Kendall County, Illinois - Chapter 1: The Mound Builders, 1877

Chapter 1: The Mound Builders

ONG AGES ago Kendall county was the southeastern corner of barren rock, Sv which reached up to, and beyond the northern end of the State. Chicago on one side was under water, and Morris and Streator on the other, with the southern part of the State, were part of a vast swamp where evergreens and rushes grew and were made into coal. That was the mediaeval time in the world's physical history. Before that, when the sea covered all the country, there were in the water shoals of curious little fellows which geologists have called Tentaculites Oswegoensi, viz. : the Oswego sort of tentaculites, or shell worms. This sort have been found nowhere but in the Oswego rocks, near the mouth of Waubonsie creek. Then after fourteen or fifteen geological epochs came the or the ages during which the land was raised and rivers cut new channels below the old. As a consequence nearly all rivers, lakes, and even the sea itself, in many places, have two sets of banks, one confining the present stream or lake, and the other bounding the flood plain into which the water rises during freshets. The upper banks are often very wide apart. Those of the Fox river below Oswego are more than a mile, and farms are now laid out and a railroad runs over what ages ago was the river bed. It was shallow, however, as were all streams not confined by rocky banks. They probably amounted to but little more than continuous swamps, making the country very unhealthy for human beings.

The table lands between the rivers were swampy in proportion, and in Northern Illinois especially, or that part of it south and west of the lake, there was, perhaps, but a small amount of really dry land.

Kendall county was half under shallow water; the temperature somewhat w^armer than at present, and the long sedge grass growing out of the marshes alternated with the groves growing on the ridges between.

At some time during this period Lake Michigan had an outlet by the Illinois river to the Mississippi, and so to the Gulf, and a large part of Cook county and perhaps of some others were under the lake. It is not likely that all the lakes flowed this way, for some of them at least have been flowing through Niagara a great deal longer than that. There may have once been a ''divide" midway between the east and the west, which was afterwards broken through. Col. Long, a well-known government surveyor, believed that he had located this ancient divide near Detroit.

Wild Animals A Few Speculations

of the State in those days - compared with other parts. Wolves, bears, coons, and bisons, inhabited the upland, and gigantic beavers worked along the streams, while the huge mastodons, the largest animals that ever trod the earth, haunted the marshes and slou<zhs and the groves that bordered upon them. It is curious that the remains of mastodons are always found in marshy places to-day, showing that the lay of the land is the same now as then, and that these animals have not been extinct long enough for wet places to become dry. Farther south enormous horses galloped over the prairies, and mammoth, hairy elephants wandered in droves through the woods.

In regard to the ancient inhabitants we can only offer conjectures. Some - as George Bancroft, the historian - believe that the mysterious mounds and earth-works were formed by nature and belong to geology, rather than to history. But it is most generally believed that they are the work of a people who, for want of a better name, are called

Their earth-works, which have become their monuments, are of three kinds : mounds, embankments and enclosures, and are found all the way from Wisconsin to the mouth of the Mississippi. One mound in Cahokia, Illinois, is 500x700 feet in size and 90 feet high. Central America is one vast field of them, and temples of stone were erected on them which still remain, while in this country the buihlings were made of clay and have long ago perished.

south. Those of North America appear to be the oldest ; then come the relics of the traditionary Toltecs of Central America ; while the Aztecs, of South America, were in their prime 350 years ago. Both these peoples believed they had come from an unknown land at the north.

The mounds in this part of the State are generally small, but quite numerous. Between one and two dozen are clearly marked on the bluffs along Fox river, in this county, and doubtless many others have been wholly or partially obliterated. One of the finest is on the county line at Millington, on Joseph Jackson's land. It was dug into by a committee "of citizens about forty years ago, and found to be a great burial heap. Numbers of human teeth were taken out, but some fragments of bones found were replaced and again covered. It is probable that these were remains of Indians subsequently buried there. Three rows of five mounds each are found on the northern bluff of the river : one on Mrs. Duryea's land, near Bristol ; another on Truman Hathaway's ; and a third on D. R. Ballou's, above the woolen factory at Millington. In Mrs. Duryea's mounds were also found in 1837 some teeth and a decayed skull. Others partially effaced are at the mouths of the Bob Roy and Rock creeks, and are only a few feet above the level of the river, proving that since they were built the river has flowed in its present channel. The Rob Roy mound a short time ago was partly uncovered by water, and George Steward, of Piano, our indefatigable archseolo- and others may be found by any one curious enough to look for them. The material is a coarse clay, mingled with sand and flint, and the outside is often rudely ornamented with lines and figures made in the clay before baking. We have no record that our Indians either did or could make such ware, while it is far too coarse to have belonged to any white family, so that we are thrown back on the supposition of an aboriginal race that were in intelligence between Indians and Whites. There are on the same ground an abundance of flint chippings, suggesting to us that the spot may have been a primitive store and workshop.

The Mounds

are generally fifteen to twenty feet in diameter, and from two to five feet high ; probably not more than one-third their original height. They are surrounded by no ditches or depressions, and are composed of black earth, by which we may understand that the builders had no digging tools, but scratched up the soil from the surface and brought it in their jars or aprons. It demonstrates, too, that the mounds are not the work of nature, otherwise the interior would be clay or gravel. Their purpose was doubtless for burial mounds. Having no means of excavating graves, the people placed their dead on the surface and heaped the soil about them, probably adding to the heap from time to time as others died, until a large tumulus or sepulchral hill was raised. Such ancient mounds, called "barrows" in England, are found all over the world, and are of a class with the stone "cromlechs" of Europe, the "cairns" of Scotland, and the "dolmen" of France. The larger kinds, however, were undoubtedly designed for defense against

Admitting these conclusions, it needs but little imagination to picture before us those first inhabitants of our country, with their red adobe dwellings along our streams, their rude pottery kilns smoking in the ground by our clay banks, and their funeral processions toiling to cover their dead and leaving some weeping mourner to watch the precious mound.

But the end came. A fierce people, less skillful in peace but more cunning in war, came in upon them and either drove them out or exterminated them, and dwelt in their stead. Soon the rude houses decayed and the conquerors cared not to repair them ; the utensils were broken and they could not replace them, and the fragments, like old hieroglyphics, remain to outline the story. The conquered race either perished or passed on to other wilds, perhaps towards the waters of the Colorado, where the remains of a similar dying race are found to-day.

It does not seem necessary to assign a high antiquity to the mound builders. They were here before white men came, but that was only three hundred years ago. Trees six hundred years old grow on some of their works, but those works may have been abandoned centuries before the race went out. Then there is the analoaT of the adobe dwellers of Colorado, who. though slowly perishing, are still in existence, while yet they have been surrounded by the wild Indians for hundreds of years. And part, at least, of the perishable remains found in the mounds are confidently believed by scientific men to belong to the mound builders. They may well enouorh have been here in that traditional time w^hen the gigantic mastodons roamed the lowlands and crossed the swamps in which they were mired, and that time is not ancient enough for wet places to have become dry ; but whatever be the time in which this people was here, they have all gone. Like the ancient monarchies of the East they have passed away ; but unlike those monarchies they have left no hieroglyphic monuments to tell the story.