Thousands of area residents drive their autos, walk or ride their bicycles over its bridges or along its banks each day, but few give any thought to why the Fox River has the name it does.
It could have been given its name because there are lots of foxes in the area. Or perhaps it was called the Fox River because the river curves, narrows and widens like a fox’s tail.
But the river’s name has nothing to do with the furry fellows once sought for their fur and hunted for their love of raiding farmers’ chicken coops.
Instead, the river carries the name of one of the Native American tribes that once lived along its northern reaches for more than a century before they were forced to relocate west of the Mississippi River by the U.S. government.
No one really knows what the earliest Native Americans called the river, although we can make a pretty good guess. By the time the first French explorers and traders arrived in northern Illinois in the late 1600s, the Native People were calling the stream “Pestekouy,” a word in the Algonquian language meaning “bison.”
According to historical and archaeological evidence, the Fox Valley was not used as a permanent home by Native Americans for several decades during the 1500s and 1600s. Instead, it was one of the prime hunting grounds for the various tribal bands of the Illinois Confederacy. As herds of varying sizes of Eastern American Bison moved across the prairies of what one day would become Kendall County, they were followed by various Indian bands, including the Illinois, who harvested them for use as a major source of protein-rich food as well as for other animal-based products needed for survival.
The Indians conducted large communal bison hunts in the fall when the prairie grass was dry, usually setting the grass on fire in an incomplete circle around the herd. When the bison attempted to escape through the narrow nonburning opening, they were killed more easily.
Given the Fox Valley’s topography of large expanses of gently rolling prairie broken by occasional hardwood grove and the wooded banks of streams and wetlands, it’s logical to assume bison found the area much to their liking. As did deer, who are creatures of the edges of woodlands. The Native People created ideal habitat for them as well by intentionally burning off the prairies in the autumn that not only killed saplings springing up on the prairie but also cleared dead underbrush in the groves. New growth around the groves’ edges created the perfect deer habitat.
But getting back to the Fox River’s name, the Indians who hunted the area’s bison probably named the river after the large herds found along its banks. We know for sure local Native Americans hunted bison, because during an archaeological dig in 1987 in Oswego, a bison leg bone was recovered from a village cooking fire pit. Kansas State University dated the bone for the Little White School Museum, indicating the animal was killed about 1400, well before any Europeans were present in North America.
When the French arrived in northern Illinois in the 1600s, they immediately understood the importance of the Illinois River valley. The river’s northern tributary, the Des Plaines, was within easy walking distance of the sluggish Chicago River, which emptied into Lake Michigan. The short distance from the Chicago to the Des Plaines meant a relatively quick trip from Lake Michigan to the Illinois and on to the French colonies in southern Illinois, if there was enough water in the upper Des Plaines.
As the French traveled that route, they were well aware of the towering sandstone bluff that rose from the river near its junction with the Pestekouy. Called simply le Rocher (the Rock) by the French, today’s Starved Rock area provided the location for a series of French forts and trading posts. The first known map that named the Fox River as the Pestekouy was drawn by Jean-Baptiste Louis Franquelin in 1684. As late as 1688, the Venetian Conventual friar Marco Coronelli drew a map (undoubtedly making liberal use of Franquelin’s map) that labeled the river as the “Pestconti,” a clear Italianization of the French spelling.
When French attention drifted away from northern Illinois, the name of Pestekouy was lost. For several decades, when the river was shown on maps at all it was unnamed. Louvigny in 1697 and DeLisle in 1718 both produced maps depicting the area with the Fox River unnamed.
During that period, the river apparently lost its original connection with the bison herds, possibly because of their eradication in the area from overhunting, and it became known by most French travelers as the River of the Rock, undoubtedly due to the proximity of the stream’s mouth to Starved Rock. A map drawn by Dutch cartographer J. Ottens in 1754, titled “Map of the English and French possessions in the vast land of North America,” shows the Fox River with the name R. du Rocher–”River of the Rock.”
Even by that time, however, the river may have been given its current name. Vicious warfare between the French and the Fox Indians had been in progress since the late 1600s. In the early 1700s, parts of the tribe were reported living on the upper reaches of the river. Since the Foxes were considered threats to the entire French empire in North America, the unnamed stream on which large bands of them made their homes probably led to the river’s final name.
By the late 1700s, the name had been finalized. Between 1764 and 1775, Thomas Hutchins, an engineer with the 60th Royal American Regiment, traveled throughout what is now the Midwest. In 1778, Hutchins published “A New Map of the Western Parts of Virginia, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and North Carolina ...,” which included the Illinois River valley and on which Hutchins clearly labeled the Fox River.
Names can tell a lot about an area’s history. Even the history behind a short name like Fox River can trace the comings and goings of Indian tribes, imperial intrigues, intrepid explorations and bitter warfare. What’s in a name? It’s everything that makes history interesting.
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