How the Fox River of Illinois (probably) got its modern name

Thousands of area residents drive their autos, walk, or ride their bicycles over its bridges or along its banks each day, but few give any thought to why the Fox River has the name it does.

Uncovering such historical mysteries is always somewhat fraught because of the mountain of variables. The river could have been given its name because there are lots of foxes in the area. Or perhaps it was called the Fox River because the river curves, narrows and widens like a fox’s tail.

But the river’s name has nothing to do with the furry fellows once sought for their fur and hunted for their love of raiding the target-rich environment of farmers’ chicken coops.

Instead, the river carries the name of one of the Native American tribes that once lived along its northern reaches a century and more before the U.S. government forced their successors to relocate west of the Mississippi River.

No one really knows what the earliest Native Americans called the river, although we can make a pretty good guess. By the time the first French explorers and traders arrived in northern Illinois in the late 1600s, the Native People were calling the stream “Pestekouy,” a word in the Algonquian language lexicon meaning “bison.”

According to historical and archaeological evidence, the Fox Valley was not used as a permanent home by Native Americans for several decades during the 1500s, 1600s, and early 1700s. Instead, it was a prime hunting grounds for the various tribal bands of the Illinois Confederacy. As herds of varying sizes of Eastern American Bison moved across the prairies of what would one day become Kendall County and our other modern governmental subdivisions, they were followed by various Indian bands, including the Illinois, who harvested them for use as a major source of protein-rich food as well as for other animal-based products they needed for survival.

Stampeding bison over a cliff where they fell to their death was one of the two major tactics Native People used to harvest bison.

The Indians conducted large communal bison hunts in the fall using a couple favored methods. Once consisted of contriving to drive a herd over a cliff where the fall would kill dozens of the huge animals. Back in 2005, conclusive evidence of this method of harvesting bison was found at the Lonza-Caterpillar Site along the Illinois River near Peoria.

The other main hunting tactic capitalized on autumn weather when the prairie grass was dry, and communal groups setting the grass afire in a incomplete circle around a bison herd. When the bison attempted to escape through the narrow non-burning opening, they were more easily killed.

Given the Fox Valley’s topography–large expanses of gently rolling prairie broken by occasional hardwood groves and the wooded banks of streams and wetlands–it’s logical to assume bison found the area much to their liking. As did deer, who are creatures of the edges of woodlands.

The Native People, whether intentionally or not, created and maintained ideal habitat for them as well by intentionally burning off the prairies in the autumn, a practice that not only killed saplings springing up on the prairie but also cleared out dead underbrush in the groves. As an added benefit, new growth around the groves’ edges created perfect deer habitat encouraging the growth of another valuable animal hunted for food and the many products that could be made from its bones and skin.

But getting back to the Fox River’s name, the Indians who hunted the area’s bison probably originally named the river after the large herds found along its banks. We know for sure local Native Americans hunted bison—around these parts in particular—because during an archaeological dig in Oswego in 1987, a bison leg bone was recovered from a village cooking fire pit. Kansas State University dated the bone for Oswego’s Little White School Museum, indicating the animal was killed about 1400 A.D., well before any Europeans were present in North America.

When the French arrived in northern Illinois in the 1600s, they immediately understood the importance of the Illinois River valley as a trade highway from the Great Lakes to the Mississippi River system. The river’s northern tributary, the DesPlaines, was within easy walking distance of the sluggish Chicago River, which emptied into Lake Michigan. The short distance from the Chicago to the DesPlaines meant a relatively quick trip from Lake Michigan to the Illinois and thence to the French colonies in southern Illinois—providing there was enough water in the upper DesPlaines. During periods of low water, the Chicago to DesPlaines portage could stretch 60 miles all the way downstream to the mouth of the Kankakee where the Illinois River formed from the two daughter streams.

Franquelin’s 1683 map labels our Fox River the Pestekouy, the Algonquian language group name for the American bison.

As the French traveled that route after reaching the Illinois, they were well aware of the towering sandstone bluff that rose from the river near its junction with the Pestekouy. Called simply le Rocher (the Rock) by the French, today’s Starved Rock area provided the location for a series of French forts and trading posts. The first known map that named the Fox River as the Pestekouy was drawn by Jean-Baptiste Louis Franquelin in 1684. As late as 1688, the Venetian Conventual friar Marco Coronelli drew a map (undoubtedly making liberal use of Franquelin’s map) that labeled the river as the “Pestconti,” a clear Italianization of the French spelling.

When French attention drifted away from northern Illinois, the name of Pestekouy was gradually lost. In fact, for several decades when the river was shown on maps at all it was unnamed. Louvigny in 1697 and DeLisle in 1718 both produced maps depicting the area with the Fox River unnamed.

The name may have disappeared because during that period, the river apparently lost its original connection with the bison herds. And that may possibly have been due to their eradication in the area due to over-hunting by French hide hunters. Between late 1702 and 1704, the French killed and skinned 12,000 Illinois bison with the aim of shipping the tanned hides back to France. The scheme failed, but nevertheless seems to have seriously depleted the state’s bison population, possibly leading to the animals’ eventual total disappearance in the first decade of the 19th Century.

A detail clip of Ottens’ 1754 map showing French and British possessions in North America. Ottens’ map names the Fox River “du Rocher,” River of the Rock, probably due to its proximity to the landmark Starved Rock.

With the bison mostly out of the picture, the Fox became known by most French travelers as the River of the Rock, undoubtedly due to the proximity of the stream’s mouth to Starved Rock. A map drawn by Dutch cartographer J. Ottens in 1754 entitled “Map of the English and French possessions in the vast land of North America” shows the Fox River with the name R. du Rocher – “River of the Rock.”

Even by that era, however, the river may have been given its current name by people living, working, and warring in its environs. Vicious warfare between the French and the Fox Indians had been in progress since the late 1600s. In the early 1700s, parts of the tribe were reported living on the upper reaches of the river. Since the Foxes were considered threats to the entire French empire in North America, the unnamed stream on which large bands of them made their homes probably led to the river’s final name.

A clip from Thomas Hutchins’ 1778 map, where he finally gives our river its final, modern name. The name likely arose from the Fox Tribe, bands of which occupied the river’s upper reaches.

By the late 1700s, the name had been finalized. Between 1764 and 1775, Thomas Hutchins, an engineer with the 60th Royal American Regiment, traveled throughout what is now the Midwest on a mapping and reconnaissance mission. In 1778, Hutchins published “A New Map of the Western Parts of Virginia, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and North Carolina…,” which included the Illinois River valley and on which Hutchins clearly labeled the Fox River.

Names can tell a lot about an area’s history. Even the history behind a short name like Fox River can trace the comings and goings of Indian tribes, imperial intrigues, intrepid explorations, and bitter warfare. What’s in a name? It’s everything that makes history interesting.

Back when drag shows were big small town entertainment money-makers

The latest cultural disturbance has been the advent of and resulting opposition to family-friendly “drag” musical comedy programs, sometimes performed at public libraries.

The programs consist of men cross-dressing as women with exaggerated clothing and make-up reading stories to kids in comedic dramatic fashion.

But the current political situation has made anything that smacks of accepting gay people anathema to a segment of the population. And that currently includes cross-dressing—even in a musical comedy setting.

Geraldine (Flip Wilson) and Johnny Cash clown around on TV in 1972.

Time was, of course, things weren’t taken so seriously. And, in fact, cross-dressing was considered almost the height of humor, and not all that long ago, either. Milton Berle was famed for cross-dressing skits on his hit 1950s TV program, comedian Flip Wilson’s Geraldine character was a hilarious hit with audiences, and the guys from “Monty Python’s Flying Circus” regularly dressed in drag in some of their funniest skits.

There are a few obvious problems with this current campaign against cross-dressing entertainers, the first of which is that everyone seems to consider all the participants gay. But when the National Center for Biotechnology Information at the National Institutes of Health conducted a study on the topic back in 1972, they found 87 percent of cross-dressers identified as heterosexual. Of that total, 60 percent were married at the time the survey was taken. They just liked dressing up as women.

As an aside, I remember when a friend went to work in the alterations department at the Jacqueline Shop, the up-scale Oswego women’s clothing store of past years, she was stunned at the substantial number of out-of-town males who were regular customers for women’s clothing—to wear themselves, not for gifts for lady friends—and who were accommodated just like the store’s majority female clientele.

As noted above, cross dressing in entertainment has a long history, stretching back to ancient Greece. Back then, women weren’t allowed to perform in the theatre, so all women’s parts were performed by cross-dressing males. Same with the Roman theatre. It wasn’t until the 17th Century that women began to portray their own sex on stage with any regularity.

Jonathan Winters’ Maude Frickert character was so popular it was used in national advertising campaigns.

Nineteenth Century Britain’s love affair with music hall entertainment included popular cross-dressers, with women portraying men and men portraying women to gales of laughter, both over there and over here as well. When they arrived over here from England, both Stan Laurel and Charlie Chaplin carried the old music hall tradition with them when they got here in the early 1900s, and dressed in drag in some of their early silent films. And in some of their comedy shorts, Curley Howard performed in drag with the rest of the Three Stooges.

A number of comedy movies have been based on cross-dressing themes, including “Charlie’s Aunt,” “I Was a Male War Bride,” “Some Like it Hot,” and “Tootsie.” And TV has been a fertile ground for cross dressing humor, from Berle and the Pythons noted above to Jonathan Winters’ over-the-top Maude Fricket character.

But perhaps the most surprising instances of comedy cross-dressing were the hugely popular “Womanless Wedding” performances given by local men to their Middle American small town neighbors in the 1920s and 1930s. In fact, one such fundraiser, sponsored in Oswego by the village women’s 19th Century Club on March 17 and 18, 1930, took place on stage in the Oswego High School gym to riotous applause and loud plaudits.

The cast of the 19th Century Club’s 1930 “Womanless Wedding” production was a veritable “Who’s Who” of prominent Oswego men, from farmers and businessmen to elected officials (Little White School Museum collection)

Oddly enough, especially given the extreme views towards such things in that region today, the Womanless Wedding craze apparently began in the South, possibly in North Carolina in the early 1900s and soon became wildly popular fundraisers for local civic and fraternal groups. The parody ceremonies put men in every position of the members of a fictional wedding party, from the mother of the bride to the bride her (or him?) self. The plays included a lot of comedy, along with music and were big money-making hits wherever they were presented.In its stage directions, one script published in 1918 by Eldridge Entertainment House of Franklin, Ohio stated: “As title indicates, no women are to be used in this play, unless desired. Special care should be exercised in the selection of the cast. Use prominent men. Men taking ladies’ parts should wear ladies’ shoes if possible. A small groom and large bride will prove effective. Have costumes and stage effects as elaborate as possible.”

As the Great Depression was just getting a hold on the country, the Womanless Wedding craze finally got to Kendall County. On Feb. 19, 1930, the Kendall County Record reported from Oswego that: “The XIX Century club of Oswego have procured the services of the Sympson Levi Producing company of Bardstown, Ky. to stage “The Womanless Wedding,” which has been put on so successfully in our neighboring towns. The dates will be March 17 and 18.”

The club not only bought rights to use one of the production’s many scripts, but also the services of a professional director, Winifred Miller, who traveled around the Midwest guiding “Womanless Wedding” productions. The production company’s services even included hiring a professional photographer who snapped a shot of the entire cast—two of which are currently in the collections of Oswego’s Little White School Museum.

Photo of the cast of the “Womanless Wedding” held on stage in the old Oswego High School (Red Brick School) gym in March 1930. The comedy fundraiser was sponsored by the 19th Century Club, Oswego’s largest women’s club. The cast included 80 of Oswego’s procurement business and farm owners.

And the ladies of the 19th Century Club made a tidy profit from the production. As the Record’s Oswego correspondent reported on March 26: “’The Womanless Wedding’ has passed into history. It was one of the most talked of and enjoyable events in Oswego for some time. Many were unable to obtain seats. The parts were very well taken.”

By then, Miller was well on her way to her next “Womanless Wedding” gig in the little town of La Dora, Iowa.

For its part, Oswego never did do another “Womanless Wedding,” although they did produce a very successful original cross-dressing sequel of their own in January 1937. According to the Record’s Oswego correspondent: “The womanless play, ‘Ladies for a Night,’ given at the high school gym last Thursday and Friday, netted nearly $100 and everyone a lot of fun.” That would be a bit over $2,100 in today’s dollars, not a bad haul for a community fundraiser, even today.

Sometimes, fun is just fun, something that is apparently difficult for a lot of folks to understand in this day and age of fear, anger, and dark suspicions of an unending parade of increasingly peculiar and implausible conspiracies.

Annual back-to-school rituals still mark the start of autumn

While it’s not officially fall yet, you can certainly see it from here. For instance, during the past couple of weeks, students have been getting settled down as a new school year began in Kendall County.

Acceptable backpacks were bought, required school supply lists checked and complied with, inoculations brought up to date, and new clothes purchased, including new—and astonishingly expensive—shoes.

And then on the appointed day, children left home to either make the walk to school or to the stop to wait for the big yellow school buses that had earlier headed out on their appointed rounds, picking up and depositing students at their respective buildings.

Oswego grade school kids at the Red Brick School climb aboard their bus in the spring of 1957 for a ride home. (Little White School Museum collection; image by Everett Hafenrichter)

There were likely a few problems, of course. A few first graders probably got on the wrong buses here and there. A bus driver or two probably got confused on new routes or held up in our increasingly clogged traffic and left students waiting. Some parents failed to fill out the right forms and watched with dismay as their children were left standing at the ends of their driveways.

And at the buildings, a few kindergarten students almost certainly decided school was NOT the place they wanted to be, no matter how sweetly the teachers and their parents explained how much fun the whole thing was going to be, and their anguished screams could be heard echoing up and down some hallways. Other kids could barely contain their glee at FINALLY getting to go to REAL SCHOOL.

Which reminds me of the story of the two sons of friends. When it was time for the oldest boy to go to school, getting him into the building and persuading him to stay there was a major undertaking. When they took the younger boy to school for his first day, they were, of course apprehensive. But instead of the struggle they feared, the little guy ran up the building steps, through the doors, threw his arms open wide and joyfully shouted “I’M HERE!”

Altogether, though, I suspect this year was a fairly routine, even traditional, opening day such as we’ve experienced for many, many decades. Which might seem odd, given how far we’ve come in this modern computerized, jet propelled, satellite orbiting, multi-media, cell phone, social media era.

Believe it or not, back in the days of one-room schools, the back-to-school ritual was pretty much the same.

Come August, the shopping trips began, or the orders that were carefully copied out of the Sears or Montgomery Wards catalogs were put in the mailbox.

My favorite lunchbox hero was Hopalong Cassidy.

Had to have a lunch box, of course. Home-packed lunches were the only food available in country schools: There were no cafeterias and no fast food restaurants nearby. In fact, there were no fast food restaurants at all.

Lunch boxes were metal in the 1950s before advances in plastic made PVC lunch boxes hardier than their metal ancestors. Boys’ lunch boxes had pictures of our favorite cowboy heroes like Hopalong Cassidy, Roy Rogers, Wild Bill Hickok, Gene Autry and the like on them. Girls seemed to favor Dale Evans, as I recall, although a lot liked horses and dogs (like Rogers‘ Bullet).

No matter what they had painted on them, though, most of them were shaped like flat, miniature briefcases and included an incredibly fragile glass-lined Thermos bottle. Usually, all it took was dropping the lunch box on the ground once to shatter the glass liner of a Thermos bottle. We soon learned to shake our Thermos to listen for pieces of the broken thermal liner clinking around inside before pouring the contents out in the combination top/drinking cup.

Some of the vintage school lunch buckets in the collections of the Little White School Museum here in Oswego.

During my mother’s school days, lunch pails were literally just that—small, covered buckets. Molasses and some other products came in small tin buckets a little larger than a quart can of paint with tight covers. When cleaned out, they made good lunch buckets—we have a few of those in our collections at the Little White School Museum in Oswego.

Our lunches consisted of sandwiches wrapped in waxed paper, some kind of fruit, and dessert—I don’t recall eating salty things like potato chips for lunch until we moved into town, although I suppose we might have. Bologna and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches seemed to predominate at lunchtime, but I always favored a more eclectic mix that didn’t much interest my classmates when sandwich trades were in the wind. I liked liver sausage, pickled tongue, and head cheese, any one of which was a sandwich trade killer.

Speaking of non-traditional sandwiches, my mother once recalled that some of the kids at Tamarack School she went to school with back in the 1920s brought lard sandwiches, which, taste aside, I suspect definitely wouldn’t pass nutritional muster today.

Church School, Wheatland Township, 1952. That’s me at lower left. You will note that plaid shirts were favored by both sexes, and both also mostly wore trousers to school.

Finally, as noted above, the other back-to-school ritual usually involved new clothes, top to bottom, shirts to shoes. Including underwear because god forbid we’d be in a fatal accident and the ambulance people would catch us wearing old, ratty underpants.

For serious new clothes buying, we’d head to downtown Aurora and shop for overalls (that’s what we called Levis back then) and plaid shirts, whether we were male or female. Out at our country school, the teacher, the wonderful Dorothy Comerford, decreed we all wear pants to school, and that was in the days before it became fashionable, or even allowed, at most schools—especially for girls. Things were different out there in the country than in town, she once told us, and so it made a lot more sense for girls to wear pants just like us boys. I can still clearly remember the feeling of walking to school in brand new stiff, blue overalls, with my legs making a “throop, throop, throop“ sound as the new denim rubbed against itself.

1950s shoe store fluoresope

New shoes were also a must for starting school, at least in our family. Back in my mother’s day, new shoes were bought from the Sears catalog, and if they didn’t quite fit, it was just too bad. My mother had bad feet to the end of her days because of ill-fitting shoes during her growth years and she was determined that wouldn’t happen to HER kids.

So we were luckier than she was. We were taken to the shoe store where we tried on a new pair and then stuck our feet under the fluoroscope X-ray machine over in the comer so our mothers could see exactly how the shoes fit. With today’s (admittedly justifiable) radiation phobia, it’s hard to believe that many shoe stores had an X-ray machines causally sitting in the comer just waiting around to irradiate their customers.

A new pencil box, a box of Crayola crayons (the giant multi-tiered size if we were either very lucky or very rich), new pencils, a plastic ruler, and a writing tablet completed our equipment.

Like today’s reluctant youngsters, there was usually at least one neighborhood kid who didn’t want to go to his or her first day of school. And sometimes the bus left us waiting—after a bus finally started picking us up out in the country, that is.

Multiplication relay races and playing Crack the Whip in the schoolyard may now have given way to computer math games and safety-approved playground equipment. But in late summer, when the big yellow buses begin their runs, the adventure of education still begins again for each new generation.