Native American Heritage Month is an annual reminder of who was here first

Having just honored the men and women who have served in the nation’s military forces, it’s time to turn our attention to another group of Americans being honored this month. November is Native American Heritage Month.

Today, most residents only dimly recall the long occupation of the Fox River Valley by Indigenous People. Many of us take for granted that Native People must have lived here sometime in the past, although few give it much thought, even though we’re constantly reminded of that era by the names of places, geographical features, roads, and buildings carrying Indian names throughout the area.

The things that apparently doesn’t register with most of us is that babies have been born, young people have grown and begun their own families, and people have died in the area along the banks of the Fox River for some 12,000 years.

Why did those Native People come here in the first place? And why did they leave?

The region’s first inhabitants arrived following their food as the last Ice Age was ending.

As my co-author Paula Fenza, noted in Indians of Kendall County (Kendall County Historical Society, 1975), the Fox Valley’s first inhabitants probably arrived by following their food supply.

Those Paleo-Indian hunters came during the last Ice Age, following the edge of the glaciers as the ice retreated north. It must have been a spectacular landscape all those thousands of years ago as the families of Stone Age hunters contemplated the great ice sheet that covered the area thousands of feet thick in some areas.

Large game animals such as the giant Ice Age versions of elk, bison, caribou, mammoth, and mastodon favored the grassy taiga and tundra along the glacial edge and were hunted as they grazed in the wake of the melting ice sheets

The Paleo-Indian period here in North America is comparable to the same period in northern Europe when Ice Age hunters roamed the region, just as their counterparts were doing here in North America.

As the ice sheets retreated ever-farther north, the Archaic Period or cultural tradition emerged among Native Americans, which compares with the time between the first domestication of plants in Asia and the rise of the first civilizations in Mesopotamia and Egypt.

The next cultural tradition that emerged among the region’s Native People was the Woodland Period spanning the European period from the Greek city states and Alexander the Great‘s empire through the time of the Roman Empire to the decline of Rome as a world power.

Here in Kendall County, people of the Mississippian Cultural Tradition lived in villages along the Fox River and its tributaries, and left behind burial and ceremonial mounds. Their culture was centered around the huge city of Cahokia in southern Illinois.

Here in Kendall County, after some thousands of years of being hunting and fishing grounds for hunting and gathering people, the land was first semi-permanently occupied by members of the Hopewell Culture. They, in turn, were then either pushed out or absorbed by peoples of the Mississippian Cultural Tradition. For reference’s sake, the Mississippian Period took place during Europe’s Renaissance. The Mississippian Culture was, in turn, apparently destroyed by a combination of climate changes and other Native American invaders who probably moved up from the south.

The Historic Period in Illinois began in 1673. That year, the governor of New France, which included Canada and much of the northern U.S., commissioned an expedition to explore the Mississippi River. Rumors collected by French fur traders and Catholic missionaries suggested the Mississippi might run southwesterly. If that was so, the mighty river could well lead to the Pacific Ocean, offering much easier access to the riches of the Orient.

Louis Jolliet, a geographer, accompanied by Jesuit linguist Father Jacques Marquette, led the expedition. The expedition left the French military and trading post at the Straits of Mackinac between Lakes Huron and Michigan in birch bark canoes and paddled down the western shore of Lake Michigan. At Green Bay, they traveled up the Fox River of Wisconsin to the portage over to the Wisconsin River, and then down the broad Wisconsin to the Mississippi. In the end, speculation about the river’s course proved untrue. By the time the expedition reached the mouth of the Arkansas River, Jolliet, who had been making careful observations, confirmed the Mississippi flowed essentially due south into the Gulf of Mexico, and not southwest to the Gulf of California as French officials had hoped.

On the expedition of Jolliet and Marquette to find the mouth of the Mississippi River, Jolliet took frequent measurements in order to create an accurate map of the region.

But while their voyage of exploration was disappointing to French officials, the expedition’s leaders did manage to leave us the first written descriptions of central Illinois.

From those accounts and others, we know that at that time, the Mississippian Tradition had disappeared some hundreds of years before, replaced by a tribal culture. In 1673, Illinois was mostly occupied by the six main tribal groups comprising the Illinois Confederacy. Calling themselves the Illiniwek (which meant “the men”) and called the “Illinois” by the French, the related Kaskaskia, Cahokia, Michigamea, Peoria, Moingwena, and Tamaroa tribes, primarily made their summer homes along the Illinois River. The confederacy’s family groups used modern Kendall County and other areas along the Illinois’ tributaries as hunting grounds and winter quarters.

Although Europeans had yet to reach modern Illinois, their trade policies had already created major impacts in the entire region. Beginning about 1660, the well-organized Iroquois Confederacy, whose home was in upstate New York, had begun a series of raids all the way west into Illinois in a quest to eliminate competition and monopolize the lucrative trade in furs with the Europeans. The military turmoil was severe enough to drive the populous Illinois west of the Mississippi for several years during that period. And in fact, the Illiniwek had probably just returned from their exile when Marquette and Joliet encountered them in 1673.

That, however, was not the end of the Illiniwek’s troubles. In September 1680, the Iroquois attacked again, this time nearly wiping out the Illiniwek in a long series of battles.

Jean Baptiste Louis Franquelin’s 1683 map of the Illinois River shows LaSalle’s colony at Fort St. Louis atop Starved Rock, and the numerous tribes the French entrepreneur had persuaded to move to the area for their common defense against Iroquois attacks. On the map, our Fox River is called “Pestekouy,” the Algonquoin peoples’ word for “buffalo.” The village labeled “Maramech” was probably located along the Fox River here in Kendall County. (Map from “The Discovery of the Great West: LaSalle” by Francis Parkman, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, New York, 1967)

By 1683, the constant Iroquois threat led French adventurer, entrepreneur and explorer Robert Cavalier de la Salle to fortify what we call today Starved Rock—the French called the prominent geographical landmark simply “The Rock”—and gather several thousand Native People 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.

Some years later, after the area’s game and other resources were exhausted, LaSalle’s principal lieutenant, Henri de Tonti, abandoned Starved Rock, relocating the entire French fur trading and security operation south to Lake Peoria on the Illinois River. Eventually, the French withdrew even farther south to Kaskaskia and Cahokia along the Mississippi River in southern Illinois. With that move went the surviving remnant of the Illiniwek, creating a strategic vacuum in the Fox Valley.

Col. Richard M. Johnson of the Kentucky militia may or may not have killed the Native American military leader Tecumseh during the Battle of the Thames in Canada in 1813 as illustrated here. But Tecumseh’s death persuaded local Native American leaders Waubonsie and Shabbona there was no military solution to White settlment of the Fox Valley. (“The Battle of the Thames,” Library of Congress collection)

The French and the Fox Tribe both tried to control the Fox Valley area in the early 1700s because of it’s proximity to the major fur trade routes of the Chicago Portage and the portage from the Fox River of Wisconsin into the Wisconsin River. Following the French war of extermination waged against the Fox in the 1720s and 1730s, and unsuccessful attempt by the culturally-related Fox, Mascouten, and Kickapoo tribes to occupy the region, the Fox Valley was again said to be, at least in theory, part of the seriously diminished Illiniwek’s domain.

It was a power vacuum in a very rich area that was bound to be filled by other tribes. According to Auguste Chouteau, the U.S. Government’s Indian agent at St. Louis, writing in the early 1800s, in 1745, several related bands of the Potawatomi, Ottawa, and Chippewa met at Green Bay to discuss that power. The three tribal groups, already related through intermarriage, decided to establish a loose confederacy they called the Three Fires, with the goal of moving into northern Illinois to occupy the rich lands formerly controlled exclusively by the Illinois Confederacy.

Within the next few years, the Three Fires Confederacy completed their move south into the Illinois, Fox, and DesPlaines river valleys, using force of arms and superior numbers to assume control of virtually all of northern Illinois.

Here in the Fox Valley, major villages were established up and down the river, especially in the area of Silver Springs State Park at Meramech Hill, along the Fox at Oswego and north into Kane and McHenry counties, as well as in some of the hardwood groves that dotted the region’s prairies.

Ambrotype was made of “Chief Shaubonee” on June 7, 1857 at Morris by image artist H.B. Field

During the French and Indian War of the early 1760s, the Three Fires supported the French. After the British won the war and evicted the French government from North America, the Pottawatomi remained loyal to their French friends. From 1763 to 1765, they participated in the conflict called Pontiac’s Rebellion, the western tribes’ unsuccessful attempt to force the British back across the Appalachian.

By the time of the Revolutionary War, however, the Three Fires had transferred their loyalty to the British, and fought against the Americans. Three Fires villages located up and down the Fox Valley 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 Forsythe, the Three Fires could muster some 600 warriors. Forsythe reported that Chiefs Waubonsee and Main Poche both had villages located on the Fox River. War parties from northern Illinois villages participated in British-instigated raids and battles against the Americans. Locally prominent chiefs Shabbona and Waubonsee were close confidants of the charismatic leader Tecumseh during the war and were on hand when he was killed in Canada during the Battle of the Thames in 1813. The experience had a sobering effect on both men, persuading them that further warfare against the U.S. Government would be destructive for their people.

So, after the treaty ending the War of 1812 solidified the Americans’ hold on the Illinois Country, the Three Fires tried to protect through diplomacy what they had failed to gain through military action. They were, however, unsuccessful in this, and were forced into a number of key land cessions to the U.S. Government during the next two decades.

Villages of Indigenous People in the Fox and Illinois River valleys. The Fox is marked in green, the Illinois in red. This map shows six villages along the Fox River north from it’s mouth on the Illinois River. (“Atlas of Great Lakes Indian History” by Helen Hornbeck Tanner and Miklos Pinther, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1987)

President Thomas Jefferson had established a policy in 1803 to remove Native People to areas west of the Mississippi River in order to open land for settlement. In 1830 the policy became law with passage of the Indian Removal Act, strongly supported by President Andrew Jackson.

In the aftermath of the brief Winnebago War of 1829 and the much more serious—and deadly—Black Hawk War of 1832, Illinois settlers clamored for all Native People, including the Three Fires Confederacy, to be removed from the state. In spite of the Three Fires’ general support for the U.S. during both upheavals, the U.S. Government readily agreed.

Although he supported the U.S. Government during the Winnebago and Black Hawk wars of the 1820s and 1830s, Chief Waubonsee was forced west of the Mississippi with the rest of his people in the late 1830s.

In the fall of 1835, U.S. Government contractors removed a large group of the Three Fires from the Chicago region were removed to land in northwestern Missouri called the Platte Country. Two years later, the rest of the Fox Valley bands were sent west in October, traveling through near continual rain and mud in a Three Fires version of the horrific Cherokee Trail of Tears. The Three Fires people crossed the Mississippi at Quincy and then made the grueling march to the Platte Country, arriving in mid-November.

But due to the continuing arrival of White settlers in the Platte Country, they were almost immediately forced to move farther west to prairie land near Council Bluffs, Iowa, which they strongly disliked due to its lack of timber, not to mention the arrival, yet again, of increasing numbers of white settlers. Late in 1837, they were removed to what was hoped would be their final home on the Marais des Cygnes River in Kansas.

Some Three Fires families had refused to move. And after seeing the lands they were assigned in Iowa, others who had moved drifted back to Illinois. But they, too, were again rounded up and forcibly removed, the last of the Fox Valley’s Indian residents finally—and permanently—taken west in 1838.

That finally brought the Native American presence in the area to a close after 120 centuries of their habitation along the banks of the Fox River.

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.

Borderers and Yankees and Midlanders, oh my!

I was going through some of my files the other day and came across a 25 year-old issue of Illinois Issues (my wife says I’m a hoarder; I prefer “archivist”). Illinois Issues was a fine magazine that once covered the state’s government and politics, and this issue had an article about regionalism in Illinois and its origin that had caught my attention all those many years ago.

According to author Harold Henderson, who was then a staff writer for the (still alive and kicking online mag) Chicago Reader, three major regional groups settled Illinois.

The first group to arrive in the state were Upland Southerners, mostly Scotch-Irish who had originally settled in Virginia and the Carolinas. It was a pretty hard-bitten group of folks who started moving west right after the French and Indian War ended in 1765. They first settled Tennessee and then Kentucky before spreading north up into southern Illinois, creating the state’s first American migratory wave.

The Borderers were experienced in the kind of pioneering that required dense stands of timber. Their techniques worked well in southern Illinois’ forests, but weren’t a good fit for the prairies of central and northern Illinois.

Upland Southerners—also known as Borderers—were not an entirely friendly group, not even among themselves (witness the very real and extremely bloody Hatfield-McCoy feud). In the article, Henderson describes them as “clannish, emotional in religion, and poor in material goods.” One author has suggested their shear orneriness was due to their ancestors, coming from the more contentious areas of England and Scotland, were “a double-distilled selection of some of the most disorderly inhabitants of a deeply disordered land.”

Many of them were deeply anti-slavery (a prime reason many of them emigrated westward), but they were also extremely anti-Black, though apparently for mostly economic reasons during that early era. Their contradictions abounded. For instance, although reportedly a pious folk, they often disdained organized religion. They were also fearless and were in the vanguard of each of the areas west of the Appalachians that were settled.

The next group that arrived were Yankees from New England and New York who arrived mostly in northern Illinois largely via the Great Lakes. Once the Erie Canal opened and connected the Hudson River with Lake Erie, Yankees flooded into the northern part of the state.

As a people, Yankees were the near antithesis of the Borderers. They were careful planners, with none of the devil-may-care pioneer sentiment of the Borderers. And they always had reasons for doing whatever it was they were doing, much to the anger and confusion of the Borderers. A New England Congregationalist minister once heard two western women, both Borderers, discussing a Yankee preacher, one saying to the other: “I don’t like these Yankee preachers; they are always proving things, just like lawyers.” If that view sounds awfully familiar in this day of “My opinion is as valid as your facts,” it ought to because it’s pretty much identical.

A typical Erie Canal passenger packet boat of the 1850s. Packet canal and steamboats sailed on regular schedules. Regular cargo vessels of the era only sailed when they had full cargoes.

Religious zeal, in fact, was actually a Yankee characteristic. In fact, their reading of the Bible led them to be the abolitionists and the prohibitionists who believed in both passionately.

Besides the intricacies of religion, Yankees cared almost as passionately about education, something Borderers tended to look upon with a healthy dose of suspicion. Yankees, in turn, could not understand why anyone would disdain either religion or education.

The third wave of settlers were the Midlanders, largely from Pennsylvania and Ohio. Although those states were their most recent addresses, many Midland family groups had already emigrated once, usually from New York or the New England states, but also from some of the Southern states. A good local example was the extended Pearce family that originated in Maryland, moved west to settle in Ohio for a few decades, and then pushed on to finally settle here in northern Illinois’ Kendall County in 1833.

The Midlanders’ sojourns in western Pennsylvania and in Ohio reportedly changed their perspective a bit from their Yankee brethren and gave it a more western tinge. The Midlanders often tended to be the mechanics, the business owners, and the builders of pioneer Illinois that sometimes melded the qualities of both the Borderers and the Yankees.

Midlanders arrived in northern Illinois mostly overland by wagon, pulled either by teams of horses or yokes of oxen.

While industrious, they were not quite as passionate about their religion or their politics as the Yankees and were not as single-minded as the Borderers. Usually, they were content to be left alone to make a living, build their mills, lay out their towns, and tinker with machinery designed to make life easier.

Interestingly enough, members of all three groups contributed to Kendall County’s frontier history.

The Borderers were among some of the earliest settlers, but they were people who didn’t stay long. Instead, they often moved on to other areas to become the first settlers there as well. The Yankees arrived after the Black Hawk War of 1832, and set about settling farms and building towns.

That strong religious component of the Yankees found it’s greatest expression in what was called the “Burned Over” area of upper New York State. It wasn’t wildfires that literally burned the area around Oneida, but rather the fire of evangelism that spurred strong abolitionist sentiments. That, in turn, resulted in establishing the Oneida Institute of Science and Industry in 1827, centered around the Congregational Church. Oneida sent scouts west from New York State in the 1830s, with the intent of buying up entire townships at the government price of $1.25 per acre and then reselling the land to like-minded folks who arrived later. Profits were to be used by each colony to establish a college.

Here in Kendall County, Oneida scouts bought up land claims in what eventually became Lisbon Township in preparation for a colony of the New Yorkers. Other Illinois colonies were established at Princeton and Galesburg. No college was established here in Kendall County, but many of those pioneering families, especially Congregationalists, sent their young people to Knox College in Galesburg, which was established by Oneida Institute settlers, along with colleges at Oberlin, Ohio and Grinnell, Iowa.

The Lisbon Academy was built in 1844 by the Yankees from New York many of whom came west as part of the Oneida Institute’s colonization project. The building’s no longer standing.

Probably not incidentally, these strongly anti-slavery Oneida colonies also became active hubs for the Underground Railroad’s activities spiriting slaves north to Canada and freedom.

The Midlanders, on the other hand, arrived soon after—although sometimes even before—the Yankees and began farming, laying out towns and establishing mills and “manufactories.” They were far more receptive to the Yankees’ ideas about education, ,religion, and their related abolitionism than the Borderers, who were opposed to the Yankees’ ideas for all three and actively hostile to abolitionism.

The Borderers are well represented in Kendall County’s early history by men such as the R. W. Carns and J. S. Murray families, who brought two enslaved women with them from South Carolina; and the John Boyd and Matthew Throckmorton families from Kentucky. The Yankees from Vermont and New York settled in Lisbon, Seward, and NaAuSay Townships, while the Midlanders pretty much covered the entire county. Typical of the Midlanders were those Pearces from Ohio who became the first settlers of Oswego Township and who also helped settle Montgomery just up the river a few miles.

And all of that got me to thinking about an article I’d just read in this summer’s issue of National Parks magazine. “5,000 Schools: How Julius Rosenwald’s Revolutionary Project Changed America” recounts how a wealthy Chicagoan who was the head of Sears, Roebuck & Company worked with Booker T. Washington to build schools. During the brutal Jim Crow era when White terrorism against Black Americans was at its height, Rosenwald, working with matching funds from Black communities, built 5,000 schools to educate Southern Blacks throughout the old Confederacy. That a wealthy Chicago Jew partnered with the other people they hated so much, their Black neighbors, must have driven the Klan absolutely nuts.

A classic Rosenwald School and its student body, Pee Dee, South Carolina.

That the South refused to build schools for their own citizens was not only a shameful cultural artifact of slavery era laws when it was against the law to teach enslaved Black people to read and write, but also the cultural remains of that suspicion of education, learning, and planning exhibited by the Borderers who left the South and settled here in Illinois and other places west.

And that, in turn (you see how I am continually plagued by falling down research rabbit holes?) reminded me of Alfred Browne. Young Alf Browne, just 18, enlisted in Company H, 146^th Illinois Volunteer Infantry Regiment in September 1864. The 146^th was a 100-day regiment raised to persuade the Confederate sympathizers in central and southern Illinois that physically interfering with the Union’s efforts to win the Civil War was a bad idea. Alf and his comrades were stationed in Quincy to keep the pro-Southern element—called Copperheads after the poisonous snake—in check.

As an interesting sidelight of his service, after President Abraham Lincoln was shot in April 1865, Browne was detailed to Springfield as part of the honor guard around Lincoln’s funeral car.

After the war was over, Browne headed east and attended Oberlin College in Ohio, which you’ll recall was one of those staunchly abolitionist institutions established by the Oneida Institute. During his college days, he served during one winter as principal of a Freedman’s school in Montgomery, Alabama under the auspices of the American Missionary Association. The schools were set up all over the former Confederacy, under the general umbrella of the federal Freedman’s Bureau to educate former slaves, who had, by law you’ll recall, been prohibited from learning to read and write.

After graduating in 1872, Browne spent a year helping freed slaves in Texas before the violence there against anyone helping formerly enslaved people forced him to return to Illinois, where he served as a principle in public schools in Sheridan, Lisbon, and in other area communities.

The Freedmen’s Bureau was established by Congress after the Civil War to introduce freed enslaved people into the nation’s democratic society. One of the bureau’s major initiatives was to establish schools to teach basic reading, writing, and math skills. Kendall County native Alfred Browne taught in Freedmen’s schools in Alabama and Texas. The schools became major targets of violent Whites after Congress stopped Reconstruction. (Stafford Museum & Cultural Center image)

The point being that while the South did, and if we’ve been paying attention to recent events down there, seems still to disdain strong, quality systems of public education. Although disdaining education they also apparently feared allowing Blacks to become educated. Or at least said they scorned it. It’s hard not to notice how the members of the Southern elite don’t hesitate to obtain their Harvard and Yale degrees while making sure others will never have the same opportunities they themselves have enjoy.

Taking all that into account and given the sharp differences between the three regional groups that settled Illinois starting more than two centuries ago, it is not surprising the state has had a tumultuous history. In fact, when you really stop to think about it, the state’s 205 years of existence really is a cause for, if not exactly euphoria, at least surprise and even some amazement.

The dream of a navigable Fox River seems (fortunately) now lost in history…

Looking out of the window at our Fox River of Illinois here at History Central, it seems the river’s lower than it’s been in quite a while. In fact, if it gets any lower, the fish are going to have to get out and walk.

It’s been a while since the Fox River’s been this low, a reflection of the drought affecting the region.

Our corner of northern Illinois is currently in drought, labeled “moderate” by the weather people, but looking pretty severe when it comes to river levels—not to mention the conditions of area lawns and farm fields. Out in the country, the drought level in corn and soybean fields seems to have reached “Grim” with no signs of moderating.

But it’s the river that’s looking peaked outside my office window this week.

The Fox rises in southeastern Wisconsin and runs 202 miles almost due south except for a slight bend to the southwest before it reaches its mouth on the Illinois River near towering Starved Rock. It’s a relatively wide river—wider than the sluggish DuPage River a few miles to the east, but narrower than the DesPlaines River just to the east of the DuPage.

Although wide, the Fox has always been a fast-running shallow stream during most of the year. But frequent and rapid fluctuations in the river’s level are common—and nothing new. In fact, our Fox River of Illinois started right out being at least a minor annoyance as soon as some of the first European explorers and fur traders started poking around these parts.

Everyone who first encountered the river and its valley, from the earliest French explorers to the permanent American settlers who began arriving along its banks in the 1820s, seemed to agree both were beautiful. But the river’s frequent depth fluctuations meant it was (and still is) often extremely shallow during certain times of the year. And that made it unsuitable to use for either travel or transporting freight.

For instance, in the fall of 1698, Jesuit Missionary Jean Francois Buisson de St. Cosme was sent by the Bishop of Quebec with an expedition to establish a mission on the lower Mississippi River. His party left the Strait of Mackinac and paddled down the west shore of Lake Michigan. Difficulties with the Fox Tribe meant they couldn’t use the usual route from Green Bay, up the Fox River of Wisconsin to the Wisconsin River and downstream to the Mississippi. So they were on their way south to the Chicago portage when some friendly Native People suggested they might try our Fox River as a cut-off to the Mississippi.

This map nicely depicts the Root River to Fox River portage west of modern Racine, Wisconsin. The clip comes from a map of Illinois drawn by Rene Paul of St. Louis in 1815, and then copied by Lt. James Kearney of the U.S. Topographical Engineers for the governor of the Illinois Territory, Ninian Edwards prior to statehood. I’ve highlighted the Fox River in blue. The portage is marked with the dotted line at upper left. The map is Plate XL of Indian Villages of the Illinois Country, Part I, Atlas by Sara Jones Tucker, Illinois State Museum, 1941.

The route they’d have to take would be up the Root River at modern Racine, Wisconsin to a roughly five-mile overland portage to the Fox River. But when they got to the Root River, they found its water level extremely low. “As there was no water in it [the Root River] we judged that there would not be any in the Peschoui [our Fox River] either,” St. Cosme reported, “And that instead of shortening our journey we should have been obliged to go over forty leagues of portage roads; this compelled us to take the route by way of Chikagou.”

Not only was the Fox quite shallow, but it also had a sharp drop about four miles above its mouth on the Illinois River at modern Dayton that Father Pierre Francois Xavier de Charlevoix described as “a fall.” And that meant a century and a half later when steamboats began plying the Illinois River early in the 1800s, that they were blocked from ascending the Fox any farther than four miles.

It must have been extremely frustrating for those early Fox Valley pioneers, who would have welcomed an easy, inexpensive way to get their livestock and crops to market by shipping them down the river to the Illinois and Mississippi systems. At that time, the St. Louis and New Orleans markets were the most active in what was then the United States’ west and the Chicago market had barely begun.

In fact, early on the river became more a barrier than an asset as people living west of it had to get across the wide stream to drive their livestock or haul their grain to market. As a result, shallow fords like the nice, smooth limestone-floored one here at my hometown of Oswego were prized by both the region’s Native People and the White settlers who displaced them.

Which is not to say the river’s geology wasn’t prized by another group of early settlers—the millwrights. Although wide and shallow, the Fox nevertheless experiences considerable fall from its headwaters north of the modern Illinois-Wisconsin border and its mouth on the Illinois River. And this, along with the rich farmland through which the primordial Fox River Torrent cut the valley and riverbed all those thousands ago, meant the river was an ideal source of waterpower.

In fact, according to John White, writing in the Fox River Area Assessment, published in 2000 by the Illinois Department of Natural Resources, “The Fox River probably produced more hydropower than all other streams in Illinois put together, excluding the Rock River. In addition to sawing wood and grinding grain, these mills ran factories. The Fox River valley became more heavily industrialized than any other area of comparable size in Illinois.”

But the idea of making at least part of the Fox navigable persisted. But the problem, even early on, had a number of parts. First was the river’s usually shallow levels and second, even as early as 1840, all those dams White wrote about had been built. Nevertheless, the Oct. 2, 1840 edition of the Illinois Free Trader, Ottawa’s weekly newspaper, reported on one successful—though arduous—attempt to navigate the Fox by steamboat:

Fox River Navigation — Arrival
of the Bark “St. Charles Experiment.”

“On Tuesday evening last Mr. Joseph P. Keiser and lady arrived at our steamboat landing in a beautiful bark, six tons burthen, from St. Charles, Kane county, Illinois. Mr. K. left St. Charles on the 18th inst.. amid the smiling countenances of a large collection of citizens of that place who had assembled to witness his departure on this hazardous and novel enterprise. He descended Fox River without much trouble, notwithstanding the low stage of the water at present and the dam at Green’s mill, &c, might be considered by some as presenting insurmountable barriers.

“The “Experiment,” we believe, is the first craft that has ever descended this beautiful stream this distance, save, perhaps, the frail bark of the Indian in days gone by. The distance from St. Charles to this place is about eighty miles by water, passing through a section of country which, in point of fertility, is not surpassed by any tract of country in the Union, and to the enterprise and exertions of Mr. Keiser belongs the honor of first undertaking and accomplishing the navigation of Fox River, which winds its meandering course through it.

“The object of Mr. K’s enterprise is somewhat of a novelty. His design is to travel by water to the river St. Lawrence, in Lower Canada, by the following route: From St. Charles down Fox River to its mouth at Ottawa; thence down the Illinois to its mouth; thence down the Mississippi to the mouth of the Ohio; thence up the Ohio river to Beaver, Pa.; thence by way of the Ohio and Pennsylvania Canal to Akron, O.; thence on the Ohio Canal to Cleveland; thence on lake Erie to Buffalo, N.Y.; thence on the Welland Canal to Lake Ontario; and thence to the river St. Lawrence.

“This route will doubtless prove arduous to our friend, but he is in fine spirits and considers his worst difficulties ended by having successfully descended Fox River at the present stage of the water. He has our best wishes for a safe and pleasant journey, hoping that he may be able to inform us of his safe arrival at his distant destination.”

But after Mr. and Mrs. Keiser steamed off into historical obscurity, it seems no more attempts were made to navigate the Fox by steamboat.

The mill dam at Oswego was representative of the dams Joseph Keiser had to ease his small steamboat across during his 1840 voyage down the Fox River from St. Charles to Ottawa. (Little White School Museum collection)

Nevertheless, interest in the idea of navigating the Fox remained in the back of a lot of minds. When the Illinois and Michigan Canal linked Lake Michigan with the Illinois River at Peru in 1848, it again prompted interest in Fox River navigation.

But it wasn’t until 1867 that the area’s local Congressman, B.C. Cook, officially urged the Federal Government to make funding available to see what might be possible concerning Fox River navigation. On May 16, 1867, the Kendall County Record reported that “From Hon. B.C. Cook we learn that he has obtained an order from the authorities at Washington for the survey of Fox River, with the intention of making it navigable as high up as Yorkville or Oswego.”

The idea, as the Record reported, was to build dams with locks to permit river traffic to ascend the Fox. “The thing is done on the St. Joseph River in Michigan and on many other streams and it affords cheaper transportation than by railroad,” Record Editor J.R. Marshall contended.

The Sept. 26 Record noted that U.S. Government surveyors and engineers were wrapping up their work on the project and that the communities up and down the river had high hopes of what might be coming.

But even the raw survey, without any of the engineers’ conclusions, pointed to some substantial issues with the idea, not the least of which was the amount of fall in the seemingly placid river. As the Rev. E.W. Hicks reported in his 1877 Kendall County history: “It was found that Oswego was one hundred and forty-five feet higher than Ottawa, and that Fox river fell fifty-eight feet in the sixteen miles between Oswego and Millington.” Clearly, some interesting engineering—unnecessary on Michigan’s St. Joseph River—would be required to create a navigable channel from Ottawa to Oswego without flooding a good portion of the local countryside.

The engineering challenges of raising river traffic nearly 150 feet by means of dams and locks from Ottawa to Oswego were serious, but were then negated when the Ottawa, Oswego, and Fox River Valley Rail Road finally got serious backing. The line ran from the Vermilion coal fields near Streator to Ottawa and then right up the Fox River Valley to Geneva. Rail traffic between Ottawa and Oswego opened in 1870.

In any case, by that time, serious consideration was also being given to building the Ottawa, Oswego, and Fox River Valley Rail Road to link the coalfields southeast of Streator with Ottawa and then up the river valley all the way to Geneva. And while water transport was, indeed, cheaper than even rail transport, the cost of the dams, locks, and other improvements to make the Fox navigable even as far as Yorkville—not to mention the maintenance costs going forward—would have been prohibitive. Plus, given northern Illinois’s frigid winters, the river, even if it could somehow be made navigable, would only be available for freight about nine months of the year.

So the idea of a navigable Fox was quickly overtaken by the new rail line, which opened in 1870, shipping in the coal and other products Fox Valley residents needed while hauling to market the grain and livestock the region’s farmers were producing.

The Fox River Improvement Plan called for building up to 40 dams and coin-operated locks to permit motorboating from Ottawa all the way to the Chain-O-Lakes in northern Illinois. Fortunately, cooler heads prevailed and just one of the dams, at Montgomery, was built with the accompanying dredging and channelizing of the river for a quarter mile below the dam–but no coin-operated lock. This map was published in the Oswego Ledger Jan. 15, 1959.

The idea of a navigable Fox lay dormant for a century before it was revived in the late 1950s, with the idea being to create a recreational power boat trail from Ottawa to the Chain-O-Lakes in northern Illinois using dams with coin-operated locks. According to a report in the Jan. 15, 1959 Oswego Ledger, the proposal was to build 30 to 40 dams and locks on the Fox River to allow motorboats to travel up and down the river. In their initial proposal, state officials were planning seven new dams from South Elgin to Sheridan, including at Geneva, Montgomery, Oswego, two between Yorkville and Sheridan, and one at Sheridan.

The dam at Montgomery and that odd dead-end channel along the east bank of the river separating Ashland Avenue Island from Route 25 where the coin-operated lock was supposed to be; the Oswegoland Park District’s Saw-Wee-Kee Park, deeded to it by the state as the proposed location of one of the dams; and the quarter-mile dredged and channelized section of the river below the dam are all that remain of that proposal, eventually shelved for both financial and environmental concerns, as well as, apparently, a sudden attack of common sense.

Today, the Fox remains a priceless natural asset, prized by canoeists and anglers, and still greatly valued for its beauty, while proposals to make it a working river lie buried in the region’s history.

Local history is just full of mysteries…

I thought it might be interesting to look at some of our region’s historical—and even prehistorical—mysteries because I think the origins of people, places, and things are always fun to uncover.

One of the most obvious questions for those of us living in the Fox River Valley is “Where did the Fox River come from?” For many, I suspect, it’s not an obvious question at all, though. Most of us accept the region’s landscape as a given, figuring it’s always been the way it is now. But that’s not true.

Up until around 19,000 or so years ago, the Lake Michigan Lobe of the Wisconsin Glacier had covered our area with a couple thousand feet of ice, but then it began to retreat northwards. A deep glacial meltwater lake filled behind the high moraine ridge the glacier’s last advance created until one day, all those thousands of years ago, the water broke through that natural dam.

The last glacier to advance out of the north covered about half of Illinois. In the Fox Valley, the ice was about 2,000 feet thick.

The almost unimaginably ferocious flood rampaged south, quickly–at least in geological terms–scouring today’s Fox River Valley into the landscape.

The Fox River Torrent left a valley that ranged from wide and shallow at its northernmost end to narrower and deeper where it joined the Illinois River, which itself had been created by the Kankakee Torrent that had rampaged southwesterly from the Saginaw Lobe of the Wisconsin ice sheet. Over the years, the land formerly covered by those giant ice sheets gradually rebounded as the weight of the ice was removed, allowing both the Fox and the Illinois rivers to further erode their valleys.

It’s fascinating to contemplate what those torrents must have looked like, had any humans been around to see them.

Back to local historical mysteries, why wasn’t the Fox River used as a canoe route during the fur trade? A person would think the Fox would have been a perfect cutoff for the fur traders as they paddled down the western shore of Lake Michigan from their posts at Green Bay. The source of the Fox is located a bit northwest of Milwaukee and is reachable by a relatively short portage from the Root River that empties into Lake Michigan near Racine.

But while the Fox looks pretty promising on maps, in reality, it’s always been a wide, relatively slow, and shallow stream, especially in its upper reaches. Not until it got south of modern Yorkville did the river deepen much at all, despite having a fairly substantial fall along that stretch. And especially in the summer and during dry autumns, the river was extremely shallow.

So, the Fox wasn’t used as a fur trade route because it just wasn’t the right kind of river for canoeing most of the year.

The era of settlement in what became the Fox River Valley started in the late 1820s. Where my hometown of Oswego is located here in mid-valley, settlement didn’t start until after the Black Hawk War of 1832.

The largest group of our county’s earliest settlers came overland from Ohio through Indiana. The second largest group arrived at Chicago on Lake Michigan, having sailed out here, mostly from the port of Buffalo at the terminus of the Erie Canal. The smallest group came up from the south having migrated west from Virginia and the Carolinas to Tennessee and Kentucky and then north.

Creating farms by plowing the sod on Oswego’s prairies began in the early 1830s

Why did those settlers leave their homes back East? For most, especially those from New England and the Middle Atlantic States, it was the search for better, cheaper land. For the Southerners, it was following the frontier as it moved west. New England’s farmland, along with that in New York, famously featured thin, rocky soil. In Pennsylvania, most of the best land had already been taken up and improved by the 1840s and 1850s, meaning it was expensive.

Meanwhile, land on the Illinois frontier of the 1830s was rich with deep black soil. The Prairie Peninsula, a vas, triangular-shaped region of rolling tallgrass prairie extending from northwestern Indiana all the way west to eastern fractions of modern North and South Dakota, Nebraska, and Kansas drew farmers because no timber needed to be laboriously cleared to start farming. Granted, that thick prairie sod had to be broken with specialized plows, a relatively expensive proposition that often cost as much as the land itself. And that lack of timber also meant that traditional frontier settlement methods using log buildings and rail fences often either couldn’t be used or created the additional expense of purchasing woodlots.

And then there was the price of that land, sold through government land offices as soon as it had been officially surveyed. The government price was $1.25 per acre, which was even cheap back then. Adjusted for inflation, that’s just $45 an acre in 2023 dollars. But, the price had to be paid in hard cash, no paper money allowed. And that was often difficult in those early days.

So, okay, cheap, high-quality land was for sale as the frontier moved west from Indiana, but why did settlers decide to move here in particular?

Most early accounts note our county’s earliest settlers came west literally prospecting for land. The Rev. E.W. Hicks in his history of Kendall County written in 1877 described one of these prospecting trips by two of the county’s earliest settlers: “Among those who came out prospecting in the spring of 1831 were Earl Adams and Ebenezer Morgan from New York. They descended the Ohio to the Mississippi, and then up to St. Louis, where buying ponies, they followed the banks of the Illinois river to Ottawa, and up the Fox to Yorkville. Reining up their horses on the present Court House Hill, they gazed on the lovely stream below them, the wide, beautiful prairies beyond them, and the timber behind them. The green was dotted with flowers, the birds sang in the branches, and a group of deer stood gazing at the strangers from the edge of a hazel thicket some distance away. Here,” thought Mr. Adams, “is my home,” and dismounting he drove his stake in the soil and took possession. Following up the river about two miles farther, they came to a creek, where Mr. Morgan halted and made his own claim. This done, they passed up to Chicago, sold their ponies, and returned home by way of the lakes.”

Adams and Morgan couldn’t get back to the land they’d claimed for a couple years, opening the way for others to be considered the earliest settlers in what’s today northern Kendall County.

In the summer of 1832, members of the extended Pearce family, Oswego’s first settlers, walked west in Champaign County, Ohio looking for likely land to settle. Possibly drawn here by reports back from Elijah Pearce’s son-in-law, Jacob Carpenter, who was familiar with the Fox and DuPage River valleys, they decided it was worth moving west to settle.

The Pearce family had started their westward trek in their home state of Maryland. They first emigrated through what’s now West Virginia and then settled for a decade or so along the Mad River in Champaign County, Ohio. After returning from their prospecting trip, the Pearces sold their Ohio farms and brought their families west to our Fox River Valley in 1833 by covered wagons pulled by oxen. Daniel Pearce settled along Waubonsie Creek on what’s now Oswego’s Fox Bend Golf Course. His brother-in-law and sister, William and Rebecca Wilson built their cabin at what’s now the busy intersection of U.S. Route 34 and Ill. Route 25 in downtown Oswego, while brothers John and Walter Pearce and their families settled on the west side of the river. Brother Elijah settled near his son-in-law and wife at what is now Montgomery in Kane County, north of Oswego.

Many of those early settlers didn’t stay put, however, but moved on as the mood struck them. Elijah Pearce and William Wilson and their families, for instance, only stayed along the Fox River for a few years before moving to Big Rock Creek near Plano, where they built a sawmill. They sold the mill in 1838 and headed west to Missouri and Iowa.

And speaking of mills, why did the Fox River have more mills than any other Illinois river? According to the Fox River Assessment, Volume 5, Early Accounts of the Ecology of the Fox River Area published in 2000 by the Illinois Department of Natural Resources, “The Fox River’s rocky channel and steep gradient made it ideal for constructing mill dams. The river was dammed at the following places: Ottawa, Dayton, Sheridan, Millington (Milford), Millbrook, Millhurst, Yorkville, Oswego, Montgomery, Aurora, two sites between Aurora and North Aurora, North Aurora, South Batavia, Batavia, Geneva, a site between Geneva and St. Charles (perhaps), St. Charles, South Elgin, Elgin, Dundee, Carpentersville, Algonquin, a site three miles below McHenry, and McHenry.”

In 1888, the Fox River dam at Montgomery was powering two mills located along the millrace. Of the two, Gray’s Mill (near the end of the millrace above) is still standing today. The millrace was filled in but can still be seen in Montgomery Park. (clip from Sanborn Fire Insurance Company map, 1888)

And that list doesn’t even include mills on the Fox River’s tributaries. Here in Kendall County, mills were built (as noted above) on Big Rock Creek and also on Little Rock Creek, Morgan Creek, Blackberry Creek, and Waubonsie Creek. So it appears we can thank the Fox River Torrent for creating a river valley so conducive to building dams to provide water power for mills.

The above are all interesting questions, but how about a real mystery? Like, for instance, who killed William Boyd.

On Thanksgiving night, 1859, Kendall County attorney, land dealer, businessman, and former newspaper publisher William P. Boyd was working late at his office in the village of Bristol, now the north side of Yorkville. As he worked away that evening, a person unknown stealthily aimed through Boyd’s office window and fired a shot, badly wounding him.

Boyd’s death capped an eventful life. He came to Kendall County from Kentucky with his parents in 1838. They settled near modern Newark in Fox Township. Boyd’s father, John, farmed, while William, who had already read law, helped but also engaged in business. In March 1840, he cemented relations with one of the county’s best-known families when he married Sarah Ann Hollenback.

Hollenback, writing in 1914, recalled of his brother-in-law: “Boyd was a born leader, a man of strong personality and great persuasive powers among his following. He was capable of swaying the riff raff crowd as best suited his purpose.”

A few years later, Boyd moved to Oswego, which had become the Kendall County seat in 1845. There he practiced law and engaged in land speculation, plus investing in other businesses. He and his wife also apparently ran a rooming house. In the 1850 U.S. Census for Oswego Township, the value of Boyd’s property was set at $10,000, a considerable fortune for the era.

In 1850 when the General Assembly passed legislation allowing counties to adopt the township supervisor form of government, as opposed to the commission form, Boyd was named one of three commissioners who divided Kendall County into its current nine political townships in accord with the recently passed state law.

Boyd bought the Kendall County Courier, the county seat paper, published in Oswego, from Abraham Sellers in 1855. He changed its political orientation from neutral to a paper supporting the Democratic Party under the editorship of Alexander P. Niblo, a former Newark resident. That move led the county’s Republicans to persuade the Courier’s former editor and publisher, Hector S. Humphrey, to establish a competing Republican paper, the Kendall County Free Press. The Courier supported Buchanan in the 1856 Presidential election. And while Buchanan won, public sentiment had already trended Republican in Kendall County, and Boyd was forced to close the Courier and sell its press and type to an Iowa paper.

By 1859, perhaps sensing voters were in favor of moving the county seat back to Yorkville, Boyd and his wife and children moved to the village of Bristol, just across the river from where the new courthouse would be built during the upcoming Civil War. And it was there that Boyd met his violent end.

Although mortally wounded, Boyd hung on until Jan. 5, 1860 when he died. Hollenback recalled years later: “The identity of his assassin was never discovered. The excitement of the trial and execution of [abolitionist John] Brown for a time dwarfed everything else. The assassination of Boyd had been so deftly accomplished there was little that could be done, and nothing was done by the Grand Jury of Kendall County.”

In what is undoubtedly Kendall County’s coldest case, Boyd’s murder is still unsolved after 163 years.

So you like history’s mysteries? As you can see, we’ve got plenty right here in the Middle Fox Valley. Some we’ve solved, and some we haven’t. What’s a local historical mystery that’s piqued your interest?

Chief Shabbona’s ghost still searching for justice 170 years after his land was stolen

For those of us interested in local history, it’s always fascinating when a bit of it pops up out of the time stream to intrude on modern life.

That’s what’s going on now as our friends west of the Fox Valley in DeKalb County find they’re having to deal with a bit of mid 19^th Century chicanery that led to the illegal theft of land from one of the region’s most revered Native American leaders.

Ask someone to name a local Indian chief, and you’re likely to hear the names of either Waubonsee or Shabbona. Both men were influential leaders of their tribal groups and historically important, but it was Shabbona who was dubbed “Friend of the White Man” by the American settlers that flooded into northern Illinois after 1832. It wasn’t, however, necessarily a compliment from the viewpoint of Native Americans.

Ambrotype was made of “Chief Shaubonee” on June 7, 1857 at Morris by image artist H.B. Field. Little White School Museum collection.

Although sources differ about his birthplace, Shabbona himself told historian Nehemiah Matson he had been born about 1775 along the Kankakee River in what is now Will County near Wilmington. The son of an Ottawa father and a Seneca mother, he grew to be just under 6 feet in height, and was powerfully built, his name meaning, according to various sources, “Burly Shoulders,” “Indomitable,” “Hardy,” or “Built Like a Bear.”

Since Shabbona could neither read nor write English, the spelling of his name varied widely with its pronunciation. Ellen M. Whitney in The Black Hawk War, 1831-1832, records his name variously spelled as Chabone, Chaboni, Chabonie, Chabonne, Chaborne, Chamblee, Chamblie, Chambly, Shabanee, Shabanie, Shabehnay, Shabenai, Shabeneai, Shabeneai, Shabonee, and Shaubena. There were undoubtedly many more.

Shabbona was introduced to the Native Americans’ struggle against European encroachment by his father, reportedly a nephew of the charismatic Ottawa leader Pontiac. Pontiac conceived of and then conducted 1763’s Pontiac’s Rebellion, designed to drive the British and American victors of the French and Indian War out of the area north and west of the Ohio River. The effort failed due to the disinterest of the French in getting reinvolved in a war with the British and the effective military response of British military officers.

Decades before that, some Ottawas had closely allied themselves with bands of the Potawatomi and Chippewa tribes. In 1746, the three related tribal groups formed a loose alliance, the Three Fires Confederacy. That year, taking advantage of the vacuum created by the rapid disintegration of the once mighty Illinois Confederacy, the Three Fires, moved south from their current homes in Wisconsin and Michigan into northern Illinois where they settled along the Kankakee, Illinois, DesPlaines, DuPage, and Fox rivers.

Waubonsee was the principal war chief of the Potawatomi tribal bands in northern Illinois. Little White School Museum collection.

The three tribal groups mixed and intermarried freely. Shabbona’s first wife was Pokanoka, the daughter of a Potowatomi chief. Likely based on his skill as a warrior and his leadership ability, Shabbona, although an ethnic Ottawa, was elevated to chief of that Potawatomi band upon his father-in-law’s death.

The Three Fires remained mostly neutral during the Revolutionary War, although they leaned towards the British, and it’s likely individual members of the confederacy may have participated on the British side.

After the Revolution, and despite the British crown ceding the region to the new United States, British military and trading forces stayed on in the Old Northwest, where they kept the area in turmoil by supporting such anti-American Indian chiefs as the Shawnee military and political leader Blue Jacket.

It’s likely Shabbona participated in the Battle of Fallen Timbers in 1794 when Blue Jacket fought U.S. government forces under Gen. Anthony Wayne in modern Ohio. The U.S. Army won that battle, and broke Blue Jacket’s alliance. Shabbona’s name appears on the Treaty of Greenville signed between the western tribes and the Americans that ended that phase of the conflict, suggesting he had more than a passing interest in the outcome.

Despite that setback, agents working on behalf of both the British Government and British fur trade companies continued to support Native American defiance of U.S. government and economic control. Starting in the early 1800s, the influential Shawnee chief Tecumseh and his brother, called the Prophet, established the Wabash Confederacy. Comprised of tribes in Ohio and the Illinois Country, its goal was to evict the Americans from the area northwest of the Ohio River—the Northwest Territory. In 1810, Tecumseh made a recruiting trip to Illinois, when he visited Shabbona’s village, then located southwest of Chicago on the Illinois River. Shabbona was won over by the Shawnee chief’s political vision, and joined him, traveling throughout northern Illinois and southern Wisconsin lending his local prestige to recruit more members of the Wabash Confederacy.

The Native American nationalist leader Tecumseh was killed in action during the Battle of the Thames in Canada during the War of 1812. Granger Collection, New York.

In 1811, when Gen. William Henry Harrison marched on Tecumseh’s base at Prophetstown in Indiana, Shabbona, along with local chiefs Waubonsee and Winamac, led their Potawatomi contingent alongside Tecumseh’s other allies against the Americans. At the Battle of Tippecanoe, like Wayne before him, Harrison’s forces prevailed, and the tribes scattered back to their homelands.

But just a year later, war again broke out again, this time between the U.S. and Britain, and the Old Northwest became one of its major theatres of operation. Shabbona and other Potawatomi chiefs allied with the British and participated in the battle and subsequent Fort Dearborn massacre at Chicago. After the battle, Shabbona and Waubonsee both used their influence to save lives of several captured Americans.

Then they led their forces to Canada where they joined Tecumseh’s Native Americans fighting the invading U.S. Army, again under the command of Harrison. At the Battle of the Thames in Ontario Province, Shabbona fought beside Tecumseh until the Americans prevailed, the allied Indian and British army was beaten, and Tecumseh killed in action.

Following that defeat, Shabbona returned to Illinois to think things over. After much deliberation, he concluded further military opposition to the Americans was fruitless. In 1827, when the Winnebagoes decided to fight the incursion of American settlers on Indian land in southern Wisconsin, Shabbona and other Three Fires chiefs helped defuse hostilities.

Shabbona’s reserve granted in the Treaty of 1829 was located in Section 23 and the west half of Section 26 and the east half of Section 25 of Shabbona Township, DeKalb County, Illinois. In this original U.S. Township Survey Plat, Shabbona Grove is outlined in green.

At least partly in return for his efforts to stop a shooting war, Shabbona received, in the Treaty of 1829, a land grant of two sections, 1,280 acres, that became known as Shabbona Grove, and where the chief maintained his village. When the land was finally surveyed, it was legally described as Section 23 plus the east half of Section 26 and the west half of Section 25 of modern DeKalb County’s Shabbona Township.

Then Black Hawk’s band of Sauk and Foxes crossed the Mississippi River back into Illinois in the spring of 1832. This time, thanks largely to Illinois Gov. John Ford’s incompetent military and political leadership, an actual shooting war broke out, with both state militia and U.S. Army troops marching against Black Hawk’s group of roughly 1,200 men, women, and children.

Just as in 1827, Shabbona again worked hard to defuse hostilities. While he was able to keep most of the Three Fires bands officially out of the conflict, he wasn’t entirely successful trying to keep individuals out of the war. Realizing the dangers angry individual members of the Three Fires posed when fighting broke out along Old Man’s Creek, he and his nephew, like a pair of latter day Paul Reveres, rode up the Fox River Valley warning settlers to flee to either Ottawa or Chicago.

One group of pioneers who had gathered at the Davis claim on Indian Creek in LaSalle County just south of Kendall County declined to leave, and were killed by Potawatomis in revenge for Davis’s brutal treatment of them.

Following the Black Hawk War, the U.S. Government decreed that in accord with President Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal Act of 1830, all Native People were to be removed from Illinois, and in 1836, most were moved west of the Mississippi under threat of military force.

Shabbona and his wife accompanied Three Fires groups who began leaving Illinois as early as 1835, although he did not give up title to the reserve he’d been granted for the benefit of himself and the Three Fires band he led. He returned to Illinois in 1837 and lived on his land at Shabbona Grove until 1849 when he left to visit Kansas. When he returned in 1852, he found that his reserve had been illegally sold at public auction. And the money from the sale, instead of being held in trust for him, apparently reverted to the government.

This 1871 plat book view of Shabbona Grove shows no evidence the chief used to own most of the grove. But it does show the numerous woodlots the grove has been subdivided into by settlers needing timber for firewood and building materials. The Village of Shabbona was moved north to straddle the tracks of the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad.

It’s never been adequately explained just how the theft of Shabbona’s land happened, either. After all, other reserves granted by various treaties—including two here in Kendall County—were owned until legally sold by their Native American owners, who were fairly paid for them. It’s also interesting, that official maps of Kendall County still sometimes show the outlines of those reserves, unlike Shabbona’s reserve in DeKalb, which was almost immediately erased from the region’s maps—almost like DeKalb’s leaders wanted to erase all evidence of the old chief’s ownership.

That the two sections of timber were extremely valuable to DeKalb County’s earliest settlers goes without saying. The county was almost entirely prairie with only a few groves, the largest of which was Shabbona’s grove. After its sale, early maps show that its new owners lost no time in subdividing the grove into dozens of valuable woodlots the settlers needed for building materials and firewood.

A few years later, a group of area citizens who remembered the contributions the old chief had made to the region bought him a small 20-acre farm near Seneca, where he lived for the rest of his life.

In an interesting historical sidelight, in 1858 he attended the first Lincoln-Douglas debate at Ottawa where he reportedly greeted his old Black Hawk War comrade, Abraham Lincoln, and where he was seated on the dais with the rest of the dignitaries.

Chief Shabbona’s granite marker purchased and emplaced by his former neighbors long after his death and the later plaque installed by the Daughters of the American Revolution in 1983.

Shabbona died on his farm July 17, 1859, and was buried at Morris in Evergreen Cemetery. For many years, his grave was unmarked, but then his old neighbors took up a collection to place a huge boulder on his grave with the simple inscription: SHABBONA 1775-1859. Finally, in September 1983, a bronze plaque, donated by the Illinois State Organization of the National Society of Daughters of the American Revolution, was placed in front of the boulder with the inscription, “CHIEF SHABBONA – Born in 1775, this gentle man of peace, friend of white settlers, died July 17, 1859, near Morris, Grundy Co., Illinois.”

In 2001, the U.S. Department of the Interior, after years of study, finally decided that, yes, the old chief’s land was stolen from him all those years ago. They have been in talks with the Prairie Band of the Potawatomi, the logical heirs of Shabbona, as well as the current owners of the land stolen from the chief as well as the local governments involved ever since, to see how that wrong done so many years ago might be at least partially righted.

Spring and the start of the fur trade’s seasonal cycle likely didn’t include our Fox River

It would have been a grand sight, seeing voyageurs paddling their canoes down the Fox River here in what’s now northern Illinois as the winter fur-trapping season ended. The water sparkling as it dripped off their red-tipped paddles, the voyageur crews’ colorful costumes contrasting with the flowing water, and the French paddling songs drifting on the breeze would have been spectacular, wouldn’t it?

If it had actually happened, yes, it would have been pretty spectacular.

But the truth is, the Fox River has always been a shallow, although wide, stream whose water levels varied widely, making navigation iffy at best during most of the year and downright impossible the rest of the time.

Every spring for well over a century, brigades of huge 35 to 40-foot freight canoes—called canots du maître (master canoes) or Montreal canoes—set off from Montreal and Quebec, each canoe laden with some three tons of goods destined for fur trading posts all over the Great Lakes region—and beyond. The route started just above the Lachine Rapids at Montreal on the Ottawa River. Paddling upstream via a number of often dangerous and usually difficult portages on the Ottawa, the arduous route then ran up the small Mattawa River, where paddling upstream ended at its source on Trout Lake and crossed the height of land where streams began flowing into Lake Huron. From there it was down into Lake Nipissing and then into the French River for 70 miles of easy paddling downstream into Georgian Bay and Lake Huron for the sometimes stormy paddle to the fur trade depot of Michilimackinac at the straits between lakes Huron and Michigan.

Reenactors portray voyageurs paddling a 35-foot Montreal birch bark canoe as it would have appeared during the period the British dominated the fur trade following the French and Indian War beginning in the 1760s.

There, the goods were broken down into smaller cargoes for smaller 20 to 25-foot north canoes that were handier on the inland trade routes to the actual post of traders, such as the one at Chicago and posts on the Illinois River. The main route to get to the Illinois Country was via the Chicago portage—which, depending on how full or empty the Des Plaines River was could be up to 60 miles long—or the St. Joseph River east of Chicago.

To get to the Chicago portage, the brigades had to paddle right past the mouth of the Root River just south of today’s Milwaukee in modern Wisconsin, a short portage from which led to the headwaters of our Fox River—which is not to be confused with the Fox River that empties into Green Bay. So the Root-Fox route would have cut off some distance to reach the Illinois River, but the Fox usually wasn’t deep enough. Not that fur traders never used it, of course, but it seems as a regular route on the fur trade highway, it was a very, very minor player indeed.

In fact, the only account we have of a French party considering using the Fox as a  shortcut from Lake Michigan to the Illinois River post at Le Rocher—Starved Rock—ended with the French missionaries and the boatmen transporting them to their destination in central Illinois deciding to go on to Chicago instead of chancing finding deep enough water in the Fox.

Map probably drawn by Rene Paul of St. Louis in 1815 and subsequently copied by Lt. James Kearney, U.S. Army. Paul was St. Louis City Engineer and also worked as a surveyor. (Source: Plate XL, Indian Villages of the Illinois Country, Vol. 2, Part 1, Atlas, Sarah Jones Tucker, Illinois State Museum, 1942)

The route they investigated went up the Root River and then over a nine-mile portage to Muskego Lake in what is today southeastern Waukesha County, Wis., which empties into the upper reaches of our Fox River.

Traveling in 1699, Father Jean Francois Buisson de St. Cosme, a Seminary priest on his way to the Mississippi River, reported that “some savages had led us to hope we could ascend [the Root River in Wisconsin from Lake Michigan] and after a portage of about two leagues might descend by another river called Pesioui [our Fox River] which falls into the River of the Illinois about 25 or 30 leagues from Chikagou, and that we should thereby avoid all the portages that had to be made by the Chikagou route. We passed by this river which is about ten leagues in length to the portage and flows through agreeable prairies, but as there was no water in it we judged that there would not be any in the Peschoui either.”

Although apparently not a regular route for French and Indian fur traders, the Root–Muskego Lake–Fox route was apparently used by at least some hardy and adventuresome travelers because the portage is clearly marked on a variety of maps of northern Illinois drawn around the time of the War of 1812.

The frequent lack of sufficient water in the Fox was not the only problem, of course. Maps from the late 1700s until the 1820s suggest that the Fox Valley was fairly lightly populated by Native People. There were only a few permanent villages along the river during that era, including at what is today called Maramech Hill near Plano and in the Oswego area near the mouth of Waubonsie Creek. Those were considered “permanent” villages, but they undoubtedly moved frequently as the farmland around them played out. It’s also likely villages were established at one time or another at or near the mouth of Blackberry Creek and all the other creeks that empty into the Fox. The farming was generally pretty good in those spots with rich bottomland soils, as was the fishing, which meant good living conditions.

During the winter months, those permanent villages broke up into small family groups, which, in turn, moved to their favored winter hunting grounds so as to spread out the hunting pressure during the lean times of the cold and snowy months.

The Fox River is picked out in green on this map of Native American villages in the Fox and Illinois River valleys as of about 1830. (Source: Atlas of Great Lakes Indian History, Helen Hornbeck Tanner, University of Oklahoma Press, 1987)

Along with hunting, the Native People did their trapping at those winter camps. For instance, Chief Waubonsee, whose permanent village was located along the Fox from Oswego north to Batavia depending on the year, reportedly spent his winters with his family along the Illinois River. A lot of other Potowatomi, Ottawa, and Chippewa family groups from northern Illinois spent their winters there, too, and that made it profitable for fur traders to open depots along the river. In particular, the American Fur Company, which took over the trade in the Old Northwest Territory after the Revolutionary War had a series of fur trade posts along the river that were regularly serviced from the company’s western headquarters at Fort Mackinac.

Press for compressing cured hides into 90 pound pièces for the fur trade. Note the wrapped bundles of hides atop the press and to the right of the press mechanism. I took this photo many years ago at the Snake River Fur Post, a reconstruction operated by the Minnesota Historical Society at Pine City, MN.

The fur trade ran on a time-honored schedule that was established by French and, later, British traders starting in the early 18th Century. In the late spring, canoe brigades arrived from Montreal and Quebec to drop off trade goods for the coming season and to pick up the furs that had been accumulating at the posts during the previous winter. As the prime peltries were brought in during the winter and early spring months, they were stretched, dried, and packed into 90 lb. bundles, called pièces, in preparation for shipment. When the brigades arrived, they off-loaded trade goods for the coming season–which had been carefully packed in the same dimension 90 lb. pièces as the furs would be–and reloaded the big freight canoes with the bundles of pelts, which were then transported back to the trading headquarters on the Ottawa River.

By the 1820s, the fur trade brigades had given up using the traditional birch bark freight canoes and were using Mackinaw boats, sturdy double-ended craft that could be either rowed or sailed and could carry about the same amount of cargo without the maintenance problems and fragility inherent in bark canoes. By the 1830s, when settlement began in earnest here in the Fox Valley, the fur trade had almost entirely ended in northern Illinois. The furbearers had been trapped out, the Native People upon whom the companies relied on as major fur pelt suppliers were being forced west of the Mississippi by government removal policies, and northern Illinois was rapidly being turned into farmland by ever-increasing numbers of American settlers.

Even though the Fox River may not been much of a voyageur highway, it was a key part of the Old Northwest’s rich history and heritage during the fur trade era.

How European hat fashions of the past nearly wiped out dozens of animal species

The February edition of BBC History Magazine had an interesting piece on how the use of feathers and bird skins and body parts in women’s hat fashions during the late 1800s and early 1900s drove some bird species to the brink of extinction—and sometimes over it.

Fashionable women’s headgear of the era was often custom manufactured by local milliners in small towns and big cities alike. When the big catalog companies and their accompanying department stores were developed, women in even the smallest hamlets or in isolated farms and ranches could buy the most fashionable and elaborate befeathered hats.

Elaborate women’s hats of the Victorian era were decorated with feathers and other parts of bird bodies, from wings to whole skins.

But while women’s hat fashions were indeed responsible for depredations on the world’s bird species, we shouldn’t forget that men’s hat fashions also drove some animal species—this time fur-bearing animals— to near or total extinction hundreds of years earlier.

Using wool to manufacture felt was common from Roman times on, but it wasn’t until the 13^th Century or so that it was found that superior felt could be made from the fur of beavers. Each individual beaver fur hair, it turns out, has microscopic barbs on it that allow it to tightly cling to its fellows.

The Russians were the first to really capitalize on beaver fur for felting, fortuitously just at the time that elaborate men’s felt hats were becoming all the rage in Europe. It didn’t take long for the idea of using beaver fur felt to manufacture the finest hats to spread all over the continent. And that spelled doom for the beaver populations in Europe as well as in western Russia.

It was just at this hat mania was accelerating that it was found that beavers were plentiful in the North American colonial possessions of France, England, and the Netherlands—not to mention all sorts of other furbearing animals as well as deer and other ruminants whose skins were valuable for manufacturing everything from riding britches to wealthy people’s gloves.

The broad-brimmed floppy hats worn by Swedish soldiers during the destructive Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648) set the fashion for the next century and a half. And all those hats required a lot of beaver skins to manufacture the felt to satisfy the need.

Beginning in the 1600s, the competition for control of the fur trade led to conflict among the European colonial powers in their North American possessions, as well as with and between the continent’s Native People.

From 1652 to 1674, the British and Dutch fought a series of maritime conflicts that resulted in the loss of New Netherlands to the British, and its renaming as New York. The British and Spanish, too, fought with each other over their North American colonies, the two major ones being the War of Jenkins’ Ear, 1739 to 1748, was largely inconclusive although it led to a Spanish invasion of Georgia that was repulsed.

The unique qualities of beaver fur made it ideal to manufacture felt for 18th and early 19th Century men’s hats. The wild popularity of beaver felt hats and the resulting trade in beaver furs prompted everything from international wars to the destruction of Native American cultures.

However, the major wars over North American colonial possessions—and control of the fur trade—were fought between the French and the British as sidelights to larger European (and even worldwide) wars. King William’s War (1688–1697), Queen Anne’s War (1702–1713), King George’s War (1744–1748), and the final conflict in the series, the French and Indian War (1754-1763) eventually resulted in the expulsion of France from most of its former North American possessions.

During all of these conflicts, North America’s Native People were involved in a series of changing alliances between tribes as well as with the colonial powers. Due to a major error on the part of French explorer, governor and military leader Samuel de Champlain, the powerful Iroquois Confederacy, which controlled the area lying between the Atlantic Coast and the rich fur-producing areas of the Great Lakes generally allied itself with British interests, while the Algonquian-speaking people of the Great Lakes area generally allied with the British and Dutch.

Furs, particularly those of the beaver, were so eagerly sought early in the colonial era that beavers were soon driven to near extinction in Atlantic coastal areas, requiring traders to range farther and farther inland.

The Iroquois Confederacy was an unusual (and innovative) political alliance of five tribes based in what is now upper New York State that all spoke related Iroquoian languages, the Mohawk, Onondaga, Oneida, Cayuga, and Seneca. By 1600, the original five-member confederacy had been formed, committing all members to an organized system of choosing leaders and defending the confederacy against other tribes, particularly neighboring Alqonquian-speaking people. In 1722, the Tuscaroras joined the confederacy, which then became known as “The Six Nations.”

The Iroquois quickly grasped the importance of their location to control of the fur trade, and they determined to control access to the western Great Lakes where the richest supplies of fur-bearing animals was to be found. In order to cement their control, the Iroquois apparently independently developed the concept of total war to either subjugate or totally destroy other tribes. Historians call the succession of conflicts waged over fur trade control the Beaver Wars. At least one large tribe, known as the Neutrals, was completely eradicated while the powerful Hurons were forced ever farther west. The conflicts even struck here in Illinois as a series of Iroquois military strikes from the 1650s to the 1680s temporarily drove the populous Illinois Confederacy west of the Mississippi River and ended up forcing the Illinois to rely on French protection for survival.

The Iroquois closed the western Great Lakes to French trade for many years, but by the 1680s, the French were building settlements all over the region including here in Illinois, first at Fort St. Louis atop Starved Rock and then at Peoria and along the Mississippi River at Cahokia, Kaskaskia, and the imposing Fort de Chartres. Throughout the late 17^th Century and through the mid-18^th Century, the French extracted millions of furs and hides from everything from beavers, martens, and mink to deer and buffalo for shipment either north and east to Montreal on the Great Lakes’ “Voyageurs’ Highway,” or down the Mississippi to New Orleans.

By the early 1800s, both the American and British the fur trade in the lower Great Lakes relied in Mackinac boats rather than birch bark freight canoes.

With the French defeated in the last of the great North American fur trade wars in 1763, the British occupied the interior of the continent and their traders enjoyed a monopoly in the trade in furs. But not for long. The British North American colonies revolted in 1776, throwing the interior back into almost constant warfare with tribes of Native People mostly supporting the British. American military forays into what was by then known as The Illinois Country, as well as the western Great Lakes secured the area to the south of the lakes’ shores for the new United States.

John Jacob Astor established the American Fur Company to take over the former British fur trade infrastructure—a plan that was set back by the War of 1812 as the British and their Native American allies who pushed Americans out of the richest areas before the Treaty of Ghent formalized the border between the U.S. and Canada.

Fort Mackinac at the strait between lakes Huron and Michigan was the western hub of the fur trade where brigades of birch bark canoes and Mackinac boats were sent to the interior each spring to collect furs trapped during the previous winter.

Native People traded furs and hides—the thick prime winter beaver pelt was the standard by which the trades were made—that had driven beavers extinct in the East soon did the same in the Western Great Lakes, and the trade gradually moved on to the Great West and the Rocky Mountains, conducted by the famed Mountain Men.

In recent decades, furbearing animals driven to near-extinction by the fur trade have made a dramatic comeback in the lower Great Lakes.

Astor sold the American Fur Company operations in 1834. By that time, furbearers had largely disappeared from northern Illinois and in any case, the U.S. Government was ready to forcibly remove the region’s Native People west of the Mississippi. While the fur trade continued for several more years in Canada and the Rocky Mountain west, it was only a shadow of it’s former extent.

When the first American settlers began arriving here in northern Illinois in the late 1820s, the area had been largely stripped of animals whose furs and hides could be sold. It wasn’t until the passage of environmental laws in the 1970s that the region’s furbearers and other animals valued for their hides such as white-tailed deer began showing up in larger numbers.

The same sensitivity to the environment has also led to the recovery of many of the bird species that were so hard-hit during the Victorian women’s mania for befeathered hats.

Looking back at those bits of history, it is interesting, not to mention appalling, to contemplate that entire species of birds and mammals were nearly driven to extinction by human fashions in, of all things, hats as we celebrate another Earth Day.

The time France tried to make a profit on Illinois bison

Given the current situation here and across the world as we attempt to deal with a pandemic, civil unrest (sometimes caused by civil authorities themselves), and almost unbelievable government dysfunction and dishonesty, it’s always valuable to have a mental bolthole handy for a therapeutic retreat.

For me, that’s colonial Illinois history, where there’s always something new to learn, especially stories about colonial efforts that didn’t turn out like their promoters expected.

The fur trade era, when fortunes were made and lost as colonial European powers traded with North America’s Native People for the pelts and hides of fur-bearing animals in exchange for various goods, is one of my historical favorites. The trade is so interesting because it was such an important driver of the European settlement that resulted in centuries of death and cultural destruction of so many of the confinement’s Native People. And, not to put too fine a point on it, but without the fur trade North America certainly would not have developed like it did.

It may seem odd to us today that animal furs and skins would be such valuable commodities that the trade in them would lead to political and military conflict on a worldwide scale. But that was indeed the case as the great European powers fought over who would control the extraction of natural riches from what they called the New World.

The currency of the North American fur trade was the prime winter beaver pelt.

The North American fur trade was built around beaver pelts. Fashion during the 17th and 18th centuries and the first quarter or so of the 19th century decreed men, in particular, wear hats in a myriad of styles manufactured from felt. It turned out the beaver’s under-fur, because of its unique physical structure, produced the finest felt in the world.

While millions of beaver pelts were harvested in North America and sent to European factories annually, those weren’t the only animal products of interest to Europeans. Mink, otter, fisher, and other fine furs were highly sought after, as were deer hides, bearskins, and the hides of American Bison.

Bison hides, when properly tanned, proved to be durable and extremely tough. Bison hide shields used by Native People had been known to be proof against even musket balls. Europeans turned the hides into heavy blankets and coats, and the hide with the fur removed was used to make boots and other heavy-duty footwear.

While bison hides were definitely salable items, they weren’t favored by the regular trade, due to their size and weight. A single bison hide weighs between 20 and 30 pounds, and measures around 7×5 feet. The fur trade, especially during the 18th Century, relied on transporting furs and trade goods by birch bark canoe, even the larges of which would have been hard-pressed to carry many oversized bison hides.

American Bison once roamed most of North America. These animals currently live at the Midewin National Tallgrass Prairie near Wilmington, Illinois, where a bison herd is being recreated.

Even so, there was a market for bison hides, and it just so happened that in the early 18th Century the bison population east of the Mississippi River was at its height. There had always been bison east of the great river, but it wasn’t until the 1500s that their numbers began to rapidly increase. That was due to a number of factors that included the success of Native People in modifying the environment by using grass fires to create and maintain open savannahs in the generally dense eastern forests and to enlarge and maintain the large prairies that began in western Indiana stretching all the way to the Mississippi. That provided additional bison habitat and by creating numerous edges around wooded areas created ideal deer habitat. At its height, the bison population east of the Mississippi is estimated at between two and four million animals.

Another, far less positive, factor was the deadly epidemics of Old World diseases loosed on Native People by Europeans that depopulated large areas east of the Mississippi, drastically lowering hunting pressure on large game animals. So, by the late 17th and early 18th centuries, the eastern bison herds numbered in the hundreds of thousands, significantly smaller than the ones on the shortgrass prairie west of the Mississippi, but still substantial.

And that’s where Charles Juchereau de St. Denys saw an opportunity. The fur trade in today’s Midwest was controlled from either Quebec or Louisiana, depending on which side of the dividing line the area was located. Juchereau’s plan was to build a trading fort and a bison hide tannery on the Ohio River near its confluence with the Mississippi, a scheme he was able to interest King Louis XIV in personally. But since that fell within Quebec’s area of influence, Juchereau had to work hard to reassure officials there that he had no designs on trading for beaver pelts. Eventually, after a lot of hard bargaining, he was able to allay enough of their suspicion to get their grudging approval. Juchereau pointed out that his post near the confluence of the two great rivers would stand as a bulwark against the growing incursions of British traders then filtering into the area, while also offering protection to the Native People Juchereau hoped to relocated near his fort. Those considerations got the strong support of the officials at New Orleans who were getting concerned about growing British influence in the area.

The expedition Juchereau put together included 24 men in eight canoes. It was prohibited from selling brandy to the Native People and from trading in beaver pelts. Any other pelts and skins were fair game, however.

Juchereau’s expedition probably traveled from Canada to southern Illinois using big Montreal Canoes like these. Made of birch bard, they were the mainstay cargo vessels of the North American fur trade for some 200 years.

Juchereau’s expedition left Montreal on May 18, 1702 and headed up the well-worn St. Lawrence-Ottawa River trade route into Lake Huron, arriving at the post of Michilimackinac on July 10. During the summer months, Midwestern rivers were at low levels, so the expedition waited until late summer to head south when, they hoped, river levels would be higher.

The expedition paddled down the western shore of Lake Michigan to Green Bay and the mouth of the Fox River of Wisconsin. The Fox River of Wisconsin was under the control of the Fox Tribe. Not yet in open warfare with the French, the Fox nonetheless charged Juchereau’s expedition a stiff toll of trade goods to pass on their way upstream to the portage to the Wisconsin River at today’s Portage, Wisconsin.

From there, the route was down the Wisconsin to its mouth on the Mississippi, and then downstream to the French settlement at Kaskaskia, where they picked up the “almoner” Juchereau’s concession required. For this duty, the Bishop of Quebec assigned the unfortunate Jesuit Father Jean Mermet.

In early 1700 Mermet had been assigned to assist Father François Pinet with the Miami mission at what is now Chicago. For whatever reason, Pinet decided to leave, putting Mermet in charge although he could not speak the languages of the local tribes. He spent the winter of 1701-02 isolated there. In the spring, Mermet made his way east to the Jesuit mission at the St. Joseph River in modern southwestern Michigan, where at least he had someone else to talk to. But this annoyed, Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac, the commander at Fort Detroit who suspected the Jesuits were trying to increase the size of the St. Joseph Mission at the expense of Detroit. So Mermet was sent on his way once more, this time down to Kaskaskia, where Juchereau’s expedition found him when they arrived from Michilimackinac.

It also turned out there were some doubts among the Jesuits about Juchereau’s plans, mainly they were suspicious—undoubtedly justified—the efforts to make a profit out of buffalo hides would have a higher priority than saving souls. Further, they noted, Mermet really didn’t have any actual missionary skills—as an almoner his job had been to distribute goods and money to the poor. But Juchereau’s patrons were powerful enough to overcome the Jesuits’ worries and off Mermet went with the expedition. At least the poor guy had somebody to talk to on the way.

The expedition reached the site of Juchereau’s concession sometime in November 1702. The location is believed to have been on the Illinois side of the Ohio River somewhere around Mound City.

Juchereau’s bison tannery and trading fort was located somewhere along the Ohio River in the Mound City area near the southern tip of Illinois.

Juchereau immediately began construction of his trade fort and tannery while Mermet began his new job as missionary to the local tribes—although inexperienced, he was given credit for working with “zeal and fortitude” and generally made a good impression on the Native People he could reach.

By the early 18th Century, the French had learned that a successful trading establishment required a large nearby population of Native Americans, something Juchereau’s concession, located in a sort of no-man’s land between tribal areas. But once it became known that Juchereau was paying top dollar for bison hides, Native People—mostly Mascoutins—began to congregate. But then disaster struck in the form of a virulent epidemic, probably malaria. The disease was a European import for which the Native People had no immunity, and it killed roughly half the Mascoutins despite Father Mermet’s frantic medical efforts.

Not incidentally, Juchereau also died from the disease, throwing the entire tannery operation into temporary chaos. But the rest of the French voyageurs quickly assumed control and the collection of hides continued until some 12,000 had been accumulated.

Which is when the big flaw in Juchereau’s scheme became clear: How to get 180 tons of tanned bison hides from the wilds of North America to market—any market. Louisiana’s new governor, Jean Baptiste le Moyne, Sieur de Bienville, responded to pleas for help by dispatching six workmen to help the tannery crew build boats to ship the hides south. In late 1704, all 12,000 hides were loaded aboard the boats and floated down the Mississippi to Fort de la Boulaye—New Orleans wouldn’t be founded for another 14 years. But there was virtually no ship traffic from the relatively new fort to France, or anywhere else at the time. The result, as one of Juchereau’s companions ruefully explained, was that “These goods we brought down in very great numbers…and for want of ships in two years’ time the moths got into them, the waters rose, and for lack of people to guard them the Indians took them and the whole lot was lost.”

With no birch trees available to build canoes in southern Illinois Juchereau’s men had to build boats to haul the tanned bison hides the operation had accumulated down to the Missssippi’s mouth on the Gulf of Mexico. They were probably bateaus, flat-bottomed, shallow draft boats favored in areas without sufficient birth trees.

Thus was the ignominious end of Juchereau’s bison hide venture.

The scheme is of interest to historians because of its colonial Illinois commercial nature and because of the evidence it offers of large numbers of bison east of the Mississippi during that era. The eastern herd, unlike the gigantic herds on the western shortgrass prairies, was divided into relatively small groups of hundreds or perhaps a few thousand each ranging into western Virginia, the Carolinas, the future states of Kentucky and Tennessee and even Pennsylvania, Indiana, and Ohio. But there were enough bison in the east to produce 12,000 tanned hides in about two years by a single trading and tanning operation, a substantial number by anyone’s reckoning.

It’s not clear if Juchereau’s venture had a negative effect on bison population east of the Mississippi, but it does seem that from the early 18th Century on, bison numbers began a steady decline. The last recorded wild bison in Illinois was reported killed in 1808.

When the topic of the American Bison comes up, Illinois isn’t generally the first part of their range that springs to mind. But time was, the Prairie State was home territory for thousands of them.

For more information on bison in Illinois, see Records of Early Bison in Illinois, R. Bruce McMillan, editor; Illinois State Museum Scientific Papers, Vol. XXXI, Springfield, 2006. For more on Juchereau’s tannery venture see “A Historical Reexamination of Juchereau’s Illinois Tannery,” by John Fortier and Donald Chaput, pps. 385-406, Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, Vol. 62, No. 4 (Winter, 1969).

Maramech Hill area a historical gem—just not the one many believe it to be

Maramech Hill, located between Big Rock and Little Rock creeks just upstream from where the combined streams enter the Fox River, has been a celebrated local historical site for more than a century. Once touted as the site of a climactic battle between colonial French forces and their allies and the Fox Tribe, the area around the hill has become one of Kendall County’s premiere cultural and natural destinations.

The Maramech Hill area of Kendall County. Click here to enlarge.

Part of the area’s story begins during Illinois’ colonial era.

Warfare between Europeans and Native Americans began almost as soon as Europeans arrived in the Western Hemisphere.

In South and Central America, and a portion of southern North America, the Spanish waged a series of very successful wars of extinction against the native populations.

For most of North America, however, the situation was quite different. A series of powerful, adaptable, Indian tribes made the conquest of North America anything but a sure thing. Eventually, however, European numbers and technology won out over the Indians. But it was a tough, generations-long struggle.

For instance, the area that now includes the states of Kentucky, Tennessee, and West Virginia was known as “the dark and bloody ground” long before colonial American frontier settlers began filtering into it.

The Maramech Hill area (between the two creeks), during the settlement era, was surrounded by tall timber as the original survey map from 1838 shows. Click to enlarge.

Claimed as a prime hunting and trapping ground by the native tribes of the Shawnee, Delaware, Miami, and Huron people, the region was the location of nearly continuous intertribal warfare. It was warfare made worse when European colonial powers began playing the tribes off against each other in a quest to dominate the trade in furs. By the mid-1760s, the Europeans’ wars against each other had largely been settled in favor of England. English peace efforts included issuing a proclamation declaring a no-go zone for settlers west of a line that roughly ran along the peaks of the Appalachian chain. That effort failed spectacularly as American colonials flooded across the mountains to settle the region, touching off even more warfare with and between the tribes. A “dark and bloody ground,” indeed.

But it’s not so well known that nearly a century before those events took place, northern Illinois and southern Wisconsin and Michigan could have been accurately described as a dark and bloody ground as well, primarily because of a decades-long war between the French colonial government and the Fox Tribe.

The Foxes call themselves Meskwaki, or people of the red earth. The French, after encountering the tribe, referred to them as the Outagami or the Renards—French for fox. The tribe was first recorded living along the St. Lawrence River in modern Ontario. But warfare resulting from side effects of the fur trade—primarily conflict with the Huron Tribe—pushed the Foxes west, first to lower Michigan and then, eventually, to the Green Bay area of Wisconsin. So the Foxes arrived in our region with built-in animosity towards the French as well as a favorable feeling towards the Iroquois, deadly enemies of both the Hurons and the French.

Through that series of wars and forced relocation, the Foxes became a pugnacious people. Part of the great Algonquian-speaking majority of Native tribes in northern North America, they were members of a linguistic subgroup with the Sauks and Kickapoos.

After being driven out of eastern Michigan by the Ojibwas, the Foxes were involved in fairly constant warfare with that tribe. The Foxes also engaged in sharp battles with the Sioux in western Wisconsin and eastern Minnesota. The Illinois, Potawatomis, the Miamis, and several other tribes in the upper Midwest were also often at odds with the Foxes.

Franquelin’s map of LaSalle’s colony in 1684 shows what early 20th Century advocate John F. Steward believed was Maramech Hill near Plano.

The warfare was bad for the business of the fur trade (especially their efforts to trade with the Sioux) and the French tried to stop it by weighing in on the side of the Foxes’ numerous enemies. This led the Foxes to cultivate ties with the powerful and ruthless Iroquois Confederacy, who were friends of the British and implacable enemies of the French and their Algonquian-speaking Native allies.

The Foxes’ actions to become the middlemen for the fur trade west of southern Lake Michigan—and to deny French firearms to the Sioux—resulted in denying the use of the strategic and economically valuable portage between the upper Fox River of Wisconsin and the Wisconsin River to French trading interests. Instead, French traders had to use the longer and far more difficult Chicago Portage. And if that wasn’t bad enough, cozying up to British interests eventually persuaded the French that the Foxes had to be destroyed.

In 1710, a large group of Foxes—not the entire tribe—agreed to move adjacent to the French fort at Detroit, ostensibly to live under the protection of the French military. However, given the Foxes’ long animosity toward the French and their Indian allies, the Foxes were soon—and predictably—embroiled with disputes against French interests. In 1712, the disputes led to a Fox siege of the French fort, with the Foxes heavily and skillfully fortified inside their own camp. Eventually, Indian allies of the French arrived to lift the siege and to besiege the Foxes. The stalemate lasted nearly a month until the group of Foxes, out of food and water, attempted to escape during a thunderstorm. They were unsuccessful, and virtually the entire band was destroyed.

The rest of the Fox Tribe, not surprisingly, was infuriated. They retaliated by killing French traders and several members of the tribes allied with France. At the same time, the Foxes mounted a diplomatic offensive, and concluded a treaty with their old enemies, the Sioux, to eliminate the threat of an attack on them from the west.

Kee-Shes-Wa, a Meskwaki chief, painted by Charles Bird King in the early 1800s.

In response to the Foxes’ military actions, in 1715, the French attempted to launch a punitive expedition but those efforts were badly planned, and failed. The Foxes used the respite to build a strong, well-planned fortification on the Fox River of Wisconsin that empties into Green Bay. The fort’s walls were made of oak logs reinforced with earth dug out of trenches inside the fort.

When the French and their allies finally attacked in 1716, they used artillery and formal European siege tactics to attack the Foxes’ fort. However, the Foxes held out against the French and their allies, and forced a humiliating retreat.

The Indians of southern Wisconsin, the Fox included, often hunted buffalo on the Illinois prairie without the permission of the latter. In 1722, members of the Illinois Confederacy captured the nephew a Fox chief and burned him alive. The murder was in retaliation for the Foxes’ continually hunting in the Illinois Country without the permission of the Confederacy. In their own retaliation, a Fox force swiftly moved down into the Illinois County, and attacked a group of the Illinois Confederacy they found, forcing them to take refuge at LaSalle’s old fort atop Starved Rock. The Illinois managed to send a message south to Fort de Chartres in southern Illinois and a force of French and their Native American allies was dispatched to rescue the besieged Illinois. By the time the relief force arrived, the Foxes had wisely retreated, leaving about 120 Illinois dead.

Not content with hindering the French trade in furs, the Fox continually attacked down into the Illinois Country, raiding French and Native American villages alike. Deciding to take the offensive against the Foxes once again in 1727, the governor of Canada, the Marquis de Beauharnois, planned a campaign to destroy the Foxes’ military power. The governor appointed Constant Le Marchand de Lignery to command the campaign. Under the plan, de Lignery gathered a force of French troops and Native American allies in the summer of 1728. The Canadian force was to link up with another group from Illinois commanded by Pierre Charles Desliettes, commander at Fort des Chartres. the Commandant of the Illinois District. The rendezvous of the two forces was to have been at Chicago. But Desliettes’ force of 20 French soldiers and 500 Illini warriors happened upon a hunting camp of Foxes, along with some Kickapoos and Mascoutens, which they immediately attacked. The French force killed 20 and captured 15, after which Desliettes’ Illinois decided they’d had enough warfare and headed back home..

The balance of de Lignery’s large force, numbering some 1,650 French and Indians, continued into the Foxes’ country, but moved too slowly. The Fox learned of the coming assault and escaped before they could be attacked. The attackers only managed to burn some Fox and Winnebago villages and crops before they retired back to Canada.

Governor Beauharnois, however, had become determined to permanently solve his “Fox problem.” Part of the plan involved using interpreter Jean-Baptiste Reaume to stir up animosity against the Foxes among other tribes. With that set in motion, he also ordered French officials in the Illinois Country to be alert for any opportunities to destroy the Fox Tribe.

“Carte du Fort ou des Renards,” a map drawn in 1731 from accounts provided by French officers involved in the 1730 battle against the Fox Tribe proved Maramech Hill near Plano could not be the battle site. Click here for a larger copy. of the map.

At the same time, the bulk of the Fox Tribe had decided they’d had enough, and determined to leave their homeland and head back east to live under the protection of their one-time allies, the Iroquois. To that end they packed up and headed southeast with the intention of looping round the end of Lake Michigan down to Starved Rock and then east to cross the Wabash. The first part of their trip was uneventful, but when they reached Starved Rock, they attacked a group of Illinois Indians, capturing the son of one of that group’s chiefs, whom they burned at the stake. That infuriated the Illinois, who complained to the commandant at Fort de Chartres. For good measure, the Foxes had also attacked and angered groups of the Potawatomi, Kickapoo, and Mascouten tribes, which, it turned out played right into the hands of the French since Reaume had been goading all of them to attack the Fox for the past couple years.

From Starved Rock, the Foxes, with about 350 warriors and around 1,000 women, children, and old men, headed southeast, intending to cross the Wabash River. But having again angered the Illinois with their attacks, a force of about 200 Illinois warriors forced the Foxes to stop and build a fort to protect themselves. In the meantime, the French were calling on their Indian allies to join them to fight the Foxes.

The French forces eventually involved included Lieutenant Nicolas-Antoine Coulon de Villiers, Commandant at the River St. Joseph in modern southern Michigan; Lieutenant Robert Groston de St. Ange from Fort de Chartres; and Reaume. The allied French and Indian forces numbered about 1,400, and arrived to besiege the Foxes about Aug. 20, 1730.

This time, the Foxes’ luck against the French and their allies ran out. Low on food and water, the Foxes decided to make a desperate run for it during a violent thunderstorm the night of Sept. 8. Caught on the prairie outside their fortification, the Foxes were attacked and nearly exterminated. The battle did solve the Fox problem for the French, but it also served to sow dissent among their own allies. After all, if the French could exterminate one tribe, they could probably exterminate others.

In the late 1800s and early 1900s, John Steward of Plano decided this climactic battle took place Maramech Hill near Plano here in Kendall County. Armed with this conviction and a good deal of money, he set out to find information to prove his contention. In 1903, Steward published a book he felt proved his point, Lost Maramech and Earliest Chicago, and even had a huge rock moved to the hill and inscribed with his version of what be believed transpired there.

Steward’s contentions, however, were controversial from the beginning, with most historians pointing out the plain language of the French colonial documents Steward located in France proved Maramech Hill could not have been the battle’s location. His thesis suffered a serious blow in 1935 when Stanley Faye published “The Foxes Fort—1730” in The Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, an article that demolished most of Steward’s contentions. Some 50 years later, three contemporary maps of the battle and site that had been unavailable to Steward were discovered and described the Journal in 1980 (“The 1730 Fox Fort: A Recently Discovered Map Throws New Light on Its Siege and Location”) and 1987 (“The 1730 Siege of the Foxes: Two Maps by Canadian Participants Provide Additional Information on the Fort and Its Location”).

The carved granite boulder John F. Steward (right in photo) placed on Maramech Hill near Plano  to mark what he believed was the location of the climactic battle between the French and their Native American allies and the Fox Tribe in 1730.

That new evidence, combined with both old and newly discovered accounts of the battle have persuaded historians that Maramech Hill was not the site of the battle. Rather, it is probable it happened near Arrowsmith, Ill., located well to the south-southeast of Starved Rock, east of Bloomington in McLean County. Archaeological work at the Arrowsmith site has made it all but certain that was the location of the 1730 battle.

Maramech Hill in 1903

So, okay, the French-Fox battle of 1730 didn’t happen at Maramech Hill. What did go on there? Obviously, given the artifacts recovered by Steward, the site had been inhabited by Native Americans. As it turns out, many of the artifacts Steward recovered proved Maramech Hill had been the home of Native Americans for a long, long time—just not the ones he thought lived there.

The potsherds he recovered from the site, for instance, appear to be from the Mississippian cultural tradition, as do other stone tools such as hoes for working cornfields. The Mississippian culture was based on growing corn and on trade all over North America. Their capital was at modern Cahokia where upwards of 40,000 may have lived in the area surrounding Monk’s Mound, the largest manmade earthen structure in the Western Hemisphere. The river and creek bottomlands around Maramech Hill seem to have been tailor-made for the intensive agriculture practiced by the Mississippians.

But the artifacts Steward says he collected also point to habitation after the era of the French-Fox War as well, including trade silver that was created by British fur trade companies after the end of the French and Indian War in the late 1760s. Maramech Hill may have been the location of a Potawatomi village in the early 1800s led by Main Poche, a noted warrior who opposed the U.S. during the War of 1812.

Today, Maramech Hill and its immediate area are one of Kendall County’s most historically significant areas. Although Steward’s insistence that the climactic battle of 1730 between the French and the Fox Tribe happened there has been proven wrong over the last century and a quarter, the research into that era and the conflict between the Foxes and the French have proved to be extremely informative. For instance, warfare between the Fox Tribe and the French did not follow the familiar Hollywood script. Instead, the Foxes were able to develop the practical engineering expertise to blunt or thwart every French attack, including those involving artillery. In the end, it was lack of supplies that forced the Foxes to leave their fortified camp, leaving them vulnerable to an attack by a superior force. And while the battle didn’t happen here in Kendall County, it was part of the region’s history that made this its own “dark and bloody ground.’

The house legendary architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe designed and built for Dr. Edith Farnsworth draws visitors from all over the world to the Maramech Hill area.

Further, the area in which Maramech Hill is situated had its own fascinating history during the pioneer era and afterwards. Just down the road a bit from Maramech Hill, where the road—part of the old Fox River Trail stagecoach road from Ottawa to Geneva—crosses Rob Roy Creek was the tiny hamlet of Penfield, where a post office was established in December 1839. When Marcus Steward—John Steward’s father—established his new town along the right-of-way of the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad, the Penfield Post Office was moved to the new town on the railroad tracks, opening as Plano in May, 1854.

In addition, the neighborhood also features Kendall County’s only international attraction, the Farnsworth House, designed and built between 1945 and 1951 by famed architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe for Dr. Edith Farnsworth on the banks of the Fox River just a short distance from Maramech Hill. The architectural treasure annually draws thousands of visitors from around the world to see van der Rohe’s architectural gem.

Finally, thanks to the area’s topography, today the Maramech Hill area is also one of Kendall County’s natural jewels featuring rare and endangered plants, a startling variety of wildlife, and unique geographical features.

Prehistory and the region’s elaborate civilizations created by Native People, Illinois’ turbulent early frontier era, the era of settlement, its rare and endangered plants and animals, the nearby Silver Springs State Fish and Wildlife Area, and world-class architecture combine to make Maramech Hill and its surrounding region one of Kendall County’s most important and interesting areas.