Our Native American past: Part 2
By the time Spanish explorers pushed their way up the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers in the 1540s, Mississippian natives were found in Arkansas and Tennessee but appear to have already abandoned Southern Illinois and their great city at Cahokia. Explorers found few people living in this region and according to some archaeologists, between 1500 and 1600 A.D. there appears to have only been a few places in Illinois that were occupied.
It was into this reasonably unoccupied territory that the Illinois tribe moved into sometime around 1600 A.D. and they who met the French Canadian, Louis Joliet, and Jesuit missionary, Jacques Marquette, in the summer of 1673. At the time of contact, the Illinois and Miami were the dominant ethnic groups in Illinois. The Illinois were a loosely held confederation of tribes who all spoke the Algonquin language, had similar ways of life and consisted at one time of as many as 12 tribes however, only five Illinois tribes survived into the 1700s; the Cahokia, Kaskaskia, Michigamea, Peoria and Tamaroa. The Miami departed the Illinois territory in the early 1700s for present day Indiana.
The village of Kaskaskia (near Chester) was founded by the French in 1703 named after the local native tribe with whom they were on good terms and conducting trade. The same year, the Tamaroa tribe, centered close by in Perry County, united with the Kaskaskia tribe. Of the original Illinois tribes, only the Kaskaskia and Peoria tribes existed into the early 1800s.
The Illinois had a diverse economy based on agriculture, hunting, fishing and the gathering of wild foods. Corn was the most important crop, but they also raised beans, squash, pumpkins and watermelons. Women stored large quantities of corn in underground pits to be eaten during winter months. Male hunters usually pursued game animals as individuals or in small groups. In June, however, huge numbers of people left the village for communal buffalo hunts in the prairies.
Upon finding a herd, runners would surround the bison on foot and by firing their guns and arrows, drive them toward the remainder of the hunting party where they were shot. In the summer of 1688, the Illinois killed more than 1,200 bison and a variety of other animals on a single hunting expedition.
The Illinois were mobile and lived in three types of settlements during the year. Summer villages, located near rivers were inhabited in April & May during corn planting and again from mid-July to mid-October when the crops were harvested. The summer villages were reoccupied from year to year and were quite large, some containing as many as 350 mat-covered long houses.
Summer hunting camps established in the prairies in June and July during communal bison hunts, were occupied briefly and consisted of temporary bark covered lodges. Winter villages, inhabited from mid-October to the end of March, were located in river bottoms where good hunting was expected, often some distance from the summer villages. To ensure good hunting, winter villages were smaller, containing from five to twenty five, mat-covered lodges called wigwams.
According to local history books, some of the favorite hunting/fishing campgrounds that were used on a regular basis by natives in this county were sites by the Big Muddy around Blairsville, Hurricane Creek near Carterville, Indian Camp Creek, Crab Orchard, Bainbridge (west of Marion), and Caplinger Pond (SE of Marion) just to mention a few.
Although the dates are not clear, I suspect that the Shawnee, who also spoke the Algonquin language, started ranging into Southern Illinois after 1763 when our area went from French to British control. According to historian Milo Erwin, who published our first county history book in 1876, the Shawnee
inhabited Southernmost Illinois from the Big Muddy River on the west to the Wabash River on the east as the northern borders while the Kaskaskia ranged on the other side.
These tribes would continually trespass upon the hunting grounds of each other, from which quarrels ensued, and finally in 1802 a battle was fought by agreement to end it once and for all on halfway ground, in Town Mount Prairie, at the edge of Franklin & Williamson county, about three miles southwest of West Frankfort. The Kaskaskia were under the command of their Chief John DuQuoin, namesake for the city of Du Quoin, then quite an old man and good friend to the whites. The Shawnee were commanded by a chief of a treacherous nature, which was, according to Erwin, probably the cause of the fight. In Erwin's version of the battle, the Shawnee were decimated and the Kaskasia won, but virtually every other modern source indicates that it went the other way around.
Regardless of the winner, the Kaskaskia ended up ceding their Southern Illinois territory for 1,280 acres at Sand Ridge in Jackson County along the Big Muddy river, where they remained until 1832.
As part of a treaty signed in 1832 the surviving members of the Illinois confederacy gave up all land that the tribes held in Illinois to the U.S. Government. In return, they received 96,000 acres at the Osage reservation in Northeastern Kansas.
The daughter of the Kaskaskia Chief Du Quoin was able to keep 350 acres in northern Ora Township in Jackson County given to her and her white husband by Du Quoin.
Next week in part 3 of this series, I will cover the interaction of Native Americans and early pioneers as the area became settled and our county came into being.