Reflections: It's Indian Summer, but where are all the Indians?

It’s Indian Summer, but where are all the Indians?

Years ago, the Chicago Tribune used to run John T. McCutcheon’s classic illustrated feature, “Injun Summer” every autumn.

A lot of us looked forward to each year’s rerun of the piece, which was first published in the Trib on Sept. 30, 1907. But then, some Native Americans explained they felt McCutcheon’s piece was racist, and to accommodate their feelings, the Trib quit running it, although you can still download a copy of it or even order framed copies from the Trib website.

Like the late film critic Roger Ebert, I have never really felt the piece was racist, but rather was a sort of folkway to explain what happened to all the Native Americans who once lived here in Northern Illinois.

Not to say that there aren’t plenty Native Americans still living around the region, of course. But what really did happen to the thousands of Native People who were living here when the first American pioneers arrived here in northern Illinois in the 1820s and 1830s?

In historic times, the Fox and Illinois River valleys were the home of the member tribes of the Illinois Confederacy. Calling themselves the Illiniwek (which meant “the men”) and called “Illinois” by the French, the related Kaskaskia, Cahokia, Michigamea, Peoria, Moingwena and Tamaroa primarily made their summer homes along the Illinois River, using Kendall County and other areas along the Illinois’ tributaries as hunting grounds and winter quarters.

By 1683, constant warfare waged by the Iroquois, who were attempting to control the trade in furs, led French adventurer, entrepreneur and explorer Robert Cavelier de La Salle to fortify Starved Rock and gather several thousand Indians to the area – including the Fox Valley – for mutual protection. After the region’s resources were exhausted some years later, La Salle’s principal lieutenant, Henri de Tonti, abandoned Starved Rock, relocating the entire fur trading and security operation south to first Lake Peoria and then to Kaskaskia and Cahokia along the Mississippi in southern Illinois. That created a strategic vacuum in the Fox Valley.

The culturally related Fox, Mascouten and Kickapoo tribes unsuccessfully attempted to occupy the region following the French war of extermination waged against the Fox in the 1720s and 1730s, and the Fox Valley was again said to be part of the Illiniweks’ domain. However, in 1746, interrelated bands of the Potawatomi, Ottawa and Chippewa tribes calling themselves the Three Fires Confederacy moved into northern Illinois from their homes in Michigan, Indiana and Wisconsin.

Since the last Illiniwek bands had been eliminated from the Fox Valley years previously, the Three Fires claimed the area as their own.

During the French and Indian War of the early 1760s, the Three Fires supported the French. After the British won the war, the Potawatomi remained loyal to their French friends. They killed British fur traders and participated in the western tribes’ attempt to force the British back west of the Appalachian Mountains called Pontiac’s Rebellion.

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 River also supported the British during the War of 1812, with many of them taking part in the destruction of Fort Dearborn at Chicago in 1812. That year, according to U.S. Indian Agent Thomas Forsythe, the Three Fires could muster some 600 warriors. Forsythe reported that war parties from the Fox River villages of Chiefs Waubonsie and Main Poche participated in raids and battles against the Americans.

After the War of 1812 solidified the United States’ hold on the Illinois Country, the Three Fires tried to protect through diplomacy what they had failed to protect through military action. They were, however, unsuccessful, and were forced into several key land cessions during the next two decades.

President Thomas Jefferson had established a policy in 1803 for the removal of Indians west of the Mississippi River to open land for settlement, and in 1830 the policy became law with passage of the Indian Removal Act.

In the aftermath of the brief Winnebago War of 1829 and the much more serious Black Hawk War of 1832, Illinois’ white residents demanded all Indians’ removal from the state. In spite of the Three Fires’ general support for the U.S. during both upheavals, the government officials readily agreed.

Most remaining Three Fires claims to northern Illinois land were relinquished in the Treaty of Chicago in 1833. Also that year, the first group of Illinois Potawatomi moved west to what was known as the Platte Purchase in the extreme northwestern corner of modern Missouri. In the fall of 1835, another large group of the Three Fires from near Chicago removed to Platte Purchase land. But that land, too, was coveted by white settlers, so the Potawatomi were forced to pack up and move to Council Bluffs, Iowa.

The rest of the Fox Valley’s Three Fires bands were sent west in October 1837. Traveling through near continual rain and mud, and suffering from lack of food due to poor government organization, they crossed the Mississippi at Quincy. The sick, hungry remnants arrived in the Platte Country in mid-November, when they were immediately forced farther west to the Council Bluffs reservation, a place hated by the tribe due to its lack of timber and the accelerating arrival of white settlers.

In 1838, the tribe split politically between full-blooded Indians and their mixed-blood American relations on the one hand, and full-blooded Indians and those of French (Metis) extraction on the other. The Metis faction was forced out and moved west to Kansas. Yet another treaty in 1847 forced the Council Bluffs Potawatomi west to Kansas as well, their land separated from the Metis Potawatomi by the Kansas River.

Some Three Fires families had refused to move and others, after one look at their Iowa lands, drifted back to Illinois, so the last of the Fox Valley’s Indian residents weren’t forced west until 1838. That finally brought the Native American presence in the area to a close after 120 centuries of continuous habitation along the banks of the Fox River.

• Looking for more local history? Visit http://historyonthefox.wordpress.com.