During most winters, we keep hearing all about the “lake effect” snow that is being dumped on our friends over in Michigan and Indiana. And during the rest of the year, the weather forecasters almost always make sure to note the day’s temperature will be “cooler by the lake.”

Virtually every day, the effects of the big lake to our east are brought home to us, even though for those of us out here in the Fox River Valley it is often only through news videos and weather maps on our television screens that we realize what’s happening.

Historically, Lake Michigan was the freshwater highway the first explorers of northern Illinois used to penetrate the rich—and then unknown and mysterious—Midwest. Like a slightly curved knife blade, the lake thrusts hundreds of miles directly south into the old Northwest Territory, penetrating from northern birth and pine forests down into the tallgrass prairie lands that would one day become the richest farmland in the United States.

When the very first Native People arrived in our area several thousand years ago, it was the end of a long period of glaciation. Lakes Michigan, Superior, and Huron formed one huge body of water then, called by geologists Lake Nipissing. As the climate warmed up and the glaciers slowly melted and retreated northward, the land began to rise as it was freed of the tremendous weight of the ice that had measured thousands of feet thick.

At a rate of about a foot every 100 years, land around the western Great Lakes rose creating the shorelines of the individual lakes we know today.

The Ice Age hunters who followed the retreating ice north as they harvested the giant bison and mastodons then living in the area slowly gave up their purely hunting culture as the big animals died out. Today, many paleontologists believe the over-sized Ice Age grazing mammals were, at least in part, hunted to extinction by efficient, organized groups of Paleo-Indians.

Thousands of years passed, during which the cultures and traditions of the local Native People underwent numerous and extensive changes. By the time the first white Europeans arrived in the early 1600s, the Great Lakes Native People had developed into numerous individual tribes with traditions and cultures that ranged from primitive hunter-gatherers to large scale farmers to skilled maritime traders.

Those early Europeans were out to make a buck and quickly grasped the fact that the interconnected Great Lakes system was a wonderful water superhighway from the East Coast deep into the interior of North America.

Adopting the excellent birch bark canoes invented by the Chippewa People—future engineers would declare the canoes’ design “elegant”—French traders and trappers penetrated the entirety of northern and northwestern North America, even extending trade ever farther west, paddling up the Missouri River well into the treeless shortgrass prairies of the Great Plains.

The first Europeans to legally travel through Illinois, Jesuit Father Jacques Marquette and geographer Louis Jolliet, both remarked about the richness of the land lying along both sides of the Illinois River. Their accounts drew French fur traders who created the first settlements in what would become Illinois.

Then, as the age of the fur trade ended, American farmers moved into the area to exploit the rich land that had been observed and reported on by the two explorers a century and a half before.

Here in Kendall County, the first American settlers came by land from southern Illinois, following the Illinois and Fox Rivers north. But as word got back east about how rich the prairie land in the Fox Valley was, setters by the thousands began using Lake Michigan as their main transportation route to their new homes.

Many of those early settlers came from Vermont, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and New York. They utilized the Erie Canal to get to Lake Erie from their homes. From Buffalo, New York on the shores of that lake, they travelled by lake schooner or steam and sailing ship past Detroit (another old French trading settlement) through Lake Huron and south on Lake Michigan to Chicago.

In its early years, Chicago was a low, muddy, swampy place rife with often fatal diseases like malaria. Those sturdy New Englanders and Middle Staters wanted to have nothing to do with such a dismal place and moved west onto the healthier prairies as quickly, as possible.

During the Black Hawk War of I832, the U.S. Army used the lake as a major transportation as troops were brought from back east to the “front” at Chicago. But the troops, who were supposed to subdue “hostile Indians”, ended up killing far more settlers than the mostly peaceful tribesmen did by bringing the dreaded Asiatic Cholera with them and infecting the entire region.

In the decades following the war, the U.S. Army dug a channel through the sandbar at the mouth of the Chicago River, creating, for the first time, a safe harbor at Chicago. Lake Michigan then became the major transportation route of the upper Midwest. In the 1840s, when the lake was connected to the Mississippi River with the Illinois & Michigan Canal running from the lake to the Illinois River, northern Illinois became an economic power that even today outranks many of the world’s sovereign nations.

The economic effects of the lake to our east do not leave off with its transportation value, however. As noted above, the climate of northern Illinois and other states bordering it is heavily influenced by the effect of the lake’s waters. In fact, on quiet summer evenings, lake mist can be both seen and smelled here in Kendall County if the breeze is in the right direction.

It would have been interesting to have been one of those Paleo-Indian hunters following the herds of giant mastodons around the base of the glaciers 10,000 years ago or so in the Kendall County area, getting the lay of the land that was to undergo so much change over so many years.

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