Kendall County, Illinois - Chapter 2: Indians and French Missionaries, 1877

Chapter 2: Indians and French Missionaries

;HE INDIANS were so called by Columbus because he supposed he had sailed across the western sea to the eastern shores of India. He did not know that a new continent in mid ocean had stopped his course before he was half wav to India, and that 3000 miles of land blocked the "North-west Passage."' It was this gorgeous East that inspired the efforts of all the early navigators, none of them realizing that they had discovered a more valuable West. Nor did they give over until every nook and cranny of the American coast, from Brazil to Greenland, had been explored, in hope of finding an avenue through to the Pacific Ocean. But what past generations could not find, the present generation has made, and the continent has become more than a substitute for the ocean, inasmuch as the Panama and Union Pacific Railways are swifter than ships.

When the Indians came to this continent we have no present means of knowing, and their traditions do not tell ; nor do we know from what land their ancestors came. They did not originate here, for they have displaced an older people. There are many ways by which they could have come. Behrings Strait is only fift}^ miles wide, with islands between. It is set down accurately in a very old Japanese Map in the British Museum, showing that the ancient Asiatic navigators were acquainted with it and with the land beyond. Then below the Strait, and reaching from Japan to America, is a natural bridge of one hundred and seventy islands - the Kurile and Aleutian groups. On the other side of the continent Greenland and Iceland, whose authentic history reaches back a thousand years, form connecting links with Europe. Greenland is but two hundred miles from British America. Over these different routes many, many voyagers undoubtedly have come whose adventures there was no historian to record. Other pathways are across the great ocean itself. Japanese junks have more than once been blown to our shores ; Polynesian islanders have been drifted across the sea in open boats ; four hundred years ago the Portugese were wafted unconsciously to Brazil ; six hundred years ago a Welsh fleet under Madoc, Prince of Wales, drifted to America, and landed, it is supposed, on the coast of Virginia; and nine hundred years ago the Scandinavians founded a colony on the coast of Massachusetts. We cannot go farther back, for history stops. The latter colony continued for three hundred years, and would probably have been permanent if they could have cut themselves loose from the mother country and become natives. They were not indigenous to the soil. This the ancestors of the Indians did, and they flourished and became tribes and nations which in lapse of time differed in appearance and in dialect one from another. Whatever their ancestral civilization might have been, they relapsed into savages, and were able by force of numbers to expel all conflicting races not as savage as themselves. In 1634 the visited the trackless wilds of Canada, and were followed in the course of thirteen years by more than forty others. By 1641 they had penetrated to Lake Superior - five years before the devoted Eliot had addressed the tribe of Indians that dwelt within six miles of Boston. In 1667 the mission was still maintained and the Pottawatomies and Sacs and Foxes visited it, and invited the missionaries to their homes. We get these accounts from the Jesuit narratives which were published at Paris, and are still preserved in old libraries. We believe they are reliable, as the missionaries, as a class, were humble, self-denying men. We cannot be sure whether famous Indian historian, says that in the early part of the eighteenth century the Pottawatomies had crowded the Miamies from their dwellings at Chicago, that they came from the islands near the entrance of Green Bay, and were a branch of the great nation of the Chippewas or Ojibwas. Others say they came from Canada, at an unknown date. Perhaps both these accounts are true, though we never shall certainly know, for Indians wrote no histories. A piece of writing was to them a dark mystery.

The Miamies were undoubtedly here in 1672, for that year they were visited by Allouez and Dablon, two French Missionaries, who were the first whites of whom we have any record who set foot in Northern Illinois.

The Mississippi

had not been discovered. It was described bv the Indians as the Great River, in whose waters were savage monsters, and on whose banks were savage nations. There were three theories about it : first, that it ran southwest to the Gulf of California ; second, that it ran south to the Gulf of Mexico; third, that it ran south-east to the Atlantic Ocean. The whole region was a mystery, and was mapped and peopled pretty much as fancy might invent. The earliest books on America contained the wildest tales. They told of races of pigmies and of giants. That the southern forests concealed tribes of negroes, and the inhabitants of the north were white like the polar bear or ermine. One writer had heard of a nation that did not eat, and another believed, if not in a race of headless men, at least in a race whose heads did not rise above their shoulders.

The Great French Missionary

The question of the river, however, was more than a matter of curiosity ; it had a commercial and political importance. At last the Governor of Canada in 1672, more than two hundred years a^o, committed the exploration to two men, Louis Joliet, who is known only in connection with this discovery, and

Jacques Marquette

JACQUES MARQUETTE, the famous missionary, who was then at his mission village in northern Michigan. These two, with two canoes and five men, floated down the Mississippi for a month as far as an Indian town, near the mouth of the Arkansas river, when they became satisfied that it emptied into the gulf.

On their return they entered this State by the Illinois river, and were struck with the beauty of the forest and prairies and variety of the game in some parts of the country, and the interminable marshes of other parts. They found an Indian town of four hundred and sixty lodges, near Utica, below Ottawa, and as they passed up, gazed for the first time on the lofty walls of Starved Rock. They were well received at the Indian town, and one of the chiefs, with some of the young men, piloted them up the O'Plaine river, helped carry their boats across the portage of four miles in Cook County to the north branch of the Chicago river, down which they came to Chicago - to Lake Illinois as they called it. Here their guides left them, and they went up the lake to Green Bay, and Joliet returned to Quebec. Marquette, according to a previous promise to the chiefs, spent the succeeding winter with the tribes at Ottawa and Chicago, and died at the Marquette river the year after, 1675.