Rural Historic Structural Survey - Will County Land Use

Wiss, Janney, Elstner Associates, Inc.
River Valley lacked large platform mounds. 5 It was also a period of a widespread trading network known
to modern anthropology as the Hopewell Interaction Sphere. The villages of this period were typically
located on valley bottom lands, close to river transportation. Agricultural development included
cultivation of floodplain lands; by 650 A.D. maize was being grown in the Illinois River valley. 6
The time span between 1000 A.D. and the coming of European explorers and settlers is known as the
Mississippian Period. Northeast Illinois was at the fringe of the larger Middle Mississippi culture present
in central and southern Illinois. At the beginning of this period, the communities of large fortified towns
and ceremonial platform mounds reached their zenith. Among these sites in northeastern Illinois is the
Fisher site in Will County, located in Channahon Township.
The Arrival of European Settlers
Now the Lenapées had a village by the sea. They often looked out, but they saw nothing. One day something came.
When it came near the land, it stopped. Then the people were afraid. They ran into the woods. The next day two Indians
went quietly to look It was lying there in the water. Then something just like it [a rowboat] came out of it and walked
on two legs over the water. When it came to land, two men stepped out of it. They were different from us. They made
signs for the Lenapées to come out of the woods. They gave presents. Then the Lenapées gave them skin clothes.
The white men went away. They came back many times. They asked the Indians for room to put a chair on the land. So
it was given. But soon they began to pull the lacing out of the bottom and walk inland with it. They have not yet come to
the end of the string.
Wyandot tale, “The Coming of the White Man” 7
French Explorers and Settlers in the Illinois Territory
By the time of the French explorations of the seventeenth century, the native inhabitants of Illinois as a
group belonged to the Algonquian linguistic family, closely related to the Chippewa. The specific tribes
in the northeast Illinois region included the Miami (located on sites near the Calumet River, the juncture
of the Des Plaines and Kankakee Rivers, and the Fox River) and the Illinois (present throughout the rest
of modern-day Illinois). “Illinois” was a native word signifying “men” or “people.” 8 By the early to mid-
1700s, the Potawatomi moved into the area from the region of Michigan and northern Wisconsin.
Detail of a mural in the Illinois State Capitol, Springfield, showing
Marquette and Jolliet on their travels.
5 Several Woodland sites are present in the river valleys of the Des Plaines and Du Page Rivers. (John Doershuk,
Plenemuk Mound and the Archaeology of Will County, Illinois Cultural Resource Study No. 3 (Springfield, Illinois:
Illinois Historic Preservation Agency, 1988), 11–14).
6 James E. Davis, Frontier Illinois (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1998), 25.
7 Native American Legends of the Great Lakes and Mississippi Valley, Katherine B. Judson, ed. (1914, reprinted
DeKalb, Illinois: Northern Illinois University Press, 2000), 195.
8 John R. Swanton, The Indian Tribes of North America (1952, Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin Number
145; reprint, Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1969), 241.
Will County Rural Historic Structural Survey
Du Page Township Chapter I – 5