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So the question is, will this be a typical Illinois winter or not? If the past few years are any guide, we’ll never know what the heck will happen next. Snow, wind, rain, sleet, thunder, lightning – sometimes all at once – along with wild temperature fluctuations enliven the experience for us as we try to cope these days.
Living in northern Illinois and surviving both the scorching, humid summers and the cold, windy, (and up until recently, anyway) snowy winters has been a challenge ever since the first Native People arrived, as they followed herds of woolly mammoths and giant elk during the last Ice Age.
Back then, the politically correct notion that it’s bad to wear furs was a few hundred centuries away from being dreamed up. Furs, in fact, were required garb during the cold months unless frostbite was the desired result. Unfortunately, no one knows exactly what those first paleo hunters wore because none of their clothing has been preserved. But we can speculate that they wore moccasins made from the thick elk hide, probably lined with mouse nest fill or dried grasses. Animal skin clothing, with the fur on the inside, was also probably very popular with the fashionistas of that era.
In fact, the winter clothing of American Indians didn’t change a whole lot for a few thousand years. When weaving was invented in North America, narrow strips of rabbit hide, tanned with the fur left on, were made into blankets and capes that were warm, and soft besides. Moccasins stuffed with grass were favored right up until leather shoes and boots were introduced by Europeans, and sometimes afterwards by both whites and Indians living in the wild.
Snowshoes were required to get around in deep snow, with most Native People from this region favoring the smaller and more maneuverable oval “bear paw” design.
When the first white settlers arrived in the Fox Valley, they didn’t live all that much differently than the Native American residents they found living here, with the exception of their homes. Instead of loaf-shaped bark-covered lodges, American settlers built log cabins with wooden split shake gable roofs.
Nevertheless, winter was as much a problem for the settlers as it was for the Indians. Log cabins were drafty and cold, and the earliest fireplaces actually had wooden chimneys. Although thickly lined with clay, wooden chimneys often burst into flame, which led to stone or brick chimneys replacing them as soon as possible.
The roads the first settlers encountered were no more than faint dirt traces across the prairie, running from one ford across a creek or river to another. It was actually a bit easier to travel in the winter because the dirt tracks were frozen solid. Spring was the bad time because the dirt roadways turned into virtually bottomless quagmires.
Sleds and sleighs provided winter transport for people and freight alike. During the winter months around these parts, animals were slaughtered and then the frozen carcasses were hauled to market in Chicago on sleds, usually pulled by ox teams. Both pork and beef were transported from the countryside to Chicago in this manner, where the carcasses were salted or smoked, to be shipped east via the Great Lakes or used for food by the residents of the fast growing city.
The only heat available in those earliest of log cabins was firewood. And it took a LOT of wood to heat even a small cabin, generally about 30 cords a winter (a cord is a tight stack of wood measuring four feet wide, four feet high, and eight feet long). Firewood was so necessary, in fact, that most of the county’s larger groves were subdivided into woodlots owned by farmers in the surrounding area. Wood, it was said then, warmed you twice, once when cut and split, and again when burned.
Meanwhile, down at the local mill dam, the millers had to work hard to keep the ice from damaging their machinery and buildings. Periodically, ice had to be broken away from the millraces and sluice gates needed to regulate water flow to the mill wheels. While that work proceeded, there was always a danger that a worker would fall through the ice and drown.
In later years, the ice itself was turned into a commercial product. Each winter, the thick ice that formed behind the mill dams at Yorkville and Oswego was harvested using horse-drawn ice plows and hand ice saws. The blocks were floated to shore by workers, and stored in huge ice houses along the river bank. During the summer, the ice was transported to Aurora and Chicago via railcar, where it was used to keep food from spoiling through the use of iceboxes.
With the advent of practical motor vehicles, roads had to be kept reasonably clear of snow. Unlike horse-drawn sleighs, autos could not travel overland across the frozen fields, but had to keep to the roadways.
Nowadays, we expect the snowplows to head out at the first sign of snow, and demand that salt, sand, or both be spread on icy streets and roads as soon as possible. The idea of hitching up old Dobbin to a sleigh and heading off across country is only remembered when we sing a few choruses of “Jingle Bells.” Even then I suspect a lot of folks don’t understand what the song’s words mean. For instance, what are “jingle bells” and why would they “make spirits bright?”
Things are a lot more complicated these days, but they also are a lot more comfortable. It’s doubtful folks would tolerate packing their moccasins with dried grass each morning before heading off to work in a one-horse open sleigh. Instead, we sit in our warm autos wrapped in goose down coats and listen to weather reports on the radio detailing the wind chill and predicting weather based on satellites and Doppler radar.
Once in a while I muse about what it would be like to go back to the good old days of Model Ts with side curtains, horse drawn open sleighs, and fireplace-heated homes. But not for long.
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