ILLINOIS BICENTENNIAL
LIFE IN NORTHERN ILLINOIS TWO HUNDRED YEARS AGO
PART ONE

After the Revolutionary War, the Northwest Territories were set aside as  lands belonging to the newly-formed United States. The territories were Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Illinois, and Wisconsin. One by one, as sufficient population was reached, each territory became a state.
 
Settlement of Illinois began in the southern part of the Illinois Territory, near the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers.  Like much of the northern Illinois Territory prior to permanent settlement, the Chicago area was occupied in the 1700s and 1800s primarily by Potawatomi Indians.  Northern Illinois and Lemont were not settled until the 1830s.
 
Prior to 1830, explorers and fur traders had traveled the rivers and lands since the mid-1600s. Early frontiersmen, speculators, and squatters came, anxious to be the first to see and stake their claim on the new land as statehood approached.
 
Plans were being made as early as the late 1700s. Between that time and 1835, Potawatomi and newcomers lived side by side, for the most part peacefully. In 1816, near what would later become Lemont, a Potawatomi village stood on the north side of the Des Plaines River and a fur station on the south side.
 
To set the scene, the story of  The Mystery at Black Partridge Woods is told by Wawetseka, a fictional Potawatomi woman who lived on the north bluff of the Des Plaines River before and after Illinois became a state. In this preface to her tale, her descendent describes the impact of approaching statehood on her people.

Wawetseka’s Tale: Living Side by Side

A Story of Early Illinois

D’Mouche-kee-kee-awh was a wealthy Potawatomi woman. In this painting she is proudly displaying the silver earrings and brooches popular among members of her tribe. Photo courtesy of Tippecanoe County Historical Society

Wawetseka, a Potawatomi woman, is my ancestor. She was born in the latter half of the 1700s in a village along the Des Plaines River where Lemont, Illinois is now located, and she lived into the mid-1800s. When she was a young woman, she was educated in a Jesuit mission. While there she was baptized in the Catholic religion and learned to read and write French. Later she returned to live with our people and married a Potawatomi man.

Indigenous people take great pride in their clan identity and ancestors. I grew up on stories about Wawetseka, and I often begged my mother to repeat my favorites. These stories, passed down through many generations, grounded me to what I found most valuable in my Native American heritage. I believe that the memoir Wawetseka wrote in her own hand, which is now in my possession, was written by her as a gift for her children, my children and my children’s children.

            Wawetseka was proud of both her white education and her native culture. She knew others were coming to her land, but like most American Indians of her time, she was hopeful she could maintain her traditional way of life. Her memoir relates a personal experience that included the sometimes-baffling changes she observed and her feelings about those changes, before the great disaster happened to her people. Later, when others of her tribe left the area, she made a decision to live among white people rather than migrate. Her story and her observations revealed the ultimate sense of loss she must have felt. The poignancy and loss resonates across almost two centuries.

            Most of our people lost their homes to treaties and left Northern Illinois for reservations in the west, especially after the Treaty of Chicago in 1833. Not everyone left. Some remained in the Midwest, and they still live in small communities in places such as Dowagiac, Michigan. Among those who stayed were people who were educated by missionaries, Catholics, and people who had established friendly or favorable relationships with white people. Wawetseka and some others from her village stayed. She lived in a small cabin near friends. There she improved her language skills to make possible the writing of a document that recorded an important event in her life.

            As her memoir begins, Wawetseka describes the arrival of men from Canada and eastern parts of the newly formed United States. As the Illinois Territory awaited imminent statehood, each man, whatever his origin, was convinced the land was rightfully his. Their reasons were as varied as were their origins.

            The Indian’s belief in his right to Illinois land was rooted in semi-migratory culture and seasonal moves. We farmed in the summer and hunted in the winter. We established lodging patterns traditional to our tribes, and sacred areas to bury our dead. We did not live in a single place but habitually returned to the same places.

            Indian farms in the Illinois Territory were extensive and well laid out, capable of producing crops for sale or trade. When we left our summer villages unoccupied to travel to winter hunting grounds, we expected to return to our fields, much as “snow birders” do today when they move from northern states to warm climates in the winter. We defended these home grounds from tribes that attempted to steal them and eventually from white men who thought our land was unoccupied.

            First to arrive, in the mid-1600s, explorers and priests came and established missions. Fur traders set up trade posts at approximately the same time. Missionaries taught religion to the native population, but they also taught white culture, including language and reading. Women and children attended mission schools, but our men were more interested in trade. They brought furs to the posts and bargained for items available only from white people. Native people initially welcomed them, anticipating trade for things we desired but did not have, items such as cloth, kettles, metal tools and weapons.

            By the time of Wawetseka’s story, white newcomers desired not only our furs but our land, spreading across the territory from crowded colonies in the east. We faced a dilemma. The fur supply was becoming depleted, leaving us with little to trade. The reduction in game forced us toward starvation and dependence on land to grow crops. We could fight for the land the white men wanted and become farmers, or we could trade land for annuities on which to survive.

To Be Continued…

 

 

 

 

 

 

Photo courtesy Richard Hoyt Lee

The Mystery at Sag Bridge

A century-old murder mystery
A dangerous ghost
An amateur historian…
What binds them together?

A ghost and an unsolved triple homicide lead Cora Tozzi to uncover a hundred-year-old mystery and the history of Sag Bridge, Illinois.

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