McLean County, Illinois - Chapter 1: Primitive Mclean County, 1924

To The West

McLEAN COUNTY A CENTURY AGO AND NOW - SOIL, TOPOGRAPHY AND VEGETATION - ANIMAL LIFE - INDIANS - KICKAPOOS MOST NUMEROUS - CHIEF MACHINA - OTHER TRIBES - INDIAN SETTLEMENTS - REMOVAL OF INDIANS TO THE WEST.

Two airplanes sailed over central Illinois, 100 years apart in time. Of course, the first of these was purely mythical, for there were no airplanes in the world 100 years ago. But imagination can serve as the pilot, and when the plane hovers over the territory which is now McLean County, we can picture in our minds the scene as the pilot would have seen it. As far as the eye could see, only stretches of prairie, broken here and there by the thread-like line of the streams and the darker patches of woods or groves. Just at the edge of Blooming Grove could be seen a curling column of smoke from the cabin of the first one or two white families who had settled there. More distant, another column of smoke from the wigwams of the Kickapoo Indians at the edge of what we call Old Town timber. Perhaps up toward the Mackinaw river might have been seen faint outlines of a camp of Delawares, last remnants of their tribe, and to the northwest the last camp of the Pottawattamies. No road or highway crossed the vast stretches of the prairie, but sloughs or ponds at intervals marked the undrained depressions in the landscape.

Wild animals roamed at large, but over the scene brooded a strange silence, as of expectation of the coming of the white man to take charge of this domain.

The second airplane, pausing in mid-air in the summer of 1923, saw nestling beneath him, beautiful and busy Bloomington, county seat of a populous and well-cultivated county. Just north lay embowered Normal, and as the eye of the pilot explored the more distant scene, he saw clusters of houses marking the site of the many villages and towns - Hudson to the north, Danvers and Carlock west, Shirley and McLean to the southwest, Heyworth to the south, Downs and Leroy southeast, Saybrook and Arrowsmith to the east, Cooksville and Colfax to the northeast, and Chenoa, Lexington and Towanda to the further north. Crossing the scene at many places were the well-defined roads, many of them paved, along which rolled hundreds of motor cars. Twin lines of rails marked the course of the steam and electric railroads, along which trains passed at frequent intervals. Between the railroads, highways and towns lay hundreds of farms, with their golden grain harvests just ready for the reapers, with their flocks and herds browsing in the pasture lands. Large bar»ns and comfortable houses denoted the habitations of a wellfed rural population, and school houses at intervals indicated the means of their enlightenment. The whole picture was of a contented and prosperous empire where once the wilderness existed.

The part of Illinois now comprised in McLean County was and is one of the most fertile sections. It is composed of rich black alluvial soil, on which for thousands of years before it was settled by the white man had grown luxuriant crops of prairie grass. The wide spaces of open prairie were broken here and there by more rolling sections of land bordering along the streams, and at intervals there were groves or small forests of native trees, oaks, elms, hickory and other varieties. The prairie grass would grow from six to eight feet in height in the more watered sections. Some of the lands, on account of the lack of drainage, would in the wet seasons assume almost the character of swamps. The rank growth of grasses gave rise to great danger of prairie fires in the fall of the year when the season was dry. If started by some accidental means, even by the lightning, there was no way of stopping their spread until the white settlers grew numerous enough to offer some serious resistance. Great stretches of the prairie lands were often left black and

The land was not without its inhabitants even before the white settlers came. There were thousands of wild creatures who lived on the prairies, in the groves or along the streams. These were deer, wolves, rabbits, raccoons and probably even bear in the more distant times. Numerous kinds and numbers of wild birds furnished a sort of companionship for the white settlers when they first came. But they also furnished a more practical assistance in the form of game and the wild meat which the settler secured with his guns and traps was his chief supply of that kind.

There were human beings here also long before the white settlers arrived. These were the Indians who roamed over these prairies and haunted the woods. There are today traces of Indian villages in some parts of the county, notably in the vicinity of Arrowsmith and in West township. The tribe of the Kickapoos were the most numerous in this immediate vicinity. They formed the first neighbors of the white settlers, and from the time when the first families of whites located in the county, until the Indian tribes finally disappeared from the scene, there was never any scene of bloodshed resulting from collisions of the two kinds of races. Machina, known as Old Machina, was the name given by the white men to the great chief of the Kickapoos who inhabited this region at first. He was pictured as a real chief in stature and bearing. He never displayed any great hostility toward the whites in the form of violence, but soon after the first families came to Blooming Grove he appeared at the settlement one day and gave them warning in his symbolic language that they must leave the country soon. This he did by throwing leaves into the air and letting them fall, indicating that the whites must not remain after the leaves on the trees should fall in the autumn. The warning was not heeded, and Old Machina was obliged to accept his fate. After the final dispersal of the Kickapoos from central Illinois, some people of the tribes settles in the west, and it is said that a remnant of the tribe remains there to this day.

In addition to the Kickapoos which inhabited this part of the country, there were detachments of tribes of the Delawares and the Pottawatomies. The Kickapoos, who were living in what is now McLean County when the white settlers came, removed here from the vicinity of Danville after a treaty in 1819 gave that territory to whites. The Indians established a village on the Mackinaw River 17 miles northeast of the present site of Bloomington.

Four localities in McLean County are notably connected with Indian history. One is in Randolph Township; one in Arrowsmith, known as the Indian battle ground; a third in West, known as the Kickapoo fort; and the fourth in Lexington township, where was a small Indian town as late as 1829. In this latter village, according to tradition, were Indians from the three tribes of the Kickapoos, the Delawares and the Pottawatomies. A Kickapoo chief, known as Ka-an-a-kuck, was famous for his religious exhortation, having become a Christian under influences of some religious sect in the East.

About 1828, the Kickapoos who had been living in McLean County, removed their headquarters to a point within the present boundaries of Livingston County, where they erected a council house and village on the east side of Indian Grove. In 1830 they removed again, to Oliver's Grove, known as Kickapoo Grove, where a census showed 630 souls, men, women and children. In 1832, the government moved the remnants of the tribes to a place west of St. Louis. The remnants of the tribe are! still in Kansas, where they were visited a few years ago by Milo Custer, a local historian, who collected valuable information concerning their present ways of life.