Nov. 9, 1871, the Kendall County Record‘s Oswego correspondent reported that “Orson Ashley and his son, Martin, started yesterday for their new home in Kansas near Topeka; they chartered a [rail] car to take their effects, Orpha and Ella, daughter and son’s wife, are to follow.”

Most headed west, but some headed south. The Record reported from Oswego on June 26, 1873: “A number of families are making preparations to move with William Hawley to the state of Mississippi.”

As the years passed, larger groups were established to head west in company. On March 8, 1883, the Record‘s Oswego correspondent reported: “Clarence Shumway and Alfred Linegar left for Nebraska with their goods and stock–in carloads–last Wednesday. Mrs. Shumway and children followed some days afterwards. Today, Alfred Wormley will start for the same destination; August Schmidt for Dakota; and James Gannon to Iowa with the effects and others are getting ready for going west.”

The correspondent added, somewhat plaintively, “If this exodus will continue much longer, there won’t be enough left of us for a quorum.”

By 1890, the county’s population had decreased to 12,106 and continued to drop until it hit its low point of 10,074 in 1920. Not until 1930 did the number finally begin inching up.

It was just in time for the major impact that World War II had on Kendall County. By 1940, the county’s population had risen to 11,105. Farming—the county’s main industry—was beginning to recover from its long depression that began as World War I ended. Meanwhile, county retail and other businesses were slowly digging their way out of the Great Depression that began in 1929.

Among those Oswegoans serving during World War II was Dwight Young, who became a nuclear physicist working on the Manhattan Project that produced the first atom bomb. (Little White School Museum collection)

With the outbreak of war on Dec. 7, 1941, Kendall’s young men (and this time young women) again flocked to the colors, enlisting and being drafted to serve in the military. Meanwhile, thousands of Kendall women joined the homefront workforce to labor in munitions and other manufacturing plants, take over the businesses their husbands had been running until they were drafted, and volunteer in local Red Cross and other support roles. A good example of the effect the war had on family-owned businesses is the story of Everett and Evelyn McKeown. The McKeowns bought Oswego’s Thorsen Funeral Home in 1938. When war broke out, Everett was drafted to serve as an Army medic. Evelyn, meanwhile, determined to continue running the funeral home on her own, but there was a problem—she had no mortician’s license. Luckily, Leonard Larson, who owned the Yorkville funeral home, stepped in and agreed to act as the business’s licenced mortician. Everett was wounded during the invasion of Normandy, evacuated to England, recovered, and was sent back to what was considered an area unlikely to see combat, only to end up smack dab in the middle of the Battle of the Bulge. He was mustered out, went back to Oswego, and took over running the funeral home business. And he and his wife adopted a daughter, which fit right in with what so many other male and female vets were doing as they all started new families.

The war was easily the greatest government program in the nation’s history, removing millions of men and women in prime working ages from the private workforce, resulting in increased wages for those remaining, providing new markets for farm products, and generally ending the financial pain of the Depression.

At the end of the war, all those young people came home to a country that was drastically changing as new, expanding businesses tried to keep pace with the demand for goods and services. Millions of young men and women married after the war, finding jobs in the factories springing up to supply goods for the pent-up demand created by the Depression and then four years of war and rationing. All those new families needed places to live, cars to drive, furniture and appliances for their new homes, and then schools for their children to attend.

The first family moved into their home at Boulder Hill in 1956. By 1958, there were 100 homes on “The Hill.” The subdivision’s population eventually reached more than 9,000. (Little White School Museum collection)

Kendall County, located at the periphery of the Chicago Metro region began to grow as the war decade of the 1940s turned into the decade of growth in the 1950s. U.S. highways Route 30, Route 34, and Route 52 provided interstate and inter-region routes into the county as did state highways Routes 25, 71, 47, and 126. Decent transportation, land available for development, and nearby jobs began drawing thousands of residents to new housing developments epitomized by Don L. Dise’s sprawling Boulder Hill Subdivision in northern Oswego Township. Between 1950 and 1970, the county’s population doubled. It took it another 30 years to double again, reaching 54,550 by 2000, but just 10 years to more than double again to 114,736 in 2010.

Along the way, Oswego ceased being that sleepy little farm town and became a full-fledged suburb, growing from a little over 1,200 people in 1950 to 3,000 in 1980 before literally exploding to more than 35,000 today.

The negative impact of the Civil War on Kendall County is long past, but World War II’s effects continue. Aspects of that growth are seen as both negative and positive, sometimes both at the same time, by longtime and new residents alike. But while the effects of the two wars can be debated, it seems pretty clear they both had profound consequences that, in so many ways, are still being felt today.

And as we ponder those consequences this Veterans’ Day week, you’re invited to the annual “Remembering Our Veterans” exhibit at Oswego’s Little White School Museum, honoring those who’ve served, from the Civil War to the present day. Admission’s free; hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Mondays through Saturdays and noon to 5 p.m. Sundays. The exhibit will be available until Dec. 2, so you’ve got plenty of time to stop by.

During this harvest season, images capture a bygone farming era…

By the late 1930s, as they slowly climbed out of nearly two decades of agricultural depression, U.S. farmers were slowly changing over from horsepower to tractor power as soon as their finances permitted.

During that pre-World War II era, horses were still ubiquitous on farms and mechanization had yet to completely replace a lot of the hand labor on farms. Producing small grains—oats, wheat, barley, and rye—was the most mechanized of the crop cycles of that time. Machines planted, cultivated, cut, bundled, and threshed the grain, although admittedly a substantial amount of physical labor still went into the production process.

Husking hook or peg. By the 1930s the hook was usually metal with leather finger loops. Earlier models had wood hooks.

With corn, however, while the planting and cultivating cycle had been largely mechanized, the harvest portion of the crop cycle was still labor-intensive. Although mechanical corn huskers had begun to be introduced, until after the war most corn here in Kendall County and the rest of Illinois was still picked by hand. The farmer walked the long rows of standing corn, twisting off each ear and smoothly removing the dried husk with a small device variously called a husking hook, husking peg, or husking mitten before pitching the ear up and into the wagon pulled by a team of horses that matched his pace down the row.

My father told me that a skilled hand husker could keep one husked ear of corn in the air and one ear bouncing off the tall bang-board on the opposite side of the wagon all the way down the row, an astonishing feat when you stop to think about it.

Farmers were justifiably proud of their husking skills, which required a combination of endurance, timing, and manual dexterity. On Nov. 20, 1935, a news note in the Kendall County Record reported: “In the Lisbon items, Mrs. Jones tells us that five brothers husked an average of 156 bushels of corn each one day. The ‘boys’ are all over six feet tall. They issue a challenge to any other five-brother team in the vicinity to a husking match.”

The 1911 Wheatland Plowing Match was held in late September on the Hafenrichter farm in Wheatland Township, Will County. The last Wheatland Plowing Match was held in 1976. (Little White School Museum collection)

Husking matches were just one of the contests, formal and informal, farmers engaged in to test and advertise their skill at various parts of the agricultural process. Probably the most famous of the formal contests were the plowing matches that were established by Scots and English settlers starting in the late 1800s. The matches tested how skillful farmers were at plowing straight furrows at specific depths as a measure of proficiency.

Husking matches weren’t so much aimed at testing farmers’ scientific proficiency as they were aimed at demonstrating the dexterity prized by their peers and providing a good time for all concerned, with a bit of prize money at the end for the lucky winner.

Husking matches began in Kendall County in the 1920s, with the Kendall County Farm Bureau sponsoring the first match in 1925. The winner of the Kendall County match, August Wollenweber Jr., went on to the state competition. After that, while Kendall farmers often attended the state matches, another formal husking contest wasn’t held until the fall of 1936, possibly encouraged by Mrs. Jones’ tale of five brothers husking challenge in 1935.

The Kendall County Farm Bureau was again the sponsoring organization for the contest, held on Nov. 2 on the Bert Kellogg farm in NaAuSay Township—his descendants still farm in that area, by the way. Ed Olson won the 1936 contest.

The 1937 contest was again held on the Kellogg farm, and this time Roy Johnson was the county winner who went on to the state contest.

There was apparently no contest in 1938, but in 1939 the Farm Bureau again hosted a contest, this time at the Thomas Fletcher farm at Lisbon Center. And luckily for us, either the Farm Bureau or the Fletcher family decided to document the year’s contest with a nice batch of professionally produced photographs. Today, a couple of Tom Fletchers still farm down on Lisbon Center Road, the grandson and great-grandson of the 1939 Tom Fletcher. Today’s elder Tom recently allowed the Little White School Museum in Oswego to scan in a batch of photos from the 1939 contest. For those keeping track, the winner in 1939 was the same Ed Olson who won in 1936.

Since this year’s corn harvest is now on-going, and this marks the 80^th anniversary of the 1939 Kendall County Hand Husking Contest, I thought it would be of some interest to post some of the photos of the contest. Hope you enjoy them as much as I do…

Aerial shot of the Tom Fletcher farm at Liston Center in 1939.

Hand husking contests were popular throughout Illinois in the 1920s and 1930s. Farmers from all over Kendall County drove to the Fletcher Farm for the 1939 contest.

Contestants’ wagons lined up ready to start. The goal was to see how much ear corn, by weight, could be husked during the contest’s time limit. Points were subtracted if too much husk was left on the ear when it was pitched into the wagon.

Farm owner Tom Fletcher started the day’s contest with a round from his shotgun.

As judges look on, a contestant twists an ear of corn off the stalk and strips the husk off with his husking hook.

The small whitish blur is an ear of corn headed up to bounce off the bang board into the wagon as this contestant reaches for another ear to twist off and husk. A good husker could keep one ear in the air all the way down a long row of corn.

Before the contest began, each wagon was weighed on the farm’s Fairbanks-Morse scale (platform at far right) and then weighed again when full to determine the weight of corn husked.

Running results were kept on the leader board nailed above the corn crib door and updated as each load came in and was weighed.

The contestants in the 1939 contest with Tom Fletcher center rear and winner Ed Olson in the center.

Champion corn husker Ed Olson, looking a bit like one of the subjects in a Grant Wood painting.