The unchanging effects of change on local history…

While there are lots of places on the Internet that it’s wise to avoid, there are many other sites that are well worth a visit. One of those sites that I’ve been having lots of fun with during the past several months is the “Oswego Then and Now” page on Facebook.

The site is a haven for those nostalgic for the Oswego that was, especially those who’ve moved away, as well as a fun and friendly place for current residents to reconnect with old friends, reminisce about the village’s past, and—even for us natives—learn new things about the area. It’s networking at its very best.

The east side of Main between Washington and Jackson streets in 1958 just as Oswego was beginning its first major growth spurt since the 1830s and changing from catering to the surrounding agricultural area to becoming an ever-expanding suburban community. (Little White School Museum collection)

A recurring theme for many posters is alarm and, often, dismay and even anger at the profound changes the community has undergone, especially during the past 60 years or so. Which is understandable, given Oswego’s population has multiplied 20 times during that period, irrevocably turning the community from the small farm town it was to the still-growing suburban community it is today.

For those of us who have continually lived in the community longer than that 50-year time period, however, the growth has definitely been surprising, but is only truly new in the shear amount of it recently.

Because Oswego, its surrounding township, and Kendall County itself actually began a radical change from its former overwhelmingly rural character to a fast-growing urbanizing area soon after World War II ended.

The era of rapid change developed due to a few factors, the first three of which, as real estate dealers always insist on putting it, were location, location, location. The city of Chicago is the engine that powers growth in northern Illinois, especially the extreme post-World War II urbanization that quickly spread to the six collar counties surrounding the city and its county of Cook.

Kendall County is the only non-Collar County that borders on three of the Collar Counties surrounding Chicago and Cook County. This made it a target for profound growth and change after World War II.

Kendall, you see, is the only non-collar county that borders three—Kane, DuPage, and Will—of those fast-growing areas.

Couple Kendall County’s location, location, location with the modernization of the region’s road system that began after World War I and the advent and perfection of economical, dependable motor vehicles from cars to buses to trucks, plus the technological agricultural advances that meant fewer farmers and less farmland were required to produce ever-increasing amounts of crops and livestock on less and less land, and you’ve created a recipe for profound change. And keep in mind that change doesn’t always lead to growth.

All it needed was a kick to get our small corner of Illinois’ growth started, and that was provided by the post-World War II economic boom of the 1950s. That was fueled by the largest governmental aid programs in history, known as the G.I. Bills. The young men and women returning home after the war were hungry to start their own families and buy their own homes. Also, many of them looked to further their educations in order to get ahead in increasingly corporate America. And the G.I. Bills funded both of those things, at least for most of those who had served.

The county’s population boom started here in northeastern Kendall County with the sprawling Boulder Hill Subdivision, a planned community fueled mainly by low-interest G.I. loans and supported by industrial expansion by giant manufacturing firms ranging from Caterpillar, Inc. to AT&T, not to mention long-established area firms from All-Steel to Equipto to Lyon Metal to Barber-Greene.

Model homes on Briarcliff Road in Boulder Hill in September 1958 appealed to those eligible for G.I. Loans, with no money down and low interest rates. (Photo by Bev Skaggs in the collections of the Little White School Museum)

That first tranche of growth from the mid-1950s through the 1970s created the first major change as the Oswego area saw itself change from dependent on providing agricultural support services to becoming a bedroom community, the vast majority of whose residents had no connection with farming at all. Instead, they commuted not just out of Oswego but also north and east out of Kendall County to staff the Fox Valley’s surging industrial base.

And that was about the time I got into the local journalism business, first as a historical columnist for the old Fox Valley Sentinel and then in 1980 becoming the editor of the Ledger-Sentinel after the Sentinel and Oswego Ledger merged.

In fact, the single biggest news story we covered for the next several decades after the Ledger-Sentinel was established was growth and the profound changes it wrought in Oswego and the rest of Kendall County and the Fox Valley.

My interest in how local history dovetailed with what was happening in the rest of North America and the world gave me, I think, a useful perspective on what was happening here in the Fox Valley.

Change, it was clear, was the most important governing historical factor and had been for centuries. The cultures of the region’s indigenous people had constantly undergone change since they had arrived as the last Ice Age ended. Their descendants, then, were forcibly displaced by the White descendants of European colonists who had arrived on the Atlantic coast in the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries.

In the Treaty of Chicago, signed in 1833, the indegenous people of northern Illinois signed away the rest of their rights to their lands. It would lead, in three years, to the tribes being forced to remove west of the Mississippi River to secure the region for White settlement. (“The Last Council of the Pottawatomies, 1833,” by Lawrence C. Earle, 1902)

Illinois’ inclusion in the new United States was partially confirmed as the result of the Revolutionary War, and was finally assured by the treaty ending the War of 1812. The various wars with the region’s indigenous people that finally ended in northern Illinois in 1832 resulted in their forcible expulsion to areas west of the Mississippi River. And that, in turn, opened the region to the flood of White settlement that forever changed the area’s very landscape.

The U.S. Civil War of the 1860s also had a profound effect on the Fox Valley. Even though fighting took place hundreds of miles away, nearly 10 percent of the county’s entire population served, and more than 200 died. The end of the war saw Kendall County’s population steadily decline during the next century due to a number of factors. Among those factors was the 1862 Homestead Act that used the lure of free land to persuade farmers to head west to try their luck on the trans-Mississippi shortgrass prairies.

Not until the next historical inflection point was reached after World War II did the character of the county and, especially, our corner of it begin to profoundly change once again.

Downtown Oswego immediately after World War II, where businesses primarily catered to the surrounding agricultural area was about to begin an era of change that is still taking place today. (Little White School Museum collection)

And so here we find ourselves looking back on what proved to be a period of extraordinary, sometimes chaotic social, economic, and population change as what so many of us remember as the unchanging halcyon days of our youth. Because Oswego’s always been a great place for kids to grow up; it’s still one of the safest towns in Illinois. And besides, when we were kids, our parents were the ones who did the worrying.

These days, Oswego’s Little White School Museum has become the main repository where as many pieces of the area’s history and heritage as possible are being collected, safely stored, and interpreted before they’re lost forever. The collection keeps growing as us volunteers frantically work to save as much Oswego history as we can before it’s either paved over or pitched into a Dumpster.

So with those aims in view, at noon this coming Saturday, May 4, the museum—located at 72 Polk Street in Oswego—will host another program dedicated to chronicling some of that disappearing history. As its title suggests, “Lost Oswego” will be look at the community landmarks that have been lost through the years, losses that in many cases are far from recent. In addition, the program will recount some of the community’s public and private preservation successes that are helping remind us of the Oswego area’s rich history and heritage.

The program’s sponsored by the museum and the Oswegoland Heritage Association. Admission will be $5, with proceeds going to benefit the museum’s operations. Reservations can be made by calling the Oswegoland Park District at 630-554-1010 or visiting the museum program page at bit.ly/LWSMPrograms—or you can walk in on Saturday and pay at the door.

Hope to see everyone there!

It’s April: Prairie grasses and wildflowers are on the way

Northern Illinois is beginning, believe it or not, to edge its way into true spring these days, which means the April showers we’ve been experiencing this past week will persuade all those May flowers to begin peaking out of the ground. Of course, the earliest spring flowers, hardy fellows that they are, have already been growing in the increasingly strong sunlight for several weeks now—especially with the unusually warm weather of the past few months.

Goose Lake Prairie south of Morris gives a hint of what Kendall County’s prairies looked like when their spring and early summer flowers bloomed.

Back in the 1820s and 1830s when the first hardy pioneers arrived in the area along both sides of the Fox River, from Waubonsie Creek to the north and south to the AuSable flowing on its way to the Illinois River, they found upland prairies dotted with open groves of hardwoods that sometimes merged with the belts to trees growing along the creeks that drained the area in what would one day become Kendall County.

Timber, scarce as it was, provided building materials for everything from homes, farm buildings, and fences. It was the settlers’ old and familiar friend. What was new to those new prairie farmers and other settlers, and sometimes not a little intimidating, was all that prairie land stretching sometimes to the horizon like an unbroken stretch of ocean—a sea of grass.

Virtually everyone who left an account of their first few years on the Illinois prairie provided a list of superlatives. And it’s fortunate we are that some of those accounts survive to let us glimpse what those early travelers and settlers found and felt.

Harriet Martineau, in an 1833 portrait. Three years later, she left a moving description of the Illinois prairie outside Joliet.

The fascinating English author, abolitionist, and sociologist Harriet Martineau, visited northern Illinois in 1836, and left a vivid record of the beauty of the Illinois prairie she saw near Joliet. She told of the beauty of the American primroses and the “…difficulty in distinguishing distances on the prairie. The feeling is quite bewildering. A man walking near looked like a Goliath a mile off.”

Her dinner one evening consisted of tea, bread, potatoes, and wild strawberries, of which a whole pail-full had been gathered around the house in which she was staying in only an hour’s time. She remarked about the beauty of the blue spiderwort in full bloom, and of prairies being “perfectly level—a treeless expanse with groves like islands in the distance, and a line of wood on the verge.”

As the seasons progressed, the grasses and broad-leafed plants comprising the prairie ecology dried, providing plenty of fuel for autumn and spring prairie fires. In October 1835, Methodist circuit rider Alfred Brunsen wrote of northern Illinois prairie fires, noting that he had traveled by prairie fire light at night: “By the light of this fire we could read fine print for ½ a mile or more. And the light reflected from the cloud of smoke enlightened our road for miles after the blaze of the fire was out of sight.”

George M. Hollenback portrait from the 1914 history of Kendall County.

George Hollenback, one of the first two white children born in Kendall County (his twin sister Amelia was the other), left a description of prairie fires he recalled from his childhood. His memory of them was both exciting and alarming. He recalled seeing, as a child, as many as 50 fires burning at one time within sight of the Hollenback homestead near modern Newark in southern Kendall County, reflecting their light in the clouds on autumn evenings.

“Early settlers protected themselves by ploughing [sic] wide and numerous furrows around their fields and their stockyards,” wrote Hollenback.

Backfires were often started to protect houses and property as well as plowing furrows to create firebreaks. The band of blackened prairie grass burned in the backfire usually stopped the on-rushing prairie fire dead in its tracks.

Prairie fires like this controlled burn at the Nature Conservancy’s Nachusa Grasslands near Franklin Grove cleared out understory shrubs creating the open savanna-type groves the settlers found when they arrived. The fires were both set by natural causes–lightning strikes–or intentionally set by the area’s Native People to modify their environment.

Prairie fires were usually pushed along by the prevailing winds on the Illinois prairies. That meant prairie fires most often came out of the west, and traveled eastward on the front of westerly winds. Old maps of Kendall County show that the timber on the western edge of the Fox River and the creeks in the county was much less dense that on the eastern edge, the trees on the west side thinned by the annual fires driven by those westerlies. There were generally fewer species of trees on those fire-prone western edges, too, with white and burr oaks and other more fire-resistent kinds predominating. (For a more in-depth discussion of the impact prairie fires had in Illinois, click here.)

A number of early Kendall County settlers left accounts of what Kendall County looked like when they arrived, just before settlement changed the prairies forever by converting them into farmland. Mary Elizabeth Jeneson, a member of Oswego’s Nineteenth Century Club, read a paper to the club in 1906, in which she stated: “No words of mine can convey to you the vastness, the grandeur and beauty of the natural prairie in 1850 when I first came to Oswego. The music of the big frogs down in the slough and the drumming of prairie chickens must have been heard to be appreciated. The Fox River was pretty then. Its banks furnished attractions for those who liked a stroll—a sort of Lovers’ Lane, in fact.”

Avery Beebe portrait from the 1914 history of Kendall County.

In 1914, Avery N. Beebe, an early Kendall County resident and elected official, offered his recollections of of how the area appeared to county pioneers: “This little chosen spot of God’s heritage, selected by the sturdy old pioneers of Kendall County, has been richly blessed with all the advantages that kind nature ever bestows: with its clear silvery streams, the Blackberry, the Big Rock, the Little Rock, the Aux Sable, the Waubonsia, the Rob Roy, the Clark, the Hollenback, and the Morgan, that pour their pure crystal liquids into the placid Fox and Illinois Rivers. All of these were densely skirted with abundant timbers for the use of the early settlers to construct the primitive log cabin, supply it with fuel, and establish the forest home in the wilds of the West; as it was then called.”

Change has been ongoing in northern Illinois in general and Kendall County in particular since the first pioneer wagons pulled up along the banks of the Fox River in 1828. During the last 50 years, that change accelerated as the county’s farmland—which itself replaced the stunning prairies described by the pioneers—has disappeared in job lots, with housing developments and shopping centers crowding out more and more open land. But on the positive side of the ledger, organized, serious efforts to preserve the region’s prairie past and the region’s remaining natural areas are continuing to grow.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Everybody here came from somewhere else…

A number of observances will be held during June, and among them will be celebrating National Immigrant Heritage Month.

And here in North America, everyone can confidently say we’re all descended from immigrants. The indigenous people Europeans found living in North and South America when they finally got here for good in the 15^th Century came from eastern Asia. Exactly HOW they got here is still debated by scientists and historians, not to mention those indigenous people themselves.

The best evidence now is that those earliest adventurous arrivals came by boat down along the Pacific Ocean edge of the ice sheet then covering much of North America, followed many centuries later by their distant cousins who took advantage of the ice-free corridor that opened the land bridge between Asia and North America.

During the next several thousand years they created the civilizations and cultural traditions that were confronted with the European invasion of North America and the continued exploitation of South America’s people and resources.

By the first third of the 19^th Century, American settlement had reached our home area here in northern Illinois’ Fox River Valley. Successive government actions were in process to drive the remaining Native People living here to lands west of the Mississippi River to open the entire region east of the river to White settlement and land ownership.

My great-grandfather, Henri Francois Matile, immigrated from Switzerland in 1867, first locating in Erie, Pennsylvania before moving to a farm outside Wellsville, Kansas. He’s pictured above about 1900, seated in the front row, with all of his living children, having outlived two wives.

Here in Kendall County, the first White settlers were Americans who had drifted west looking for cheap farmland and new business opportunities. But starting in the 1840s, foreign immigrants began arriving, seeking the same things their American cousins were.

The 1840s were fractious times in Europe, with disorder and revolution in the air, especially in what soon became the German Reich. Thousands of solid German farmers and business people left the turmoil of their homes and risked the trip across the Atlantic to try their luck in the United States. A fair number of those hardy souls ended up here in my home area of Oswego Township and elsewhere in Kendall County. Burkharts, Schogers (many of who simplified their name to Shoger), Hafenrichters, Ebingers, Schlapps and others came, liked what they saw, and put down roots.

Arriving about the same time were Scots farmers, many livestock experts, who were leaving their homes seeking land of their own to farm, it being nearly impossible for non-titled people to obtain their land in Scotland.

My mother’s maternal grandparents were the descendants of early arrivals in North America, dating back to the French and Indian War era of the 1760s. The family emigrated from the Pennsylvania Dutch country to Illinois in 1850 along with their neighbors and cousins.

Those two groups had been here only a short while before another group of Germans arrived, but these were America’s own Germans. Many of the families had lived in the “Pennsylvania Dutch” country of the east for more than a century before they decided to seek their fortunes on the rich prairies of northern Illinois. And so came the Lantz, and Schall, and Stark, and other families, who even after living in what eventually became the United States for 100 years and more still spoke German at home.

The whole group of farming families soon intermarried, creating a web of cousins that persists to the present day.

They were joined by successive waves of Norwegians, Swedes, Welsh, and Danes who joined the mix that included a rich leavening of French Canadians who’d arrived earlier and added their rich culture to the region’s mix.

Following the end of the Civil War, a wave of Black farmers and business owners, almost all former enslaved people, arrived to settle, along with Hispanics, Eastern and Southern Europeans and others who brought their Catholic heritage with them as they provided the personnel for the Fox Valley’s growing industries.

My mother’s paternal grandparents immigrated from East Prussia to the U.S. in 1882 after cousins who had earlier crossed the Atlantic wrote back to say what a wonderful place America was. One of their descendants still lives in the house they built after they arrived.

And as the decades passed, the mix has just kept getting richer as the region’s seemingly bottomless and ever-changing business and industrial environment has continued to evolve. Eastern Europeans, Asians and Southeast Asians, Pakistanis, Indians, Pacific Islanders and people whose heritages stretch back to virtually every corner of the earth come and go to and from the dynamic melting pot we call home here in our small corner of northern Illinois.

It’s become all the rage in certain circles lately to disparage and harass, both legally and often physically, immigrants that some consider to be the wrong kind of additions to our American melting pot. And looking at history, that has unfortunately always been the case. The Chinese, the Irish, the Italians, Catholics as a whole, Jews, Blacks, Hispanics and other entire groups have bourn the burden of intense discrimination—and in so many cases still are.

Nevertheless, we, as a nation, still welcome strangers who come to get ahead, to make our communities and their lives better and we’re all the better for it. Not the least reason being that we all really are, ultimately, from somewhere else, the descendants of those who made the decision to make better lives for their families and themselves by venturing out and away and ending up with us here. Those are the ones, in particular, we should all remember with gratitude during National Immigrant Heritage Month.

Despite our best efforts to erase it, evidence of the past lingers…

Exactly 190 years ago this year, the weather in the northern United States, especially in what was then called the Old Northwest Territory (the region north and west of the Ohio River), for once, proved congenial.

The two years previous to the spring of 1833 had been not only long and hard, but had been deadly, too. The winter of 1830-31 was dubbed “The Winter of the Deep Snow” by early settlers, while 1832 brought the Black Hawk War, the last Indian war fought in Illinois.

But then came the spring of 1833. Wrote the Rev. E.W. Hicks, Kendall County’s first historian:

“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.”

Despite promises made by the U.S. Government in treaties, such as the 1829 Treaty of Prairie du Chien illustrated above, settlers flooded into lands east of the Mississippi River reserved for the use of Native Americans.

But all those early settlers were violating the law, in the form of solemn land cession treaties concluded between the U.S. Government and the region’s Native People. Those treaties had assured the indigenous people they’d have the use of the land they’d ceded to the U.S. Government until it was surveyed and put up for sale.

Nevertheless, settlers had begun moving into northern Illinois in substantial numbers in the late 1820s, creating tensions with the resident Native People. A series of near-wars between White settlers and indigenous residents was the result, finally culminating in the Black Hawk War of 1832. The result of these tensions were the various Indian Removal Acts passed by the U.S. Congress mandating the removal of all Native People west of the Mississippi. Removals of Illinois’ Native People were largely completed by 1838.

According to Michigan Territory Gov. Lewis Cass, the indigenous population of Illinois in 1830 was jus 5,900 souls, while that of Indiana was 4,050, and that of his own Michigan Territory was 29,060.

The ancestors of area’s original residents had arrived some thousands of years before, following the herds of giant Ice Age mammals that lived along the retreating edges of the stupendous glaciers. Those glaciers had advanced several times from the north, sometimes covering the area now occupied by Kendall County with several thousand feet of ice, then retreating only to advance once again.

But as the climate finally began warming somewhere around 8,000 to 10,000 years ago, the ice slowly retreated for the last time leaving a bleak steppe behind. Bleak it may have been, but it was the perfect landscape for the Ice Age mammals that thrived on it, from giant bison to wooly mammoths and their mastodon cousins, and the predators whose food source they were. And that included the bands of human hunter-gatherers that followed the game.

Gradually, the hunter-gatherer tradition gave way to more sedentary lifestyles as the Native People began adapting wild foods by cross-breeding and selective growing to create more nutritious foods that began greatly complementing their diets.

Eventually, some group of native agronomists in South or Central America either brilliantly or luckily hit upon the possibilities selectively breeding maze, eventually coming up with the ancestors of the corn Illinois farmers are so famous for growing today. Two varieties of this early maze worked their way north, called by later-arriving European colonists flint corn and dent corn, proving so productive and nutritious that complicated and culturally diverse civilizations grew up around their cultivation.

The culmination of this rich cultural tradition was the Mississippian Culture whose capital grew up on the floodplain of the Mississippi River just across from modern St. Louis. The Mississippians were cultural inheritors of the earlier Hopewell Culture that was centered in the Ohio River Valley. Both cultures, besides heavily relying on maze agriculture, also built significant numbers of mounds, apparently as part of their religious traditions. While the Hopewell people built not only smaller burial mounds, they also built larger effigy mounds in the shape of animals, the Mississippians tended to concentrate on geometric mounds. They left behind their most spectacular engineering achievement, Monks Mound, across from St. Louis. The largest earthen construction in North America, the towering geometric mound is 100 feet high and measures about 15 acres on the base.

An artist’s rendering, based on archaeological evidence, of the Mississippian people’s capital at Cahokia, just across the Mississippi River from modern St. Louis. The population of the metropolitan area was probably between 10,000 and 30,000 people.

From their capital at the city eventually called Cahokia in the Mississippi floodplain, the Missippian culture spread up every tributary of the huge river, including the Illinois River and its tributary, our own Fox River. These early people not only left behind their finely-worked stone tools, but also their pottery and, even more noticeable, the mounds they build overlooking the river valleys they called home.

The region’s earliest settlers didn’t know what to make of the mounds those early people left behind. The innate racism of the early 19^th Century settlement era argued against such amazing constructions being achieved by the region’s Native People, so all sorts of hypotheses were advanced to account for them, from some mysterious long-exterminated race to the lost Tribe of Israel.

While those early White settlers didn’t know who’d built the mounds, they did know the shear number of mounds were often in the way of progress, from building roads to building farmsteads. And if they weren’t subject to being used for road fill or other purposes, all those mounds offered inviting targets for curio hunters.

According to the Rev. E.W. Hicks writing in his 1877 history of Kendall County: “The mounds in this part of the State are generally small, but quite numerous. Between one and two dozen are clearly marked on the bluffs along Fox river, in this county, and doubtless many others have been wholly or partially obliterated. One of the finest is on the county line at Millington, on Joseph Jackson’s land. It was dug into by a committee of citizens about forty years ago, and found to be a great burial heap. Numbers of human teeth were taken out, but some fragments of bones found were replaced and again covered. It is probable that these were remains of Indians subsequently buried there. Three rows of five mounds each are found on the northern bluff of the river: one on Mrs. Duryea’s land, near Bristol; another on Truman Hathaway’s; and a third on D. R. Ballou’s, above the woolen factory at Millington. In Mrs. Duryea’s mounds were also found in 1837 some teeth and a decayed skull. Others partially effaced are at the mouths of the Rob Roy and Rock creeks, and are only a few feet above the level of the river, proving that since they were built the river has flowed in its present channel. The Rob Roy mound a short time ago was partly uncovered by water, and George Steward, of Plano, our indefatigable archaeologist, picked up there, three hundred and twenty fragments of ancient pottery, and others may be found by any one curious enough to look for them.”

Elmer Baldwin, in his excellent 1877 history of LaSalle County wrote of the people who he believed built the mounds: “Their works remaining are their only history. They exist at Ottawa, LaSalle, Peru, and other points along the Illinois and Fox [rivers], and always on a commanding and sightly location, in fancy giving the spirits of the dead a view of the scenery they doubtless loved so well when living.”

Joslyn and Joslyn, on the other hand, recorded in their 1908 Kane County history the typically racist interpretation of the day, of the region’s indigenous people: “So the land which the red man failed to use was taken from him and given to those who would utilize it. But they left the graves of their ancestors behind, and several mounds in Aurora and vicinity are known as Indian burying grounds. Bones and arrow heads are all that remain as evidence that the country was once inhabited by another race.”

We can take at least a little comfort that all of our ancestors weren’t entirely insensitive to disturbing the dead, even if they were Native American dead. In the May 27, 1880 Kendall County Record, the paper’s Oswego correspondent, reported that a proposal was at hand by the residents of Millington to spend an afternoon picnicking in a grove near the village that contained several Indian burial mounds. The writer suggested it was wrong to desecrate the graves, even though the ancient Indians in question had not been Christian. “The cemeteries of the present day may in time become subject to investigation—they are so already to a small extent—the silver plate of coffins and jewelry on corpses may prove more desirable relics than the arrow heads and other trinkets of the Aborigines. The setting of precedents should be discouraged.”

And finally, on April 7, 1897, the Record reported from Millington: “The oldest landmark and relic of the red men in this vicinity, the Indian mound on Mr. Lewis Jones’s lot, and probably the largest of its kind in Kendall or LaSalle counties, is now no more, for the work of leveling it commenced Saturday and is now about finished. A great many people said it seemed too bad to destroy it, but it is located near the front of the lot and near where a house ought to be placed if the owner saw fit to build one. Mr. Jones’s family are known to be hustlers, but they did not care to have a hump on their front yard so, for reasons mentioned above, the historic pile has been leveled. As is generally known, the mound was an Indian burying place and was opened a number of years ago by relic hunters We do not remember just what relics were found or how many, but not all of them were unearthed at that time, for a few were discovered the other day, which proves that the redman’s remains have not yet all crumbled into dust. Monday, a part of the frontal bone of a skull was found and one of the bones of the lower limbs. They are of a dark brown color and have much the appearance of decayed wood, but the shape and porous structure proves them to be human bones. Quite a number of arrow heads of various sizes and shapes were also found.”

Some of those once-numerous mounds, so laboriously built by long-vanished Native People, still exist up and down the Fox Valley. Mound groups in both St. Charles and Aurora are still visible by the sharp-eyed investigator. And, of course, the World Heritage Site at Cahokia still maintains its wonderful collection of mounds and its truly amazing cultural interpretive center that is well worth a trip to see.

The main entrance drive to the Oswego Township Cemetery goes up the rise to the small mound around which the cemetery was developed in the 1870s. (Homer Durand photo, 1958)

And while we don’t have any bonafide mounds left here in my hometown of Oswego, we do have a possibility of sorts. My good friend, the late Dick Young, was always convinced the rise around which the Oswego Township Cemeterey on South Main Street was developed might well be a remnant mound. As Dick noted, it’s in the right place, on the brow of the river valley overlooking the river, and it’s the only mound along that stretch of land, making it certainly look artificial.

If it is a remnant mound, it seems somehow fitting that our ancestors ended up using it for their own funerary traditions in conjunction with the people who lived here many hundreds of years before.

William Keating was the Geologist and Historiographer for Major Stephen Long’s expedition that crossed the Fox River valley in 1823. The explorers set out from Chicago on June 11. The next day, Keating reported: “On the west side we reached a beautiful but small prairie, situated on a high bank, which approaches within two hundred and fifty yards of the edge of the water; and upon this prairie we discovered a number of mounds, which appeared to have heen arranged with a certain degree of regularity. Of these mounds we counted twenty~seven ….”

The effects of weather have been, and continue to be, historic…

Humorist Charles Dudley Warner once quipped “Everybody complains about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.” And during Warner’s lifetime (1829-1900), that was mostly true—though not entirely.

For instance, the amount of coal smoke from tens of thousands of stoves and fireplaces created sometimes deadly weather conditions in London, England. But the feeling at the time was that humans really couldn’t affect nature, especially the weather.

Nevertheless, in 1896, Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius proposed the hypothesis that massive amounts of human instigated fossil-fuel burning and other combustion that produced carbon dioxide was enough to cause global warming. His suggestion was met with general derision. But then in 1938, Guy Stewart Callendar, a British steam engineer, mathematician, and amateur climatologist gathered actual temperature records from the late 19th Century onward. When analyzed, his data showed that during the preceding 50 years, global land temperatures had increased. In other words, he proved global climate change was happening. In 1938. Something some still refuse to believe.

The heavy smogs in London during the 19th Century not only required carriages and wagons be guided by torch-bearers during daylight hours, but also killed people. That continued into the 20th Century with the notorious London Fog of 1952 that lasted for days and killed several people. (Illustrated London News)

But back to Charles Dudley Warner and his quip about the weather. There doesn’t seem to be any doubt that the weather has had a relatively huge effect on world history. From the 16th Century Kamikaze “Divine Wind” that supposedly disrupted a Mongol invasion of Japan to the 1588 storm that scattered the Spanish Armada, to Napoleon’s disastrous winter retreat from Moscow in 1812, weather’s effects keep turning up in the historical record.

Here in North America—the New World to Europeans but the same old place to the Native People who had been living here for thousands of years—weather began playing an important role as soon as those Europeans mentioned above arrived.

For instance, in 1620, a group of disgruntled British religious separatists left the Netherlands bound for what they hoped would be their very own New World utopia across the Atlantic. Earlier, they’d left England for the Netherlands because their brand of Protestantism was actively suppressed. But they found the religious tolerance of the Dutch intolerable and so decided to make a truly clean break and a new start in the New World, where they hoped to have the religious freedom to oppress other faiths.

They aimed to land in Virginia when they sailed from Plymouth, England on Sept. 16, 1620, but the iffy navigation of their ship’s captain instead landed them on the coast of modern Massachusetts, hundreds of miles north of where they planned to take up their new homes. During their first winter in North America, the unplanned-for cold weather nearly killed the lot of them, but they managed to survive, and then eventually prosper.

Meanwhile even farther to the north, the French were settling Canada, eventually creating a string of settlements along the St. Lawrence River from its mouth upstream to the La Chine rapids, so named because the first explorers hoped China was just beyond them. Although they kept expecting to run across Chinese officials as they continued ever farther west, they were, disappointed when they found the Pacific Ocean in the way of extending their travels.

The weather in Canada was even more brutal than that experienced by the English Separatists settled in Massachusetts. But intrepid French explorers and rapacious businessmen—usually one in the same—kept pushing farther and farther into the interior in their search for China and the East Indies. Among them was René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, who managed to obtain the royal trade cession for what is now most of the upper Midwest. LaSalle pushed as far west as the thundering falls on the Niagara River between Lakes Erie and Ontario and in 1679, built the first large sailing ship on the western Great Lakes, the Griffin.

LaSalle’s expedition on its way south on the upper Illinois River looking for open water. They didn’t find any until they got down to modern Peoria.

There, weather again came into play when the Griffin, loaded with valuable furs collected from tribes from the western lakes, disappeared, likely sinking during one of the Great Lakes’ frequent and violent storms. The loss threatened to bankrupt LaSalle, but he managed to talk his way out of the problem and mounted yet another expedition in the spring of 1682.

Setting off from Fort St. Joseph on the St. Joseph River, a Lake Michigan tributary, the LaSalle expedition had to haul their canoes downstream on improvised sledges because the St. Joseph was frozen solid, as was the Kankakee when they portaged into it, as was the Illinois River as they traveled downstream from the Kankakee’s mouth on the Des Plaines. Not until they reached Peoria did they find open water. That allowed them to paddle down the Illinois to the Mississippi, and then down to the Mississippi’s mouth on the Gulf of Mexico. There, in an elaborate ceremony (he’d brought along his royal court clothes in case he met some of those long-sought Chinese officials) LaSalle claimed the entire Mississippi watershed for France, something that must have, at the least, bemused the tens of thousands of Native People who’d been living there for the past several centuries.

Weather continued to have its affects on history as the thin line of European colonies that stretched along the Atlantic seaboard grew and prospered. The frontier moved ever farther west as White settlement pushed the resident Native People ever farther west. By 1830, settlement had begun in what geographers eventually called the Prairie Peninsula, a generally open, huge, roughly triangular-shaped tallgrass prairie with its apex in northwestern Indiana and extending northwest all the way to the eastern Dakotas and southwest into eastern Kansas. It must have been quite a sight for those early pioneers when they emerged from the familiar dense timber that stretched behind them east all the way to the Appalachian Mountains and saw a seemingly endless sea of 6-foot tall Big Bluestem grass extending all the way to the horizon.

Pioneer farmers had to change their techniques when they reached the tallgrass prairie. Instead of clearing timber to plant their fields they had to “break,” or plow, the prairie, an expensive, time-consuming task.

All that open grassland was a great boon for those frontier farmers because they didn’t have to laboriously cut down towering old-growth hardwoods before they could farm the land. But the lack of timber also threw a wrench into traditional frontier farming techniques. While groves of hardwoods spotted the prairie and timber did grow on the east side of prairie water courses, the old ways of depending on logs for cabins and farm buildings, as well as to split into fence rails had to be modified.

The earliest prairie settlers here in northern Illinois staked their claims on the east side of groves and streamside woods in order to assure enough timber for building as well as for firewood. Because prairie pioneering required a LOT of timber for both. For instance, the rule of thumb for firewood was that it took about 30 cords to make it through a northern Illinois winter, a cord being a stack of wood 4 feet wide, 4 feet high, and 8 feet long.

The 1870 plat map of Big Grove in Kendall County’s Big Grove Township illustrates how the county’s groves were subdivided into smaller timber plots for sale by earlier arrivals to later arrivals who needed timber to build farmsteads and put up rail fences.

The earliest settlers who had vision and business sense quickly snapped up those isolated groves and other patches of timber out on the prairie, subdivided them into 10-acre plots, and sold them to later arrivals.

One of the other reasons early settlers preferred to locate their farmsteads on the east side of timber patches was to shelter against the prairie winds that came howling out of the west. In winter, especially, those winds could be brutal, as the early pioneers found out during the fierce winter of 1830-31. Forever after known as the Winter of the Deep Snow, the series of storms led to the deaths of countless settlers as well as many of the Native People who lived here. The weather that winter may even have created conditions that led to the Black Hawk War of 1832, Illinois’ last Indian war.

The 1838 U.S. Survey map of Oswego Township nicely illustrates how the earliest pioneer farmers staked claims hugging the sheltered east side of the region’s patches of timber. The area shaded in green shows the southern-most lobe of the Big Woods, a huge patch of timber that stretched from Oswego north to Batavia and east to Naperville.

But while the Winter of the Deep Snow put a damper on things, and 1832 saw war across northern Illinois, just a year later, the Year of the Early Spring led, at least in percentage terms, to the biggest population explosion in northern Illinois history. As described by Kendall County’s first historian in his 1877 history: “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. This was partly because the emigration of the summer preceding had been held back by the [Black Hawk] war.”

And weather has continued to have more or less serious effects on our little corner of the world ever since. Annual spring floods—called “freshets” back in the day—regularly washed out the numerous dams and bridges on the Fox River, costing the dam owners and taxpayers substantial amounts of money to repair and replace. And weather’s effect on farming is well-known, from drought conditions to years that proved too wet. Townsfolk were also affected, from winters so cold they froze preserved food in area residents’ basements to summers so hot and dry the mills that depended on the Fox River’s waterpower had to temporarily close.

The old Parker Gristmill on the west bank of the Fox River just above Oswego during a spring freshet (flood) around 1910. The flood waters have completely covered the mill dam. (Little White School Museum collection)

The drought and destructive dust storms of the Great Depression years didn’t just affect the Great Plains—they had severe economic effects here, in Kendall County too, with dust storms carrying away tons of topsoil and dry conditions encouraging insect infestations that destroyed thousands of acres of crops.

The blizzards that swept down across the Great Plains east across the Mississippi didn’t stop with the Winter of the Deep Snow, but created both economic and political problems right up to modern times. The winter of 1978-1979 brought parts of northern Illinois to a halt. And when two January storms dropped heavy snow on Chicago, voters showed their displeasure with how the city handled snow removal by kicking Mayor Michael Bilandic out of office and electing Jane Byrne, the city’s first female mayor.

Unfortunately, the snow from the brutal winter of 1978-1979 didn’t only fall on Chicago. A good bit of it fell out here in the Fox River Valley, too. We were able to keep a walking path to the garage clear, though.

Most recently, on-going global climate change has created a confused weather situation not only here in the Fox Valley but across the nation. Far western states have lately been toggling between extreme drought and record floods and snowfall. The fragile electrical grid in Texas gets regular stress tests that it partially fails due to colder than expected winters and hotter than anticipated summers.

Meanwhile here in northern Illinois, winters have become increasingly mild, creating year round open water on the Fox River and the numerous water detention ponds created to control stormwater runoff that has attracted tens of thousands of once extremely rare Canada geese and various duck species.

And from what we see on the news these days, warmer weather is not only encouraging the northward march of such pests as fire ants, but the climate change causing it seems to be pushing the old Tornado Alley of the Great Plains eastward across the Mississippi River into more densely populated areas.

Even with climate change driven weather causing so many problems, though, we’re still only taking baby steps to try to do something about it. While weather has always had major effects on history, and while we do have the technical ability to do something about it these days, it looks as if Charles Dudley Warner’s quip is likely to continue to describe the situation for the foreseeable future.

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.