Madison County, Illinois - Chapter 1: Primeval Inhabitants, 1912

Successors of Mound Builders - The Illini or Illinois - Pontiac's Conspiracy - Pon¬ tiac's Deatli Avenged - The Iroquois Descend on the Illini - Twilight of French

The Indians found upon the American con¬ tinent when it was first discovered by white men were not the original inhabitants. They supplanted a vanished race or races of a prob¬ ably higher type of civilization than them¬ selves. But as to the origin or racial type of these primeval inhabitants nothing is known. Ethnologists have their theories and specula¬ tions, but theories, however, learned and plaus¬ ible, do not constitute history. Just as little is known of the history and origin of the In¬ dians known to white men. There are no ruins of temples, towers, shrines and palaces lying prostrate, overgrown with forests and vegetation, as in Mexico, to tell the tale of vanished splendor and civilization ; no inscrip¬ tions, as on the ancient tablets dug up from the ruins of Nineveh, Baalbec and the buried cities of Egypt, to unfold the record of a van¬ ished past, - nothing save the remnants of what appear to be ancient fortifications and the stupendous works of the Mound Builders which contain no record which give any clue as to their origin. All their past is wrapped in mystery, and the only agreement as to the Mound Builders is a negative one, viz : that they were not the Indians known to white men. But as Madison county seems to have been the main seat of power of the Mound Builders and the locality where their greatest works survive, this question will be treated in a separate chapter.

A new land, and yet, some claim, an older land than Europe, geologically - it is new only in the sense of being new to us and to history. The Indians of the Illinois country were wan¬ dering tribes coming from where they knew not and caring not whither they drifted, some¬ times living a communal life in villages and cultivating the soil to a limited extent, but mainly rangers over the forests, plains and prairies, with few fixed places of abode, and yet their wanderings circumscribed within cer¬ tain territory by the cordon of surrounding hostile tribes. Some writers claim the Amer¬ ican Indians to be the descendants of the Lost

Ten Tribes of Israel, which were dispersed abroad, and to discover in them traits and types peculiar to the ancient Jews, but this, and many other theories and speculations as to their origin, have no better basis than the author's ingenuity or imagination. The book is still sealed. Of history and records among the Indians the early explorers found none. Neither did those scholars and ethnologists who lived among them for years in order to learn something of their past establish any¬ thing definite or satisfying. Myths, legends, traditions, bequeathed from one generation to another, they found in plenty. But while weird and strange, the legends were fantastic and incredible to the last degree. After going back two or three generations they were lost in the mists, and fact, if there was any, was lost in fancy.

But that they had once been strangers in a land they claimed as their own is told by the mute relics of a vanished race that evidently preceded their own as lords of the soil, and were, moreover, of a higher racial type. The Cahokia group of mounds, in the southern part of Madison county, stands alone, as the great¬ est memorial of their existence in the United States. Of the Indians themselves the records above ground are confined to rude pictographs and figures painted on rocks and cliffs, some of them displaying considerable artistic skill, and emblematic of events or incidents in the lives of the tribes, or designed to display some legend or tradition. The most notable of these pictographs in the Mississippi valley was the picture of the Piasa bird portrayed on the cliffs of Alton. The main relics of the race are beneath the ground, in the graves of their warrior chiefs, where have been found vast quantities of arrow heads, battle axes, stone pipes, implements, ornaments, votive offerings, utensils and pottery, some artistically and cu¬ riously fashioned but all telling of a rude and primitive existence in which the use of metal

The Illini, or Illinois, as the French phrased the word, and from which the state and its greatest river take their name, were an aggre¬ gation of distinct but kindred tribes, - the Kaskaskias, the Peorias, the Cahokias, the Tamaroas, the Kickapoos and others. The mean¬ ing of their name is men, or superior men, but they did not live up to their assumptions and were not the equals in intelligence or ad¬ vancement of the Mohawks, the Iroquois ot New York, or the Cherokees and Chickasaws of the south. They were proud, vain, boastful in their naked savagery ; cruel, treacherous and slothful; yet they possessed many noble traits, a vivid imagery, drawn from nature, and a natural eloquence that was appealing in its richness of expression. The gay-hearted, joyous, adaptable and tactful Frenchman won their confidence and affection ; the Anglo-Sax¬ ons never did, save in individual and excep¬ tional cases, but never as a race. The French danced with them, joined with them in the chase, lived in their wigwams and intermarried with them. The English regarded them as their natural enemies and kept them at swords' points.

The general characteristics of the Illinois were those of the tribes the continent over, but they were reputed to be more inert and cow¬ ardly. Along the Rock and Illinois rivers they dwelt in villages, or towns, sometimes num¬ bering several thousand inhabitants, as in the case of the Indian town on the Illinois river on the present site of Utica, and that on the island near the mouth of Rock river. About the time of the early French explorations these northern Illinois tribes were driven from their ancient homes by the incursions of the fierce and relentless Sioux and the savage and fiery Iroquois. They became wanderers in the wilderness of central and southern Illinois, and seemed loath or afraid to resume the com¬ munal life of the towns, though there were vil¬ lages of certain tribes in Sangamon and Mc¬ Lean counties and one of the . Kickapoos in central Madison. They raised a little corn, and some beans and squashes, but relied mainly on the chase for their support, the game of the woods and prairies and the fish of the rivers and lakes, with the varied abundance of the wild fruit^ and products of the forests. They made little provision for the future ; they reveled in summer in nature's prodigality of supplies, and starved in winter through lack of foresight in providing for the future. They likewise made little provision for protecting themselves against the severities of the inclem¬ ent season either in their habitations or their persons. Such garments as they wore were made of skins and furs of wild animals, which were often fashioned with rare skill by the squaws and richly adorned. They were chil¬ dren of nature and took nature as it came. They were incessantly at war with neighbor¬ ing tribes, and later with the encroaching white settlers, and their ferocity is a tale of continuous horrors unspeakable and unwrit¬ able, but be it said of the white settlers that when at war on the border they showed no more mercy than did their savage foes. All men are accused of being barbarians at bot¬ tom. It may be said, however, in some ex¬ tenuation of the war of extermination waged against them by the English that the Indians made no use of the beautiful and fertile lands they occupied, except as a field for the battle and the chase, and if the whites had not exter¬ minated them the Indians would have exter¬ minated each other - a work they were busily engaged in when diverted, in some measure therefrom by the incursion of the whites.

ent tribes, speaking different languages or dia¬ lects, with each tribe looking upon its neigh¬ bor as its natural prey. At the way Indian wars were raging at the time of the French occupation of the Illinois country, it would only have been a short time until the rival tribes would have extirpated each other and left the wilderness tenantless. Their nearest approach to racial or national unity, in the Mississippi valley, was after the session of the country by France to England in 1763, when the great chieftain Pontiac, foreseeing the doom of his people in the encroachments of the colonists, organized the great conspiracy extending over the territory from Canada to the Gulf and from the Alleghanies to the Mis¬ sissippi, and uniting all the tribes therein in a concerted attack on all the English forts, set¬ tlements and outposts along the frontier; and then followed the two bloodiest years ever known to the pioneers on the border. The whole valley was aflame with burning villages and isolated cabins, forts were captured, old and young were slaughtered, cruelty demoniac and horrors infinite reigned supreme. But the French settlements along the Mississippi suf¬ fered little from the widespread conflict. It was the English against whom the conspiracy was organized by Pontiac, in a confident but vain hope of help from the French govern¬ ment in regaining the land of his fathers. It was in our neighboring town of Cahokia, in 1767, after the collapse of the conspiracy, that the mighty chieftain met his death at the hands of an Illinois renegade Indian, hired by a trader to assassinate him.

A fearful retribution was exacted from the Illinois Indians for this murder for which the tribe was made responsible. In revenge there¬ for the Pottawattomies made war upon them. The Illini being defeated, so runs the legend, fled for refuge to the tall cliff on the Illinois river, in what is now La Salle county, which was inaccessible from three sides and from the fourth was approachable only by a nar¬ row causeway, easily defended, and where they repulsed their pursuers. But the pursu¬ ers then changed their tactics, cut off all sup¬ plies of food and water, and literally starved the whole tribe to death, only one woman sur¬ viving when the foes gained possession of the mount. Thus was the death of Pontiac avenged at Starved Rock.

Among the Indian myths and traditions that have come down to us is that of the Piasa Bird, the scene of which is laid in Madison county, and is founded on the famous Indian painting on the cliffs at Alton. The legend, as related by John Russell, appears elsewhere in this volume. As far as the present territory of Madison is concerned, the ninety years follow¬ ing its discovery by Marquette and Joliet is a twilight period marked by few recorded in¬ cidents connected with the Indians. La Salle, however, records a nearby illustration of sav¬ age ferocity that he came upon near the mouth of the Illinois soon after its occurrence. On his voyage down the Illinois, in 1680, he fol¬ lowed in the wake of the destroying hosts of the Iroquois who had driven the local tribes from their villages and pursued them south¬ ward. The invaders not only destroyed the villages of the unhappy Illini, and put to death every living thing, but they even tore opened the graves, mutilated the bodies and strewed them over the plain. Near the mouth of the river, on the east side, apparently, the explorers came upon the spot where the pur¬ suers had overtaken the helpless women and children of the tribe, their warriors having abandoned them and fled. The attention of the Frenchmen was first attracted by seeing in the distance numerous forms of human beings upright but motionless. They landed and made an examination, finding the forms to be those of squaws who had been captured and burned at the stake, their charred remains standing as mute evidences of savage brutality. Tradition says the victims numbered seven hundred. But we must not forget that prior to this period and later, in England, France and Spain, among alleged civilized people, the souls of saints and martyrs were ascending to Heaven in columns of smoke and flame, a sac¬ rifice to the malevolence of religious bigots, and that in the same countries alleged witches were burned to death. Burning their enemies at the stake seems a savage instinct that civil¬ ization has never yet eradicated from the na¬ ture of men, and is even now frequently chronicled in our newspapers as the form of punishment or revenge most favored by howl¬ ing mobs for those charged with revolting crimes. In this respect the enlightened Cau¬ casian can assume no airs of superiority, as a race, over the -primeval denizens of the forest.

During this twilight period of French occu¬ pancy the settlers on the American Bottom lived mainly at peace with the Indians and the devoted priests won many followers among the savages to whom they brought the story of the Cross. The five settlements, of which Cahokia was the oldest, increased slowly by emigration from Canada, and later on from France by way of New Orleans, but their progress is not a part of this narrative. The migration from Canada passed by the present bounds of this county and located in the col¬ onies further south. No mission seems to have been established within the present lim¬ its of the county, but as 'Cahokia mission was located only six miles south, there is no doubt that the missionaries of the Jesuits were con¬ stantly traversing the soil of this county on their self-denying labor of winning souls to the Christian faith. It is claimed, however, that a' French settlement once existed on Chouteau island, whether a mission or not is unknown. The proof of this settlement seems to rest on the finding, by the early English settlers, about 1802, of the remnants of pear and apple or¬ chards on the island, the trees being evidently of great age, indicating, of course, prior oc¬ cupancy by white men. Undoubtedly all the territory of Madison was well known to the traders and trappers of Cahokia and that the county was threaded with their trails. It was also constantly traversed by wandering tribes of Indians, but no villages except that of the Kickapoos on Indian creek seem to have been permanently located in the county during the ninety years of French domination. But that it was, at one time, prior to recorded history, the home of a teeming aboriginal population is attested by the vast quantities of relics and implements, of which we have spoken, found in the graves along the bluffs and in the mounds of the American Bottom. Calhoun, the peninsula county, lying between the Illi¬ nois and the Mississippi rivers and twelve miles beyond the north line of Madison, is richer in Indian remains than any other county in the state and is a favorite field of research by archaeologists.