USA > Illinois > Kendall County > History of Kendall county, Illinois, from the earliest discoveries to the present time > Part 2
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19
THE GREAT FRENCH MISSIONARY.
The question of the river, however, was more than a matter of curiosity ; it had a commercial and political importance. At last the Governor of Canada in 1672, more than two hundred years ago, committed the explor- ation to two men, Louis Joliet, who is known only in connection with this discovery, and
JACQUES MARQUETTE,
the famous missionary, who was then at his mission vil- lage in northern Michigan. These two, with two canoes and five men, floated down the Mississippi for a month as far as an Indian town, near the mouth of the Arkan- sas river, when they became satisfied that it emptied into the gulf.
On their return they entered this State by the Illinois river, and were struck with the beauty of the forest and prairies and variety of the game in some parts of the country, and the interminable marshes of other parts. They found an Indian town of four hundred and sixty lodges, near Utica, below Ottawa, and as they passed up, gazed for the first time on the lofty walls of Starved Rock. They were well received at the Indian town, and one of the chiefs, with some of the young men, piloted them up the O'Plaine river, helped carry their boats across the portage of four miles in Cook County to the north branch of the Chicago river, down which they came to Chicago-to Lake Illinois as they called it. Here their guides left them, and they went up the lake to Green Bay, and Joliet returned to Quebec. Mar- quette. according to a previous promise to the chiefs, spent the succeeding winter with the tribes at Ottawa and Chicago, and died at the Marquette river the year after, 1675.
CHAPTER III.
EXPLORATIONS OF LASALLE.
T THAT time Robert Lasalle, an educated and talented young man, skilled in the Indian dialects, was residing at Kingston, Canada, then Ft. Frontenac, having obtained a large grant there from the French government. His fields were fertile; his herds multi- plied. His hunters roamed the forests after furs, and his mechanics built canoes and vessels, while under his shel- ter the missions flourished, his countrymen settled, and groups of friendly Iroquois built their cabins. Fortune was within his grasp. But Joliet, as he descended from the upper lakes, passing the forts, had told the story of his discoveries, and Lasalle was at once fired with plans of commerce between Europe and the Mississippi. Going to France, he unfolded his vast schemes, obtained his commission, returned with the necessary men, Tonti, an Italian veteran, as his lieutenant, launched a ship of ten tons at Niagara, and about Sept. 1, 1769, shipped back his first ship load of furs from Green Bay. He never heard of this ship again ; she was probably wrecked. Weary of waiting for her return, he determined to
EXPLORE ILLINOIS.
And in December ascended the St. Joe river, and down
21
TROUBLES OF LA SALLE AND TONTI.
the Kankakee to its mouth, above Morris. Descending the Illinois river, he reached the Indian town visited by Marquette, near the mouth of the Vermillion, but the tribe was absent in the chase. Farther down, where the river widens into Lake Peoria, Indians appeared, and still farther down he built a fort, calling it, in his grief, the Broken Heart, and afterwards set off on foot, with three companions, for Kingston, leaving orders with Tonti to fortify the Great Rock, now Starved Rock. This he did the following spring. But LaSalle had ene- mies in Canada, who were jealous of him on account of the authority and trading monopoly granted him by the government, and as soon as they knew he had returned to Kingston for supplies, they stirred up the Iroquois and persuaded a large party of them to go to Illinois and destroy his forts. The Indians came by canoe around the lakes, and in September, 1680, descended the Illi- nois river and invested Starved Rock. Tonti was not prepared for a siege, and, after a parley, was allowed to escape with the few men left him, for many had deserted, and took refuge with the Pottawatomies at Chicago, who appear to have displaced the Miamas about this time. Then began the famous persecution by the Iroquois of the Illinois Indians, who were friendly to LaSalle. At least at this time it first comes into history. The Iro- quois had long traded with the whites, and were well armed, and the others, living so far in the wilderness, were beaten again and again and consumed everywhere with horrid butchery. Only traditions and imperfect accounts have come down to us, giving but gleams of the truth-but those gleams are tongues that tell uniformly the same pitiless tale.
22
HISTORY OF KENDALL COUNTY.
TONTI AND HIS MEN
may have remained some time with the friendly Potta- watomies, and scoured with them the prairies of Ken- dall County-drank of its springs and camped in its groves. But it is most probable that he preferred win- tering on the other side of the lake St. Joe, and, if so, there the intrepid LaSalle found him the next spring, having returned from Canada with men and stores for another little ship or barge. They built it at Green Bay, during the summer, launched it in the spring of 1682, and with another cargo of furs, the party again descended the Illinois. They doubtless gazed long and earnestly at the deserted Rock Fort, as they floated past, but kept on to the Mississippi, and completed the explo- ration of the river to its mouth. LaSalle then formally took possession of the entire country in the name of France, calling it Louisiana. The news was gloriously received at the French court. It was the beginning of what, it was confidently believed, would be a vast and wealthy empire, making France the mightiest nation on earth. And that piece of tall sandstone, now known as
STARVED ROCK,
was the centre of those ambitious hopes-so far as the great West was concerned, for it was for years the only important military station in the West, besides Macki- naw, and was far the stronger of the two. Lasalle returned there from his Mississippi exploration, cut away the forest trees from the top of the rock, built houses, stretched palisades across the isthmus, and gathered at the base as many of the friendly Illinois tribes-Tama- roas, Kaskaskias, Cohokies, Michigans, Peorias, &c .-
.
23
LA SALLE RETURNS TO FRANCE.
as he could find. It was a lively place for the time. He either wintered there, or leaving Tonti in command, went on to Green Bay. In either case, the territory of Kendall county was too near not to be traversed again and again by the French garrison and their Indian allies in search of game, and the coveted furs, for the sake of which the post was largely maintained. Wolves and raccoons were shot in our groves, beavers trapped along our streams, and the lordly buffalo chased over our prai- ries and brought to the ground by Indian arrows or French flint-locks. The following year Lasalle's monop- oly expired, and he returned to France to have it renewed, leaving the faithful Tonti in command at the fort. He never saw Illinois again. In the meantime the missions were continued at the Rock and Kaskaskia. The last is the oldest European settlement in the Missis- sippi valley, and Illinois is consequently the oldest of all the interior States. Among the missionaries was Allouez, one of the two who visited Illinois eleven years before.
Lasalle was expected back in the summer of 1684, and in the early spring Tonti sent a letter by trusty messengers to await him at the mouth of the Missis- sippi. But he came not, and the messengers left the letter at an Indian village, with directions to deliver it to the white ships when they arrived. They were faith- ful to their trust, and fifteen years afterwards delivered the letter to D'Iberville, who entered the mouth of the great river with a Canadian colony.
Three years wore away. The lonely Illinois garrison passed their time in fishing, hunting, trapping, trading
24
HISTORY OF KENDALL COUNTY.
with the natives, and taking turns in going to market with the furs and returning with stores and articles of barter. The
MISSIONARIES
had the hardest life. Marest wrote : " Our life is passed in roaming through thick woods, in clambering over hills, in paddling the canoe across lakes and rivers, to catch a poor savage who flies from us, and whom we can tame neither by teaching nor by caresses."
He thus describes a journey from the rock to the Peo- rias : "I departed, being accompanied by only three savages, who might abandon me from levity, or from fear of enemies might fly. The horror of these vast uninhabited forest regions, where, in twelve days, not a soul was met, almost took away all my courage. Here was a journey where there was no village, no bridge, no ferry, no boat, no house, no beaten path, and over boundless prairies, intersected by rivulets and rivers, through forests and thickets filled with briers and thorns, through marshes where we plunged sometimes to the girdle. At night repose was sought on the grass or on leaves, exposed to the wind and rain, happy if by the side of some rivulet of which a draught might quench thirst. A meal was prepared from such game as was killed on the way, or by roasting ears of corn."
This is from Marest's letters published a quarter of a century later, at Paris, but applies equally to the state of things in Tonti's day. In the spring of 1687, the Italian lieutenant having heard through Canada that Lasalle with four ships and a large colony had sailed from France for the Mississippi, and unable to bear his
25
THE DEATH OF LA SALLE.
suspense any longer, went down with a single compan- ion in search of him. Finding no success, he built a log cabin on an island near the mouth of the Arkansas river, erected a large cross to attract the attention of passing boats, and resolved to spend the season there, in hope of obtaining some trace of his master. It soon came. July 24th, six men and an Indian guide appeared on the Arkansas side of the river, and proved to be a remnant of Lasalle's party. The first question was : " Where is Lasalle?" "Dead!" On arriving three years before he had missed the mouth of the Mississippi, spent two years on the coast of Texas after the wreck of the one ship left him, and started with sixteen men to reach Canada, eighteen hundred miles through the wilderness. On the way he was shot by two of his men and left to be devoured by wolves on the Texas prairie, on one of the lower branches of the Trinity river.
So perished one who by his adventures is linked to Northern Illinois, and who for true genius, vast concep- tions, force of will, energy of purpose and unfaltering hope, had no superior among his countrymen. It is no sorrow to us to know that his murderers were themselves murdered while quarreling over the spoil. The surviv- ors obtained a guide who piloted them to the Indian town on the Arkansas, nearly the very spot where Tonti was awaiting him. In a few days they took their sad journey up the river to the Illinois Rock, where, so far as we know, Tonti remained in command during the following eighteen years.
3
CHAPTER IV.
TRADE AND WAR.
URING this time there was a continued struggle between French and English for
MONOPOLIES IN TRADE.
France, through her missionaries, had the start, and, with the exception of the At- lantic coast, claimed and held the entire land from Maine to Hudson's Bay. It was called New France. Yet, so weak were the garrisons that English traders, through the Senecas, obtained a large share of the commerce of the lakes, and individual rangers penetrated every for- est where there was an Indian with skins to sell.
In 1689 war was declared between France and Eng- land that continued eight years, and the Jesuits, hereto- fore so self-denying, became bloody partisans for their country. They stirred up the Indians to such horrid massacres of the English colonists, that the very name of a French missionary was hated, and in 1700 the New York legislature made it legal to hang any Popish priest who should come into the province. The blood policy, though ruinous in the end, was successful at the time, for when peace was made, France retained all but the cod fisheries of Nova Scotia.
27
THE SEVEN YEARS' WAR.
In 1696 it was stated in a public document to be the wish of Louis XIV of France to preserve the rock fort in Illinois as a permanent fortress, but whether it was done or not we cannot say. Tonti, with twenty Cana- dians, left it in February, 1700, again going down the Mississippi to meet some new arrivals, and we have no certain account of his ever returning. He had become an old man, and after twenty-two years of wil- derness life, doubtless longed for his native Italy. The probability is that the post was maintained, as traders were still more numerous. That very year a company in quest of copper ore wintered among the Iowas, far up the Mississippi, above St. Paul. But the western records of the following half century are scarce. We
find fewer missionary narratives to appeal to.
Their
pens were drowned in blood. Or, perhaps the story of the wilderness being once told, there was less to write about. The general history, however, was one of Indian trading ; the colonist had not begun to come. In 1756,
THE SEVEN YEARS' WAR
begun between the powers of Europe, during which 886,- 000 men were slain. In many parts not enough were left to till the ground. Nothing at all was gained by those who planned the carnage. The possession of the Great West passed over to England. Illinois ceased being a part of New France, and became a part of the North- western Territory. The Indians under
PONTIAC
continued the war two years longer, and then yielded. This imperious, long-haired, dark-skinned orator, prophet and general, was truly one of nature's noblemen, but had
28
HISTORY OF KENDALL COUNTY.
the misfortune to be born a savage. He was of extraordin- ary talent and force of character, and was signally famous for his hatred of the English. He organized against them a confederacy of Indian tribes, through a region of wilderness a thousand miles long, but only to be defeated in the end. He retreated to Illinois, and in April, 1769, was killed by an Indian assassin from the tribe of the Peorias. On this, a bitter Indian war fol- lowed, which resulted in nearly exterminating some of the Illinois tribes. One
ILL-FATED PARTY
was besieged on the rock of the old French fort. Their provisions gave out. For water, they rolled up their blankets and let them down to the river below, but the cords were cut off by their watchful enemies. And so, by the agonies of hunger and thirst, they perished, and the spot has ever since been known by the name of Starved Rock-the greatest historical relic in Illinois. One great battle was fought on the site of the city of Morris, and the bones of the dead still moulder there in the soil. At this time there were about two thousand whites, including women and children, in the whole Illi- nois valley, and about fifty families at St. Louis, the center of the fur trade with the Indian nations on the Missouri. Daniel Boone had but just wandered forth "in quest of the country of Kentucky."
Illinois was regarded as a land of boundless plains and boundless wealth, and many advocated sending out colo- nies immediately to take possession of it. But it was objected that a power would be formed which distance would make practically independent of the colonies on
29
CESSION OF CHIKAJOUX.
the coast. So the land was left to become the asylum of the distressed and adventurous, the poor man's refuge, and log cabins and clearings rapidly multiplied. It is a strange fact, but probably true, that
THE BUFFALOS
went out with the French. Up to that time, as the Indians said, "they were as thick as trees in the forest," and roamed in vast droves over the prairies. They were so plenty and so valued that one of the specifications in LaSalle's first commission was a monopoly of the trade in buffalo robes. But in 1763 the snow fell, it is said, twelve feet deep-the severest winter ever known-and the buffaloes, cut off from their supplies, wholly perished. For fifty years or more, acres of bleaching bones, here and there upon our prairies, testified to the hard winter that destroyed nearly every buffalo east of the Missis- sippi.
In 1790, Gen. St. Clair was appointed Military Gov- ernor of the northwest territory, and the first territorial legislature meeting, at Cincinnati, elected William Henry Harrison delegate to Congress.
St. Clair was succeeded by Gen. Wayne, who defeated the Indians in a pitched battle, and so made peace for a time. In the peace treaty, the Indians ceded to the United States, "one piece of land six miles square, at the mouth of the Chikajo river, emptying into the south- west end of Lake Michigan, where a fort formerly stood." The name of the river in one of the missionary narra- tives is Chikajoux.
30
HISTORY OF KENDALL COUNTY.
In 1800, the territory was divided, and Illinois was included in the
INDIAN TERRITORY.
In 1804 Fort Dearborn was built, and Mr. Kinzie, father of John H., moved there as Indian trader. In 1811 Gen. Harrison was Governor, and defeated the Indians in a bloody battle at Tippecanoe, not more than a hundred miles southeast from Yorkville. Tecumseh was not present, but was the general commander of the Indians. British agents, however, were the real cause of the troubles, and this battle greatly increased the desire of the people, especially along the frontier, for war with England, both to avenge their calamities and also as the only sure road to peace. This feeling was shared by Congress, and led to a declaration of war in June, 1812. In August, the traitor general Hull, command- ant at Detroit, ordered the Chicago fort to be abandoned, and the garrison, in trying to escape, were nearly all murdered by the Pottawatomies, near what is now Twelfth street. Their bones bleached on the prairie for four years, until the war was over, when they were gathered and buried in 1816.
Oot. 5, 1813. the renowned Shawnee orator and com- mander,
TECUMSEH,
one of the most formidable Indian chiefs that ever fought against the United States, was killed at the battle of the Thames. near Lake St. Clair, in Upper Canada. Shab- bona, the famous Pottawatomie, was with him at the time, as one of his aids. He had a presentiment that it would be his last battle, and gave his sword to one of
31
THE DEATH OF TECUMSEH.
his followers, to be given to his son as soon as he should become a warrior. Then raising the war-cry, he sprang up from the swamp where he lay with his men, and charged the Kentucky cavalry. He was wounded sev- eral times, but fought on with the greatest desperation. At last, says Shabbona, he sprang forward with uplifted tomahawk towards a man riding a gray horse. Before he could reach him the man discharged a pistol, and the fiery chief received a mortal wound in the breast. He shouted his last word of command, and stepping forward, sunk down at the foot of a tree and died. The officer on the gray horse was Col. Richard M. Johnson. As soon as they knew their commander was no more, the red men were seized with terror and despair, and fled.
Such scenes were repugnant to the peaceful disposi- tion of young Shabbona, and it was the last great battle he was ever engaged in. In referring to it he used to say : " Indians and red coats all run ; Shabbona run, too. He never more fight 'Mericans ; Ugh, never!" At the close of the war in 1815, the Indians made a general peace, which was not broken for seventeen years. In 1816 the fort was re-built, and the Pottawatomies coded to the State a tract of land twenty miles wide, for the canal route from Chicago to a line uniting the months of the Fox and Kankakee, or thereabouts. They asked but a trifle for it, being convinced by the treaty commis- sioners that the canal would be greatly to their benefit. The project was the result of a lesson learned by the government during the war, viz : The need of a more perfect means of communication with the interior.
32
HISTORY OF KENDALL COUNTY.
In 1818,
ILLINOIS,
made the Union of legal age, by being admitted as the twenty-first State. Shadrach Bond was the first Gov- ernor. There was not in the northern part a single white man, so far as known, except at the military post at Chicago. The prairies, covered with grass and span- gled with flowers, were undisturbed save by droves of passing deer, or Indian travelers following their trail in single file. The rivers and creeks, stocked with fish, flowed silently by. The solitude of the groves was unbroken except by the hungry howling of the wolves and the occasional sound of an Indian's musket.
CHAPTER V.
EARLY SETTLEMENTS.
O EMPTY was the wilderness, that in 1820, when Alexander Wolcott, the In- dian agent at Chicago, wished to be united in marriage to Ellen M. Kinzie, he was obliged with his bride and party to go down the silent Fox and Illinois valleys, one hundred and thirty miles, to Fulton county, to find a Justice of the Peace to per- form the ceremony.
The year following Lewis Cass arrived in a birch canoe, charged with the weighty business of obtaining from the red men the right of way for a government
33
ILLINOIS IN 1823.
railroad from Detroit to Chicago, uniting Lake Erie and Lake Michigan. He obtained the land, but the project fell through and was left for the Michigan Southern Rail- road Company to accomplish. The lead mines at Galena caused that portion of the State to be settled before any of the surrounding territory. The mines began to be worked in 1821, and in five years Galena was laid out, and the county organized. The first miners used to spend their winters at home, returning to the mines in the spring at the time when suckers run, and this coin- cidence and their great numbers caused them to be called "Suckers." In this way, so the tradition runs, the inhab- itants of Illinois came by their cant name.
The American Atlas, published at Philadelphia in 1822, says : "Illinois has nineteen counties and fifty- five thousand inhabitants. The settlements at present are confined to the southern portion of the State, and the neighborhood of the great rivers. Vandalia is now the seat of government. Kaskaskia, the former capital, contains a bank, a land office, and about one hundred and sixty houses, scattered over an extensive plain. The town was settled upward of one hundred years ago by emigrants from Lower Canada, and about one-half the inhabitants are French. The surrounding country is under good cultivation."
On the accompanying map counties were laid off as far as Madison, opposite the mouth of the Mississippi river. All north of that was unsurveyed territory, con- taining Indian villages only.
In 1823, after seven years' delay, Majors Long and
34
HISTORY OF KENDALL COUNTY.
Keating surveyed the canal lands. In their report they say :
"The scenery about Chicago consists merely of a plain in which but few patches of thin and scrubby woods are observed scattered here and there. The vil- lage presents no cheering prospect, as notwithstanding its antiquity it consists of but few huts, inhabited by a miserable race of men-scarcely equal to the Indians -- from whom they are descended. Their log or bark houses are low, filthy and disgusting, displaying not the least trace of comfort. The number of trails centering at this point and their apparent antiquity indicate that this was probably for a long time the site of a large Indian vil- lage. As a place of business it offers no inducement to the settler."
The poor opinion of the government surveyors possi- bly contributed to the delay of the work, for another seven years passed before much more was done.
The northern boundary of the canal tract, known as the
INDIAN BOUNDARY LINE,
strikes Kendall county at the north-east, section corner, on the estate of William Murray, town of Na-au-say, passing through the Aux Sable timber, in the town of Seward, and crosses the creek on J. McKanna's land. There it turns, where there is a jog in the road, at a point opposite to where the south boundary strikes the Kankakee, and goes nearer west, crossing Lisbon creek four times, in the town of Lisbon, passing a few rods south of the red school house, in the town of Big Grove, through Apakesha grove, and out of the county, eighty rods north of Holderman's grove. It strikes Fox river
35
THE FIRST PIONEERS.
two or three miles below Sheridan. The southern boundary ends at the Kankakee river, two miles above Wilmington. Those surveyors were probably the first whites who explored our county. No provision was made for constructing the canal until Congress, in 1827, granted every alternate section in a strip five miles in width for that purpose. Two years afterwards Chicago was laid out by the canal commissioners, on the first alternate section.
We have now reached the time of the first pioneers.
In 1823 Archibald Clybourne came from Virginia, horseback, to Chicago, and took up a claim on the west fork of the North Branch, three miles from the fort. The same year Dr. Davidson built a cabin by the mineral spring in what is now South Ottawa, and traded with the Indians until his death three years after.
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