In a previous column I talked about how Illinois was saved to become part of the brand new United States during the Revolutionary War.

As we get into the yearlong celebration of the nation’s 250th anniversary, it might be interesting to take a brief look at what was going on right here in the Fox River Valley 250 years ago.

In 1776, it would be 50 years before the first White settler came up the Fox River from the Illinois River town of Ottawa to settle in what became Kendall County. But that doesn’t mean no one was living here.

The entire Fox Valley had been considered a prime hunting and gathering area for a couple thousand years before the Massachusetts militia and British redcoats squared off on Lexington common.

The first hunter-gatherer people followed the melting glacial ice as it retreated north, harvesting the huge Ice Age mammals living on the steadily growing tundra at the glacier’s base.

Those glaciers had been almost unbelievably huge, with the ice at its greatest extent thicker than the Sears Tower (which you may call the Willis Tower if you must) is tall. As the ice retreated north it left behind a brand new landscape dotted with pothole lakes and gravel ridges, along with huge “glacial erratic” boulders that would cause problems for builders right up to the present day.

Gradually, the Native Peoples’ cultures stabilized into the tribes the first Spanish, French, British, Dutch, and Swedish colonizers found living in North America. The Europeans came to northern North America for the rich fur-bearing animals that lived in the area, and the contest between them to secure as much of that trade as possible with the Native People led to decades of violent warfare.

In the mid-1600s, Iroquois raiding parties struck here to northern Illinois from their home base along New York’s Hudson River in an effort to control the fur trade.

That drove the resident tribal groups of the Illinois Confederacy west of the Mississippi River. Gradually, the Illinois filtered back so that when the first French explorers arrived in the Illinois River Valley in 1673, Illinois groups were once again living along the river.

But the warfare had debilitated the Illinois. In the 1740s, the Three Fires Confederacy, sensing the Illinois’ weakness, moved south from their recent homeland on both shores of Lake Michigan and took the Fox and other neighboring river valleys to the east for themselves.

The Three Fires consisted of inter-related village groups of Potawatomi, Ottawa, and Chippewa people. Most of their villages were established in modern northern Indiana, with their territory extending all the way west to the rich area along the Fox River.

Villages seem to have been established in the Big Woods that stretched in a giant triangle all the way from modern Batavia on the east bank of the river south to Oswego and east to Naperville.

Meramech Hill near modern Plano across the river from Silver Springs State Park was another long-time home of Native People, its occupation dating back a thousand or more years in the area’s history before the Three Fires arrived. Other villages existed at one time or another in the AuSable timber in today’s NaAuSay Township and along AuSable Creek.

The Three Fires had been staunch allies of the French, who had helped them in their struggles against the Iroquois. After the British won the French and Indian War (1754-1763) leading to France withdrawing from most of its former North American colonies, the local tribes allied themselves with the charismatic leader Pontiac, whose war nearly eradicated British control of the area north and west of the Ohio River in an effort to bring back French control.

As a result when war broke out between the 13 American colonies and Britain, the Three Fires at first apparently participated in some raids against the colonial frontier in modern Kentucky and Tennessee. But in 1778, Virginia militia Lt. Col. George Rogers Clark managed to seize control of the Illinois Country. He negotiated neutrality with the Three Fires that the confederacy took very seriously.

In the summer of 1779, British Lt. Thomas Bennett arrived at the St. Joseph River in northern Indiana with a substantial force of Native Americans, French Canadians, and British regulars with any eye towards attacking Clark. But the Three Fires told Bennett and his legendary second in command, Charles de Langlade, they would annihilate them if they attempted to move any farther west, halting that effort.

Meanwhile, Jean Baptiste Pointe Du Sable, who was running a fur trading post at Chicago, was acting as a spy for Clark while ingratiating himself enough to the British that they eventually commissioned him as a sergeant in their Indian Department.

Although no battles were fought here in the Fox Valley during the Revolution, a number of armed forces on both sides seem to have marched through or near the Fox Valley. And during it all, the Three Fires maintained their neutrality and as noted above, enforced it with threats of their own when necessary.

Native People continued to live along the banks of the Fox River for several more decades, including during the War of 1812 when the Three Fires decided, initially, to throw in their lot with the British against the Americans who were invading their territory.

Chief Main Poche at his village at Meramech Hill and Chief Waubonsie from his village near Oswego, both apparently participated. Waubonsie and Shabbona, whose village was located west of the Fox River, allied themselves with the native leader Tecumseh during the war. They were both with him at the Battle of the Thames in Canada when he was killed in action.

After that experience both Waubonsie and Shabbona decided peace with American settlers was the better course. They maintained that attitude even during Illinois’ last Indian war, the 1832 conflict prompted by the Sauk warrior Black Hawk, when both aided local American settlers.

In 1836 the Three Fires people were removed by the U.S. Government west of the Mississippi River, first to Missouri then to Iowa and finally to Kansas where their descendants live to this day.

While the government had legally obtained title to most of the Three Fires’ lands the treaty grant to Shabbona was still his village’s property when it was illegally sold from underneath him while he was away.

Today, a bit of that long-ago injustice has been remedied, although it remains a sore subject on both sides, a reminder that while we might not care about history, history cares about us.

Interested in more local history? Visit http://historyonthefox.wordpress.com/