Rural Historic Structural Survey - Will County Land Use

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Wiss, Janney, Elstner Associates, Inc. The Native Americans who occupied the area at this time were divided into powerful tribes who at times fought the European settlers to hold their hunting grounds. Chief among these tribes was the Kickapoo, who were among the first to engage in war with European settlers and the last to enter into treaties with the United States government. On 30 July 1819, by the Treaty at Edwardsville, the Kickapoo ceded their land to United States and began to retreat to Osage County. By 1822, only 400 Kickapoo were left in the state. The Peace Treaty of Tippecanoe of 1832 was negotiated with the Potawatomi tribe, resulting in the ceding of the land now occupied by Chicago and Joliet to the federal government. The early 1830s saw the greatest land boom thus far in American history. Land sales gradually came under the control of the General Land Office as the survey moved westward. In 1834 and 1835 alone, 28 million acres were shifted from closed to open land for purchase. Two years later the Van Buren administration placed an enormous 56,686,000 acres on the market. These lands were located in some of the most fertile farming regions of the nation: Illinois, Iowa, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Missouri. 24 The building of the Illinois and Michigan Canal in the later 1830s and 1840s (discussed in Chapter II) led to a land boom in Chicago, which had been platted in 1830 and incorporated in 1833. 25 The rate of growth in northern Illinois soon matched and then surpassed that of the southern portion of the state. Settlement and Development of Will County By 1826, more European settlers began to move to the northeast Illinois region, so that by 1831 a few hamlets were present between LaSalle and Chicago. Also present in the region was a tribe of nearly 1,000 Potawatomi in the area along the Du Page River south of what would become Plainfield. 26 At the beginning of the Black Hawk War in 1832 the largest settlement north of the Illinois River (except for Chicago) was on Bureau Creek, where there were about 30 families. A few other settlers had located on the river at Peru and LaSalle, and a considerable number at Ottawa. At Walker’s Grove or Plainfield, there were 12 or 15 families. 27 Along the branch of the Du Page, partially located in the region that would become Will County in 1836, there were about twenty families. In Yankee settlements, which embraced part of the towns of Homer, Lockport and New Lenox, there were 20 or 25 families. Along the Hickory in the town of New Lenox, including the Zarley settlement in Joliet Township, there were approximately 20 more families, and at the Reed’s and Jackson Grove there were 6 or 8 more. 28 In 1832, a band of Sauk Indians led by Black Sparrow Hawk, resisted their deportation by Europeans settlers from their ancestral lands. Although most of the fighting occurred in the Rock River area in Northwest Illinois and southern Wisconsin, an Indian panic swept through Will County settlements. The settlers in Walker’s Grove together with about 25 fugitives from the Fox River area hurriedly constructed a stockade from the logs of Stephen Begg’s pigpen, outbuildings, and fences (“Fort Beggs”). The prospect of engaging Indians in pitched battle from the confines of “Fort Beggs” prompted the settlers to leave the makeshift stockade in favor of Fort Dearborn in Chicago. Meanwhile homesteaders in the eastern Will County area gathered at the Gougar homestead and decided to flee to Indiana. 29 24 Ibid., 51. 25 Between 1840 and 1860 the population of Chicago increased from 4,470 to nearly 100,000, growth tied to the economic boom started by the opening of the Illinois and Michigan Canal. By 1890, Chicago’s population was more than 1,000,000 persons (Harry Hansen, ed., Illinois: A Descriptive and Historical Guide (New York: Hastings House Publishers, 1974), 176–83). 26 Herath, Indians and Pioneers: A Prelude to Plainfield, Illinois, 21. 27 A Potawatomi village was located to the south of Walker’s Grove. (Map 26, Helen Hornbeck Tanner, ed., Atlas of Great Lakes Indian History (Norman, Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987), 140.) 28 Ibid. 29 Robert E. Sterling, A Pictorial History of Will County, Volume 1 (Joliet: Will County Historical Publications, 1975). Will County Rural Historic Structural Survey Du Page Township Chapter I – 13
Wiss, Janney, Elstner Associates, Inc. Also in 1832, northwest Will County was the scene of an epidemic of smallpox among the Potawatomi, inflicting a mortality rate at least twice that of European settlers. Approximately one-third of the Native American population in the region died during the epidemic. 30 The end of the Black Hawk War brought about the expulsion of the Sauks and Foxes from lands east of the Mississippi River. Also in 1832, the Winnebago ceded their lands in Wisconsin south and east of the Wisconsin River and east of the Fox River to Green Bay. The Potawatomi, Ottawa, and Chippewa tribes still held title to land in northern Illinois outside of the Indian Treaty Boundary lines. The illustration at right is from a diorama that formerly was in the Illinois State Museum (it is no longer on display). It shows two Native American chiefs who have been plied with alcohol to force a signature on the 1833 Chicago treaty agreeing to Indian removals to lands west of Mississippi. Whether historically accurate or not, the diorama is noteworthy in the honesty that it portrays the subtle treachery of European-American negotiators. (Reproduced from Virginia S. Eifert, The Story of Illinois: Indian and Pioneer, Story of Illinois Series No. 1, Fourth revised edition (Springfield, Illinois, 1954).) Early northeastern Illinois settler, and later Illinois Supreme Court chief justice, John Dean Caton was witness to the native peoples of the region: …I found this whole country occupied as the hunting grounds of the Pottawatomie [sic] Indians. I soon formed the acquaintance of many of their chiefs, and this acquaintance ripened into a cordial friendship. I found them really intelligent and possessed of much information resulting from their careful observation of natural objects. I traveled with them over the prairies, I hunted and I fished with them, I camped with them in groves, I drank with them at the native springs, of which they were never at a loss to find one, and I partook of their hospitality around their camp fire. 31 In September 1833, a gathering of Native American chiefs and leaders was held in Chicago to “negotiate a treaty whereby the lands might be peaceably ceded, and the Indians removed therefrom, to make way for the tide of white emigration which had begun to set irresistibly and with ever increasing volume to the coveted region.” 32 Chicago historian A.T. Andreas, writing in the 1880s, emphasized the disadvantaged position of the Native Americans, who had seen the effects of war on other Native Americans and experienced the ravages of epidemic on their own peoples: Black Hawk’s ill-starred campaign, followed by the subsequent treaty made by his tribe, showed them the inevitable result [that] must follow resistance. They knew quite well that they had no alternative. They must sell their lands for such a sum and on such terms as the Government agents might deem it politic or just or generous to grant. The result of the treaty was what might have been expected. The Indians gave up their lands and agreed for certain considerations, the most of which 30 Tanner, ed., Atlas of Great Lakes Indian History, 173. 31 John Dean Caton, “The Last of the Illinois, with a Sketch of the Pottawatomies [sic],” Miscellanies (Boston: Houghton, Osgood and Company, 1880), 117. 32 Andreas, History of Chicago, 123. Chapter I – 14 Will County Rural Historic Structural Survey Du Page Township
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