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.

Recognizing military servicemen and women as another Memorial Day rolls around…

We’re preparing to observe another Memorial Day holiday—an observation my mother insisted on calling Decoration Day despite it’s official title having been changed many decades before her death.

On that day, it was our family tradition to visit relatives’ graves and decorate them with flowers, something that gave my parents a chance to tell me about the family stories involved with the people lying in the cemeteries we visited. The stories always fascinated me. In fact, they’re what piqued my interest in history all those many years ago growing up in the rural America of the 1950s.

My great-great-great uncle, Michael Wolf, is one of the Civil War veterans buried here in the Oswego Township Cemetery. Severely wounded at the Battle of Spotsylvania Courthouse, he died of complications due to his wounds in 1884. (Little White School Museum photo)

It was impossible to ignore, during those visits, the graves marked with small bronze plaques, each with a miniature American flag rippling in the breeze that denoted veterans’ graves, including some of the relatives whose graves we decorated. And as it turned out, the veterans whose graves drew my interest all those years ago were just the tip of the military service iceberg here in our small corner of northern Illinois. As I found out later in life as my interest in local history grew, veterans of every war in the nation’s history, starting with the Revolutionary War that created the nation, are buried on Kendall County soil.

From the resting place of Henry Misner in the Millington Cemetery—a Revolutionary War veteran of the Pennsylvania Line—to those who served in 1812, the Seminole Wars of the 1830s, and the Mexican War and who then marched off to the wars in places both near and far overseas, the service of these men and women is recalled by their tombstones and epitaphs.

That service began even before Kendall County was established in February 1841. In the spring of 1832, a band of around 1,200 men, women, and children of the Sauk and Fox tribes crossed into Illinois from the west bank of the Mississippi River with the intention of living with a Winnebago tribal group in northern Illinois. The problem was that the group of Sauk and Fox, led by the Sauk warrior Black Hawk, had previously agreed not to come back to Illinois. Their arrival created panic among American settlers, many of whom were squatting on land that still legally belonged to the two tribes. The situation also persuaded members of other tribes, disgruntled at the mostly illegal influx of White settlers across northern Illinois to retaliate against what they saw as injustices perpetrated against them.

The resulting conflict was called the Black Hawk War, named after the warrior who led his people back to Illinois from Iowa. Most all of the settlers in our own Fox River Valley left on learning about the rumor of war, fleeing either south to Ottawa or east to Chicago’s Fort Dearborn—whichever proved closer. Several of the settlers who had claimed land in what would become Kendall County—it had not been surveyed or put up for sale yet, so their presence was illegal—and who fled to Chicago volunteered for militia duty.

Among those early settlers volunteering to serve were Edmond Weed, George Hollenback, Edward Ament, Stephen Sweet, William Harris, Thomas Hollenback, and Anson Ament. Methodist missionaries Jesse Walker and Stephen Beggs of the Walker’s Grove settlement—now Plainfield—also volunteered. That unit only served for 14 days but after it dissolved many of the men in it volunteered to serve a longer hitch in another, more permanent unit.

The Black Hawk War was over by the summer of 1832 and was the last to be fought in Illinois. But other wars were to follow at regular intervals, each drawing either volunteers or draftees—or both—to fight for their country.

In 1846, for instance, President James K. Polk took the nation to war against Mexico. By that time, Kendall County had been established, the county seat had been moved to Oswego, and the era of settlement was coming to a close. Upon receipt of the news that war had been declared, a mass meeting was called at Oswego. A torchlight parade marched to the schoolhouse—then a one-room structure on Madison Street just south of Van Buren Street—where patriotic speeches were given and a number of local men agreed to volunteer.

Company D, 2nd Illinois Volunteer Infantry was recruited here in Kendall and Kane counties by Capt. A.R. Dodge, a prominent lawyer. According to early historian the Rev. E.W. Hicks, Kendall County men serving in the company included A. H. Kellogg, William Sprague. David W. Carpenter, John Sanders, John Roberts, George Roberts Aaron Fields, Edward Fields, James Lewis, Dr. Reuben Poindexter, William Joyce, Benjamin Van Doozer, and William Potter, along with a Mr. Tacker, Mr. Hunt, Mr. Hatch and Mr. Sheldon.

The 2nd Illinois and the 1st Illinois both fought in the fierce battle of Buena Vista that was a U.S. victory. They then served in garrison duty before being discharged in 1847 and sent home.

Kendall County men fought at the fierce Battle of Buena Vista during the Mexican American War.

The outbreak of the Civil War, when a confederation of Southern states attacked the U.S. Government in 1861, again saw a torchlight parade in Oswego, this time to the courthouse that hadn’t yet been completed in 1846. Again, patriotic speeches were given and men pledged to serve. But it wasn’t until 1862, when it became evident the war was not going to be a short one, that Kendall County men and boys began heading off to battle in earnest.

Eventually, nearly 1,500 county residents would serve, a huge percentage of the county’s total 1860 population of 13,000. The largest number of county residents served in the 20th, 36th, 89th, and 127th Illinois Volunteer Infantry Regiments and the 4th Illinois Volunteer Cavalry Regiment. Several eventual county residents also served in the U.S. Colored Troops after their service was authorized by President Lincoln. Kendall County’s only Medal of Honor winner, Robinson Barr Murphy, served as a drummer boy in the 127th Infantry, earning the medal when he was just 15. Several hundred of those who so confidently marched off to war never returned, most dying of rampant disease or the results of wounds. And many more returned only to deal with what a later generation would call post-traumatic stress disorder as well as the lingering effects of wounds or hard military service.

Kendall County men also served in the 1896 Spanish American War, including Philip Clauser of Oswego, but the conflict—described as “A splendid little war” by future president Theodore Roosevelt—was over too quickly to draw many into service.

Getting ready for the 1919 “Welcome Home” celebration for World War I veterans who marched through downtown Yorkville to a celebration dinner on the grounds of the Kendall County Courthouse. (Little White School Museum collection)

U.S. participation in World War I also drew a number of Kendall County men into service, and this time, women like Oswego’s Mary Cutter also served, especially as nurses and YMCA volunteers. A total of 487 soldiers served and three—Archie Lake, Oswego; Leon Burson, Plano; and Fred Thompson, Yorkville—were killed in action.

The U.S. entered World War II when the Japanese Imperial Navy attacked the U.S. Naval Base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii on Dec. 7, 1941. The German government declared war on us a few days later. In that conflict, about the same number of county residents, both men and women, served in the nation’s armed forces as served during the Civil War, this time amounting to more than 10 percent of the county’s total 1940 population of 11,100. Of the total who served from Kendall County, 32 were killed in action.

My second cousin, Sgt. Frank Clauser, was killed in action during World War II, shot down over the Medeterrain Sea during a bombing raid against Italy. (Little White School Museum photo)

And this time, those who objected to service that might cause them to kill others also honorably served the nation in other capacities, from battlefield medics to volunteering for experimental subjects that pushed medical science forward—and received official government recognition for doing so in the Alternative Service Program.

The county’s participation in military service to the nation continued during the Cold War era as well as the terrorism wars in the late 20th and early 21st centuries as soldiers went off to fight in the snows of Korea and the jungles of Vietnam and then to the deserts of the Middle East where so much religious and political turmoil has roiled the entire globe.

Starting as the Civil War ended, it became a tradition for young girls to decorate the graves of that war’s dead with bouquets of flowers. As Oswegoan Lorenzo Rank explained in 1898: “The spirit that then moved the decorators was that of pity; a pity that these young lives should have been sacrificed; that kind of practice would have tended towards aversion to war.”

Gradually, however, Decoration Day became a commemoration of the dead in all the nation’s wars and was renamed “Memorial Day.” This year’s commemoration will be held throughout the nation on Monday, May 29.

In between the normal holiday activities, why not take a few moments to recall the service so many of our men and women have provided to the nation through the years?

Plenty of people already lived in the Fox Valley when the first settlers got here…

Out in North Carolina, a friend of David Evans who had served with the U.S. Army during the Black Hawk War of 1832 told Evans of the richness of the Illinois prairies west of Chicago. So in 1833—the Year of the Early Spring—Evans headed west prospecting for good land. 

Following his friend’s directions, Evans traveled up the Illinois River to Ottawa and then up the Fox River, counting tributaries until he got to Big Rock Creek. He followed the creek two and a half miles upstream until he found a spot he wanted and there he staked his claim.

“There were none to dispute his claim; no mark of white man’s hand was anywhere to be seen,” Evans’ son told Kendall County’s first historian, the Rev. E.W. Hicks, in 1877.

While “no mark of the white man’s hand was anywhere to be seen,” there were plenty of marks on the landscape made by other hands—namely those of the Fox Valley’s Native American residents.

This map from Atlas of Great Lakes Indian History, published by the University of Oklahoma Press at Norman in 1987, (with the Fox River marked in green) shows the number of Potawatomi villages on the mid-Fox River in 1830.

In the early 1830s, the local Native People were living in a number of villages dotting the banks of the Fox River. A map in the Atlas of Great Lakes Indian History (University of Oklahoma Press, 1987) located several Potawatomi villages on our stretch of the Fox River south of, roughly, Elgin and north of Indian Creek, included the named villages of their leaders Waubonsee, Shaytee, Naysosay, and Awnkote, plus two more unnamed villages north of Waubonsee’s. And that doesn’t even count the other villages on the DuPage and DesPlaines rivers.

“The Year of the Early Spring,” as the settlers dubbed it, persuaded dozens of families to move west to the Illinois frontier, including many of Kendall County’s best-known pioneers. But the uncomfortable fact about that influx—the Fox Valley’s first real population explosion—was that those who came were illegal squatters.

The federal government had concluded a number of treaties over the years with the resident Native People that resulted in the cession of much of their land. But the treaty provisions promised that the resident Native Americans would have the use of the lands until the land was officially surveyed and put up for sale. And in 1833, the day when most of the land in the Fox River Valley would be surveyed was still four or five years in the future and the day it would be put up for sale was still nearly a decade away.

The friction caused by squatters illegally moving onto Indian land in northern Illinois was the main cause of the bloodshed that was called the Black Hawk War. Settlers seized the lands occupied by the Sac and Fox Tribes in western Illinois, badly beating the Sac warrior Black Hawk when he complained about the thefts.

The Sac warrior Black Sparrow Hawk, whose name was shortened to Black Hawk by American officials, tried, unsuccessfully, to peacefully live among White settlers. His efforts actually caused a war in which hundreds of his people were killed.

Here in the Fox Valley, a belligerent pioneer, William Davis, built a dam on Indian Creek in what is today northern LaSalle County just over the Kendall County border. The dam, just upstream from the creek’s mouth, was to power a mill Davis planned to build. But the dam prevented fish from the river swimming upstream to a Potawatomi village that relied on the fish for food. When a prominent warrior from the village complained, Davis severely beat him. When Black Hawk led his band of Sac and Fox men, women, and children back across the Mississippi to Illinois from Iowa, the resulting panic and eventual fighting offered a chance to settle scores, including the problem on Indian Creek. The resulting attack by Indians on the Davis claim led to the deaths of 14 settlers.

The continual friction between the Native People and settlers had led to passage by Congress of the Indian Removal Act of 1830. President Andrew Jackson strongly supported the legislation. The eastern “Five Civilized Tribes” of the Cherokees, Chickasaws, Choctaws, Creeks, and Seminoles were first to be forced on a “Trail of Tears” west across the Mississippi to what’s today Oklahoma. By 1833, it was the turn of the Potawatomi, Ottawa, and Chippewa tribes here in northern Illinois to be forced west to free up land for the growing number of settlers arriving almost daily.

To that end, the U.S. Government called thousands of members from the three tribes to Chicago in September 1833 to negotiate the cession of all their land east of the Mississippi. The negotiations got off to a strained start when the government negotiator announced to tribal representatives that officials in Washington had heard the Indians wished to sell their land. To which the Indians replied they had no idea where the government had gotten such an idea and that they had no intention of selling their land.

Several days of both above and below board bargaining followed before initial deals were reached to give the tribes rich land now in the extreme northeast corner of Missouri in exchange for their Illinois land plus other possible lands in Iowa. But the tide of settlement was already moving beyond the Mississippi and by the time the removal of the tribes really got underway a few years later, settlers were already moving into the lands reserved for the tribes.

Over the next few years, other areas were picked and had to be abandoned forcing the tribes to move off of before they were finally and permanently settled in Kansas on land much different in quality, climate, and topography from their northern Illinois tribal lands.

Although Waubonsee, war chief of the Prairie Band of the Potawatomi Tribe was rewarded for his pro-American stance during the Black Hawk War, he was still forced west of the Mississippi with the rest of his people in 1836. (Original image in the author’s collection)

There were, in fact, several instances of Native People leaving the lands the government picked for them out west and returning to their old homes in northern Illinois, Indiana, and Michigan before they were again removed by government agents back west again. Sometimes, the cause was because they were simply homesick for their old homelands, while other times it was because the government-mandated reservations were too close to traditional tribal enemies.

In other cases, land that had been given by the government to various Native American tribal bands, as opposed to individuals, was simply stolen. Such a case was that of Chief Shabbona’s land in what is today DeKalb County. Litigation over its theft continues to this day.

It’s interesting to read the accounts left by early settlers who reminisce about arriving from their Eastern homes and settling onto an empty landscape. The landscape, of course, was far from empty, but those settlers were able to ignore entire villages, home to hundreds of Native American men, women, and children, apparently because their lifestyles didn’t match the of the new arrivals. Some of those Eastern pioneers expressed a little sadness that the forced departure of the region’s Native People meant the end of a historical era. Most others, though, were firmly in the “Manifest Destiny” camp that White settlement was part of unstoppable progress that eventually led to removing Native People from as much of the landscape as possible from Illinois all the way to the Pacific Ocean. For that majority group, naming local landmarks or new political divisions for the displaced tribes and their leaders was about as far as they’d go in recognizing those who had populated the region for centuries before the first Whites arrived to make their new homes on the Illinois prairies.

Celebrating the 190th anniversary of “The Year of the Early Spring”

It’s really no longer realistic to deny that climate change and the weather it’s causing are having major geopolitical effects.

Back in the early 2000’s, Syrian drought may have contributed to the start of the Syrian civil war that further destabilized the Middle East. And now, much warmer than usual winter temperatures in Europe are blunting Vladimir Putin’s attempt to blackmail NATO into stopping their support of Ukraine by cutting off natural gas supplies. Thanks to those warmer temperatures, Europe’s natural gas usage is so much lower than usual that its price is actually declining.

Meanwhile here in the U.S., climate change is creating extreme weather events that are happening far more often and that are far more destructive than in the past. And those of us old enough are watching the actual change in climate. Those snowy, sub-zero northern Illinois winters of our past have gradually given way to winters that feature some early low temperatures and snowfalls followed by generally milder late winters than in the past.

As you might think, then, climate also had some major effects on northern Illinois during the settlement era when the warming of the globe had started but wasn’t really noticeable, not to mention the lack of our modern cold weather gear, from Thinsulate gloves to comfy coats and insulated boots.

The 1830-1831 Winter of the Deep Snow plagued everyone in the Old Northwest, from the region’s Native People to the newly arrived White settlers then starting to move into the area. The aftermath of the privations the winter caused the region’s Native People may have even been one of the causes of 1832’s Black Hawk War. And while the following winter of 1832-1833 was not as hard, it was also a difficult one for the new arrivals out here on the northern Illinois prairies.

The grueling Winter of the Deep Snow led to privation and death for White settlers and Native People alike. Fireplaces consumed between 11 and 17 cords of firewood during a regular winter, each cord a stack of logs measuring 4 feet wide, 4 feet high, and 8 feet long, all of which had to be cut, stacked, and split by hand.

But Mother Nature wasn’t always trying to thrust misery on us humans. Sometimes the weather offered an unexpected boost. And that was the case in the new year of 1833.

As the county’s first historian, the Rev. E.W. Hicks, reported in his 1877 history of Kendall County: “The year 1833 opened out splendidly, as if to make amends for the hardships of the year before. The snow went away in February, and early in March the sheltered valleys and nooks by the groves were beautifully green, and by the end of the month, stock could live on the prairies anywhere. It was an exceedingly favoring Providence for the few pioneers who remained on their claims; for had the spring been cold and backward, much more suffering must have followed. The tide of emigration set in early, and in one summer more than trebled the population of the county.”

The extended Pearce family was among the first to arrive, rolling up on June 1 to the claims they’d staked the year before. The party consisted of Daniel, John, Walter, and Elijah Pearce and their brother-in-law, William Smith Wilson. Elijah and wife settled north a bit, on the east side of the Fox at what’s now Montgomery and so did their son-in-law, Jacob Carpenter. Daniel and his wife and children chose land along Waubonsie Creek where Fox Bend Golf Course and Windcrest Subdivision are now located in Oswego. Wilson, their brother-in-law built his cabin at what is now the busy “Five Corners” intersection in downtown Oswego where modern Ill. Route 25 and U.S. Route 34 meet. John and Walter, meanwhile, settled on the west side of the river.

Earl Adams and Ebenezer Morgan had staked their claims in what eventually became Kendall County in 1831, but were prevented from settling here in 1832 by the Black Hawk War. The two men and their families arrived in 1833, Adams at his claim on what is now Courthouse Hill in Yorkville and Morgan along the creek near Oswego bears his name.

Many of the earliest settlers who had been uprooted by the Black Hawk War also decided to return in 1833, setting back in their former homes, if they were still standing. George B. Hollenback moved from the site of his old store to a site not far away, thus becoming the first settler in what became Newark after being known for several years as Georgetown. John Doughtery and Walter Selvey came back to their claims, too.

In 1833, John Schneider chose a spot at the mouth of Blackberry Creek across the Fox River from Yorkville as the site of his new sawmill. Here’s what the area looked like when U.S. Government surveyors mapped it in 1837.

Millwright John Schneider had helped Joseph Naper build his mill on the DuPage River at what eventually became Naperville. In 1833 he came farther west to the Fox Valley looking for a likely mill site. He found it at Blackberry Creek’s mouth on the Fox, and staked his claim with the intention of building a mill the next year.

New Yorkers John and William Wormley walked west from the Empire State and made their claims on the west side of the Fox River just above where Oswego would one day be located.

In May, a wagon train with Joel Alvard, William and Joseph Groom, Madison Goisline and Goisline’s brother-in-law, Peter Minkler, and their, families, along with Polly Alvard, a widow with two children, and two unmarried men, Edward Alvard and Jacob Bare, headed west from Albany County, N. Y., with the goal of settling in Tazewell County here in Illinois. It was an arduous journey as they battled through the infamous Black Swamp bordering Lake Erie to the south and then making the numerous river and wetland crossings here in Illinois. In the end, Peter Minkler decided to settle not far from what would become the Village of Oswego along the trail that today is a busy road carrying his family’s name.

Thanks to Peter Specie, Smith Minkler, Peter Minkler’s son, obtained seedlings that he used to breed the famed Minkler Apple, a commercial favorite during the era when cider and cider vinegar were big business.

Shortly after arriving, two of the Minkler party—Peter Minkler’s mother and his brother-in-law—both died. Old Mrs. Minkler’s death was blamed on the rigors of the trip west from New York, while his brother-in-law Madison Goisline accidentally shot himself in the shoulder while pulling his rifle out of his wagon, and soon died of infection.

Out in North Carolina, David Evans heard about the richness of northern Illinois from a friend who served with the U.S. Army during the Black Hawk War. Evans apparently came by river, down the Ohio and then up the Mississippi to the Illinois where he followed his friend’s directions up to Ottawa. From there, he followed the Fox River up to Big Rock Creek, and walked up the creek for a couple miles where he staked his claim, becoming the first settler in Little Rock Township. He built his cabin there and the next year brought his family west.

John Darnell, another North Carolinian, had settled with his parents and brothers in Marshall County, located about midway between LaSalle-Peru and Peoria in 1829. In 1833, hearing good things about the Fox River Valley, he came north and staked a claim in the timber along Little Rock Creek. The word he sent back to Marshall County was so enthusiastic that in 1834, his parents and five brothers all decided to settle here as well.

Meanwhile down in modern Seward Township, Hugh Walker had staked a claim, broke 10 acres of prairie sod and planted wheat in the spring of 1832, only to be run off by the Black Hawk War. He sold his claim to Chester House in 1833. The grove on the claim was soon named for the House family—the location of today’s House’s Grove Forest Preserve. Mrs. House was well-known for keeping a candle burning at night in their cabin’s west window as a guidepost for prairie travelers. “So level was the prairie, and so clear from underbrush and trees, that the feeble ‘light in the window’ could be seen for six or eight miles,” Hicks reported in 1877.

Former French-Canadian fur trader Peter Specie earned money by renting his yokes of oxen and prairie breaking plow to newly arrived Kendall County settlers. It cost nearly as much to break the tough prairie sod as it did to buy the land.

Vermonter John Shurtliff had arrived at Plainfield in 1831. In 1833, he moved west out onto the prairie about a mile from House’s claim, settling along AuSable Creek. Shurtliff hired early entrepreneur Peter Specie to break seven acres of prairie as a start, repaying Specie by driving his breaking team for a month.

Arriving around the same time was Daniel Platt, another New Yorker. In 1785, his family had established Plattsburgh in that state. He, however, decided to try his luck in the west, arriving in 1833. For $80, he bought “The Springs” from the Rev. William See—today’s Plattville—and thereby the Platts became the first settlers in Lisbon Township.

Meanwhile in today’s Big Grove Township, more New Yorkers arrived, this time from the hotbed of anti-slavery agitation, Oneida County. Brothers Eben and Levi Hills along with William Perkins and their families all arrived in 1833, Eben coming by wagon with the families and Levi and William came west via the lakes. It was still rare for lakes shipping traffic to arrive at Chicago in 1833 because the harbor wouldn’t be completed for another year. In 1833, in fact, only four ships arrived at Chicago. In 1834, however, the Federal Government financed digging a channel through the sandbar at the mouth of the Chicago River to create a safe harbor for ships. That led to an explosion of ship arrivals at Chicago, 250 in 1835, 456 in 1836 and the number continued to grow every year.

The year 1833 wasn’t memorable simply for all the families who arrived to settle out here on the prairies near the Fox River, however. The final treaty with the region’s Native People was signed in Chicago in 1833 that ceded their land east of the Mississippi River—and some west of the river, too—to the U.S. Government. Three years later, government officials backed by the U.S. Army moved the region’s Native Americans west and away from their ancestral lands.

And as the year came to a close, Mother Nature put on an astonishing light display for all the new settlers to look on with awe. On the Nov. 10, 1833, a huge meteor storm lit up the night sky in spectacular fashion the settlers named “The Night of the Falling Stars.”

“Those who saw it never forgot it to their dying day,” historian Hicks reported.

This year, we’re celebrating the 190th anniversary of that momentous “Year of the Early Spring” that brought so many of the Fox Valley’s first settlers west to Illinois. And interestingly enough, there are still plenty of descendants around these parts of some of the enterprising, intrepid folks who ventured out of the Eastern forests onto the tallgrass prairies of northern Illinois to make a better life for their families.

Before the colors fade: A young Oswego “daredevil” jumped into Pacific Theatre combat

My friend Stan Young died on Nov. 9.

He was my best friend’s dad, so I literally grew up with him. He was a sort of building genius here in town, and in my adult years I had him do a number of projects at our house. He was absolutely top-notch in maintaining our house’s Queen Anne architectural elements, making additions or improvements look like they’d always been there.

Stan Young (left at top of ladder) and his son, Glenn installed the finial Stan made for the top of the Little White School Museum’s bell tower in 1983 the day before the museum gallery opened for the first time. (Little White School Museum collection)

Back in 1977, when we started restoring the Little White School Museum, Stan volunteered to take on a number of projects, mostly donating his labor for free. Those projects included stabilizing and replacing the building’s timber front sill that had been badly rotted out over the years and replacing floor joists in the building’s entry, recreating the building’s wooden front porch, and then recreating and installing its iconic bell tower. His last big project was recreating the finial atop the bell tower, something he and his son, Glenn, installed the day before the museum in the building opened in 1983.

A lifelong resident of Oswego, Stan joined the Army when he was drafted on Jan. 12, 1943. He volunteered for the paratroopers and fought in several engagements in the Philippines, making four combat parachute drops. Serving in the headquarters company of the 1st Battalion, 511th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 11th Airborne Division as a mortar gunner, Young eventually rose to the rank of staff sergeant by the end of the war.

Several years ago, he retired from both contracting and owning, with his wife Lydia, Scotty’s Restaurant in Oswego and moved to Mena, Arkansas. And after battling some increasingly serious health issues, that’s where he died at age 99 after a long and very eventful life.

Stanley Young’s Oswego High School senior class photo. (Little White School Museum collection)

Back in August 1985 to commemorate the 40th anniversary of VJ Day marking the victory over the Japanese in World War II, I interviewed Stan for the Ledger-Sentinel and finally got him to talk a bit about his years in the military, something he never really spoke of—other than to note one time that one of the guys in his company was always going around writing stuff and eventually became involved with television. That literary former paratrooper turned out to have been Rod Serling of “The Twilight Zone” fame.

Born and raised in Oswego to a family that had been in the area since the 1830s, Stan was popular in the community as a youngster. At Oswego High School, he was involved in just about every activity that was offered, from sports to helping produce the yearbook, to his election as senior class president. He graduated with the Class of 1941 and attended teacher’s college in Winona, Minnesota before being drafted.

Although he wanted to be a paratrooper, he was nearly talked out of it before he left for the service. As he related the story to me back in 1985:

“It’s a funny story and it’s kind of a sad story as well. I had always thought I’d like to jump out of a plane with a parachute. 1 Just was kind of a little daredevil in those days, and I thought it would be fun. The last day when I was leaving, my mother said, ‘You’re not going to get into paratroops, are you?’ and I said, ‘No, I don’t think they’d accept me anyway.’

“So, riding in on the train, my best buddy that I had gone through school with from first grade was Stuart Parkhurst. And he said, ‘Let’s get into paratroops.’ And 1 said ‘No, I told my mother I probably wouldn’t.’ He said, ‘Aw, come on. You get better pay, nicer uniforms; you get your own special camps. It would be neat!’ And I said, ‘Well, it probably wouldn’t hurt me.’

“So, I volunteered that I wanted to be in the paratroops, and the first thing they said to me was, ‘I don’t think you want to be in the paratroops.’ And I said that I really did, and they had me sign some other papers and take some more physicals. At noon 1 got out of all that, and I said, ‘Stu! I made it! I made it! How’d you do?’ And he said, ‘They told me they didn’t think I wanted to be in it and I decided not to.’

“He subsequently went into an infantry outfit and was killed over in Europe. So, I made it and came through alright, and he didn’t and he was in what he thought was a safer outfit. If they got your number, they got your number.

“Initially, we went to Tacoa, Ga., where the unit was formed and then to Camp McCall, N.C. where we took parachute jump training. By then the division (l1th Airborne) had solidified and was preparing for duty in the South Pacific. We trained additionally at Camp Polk, La., and shipped out in April of ’44 for New Guinea. There we trained additionally. We made a few more parachute jumps and did some more jungle training, preparatory to going to the Philippines.

11th Airborne Division Paratrooper Stan Young, 1943. (Little White School Museum collection)

“In November of that year, they put us on a ship and we arrived at Leyte [an island in the Philippine Group]. When we got there, they had concluded that the war was about over there, as far as Leyte was concerned, and we were to go into a mop-up operation. But when we arrived, new troops arrived from Japan on the opposite side of the islan—and also paratroops and ships and airplanes attacked, and we had a full-scale war instead of a mop-up operation.

“We were in combat there for about 30 days in the jungles and mountains of Leyte, and the mountain where we were was subsequently named Starvation Ridge. We didn’t eat for five days from the time the last C-ration was gone, and we were on one-third of a C-ration at THAT time. Every time they air-dropped something, the Japs got to it before we did because of the heavy fog and mist, because they kind of had us surrounded there.

“We finally got back to the beach about Christmas. About mid-January we got on some little landing craft and sailed across the Philippine Sea to Mindoro Island, not knowing where we were going at the time. There we enplaned and made a combat parachute drop about 37 miles south of Manila. We marched a shuttle march, the entire 511th Parachute Regiment, with us walking and being shuttled forward by the three trucks we had, to a little village. And here all hell broke loose. We arrived just before dark and they gave us the option of digging in. The ground was like sandstone. About that time, the artillery started hitting and we decided it was about time to start digging in. We took several casualties before we did dig m and they were lobbing mortar rounds and artillery right into our position.

“We were there until June, in that area, from February until June. At one time I figured it was 102 days that I didn’t lay down to sleep, that we slept in the ground sitting up in our foxholes. We were in some pretty intense combat.

Troopers from the 511th Parachute Infantry Regiment get ready to enplane for the Raid on Los Baños to free the roughly 2,000 prisoners the Japanese housed there. (History Net photo)

“Along with it, we freed one of the Japanese prison camps where they held a bunch of Catholic nuns and priests. There were some showgirls and prostitutes and dancers; some businessmen; some Americans; some Spanish and other nationalities. They were holding them at Los Baños near Santa Rosa.

“It was about that time there was a lull in Southern Luzon. We went, at one point, into this little town of Santa Rosa and they said they had a festival. What it was was several Japanese collaborators had been captured and they were going to punish them. We saw them execute three men by slow degrees–torture. It was horrifying. For the grand finale, they had a woman. They tied her to a post in the square, put rice straw all around it, threw gasoline on it, and set it on fire. I’ll tell you, it’s quite a shock. We were told we were not to interfere with the Philippine guerillas in any way.

“We eventually took Luzon Province. On June 23, we were enplaned and flew to the very tip of Luzon Island and engaged in a parachute jump there, but there was no combat. All the Japs pulled back.

There I sustained a serious shoulder injury and was taken to the hospital. I was released on July 20, and we entered into a training program, and the word was out we were to make a jump on Japan proper. But then the scuttlebutt had it that a big bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima and subsequently another one was dropped [on Nagasaki].

“When they said the Japs had given up, there about the middle of August, 1 have never seen so much jubilation in my entire life. I think that was the happiest moment of my life, when they said the Japanese had surrendered, because I figured there was new life. Regardless of any joys I have ever had over anything in the whole world, ever, that was the happiest single moment. And I would imagine any of the guys who were there would agree with me. Guys were running up and down the company street, running in and out of tents, you never saw such running and jubilation! You can’t imagine the jubilance!

“Some people say, ‘I bet it was thrilling;’ and others say, ‘I bet you miss your old buddies and I bet that was exciting.’”

“Hey—none of the above. It was horrible. 1 can look back and say 1 was there and it was interesting, but it was a horrible thing. And to hear it happened again in Korea and Vietnam, you wonder why aren’t people smarter? They learn to build huge buildings and marvelous communications systems and yet two people can’t even sit side by side in a bar and keep from arguing and then they carry that right on to country to country.

“If there’s one thing 1 brought back with me, it’s a total aversion to violence of any kind. I can’t even stand to watch it on television. If it comes on, 1 just get up and turn it off. I had enough of the real thing.”

After the end of the war was announced, Stan was among those on one of the first, if not THE first, Allied planes to land Allied military forces in Japan to take that country’s surrender. Given how ferocious the Japanese military had been during combat I asked him if he and his buddies were worried about what kind of reception they’d get when they touched down at that Japanese military base. He replied that, yes, there was worry, but it turned out once the emperor told the military to surrender, they did it virtually without incident.

As a sort of sidelight, both of Stan’s brothers also fought through the Pacific. John, an Army Air Corps pilot, eventually flew 50 missions in A-20 Havoc bombers, also in McArthur’s campaign through New Guinea and the Philippines. Brother Dick, a Marine, was wounded three times on Iwo Jima in the Navy’s island-hopping campaign. Stan and John were even able to meet once in January 1945. As reported back home in the Kendall County Record: “Mr. and Mrs. Dwight Young have three sons in the service for two years. Two of the boys met in the Philippines on Jan 25. Lt. John S., a pilot, landed on an island and heard that his brother, Corporal Stanley, was on the same island. Obtaining a jeep he drove 20 miles, found his brother, who was more surprised than words can tell. The two had a fine time for about two hours when the party had to break up. John reports Stanley as looking fine and strong. Lt. John has 13 missions.”

And the boys’ father, Dwight, was involved in the Pacific Theatre as well, although not in direct combat. Instead, he was a self-taught physicist who was working on something called The Manhattan Project in New Mexico. That “big bomb” Stan heard about through the paratroopers’ scuttlebutt was partly his dad’s handiwork.

After the war was finally over, all three of the Young boys found they’d survived and came home to resume their lives, and they made good ones, too. Stan was the last of the three, surviving to 99 years despite not playing it safe in 1943 like his best friend. Stu Parkhurst.

Before the colors fade: Local heroes who hid in plain sight…

During my 1950s childhood, we all envied friends whose dads were World War II veterans because so many of them had such cool war souvenirs. From web belts and canteens to equipment pouches, first aid kits, and even U.S. Army leather holsters, that stuff enlivened our hours playing “War.”

But little did we know that several of those dads—and even a few moms—had done far more than their part during the war, only to be determined to come back home to our little corner of northern Illinois and get back into “real life.” In fact, about the only time we saw any evidence of those folks’ service was during the annual Memorial Day Parade when they marched with our local American Legion Post to the cemetery to honor the nation’s war dead.

But from the director of the local funeral home to the carpenter down the street, many of them had stories of pivotal events they’d participated in that they simply didn’t want to discuss with anyone who hadn’t also participated in the same kinds of things they’d seen and done. So they kept their peace in public, lived productive lives by contributing to their communities, and have now passed on leaving others to piece together tales of the sacrifices they made to save their country during the momentous events of the war years.

Two men who spent almost their entire lives in our then-little town are excellent examples of those who served. Their service took them to opposite sides of the globe from each other, but after the war and returning home, they became related by marriage.

When it came to winning World War II, the combat arms of the Army, Navy, Marines, and Air Corps have justifiably gotten most of the attention. But there were hundreds of thousands of others who also fought and died to win the war, from the merchant mariners manning the Liberty Ships carrying vital Lend-Lease supplies across the oceans, to truckers who kept the supplies going to front line troops.

In September, Oswego’s Little White School Museum received two donations from long-time Oswegoland Heritage Association member and frequent donor Barbara Wolf Wood that added to our knowledge of how some of those unheralded participants in the war not only did their duty for their country, but helped win it.

The materials donated came from the estates of Oswegoans Ray Leifheit and Merrill Wolf. Leifheit served in Company C, 9th Armored Engineering Battalion in the European Theatre of operations while Wolf served in the Seabees in the Pacific Theatre.

Merrill Wolf

The Merrill Wolf donation included his Seabee footlocker, two complete uniforms—his blues and his whites—a 1940s hard hat, and a pair of khaki shorts of the kind Seabees wore during their hard work maintaining the pipeline of supplies to Marine and Navy fighters as well as building the ports and airfields on once unknown Pacific islands to allow the bombing raids on Japan that eventually led to its surrender.

The Seabees were the construction experts for the Navy and Marines. The name stems from the initials for Construction Battalion. The force was created by Rear Admiral Ben Moreell just weeks after the Japanese attack of Pearl Harbor. The original authorization was for a naval construction regiment consisting of three naval construction battalions to be comprised of construction tradesmen. Adm. Moreell realized that using civilian construction crews for the ports and airfields the Navy would need as they leapfrogged across the Pacific simply wouldn’t work. As the U.S. Naval History and Heritage Command put it: “Under international law civilians were not permitted to resist enemy military attack. Resistance meant summary execution as guerrillas.”

Wolf, an electrician, enlisted in the Seabees in June 1943 at the age of 32.

He subsequently served throughout the Pacific Theatre, aboard LST-244, working as an Electrical Mechanic First Class. LST-244, was a large ship designed to land tanks and other heavy equipment directly ashore. Ironically, LST-244 was built not far from Wolf’s home in Oswego at Evansville, Indiana. Launched on Aug. 13, 1943, the ship sailed down the Ohio River and then down the Mississippi River to New Orleans. From there it was down to Panama and through the canal to the Pacific. Reaching the Pacific Theatre of Operations, the ship and crew participated in the Gilbert Islands Campaign in November and December, 1943; the invasion of Kwajalein and Majuro atolls in February 1944; the capture and occupation of Guam, July and August 1944; and the bloody assault and occupation of Okinawa, April 1945.

Landing Ships, Tank (LSTs) under construction at the Evansville, Indiana shipyard on the Ohio River. The ships were launched sideways into the river. From there, they sailed to the Mississippi River, and down to New Orleans. The shipyard employed 19,000 workers at its height. Today, one of the LSTs like those built there is on exhibit as a fully-operational museum ship. (Courtesy of Evansville Museum/Evansville Vanderburgh Public Library)

After Japan’s surrender on Aug. 15, 1945, Wolf continued to serve on Okinawa for a few more months. When his discharge number came up, he was shipped directly from there back to the U.S. As the Kendall County Record reported on Nov. 13, 1945: “Merrill Wolf, who had the rank of Electrical Mechanic 1-C, received his honorable discharge at Great Lakes on Nov. 10 and came home to his wife and two little daughters. The younger, June Anne, 17 months, he had never seen. He had been in the Pacific for two years, coming home directly from Okinawa to Seattle and thence to Great Lakes.”

A future brother-in-law already in the Army Engineers

By the time Merrill Wolf enlisted, his future brother-in-law, Ray Leifheit, had been serving in the U.S. Army for almost two years. A carpenter by trade living in the Yorkville area, before the war Leifheit had volunteered for three years to serve in Company E, a unit of the Illinois National Guard’s 129th Infantry Regiment based here in Kendall County at tiny Plattville.

Raymond Leifheit

After induction into the U.S. Army, Leifheit was eventually assigned to Company C, 9th Armored Engineer Battalion, an engineering unit attached to the 9th Armored Division.

He was shipped overseas to England in August 1944, where the 9th Armored Division and the 9th Engineers underwent additional training before being sent to France in October 1944 to aid in the defeat of Germany. The engineers assisted the division in its move across France, first seeing action in northern Luxembourg. The battalion was in the Ardennes Forest area in December 1944 when the Germans launched their surprise offensive that became known as the Battle of the Bulge.

Leifheit and the rest of his Company C mates found themselves desperately fighting to slow down the German armored spearhead. As U.S. forces retreated, C Company engineering troops worked hard continually creating new defensive positions, blocking roads and destroying bridges, and even fighting as infantry as they withdrew, finally reaching the strategic crossroads of Bastogne on Dec. 19. The engineers then returned to their engineering skills and from Dec. 20-27 blocked six roads south and east of Bastogne to check German assaults from those directions.

It was during the furious fighting to block those roads on Dec. 26 that Leifheit was seriously wounded and captured by the German Army. He was initially listed as missing in action, but in April his parents in Yorkville finally got the good news that he was indeed alive.

A U.S. Army engineer prepares to drop a tree onto a road near Bastogne in December 1944 during the Battle of the Bulge. Oswego’s Ray Leifheit served in Company C, 9th Armored Engineer Battalion during the battle. (Courtesy To Those Who Served website)

As the Kendall County Record reported on April 11, 1945: “Mr. and Mrs. R.W. Leifheit received the glad tidings in the form of a telegram on April 7 from the War Department stating that their son, T-5 Raymond Leifheit, who was reported as missing in action Dec. 26, in Belgium, was a prisoner of war of the German government. Many friends and relatives rejoice with them at this word and hope he will soon be released to return home.”

He had been treated in German military hospitals for two months after being wounded before he was liberated by Allied forces, and then spent more time in U.S. Military Hospitals before being finally sent home.

It took some time before he was completely healed. But he eventually did, getting back to his old carpentry profession.

Then on Jan. 3, 1948, he married Mary Wolf, sister of former Seabee Merrill Wolf.

Thanks to those recent donations from Wolf family descendants, the stories of these two World War II veterans will be preserved in the collections of the Little White School Museum, along with so many other stories of the men and women who have gone off to serve their nation in both war and peace, and whose memories the museum is committed to preserving.

As part of their mission to preserve the achievements of the hundreds of men and women from Oswego who have served their country for the last 190 years, the Little White School Museum, 72 Polk Street, Oswego, will host their “Remembering Our Veterans” special exhibit starting Thursday, Nov. 10 and running through Sunday, Nov. 27. Regular museum hours are Thursday and Friday, 2 to 6:30 p.m.; Saturday and Sunday, 9 a.m. to 2 p.m.; and Monday, 4-9 p.m. The museum, located just two blocks east of Oswego’s historic downtown business district, is closed on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. Admission is free, but donations are always gratefully accepted. For more information, call the museum at 630-554-2999, check the museum web site, http://www.littlewhiteschoolmuseum.org, or email info@littlewhiteschoolmuseum.org.

The era when the Fox River Valley’s Native People and settlers lived along side each other

Starting in 1835, under terms of the Indian Removal Act of 1830, the Fox Valley’s Native Americans were forcibly moved west of the Mississippi River.

But that meant the region’s white settlers lived alongside their Native American neighbors for roughly a decade. How were relations between the two groups? An honest appraisal would have to say those relations were mixed.

By the time whites began settling the region between Chicago and the Fox River Valley, the area was mostly populated by bands of the Three Fires Confederacy. About 1745, reports that the interrelated tribes of the Illinois Confederacy had become so weakened they could no longer claim control of that area prompted the Three Fires member tribal bands to move south from their current homelands in Michigan and Wisconsin to fill the vacuum created by the Illinois’ difficulties.

A cultural mixture of the Potawatomi, Chippewa, and Ottawa tribal bands, Three Fires villages soon dotted the banks of the Fox, DesPlaines, DuPage, and Illinois rivers. The member tribal groups had been hostile to the United States until the end of the War of 1812, after which they determined to live in peace with Americans.

Ottawa, located at the head of steam navigation on the Illinois River, was the jumping off spot for many of Kendall County’s earliest settlers. This 1845 map of the area west of Chicago was published in the Guide Through Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, Wisconsin & Iowa. Showing the Township lines of the United States Surveys by J. Calvin Smith. New York in the David Rumsey Map Collection.

Settlement in the Fox Valley region really didn’t begin until about 1826 when Robert Bearsford’s family moved up the Fox River from its confluence with the Illinois River at Ottawa and settled in modern Kendall County’s Big Grove Township. Bearsford’s claim was reportedly at the southernmost point of the grove of mixed hardwood trees.

By 1829, a couple other families had moved to the Big Grove area including former French Canadian fur trader Vetal Vermet’s family as well as American Frederick Countryman and his Potawatomi wife, En-do-ga.

In August of that year, whiskey provided a trigger for a relatively violent incident between the two cultures. Peter Lamsett, nicknamed Peter Specie by the settlers for his policy of only accepting coins—specie—in payment for the goods and services he sold, brought a complaint before Peoria County Justice Alexander Doyle at Chicago (then governed from Peoria County) concerning the theft of several gallons of whiskey by a group of Indians.

Specie Grove in Oswego and Kendall townships of Kendall County was named after Peter Lamsett Specie, who was living there when the county’s first White settlers arrived. This clip from an 1876 map of the county in the Biographical Directory of the Voters and Tax-Payers of Kendall County, Illinois by George Fisher & Company.

Specie, a French Canadian who had engaged in the fur trade before concentrating on providing various services to new settlers, was on his way from Chicago with his ox cart to deliver three barrels of whiskey to Countryman and a half-barrel to Vermet at Big Grove when he said he was set upon near the DuPage River by the Potawatomi Chief Half Day and two warriors. He said the Indians took a quantity of alcohol, claiming one of them slashing him with a knife during the scuffle. Specie continued his delivery, but testified he was again stopped near Countryman’s cabin on Aux Sable Creek by the two warriors, who, he said, stole more liquor. Specie told Justice Doyle he estimated about 10 gallons of whiskey had been taken. The resolution of Specie’s complaint is missing from the county court records, but the case and Specie’s testimony does suggest some significant tensions between Native Americans and the increasing number of White settlers—even those generally considered sympathetic to the tribes.

Sauk Warrior Black Hawk

The worst clash of the era between the area’s White settlers and Native People was 1832’s Black Hawk War. An influential Sauk warrior, Black Hawk determined to move his band of about 1,500 men, women, and children back across the Mississippi to Illinois in the spring of 1832 in violation of government orders. Black Hawk had a long history of opposing White settlement of western Illinois. During the War of 1812, Black Hawk, who had allied himself with the British, out-generaled Illinois militia troops who tried to attack the Sauk Tribe’s main settlement at Rock Island. After that war, Black Hawk still remained attached to British interests to such an extent that the tribal group he led was called the British Band by U.S. officials.

In 1832, the British Band’s return to Illinois caused conflict to break out across northern Illinois. Local tribes people seized on the opportunity to settle some scores. The most violent of these was the Indian Creek Massacre in LaSalle County, where 14 men, women and children at the William Davis claim were killed over Davis’s cruel and violent treatment of local Three Fires people.

A few miles north of Indian Creek, Hollenback’s store at modern Newark was looted and burned, as were the cabins of settlers who had been warned to flee by the Three Fires’ Chief Shabbona. At the William Harris cabin, panic reigned. The family’s horses had bolted meaning the couple, their seven children, and Mrs. Harris’s father, the aged and crippled John Coombs, had to flee on foot. Realizing he’d slow them down, Mr. Coombs told the family, “Leave me to my fate, and save yourselves; I am an old man and can live but a little while at best.” Which they tearfully did, thinking they’d never see him alive again. But when an Indian raiding party arrived at the Harris cabin and saw Mr. Coombs was an invalid, they left him be and passed on to other pickings, not exactly the picture of ruthlessness we expect to see during a war.

Waubonsee, principal war chief of the Prairie Potawatomi

And as for the perpetrators of the Indian Creek Massacre, the suspects were arrested after the war and tried in Ottawa. But since the survivors of the attack, including Sylvia and Rachel Hall, teenage sisters seized and held for ransom, could not positively identify which warriors had attacked the cabin, the charges against the defendants were ruled unproven and they were released, which seems an interesting comment on the attitude towards justice, even on the frontier that was northern Illinois at that time.

After the war, until the Fox Valley’s Native People were removed, relations seemed to be good. Early settler and eventual orchardist Smith Minkler’s recollection of visiting the claim of William Wilson, Oswego’s first settler, in late 1833 as recounted in the Rev. E.W. Hicks’1877 history of the county might have been typical: “Mr. Minkler was down there [at Oswego] one day when Wilson’s boys were astride of an Indian pony, and the Indians with wild shouts of glee were pulling it along the trail. It seemed to be great fun for them.”

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

Shabbona, who had warned the settlers to flee during Black Hawk’s war, was rewarded with a small reserve at the grove west of the Fox River in modern DeKalb County that had been named for him. But he, along with Waubonsee, and the other chiefs and families, were all ordered west anyway. The first group left Chicago in 1835 for a grueling trip first to Missouri, then to Iowa, and finally to Kansas that rivaled in tragedy the famed “Trail of Tears” of the Five Civilized Tribes. Other groups left in 1836, but some of those who’d been removed hated where they’d been situated and filtered back to northern Illinois. It wasn’t until 1837 that the last of the Three Fires were finally, permanently removed.

Even after that, Shabbona returned for visits, living on his land off and on until it was simply sold out from underneath him, something that is still in litigation to this day. Virtually homeless, the old chief’s friends bought him a small house where he spent the last two years of his life. The highlight of that period was at Ottawa on Aug. 21, 1858 when he was invited to sit on the dais during the first Lincoln and Douglas Debate and when he was able to greet his former Black Hawk War comrade, Abraham Lincoln.

Like most of history, the era when settlers and Native People lived together in Illinois’ Fox River Valley is complicated, an era when both sides had something to learn from and teach to each other. And that’s perhaps something worth thinking about throughout November as the nation celebrates this year’s Native American Heritage Month.

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.