ROLLING DOWN THE (ILLINOIS) RIVER

Read to the Chicago Literary Club on April 9, 2012 by

Stephen P. Thomas

1. The Flood of 1943

It is late May, 1943. I am not quite five years old. We live in East Peoria, Illinois, less than a mile from the extensive Caterpillar Tractor Company works. My father walks to work there each day. On this evening he returns late, after 8pm. My mother looks warily at him and says - “Tom, you need a bath.”

“I need a beer” he responds.

“You mean another beer?”

“We stopped for a cool one at Hap’s on the way home. My back is killing me. Sandbags all day long. Sandbags yesterday. Sandbags tomorrow. And it’s still raining. River still climbing. Its killing me.”

“I’ll connect the heating pad. At least wash up some. Your clothes are filthy and you smell.”

“It’s not a beauty pageant. It’ll just be more of the same tomorrow.”

* * * * *

In May of 1943 the Midwest rivers leading to and down the Mississippi were filled to overflowing. It was at the same time a peak period of Allied response to Japanese and German forces in World War II, with the great battles of the Pacific islands and the Normandy invasion in Europe already being planned for 1944. The world desperately needed the industrial and agricultural production of America’s heartland, and these persistent spring rains of 1943 were placing both in real jeopardy. Recently planted fields were flooded. Caterpillar had stopped producing the crawler tracks destined for bulldozers and tanks on May 22. Every one of the 15,000 Caterpillar workers was assigned to flood duty, joined by more than a thousand from other nearby and threatened factories. Most were engaged in filling, lifting, carrying and setting in place sandbags weighing 50 - 75 pounds each.

The Caterpillar Tractor Company was located entirely on a flood plain on the east side of the Illinois River at Peoria. There were levees, and periodically the river reached flood stage – anything above 18 feet. Sixteen feet or less was normal. The River had been above 23 feet only a few times since 1900. But now, in mid-May, 1943 the River was above 26 feet and still rising. Equally threatening, nearby Farm Creek, full to the top of its banks, met the Illinois River at East Peoria after crossing the same flood plain. Almost all of East Peoria, including our modest house, was located on the plain protected only by the levees sheltering the area from the River as well as the Creek. Nearby were huge, sparsely populated bluffs overlooking the Illinois River valley. Why had such a critical piece of industrial capacity been so precariously located? Much of the plant was built for a predecessor enterprise which went broke after World War I. Caterpillar, relocating from California to be closer to raw materials, transit for finished goods and a plentiful labor supply, occupied the vacant factory space and then expanded it greatly. It’s an old story. Floodplains are always attractive – to wildlife, to settlers and farmers, to industrial enterprise. Until the water rises. Then they head for higher ground --- if they can. Not so easy for a large factory.

From May 20 to late May the workers struggled with the River in 12 hour shifts. More than 250 pieces of earth moving equipment ran 24 hours a day; 1.5 million sand bags were filled and lugged into place. Because of dikes and levees, the River narrows at Peoria to a few hundred feet across. Just to the north the River is well over a mile across. So with water squeezing southward through this narrow gap at 10 feet above flood level, there was great danger. The River crested at 28.8 feet at Peoria on May 23, 1943. In the almost 70 years since 1943 it has never quite reached that level again.

Caterpillar President Louis Neumiller stated in a special June 1943 issue of the employee news magazine: “. . . we faced, fought and licked the worst flood threat in the history of this part of the country. . . With the plant back to full operation, plans are already being developed to permanently strengthen the levee defenses so that never again will there be an interruption in our still greater job --- that of supplying the materials of war to our fighting forces . . .” There is admirable lack of hubris in the headline to this message which stated – We Fought The River To a Standstill.

The Caterpillar factory works in East Peoria has now mostly been vacated, in large part over labor troubles. Much of the trajectory of the U.S. manufacturing economy over the past 65 years can be illustrated through the history of this workplace. But the River defenses are still in place. A few years ago I stood on the Mississippi River levee next to the flood gates at Hannibal, Missouri. The town engineer who designed the gates was with us. The enlarged levee and new flood gates had been completed and installed a few days before the Mississippi River crested there in the Great Flood of 1993, with water rising to a few inches from the top of the levee. The engineer said to us --- “In the long run this river will do exactly what it wants, and neither this levee nor any which replaces it will stand in the way.” These words came to mind when I read Neumiller’s verdict of fighting another river, the Illinois, to a standstill in the 1943 flood at Peoria, 50 years earlier.

* * * * *

My talk this evening is about a river. Our Illinois River starts with the confluence of two others (the Kankakee and the Des Plaines) which come together a little south and west of Joliet and then flow quite calmly through Illinois for 273 miles before joining the Mississippi just north of St. Louis. For more than 10,000 years, or the time since most of our present topography emerged from the last glaciation, this river has functioned as a centerpiece of the land and life of Illinois, sustaining life and enriching and cleansing the land. It’s a bit like having our own Nile basin but tied to the great Mississippi River flowage which drains most of the central United States from the Rocky Mountains in the west to the Appalachians in the east. Because of the Chicago River which now flows from Lake Michigan down the Des Plaines River, it is fair to say that the Illinois River has a finger in the Great Lakes and a toe in the Mississippi. Along the way it is joined by several major tributaries and creeks, of which the more significant are: the Fox, the Mazon, the Vermillion, the Mackinaw, the Spoon, the La Moine, the Sangamon and the Macoupin. Water flows down the River at an average rate of about 23,000 cfs (cubic feet per second) as the River descends a modest 88 feet from 505’ at its start to 417 feet above sea level where it joins the Mississippi. The drainage area of the River includes some 28,000 square miles, most in Illinois, but part in both Wisconsin and Indiana. There is only one small rapids where the River descends about three feet at Marseilles, Illinois. This drop down is immodestly called the Great Illinois Falls.

2. Prehistory of the Illinois River

The great flood of 1943 was not the largest in the longer geologic history of the Illinois River. Not even close. The mother of all floods in this river valley took place about 12,000 years ago. It is hard to pinpoint the exact date. The last glaciation in North America was then in retreat, or as some say – just headed back to Canada to pick up more rocks before returning. The landscape of today shows us what a messy business it is when glaciers come to an end. Meltwater flows over the top, through the middle and underneath the ice. Boulders, smaller rocks, sand and gravel, carried hundreds of miles south with the ice are unceremoniously dumped and then pushed about by stream flow. As the warming sun melts the glacier from the top down, pools of water can get trapped behind dams made of rock-laden debris and huge chunks of melting ice, some more than a thousand feet thick or wide or both. The hypothesis behind the flood – its official name is the Kankakee Torrent – is that a great dam of this kind in northern Indiana and Illinois trapped the lake water to the north. Ice and debris were piled up for miles to the east and to the west blocking any flow out to the south when a breach occurred and part of the obstruction fell away. All of a sudden unimaginable quantities of water rushed through, tearing away at the blocking structure and heading south and west. This flood – or torrent – followed the path of least resistance, but was capable of moving or swallowing much that stood in its way.

The Torrent flowed east to west down the Kankakee River drainage to its conjunction with the mouth of the Des Plaines River, and then westward along the present course of the Illinois River for about 100 miles. As the flood passed what is now called Starved Rock, it literally scoured the river bed and ripped out portions of the limestone deposits to its immediate south and north sufficient to create the over towering walls and gorges we see today at Starved Rock. How long did this take? We don’t know. Some think that most of the Torrent may have passed through in as little as 30 days -- not long in a scale of more than 10,000 years. And there may have been more than one such torrent as other blockages at other times gave way to the pressure of accumulated meltwater. The result was the lowering of water levels in the entire Great Lakes system over time by several feet. If I could find a time machine, I would go directly to the Kankakee Torrent, roll the camera and post it on You Tube so that we could all enjoy the spectacle.

But this is not the end of the story, because the floodwaters were still rolling. Not far north of present day Hennepin, Illinois, the River takes an abrupt turn (a point known to the barge and towboat crews as the Great Bend) and then flows mostly south and a little west for the next 210 miles before joining the Mississippi at Grafton, Illinois. The topography after the Great Bend is much different than it is before. The Illinois River valley broadens with bluffs far to the east and to the west so that the present River seems to be considerably smaller than its bluffs and floodplain would imply. There is an explanation. Another effect of the great glaciations was to divert the Mississippi River to essentially its present course at a point just north of the Rock Island/Davenport area. Before that, it flowed through what is now central Illinois in the course now occupied by the Illinois River. Our river inherited its valley and streambed from the prior Mississippi. The Hennepin Canal was built between 1892 and 1907 more or less along the line which runs from Hennepin to the Rock Island/Davenport area to create a short cut between the Illinois and Mississippi rivers, taking advantage of the now abandoned old course of the Mississippi River. The Canal had a short useful life. Railroads and enlarged locks and dams on the Illinois and Mississippi Rivers supplanted its function for cargo transit. Too shallow, too narrow, too late. But the Hennepin Canal has since been restored along much of its course to provide a magnificent 104 mile recreational corridor through northwest Illinois with a broad pathway alongside the canal.

3. The River After 1600

a. Marquette and Jolliet. If we look to the Kankakee Torrent as representing the starting date of the post-glacial Illinois River, we can look to two much later dates of great significance to the modern history of the river. The first of these dates is August 25, 1673. The second is January 2, 1900. In August, 1673 Jesuit missionary Father Jacques Marquette (1637-1675) and French Canadian explorer Louis Jolliet (1645-1700?), returning from their initial exploration of the Mississippi River basin from Canada to as far south as Arkansas, decided to rely on the advice of their native American crew. The crew suggested that it would be easier to return north to what we call Lake Michigan by coming up the Illinois River instead of returning the way they had descended - via Green Bay, and the Fox and treacherous Wisconsin Rivers, connecting with the Mississippi at Prairie du Chien in Wisconsin.

So on August 25, 1673 the Marquette/Jolliet party entered the Illinois River at its confluence with the Mississippi. There is a little town named Grafton there now, on the Illinois side. I was surprised to learn that on about September 13 (just 20 days later) they reached Lake Michigan via the Des Plaines River and the short Mud Lake portage to the Chicago River and the Lake, a total distance of about 330 miles from their point of departure from the Mississippi. Thus they came upstream at an average rate of over 16 miles per day. Fortunately for these travelers, the Illinois River would have been at a fairly low water level in late summer and there was only one portage necessary, unlike on the wilder rivers in Wisconsin. There was likely also some upstream breeze west to east, especially after their turn to the east at the Great Bend in the River. Typical rates of canoe travel in that era were about 40 miles per day downstream, and 14 miles upstream.

Here is a translation of a part of Marquette’s account of the return trip up the Illinois River:

We have seen nothing like this river that we enter, as regards its fertility of soil, its prairies and woods; its cattle, elk, deer, wildcats, bustards, swans, ducks, parroquets, and even beaver. There are many small lakes and rivers That on which we sailed is wide, deep, and still, . . .. In the spring and during part of the summer there is only one portage of half a league. We found on it [this would have been near Starved Rock] a village of Illinois called Kaskaskia, consisting of 74 cabins. They received us very well, and obliged me to promise that I would return to instruct them. One of the chiefs of this nation, with his young men, escorted us to the Lake of the Illinois, whence, at last, at the end of September, we reached [Green Bay] from which we had started at the beginning of June.

Marquette and Jolliet immediately recognized that their return path up the Illinois River to Lake Michigan had opened up for the French a most advantageous and simple way to connect Canada and the Great Lakes with New Orleans and Europe. The short transit season out the St. Lawrence River to the North Atlantic could now be extended. In that sense Chicago as a future crossroads city and to this day the major point of transit in central North America can be viewed as having been born on that September day in 1673. Ninety years later, in 1763, Illinois and neighboring territory would be ceded by the French to Britain at the end of a conflict variously termed the Seven Years’ War or the French and Indian War. In only another 20 years almost all of the land south of the Great Lakes, east of the Mississippi River and west of the eastern colonies (excepting Florida) would become the new United States after its war of independence from Britain. The French influence in central North America south of the Great Lakes would decrease over time, but cities like St. Louis and New Orleans would retain a significant French identity, and many place names in our region to this day have French origins, witness cities and towns such as Joliet, Marseilles, LaSalle, Des Plaines, Bourbonnais, Cape Girardeau, and many others, especially along the rivers.

As a matter of interest we can speculate on how North America might have evolved differently had the conflict between the French and the British ended with a French victory. A few years ago we were in Montreal visiting the city on a spring break when a gentlemen (a French Canadian) guiding our small group on a highlights tour of the city asked: “Do you know why you Americans speak English rather than French?” We had no answer – whereupon he observed: “Because French women would not leave France.” The result was that French Canada was largely populated by young French men, particularly those of an adventurous spirit, and by Jesuit clergy. There was a sprinkling of French women, but the French became mostly traders or missionaries. They freely cohabited with native American women with the result that there were few settled communities and many transient relationships. The French presence moved south mostly just to trade and establish missions and trading outposts. It was not the sort of colonization for which France was willing to make great sacrifice. So here we are – descended from British rather than French masters.

b. A river reversed. On January 2, 1900, with a few deft explosive charges to collapse a holding dam, the Chicago River was turned on its end to flow in a slightly deepened channel westward and away from Lake Michigan and into the Des Plaines River. The result was to convert the Illinois River drainage into a massive sewage disposal outlet for Chicago. This greatly facilitated the public health and growth of the City where the shallow waters of southern Lake Michigan had proved to be an inefficient place for the disposal of urban sewage and waste water. Since that time essentially all of the water which Chicago and many of its suburbs remove from Lake Michigan gets cycled through our homes, streets, alleys, gardens and places of work and eventually sent away down the Illinois River. When I was growing up my father would say: “Every time somebody flushes a toilet in Chicago, we can see the consequences here in Peoria about three days later.” Actually he used language which was more graphic and colorful, but you get the point. It is still true, except that sewage treatment procedures in Chicago, while still not perfect, are much improved over recent decades.

The reversal of the Chicago River illustrates a key geophysical fact. The Des Plaines River drainage parallels and is quite close to Lake Michigan. Relatively little of the rainfall or snowmelt in southern Wisconsin or northern Illinois ends up in Lake Michigan. Instead it heads south, eventually to New Orleans. Thus the bed of the eastward flowing Chicago River had to be lowered only a few feet over a length of just a few miles to permit Lake Michigan water to flow away from the Lake to the south. The key element was to cut through a small ridge 12 miles west of the lake shore to connect the Chicago and Des Plaines Rivers in what is now called the Chicago Ship and Sanitary (sic!) Canal. This narrow north/south ridge along the Lake is called an intra-continental divide. North of Chicago near Illinois Beach State Park is a north/south street from which Lake Michigan can be seen. Rain falling on one side of this street may travel a few hundred feet to Lake Michigan while raindrops on the other side are headed for the Des Plaines River and New Orleans. Chicago exists where it is primarily because of this simple geophysical fact.

As far back as 1848 a waterway had been devised to move cargo to and from Chicago to the point on the Illinois River near LaSalle-Peru where it could easily be offloaded for transit to or from points south. This 96 mile waterway, the Illinois and Michigan Canal, was constructed between 1823 and 1848 but came almost immediately into competition with the railroads as they emerged in the 1850s. Like its future cousin, the Hennepin Canal, it was too narrow, too shallow and too slow for the heavy duty work of handling a growing Chicago’s bulk cargo needs. Still, the I&M Canal did not cease operations until 1933, even though much of its traffic moved to the Ship and Sanitary Canal after 1900. Remnants of the I&M Canal with its locks and towpath are now an important recreational feature with a 61-mile State Trail along remnants of the waterway and four state parks on the Trail with others nearby. It has been a National Historic Landmark since 1964.

4. The Human History of the River.

The landscape of much of North America as we know it is tied to several great Pleistocene glaciation episodes of approximately the last 2.5 million years. The glaciers scooped out the Great Lakes, rerouted the Mississippi, Missouri and Ohio Rivers, and obliterated an old east to west flowing river called the Teays which used to pass through Ohio and central Indiana and Illinois before heading south. The most recent of these glaciations (often termed the Wisconsin Episode) retreated from our area a mere 10,000 – 15,000 years ago. It takes a long time for ice up to a mile thick to melt. As the ice retreated and the climate warmed, the land and vegetation slowly recovered. Soon – within 2,000 years or so – people could move north or move back north, it’s hard to be sure because the glaciers obliterated everything which was animal, vegetable or even mineral in their path, sparing only the bedrock limestone and the various sedimentary, igneous and metamorphic rock formations of prior geologic eras. People like us have been living in the Americas for 25,000 – 30,000 years, maybe more. The consensus is that they walked here via the land bridge to Asia which was facilitated by the glaciers and the lowering of sea levels. Some may also have come from Asia in small boats along the Alaskan and northwest coasts. There is less support for the contention that humans from northern Europe may also have arrived thousands of years ago via Iceland, Greenland and onto the northeast side of North America. By the way many scientists believe that we are still living in an ice age, albeit in a so-called interglacial period.

A few weeks ago my wife Marcia and I drove the entire length of the Illinois River on our way to St. Louis. As an avid camper, I am pretty well acquainted with the River as far as the Great Bend, because of the excellent state parks along the way – Gebhard Woods at Morris, Illini at Marseilles, Buffalo Rock near Ottawa, Starved Rock and Mathiessen near La Salle/Peru. I grew up in the Peoria area, so I was also generally familiar with the River there and as far south as the Havana, Illinois where my father’s family had settled in their later years. But the River south of Havana to the Mississippi confluence was something I had read about but not seen at first hand.

We crossed the River at Havana to visit the close-by fabulous Dickson Mounds State Museum and to visit our good friend Tom Lerczak, a biologist from the Chicago area who has studied the River and its environs from Havana for more than 20 years. The Museum has been reconstructed and recast since my childhood days when it was built over an open Native American gravesite to highlight several sets of bones in full view more or less where they had been placed long ago.. Displays of this type are now out of fashion and contrary to Federal law. So the Museum no longer displays actual human bones, but its many fine exhibits as part of the excellent Illinois State Museum system tell the story of long human settlement along the River very well.

I knew of the well-organized displays at Dickson, but what I wanted particularly to be near was the Koster site at Kampsville farther to the south. So, back and forth across the River we went several times until we arrived at the Kampsville ferry in Calhoun County on the west side of the River, less than an hour (32 river miles) above Grafton. Close to the River on the Kampsville (west) side is Louie’s bar and restaurant, from which we could watch the ferry move back and forth across the River. On the wall near our table were markers showing how high the water had risen in that room in various years. When the River comes up, they simply move all the furniture and fixtures to a second floor storage area and wait for the flood waters to recede. I asked about the flood of 1993 which I did not see marked. The response: “All the way to the ceiling and above.” We were in a room with a floor at least 10 feet above the River level with a 10 foot ceiling, so you get the idea of what high water means in these parts.

Our immediate destination after a quick ferry ride across the River was a place nearby named Bluffdale Vacation Farm which I happened upon in an Internet search of places to stay in the area. Bluffdale calls itself “an Illinois farm vacation dude ranch and bed and breakfast welcoming guests since 1963.” The owners, Lindy and Bill Hobson, greeted us in their kitchen pointing to a marking on the limestone wall with initials dated “1835”. Mr. Hobson is a direct descendent of John Russell (1793-1865) who settled in this valley from Vermont in 1828. Descendents of the Russell family have been here for six generations. The Russell homestead has reputedly been visited by Abraham Lincoln, Charles Dickens, Mormon founder, Joseph Smith and Ernest Hemingway over its long history.

After these preliminaries, it being mid-afternoon, I asked about the Koster site and was given directions to drive back south through the little town of Eldred, and to look for a barn near the road about three miles south of Eldred and to turn in there. I was told, as I suspected, that there would be no signage at the Koster site where excavation work has been in suspense for some years, and that if I reached Macoupin Creek we would have gone too far. We turned back at Macoupin Creek and soon turned right driving a short distance into a farmyard with both a modern (but unoccupied) house and a much older limestone building, as well as other structures of uncertain function. After leaving and asking guidance locally, we returned to this site which I was satisfied was indeed the old Koster farm on which archaeological work had begun in 1970 when Mary and Teed Koster convinced archaeologist Stuart Struever of Northwestern University that there were many signs around the farm suggesting ancient settlement worthy of exploration.

The main excavation or deep dig trench at Koster was some 34 feet deep from which a total of 13 separate Horizons of human settlement were initially observed. The top Horizon (#1) dates from 1000-1200 A.D. Here is Struever’s account at the time of the dating of Horizon # 10:

During the 1970 season we carefully collected carbon samples, although we had no funds to pay for having these analyzed . . . One day toward the end of summer I received a call from the Illinois State Geological Survey in Urbana, offering to analyze them for free. We carefully packed our samples and dropped them off. . . . (In the spring of 1971) a letter arrived from ISGS. I tore open the envelope. Just reading the radiocarbon dates was enough to lift my spirits. . . . Now we knew that prehistoric people had lived (here), off and on, for almost eight thousand years, from before 6400 B.C. to A.D. 1200. . . . More than six thousand years before Christ . . .., at least four thousand years before Stonehenge. . . ., and more than three thousand years before the great pyramids were erected to honor the Pharaohs in Egypt, people had settled in the great river valleys of the American Middle West, and now we were uncovering their settlement by chance.

The next morning (March 7, 2012) Marcia and I were at breakfast with the Hobsons in their dining room overlooking the floodplain leading westward to the Illinois River. I asked how near the River came in the flood of 1993 and learned that the dikes had held, but only in their immediate area. The 1993 flood escaped both sides of the River a few miles to the north and south. We learned that the Hobsons met as undergraduates at the University of Illinois, Champaign, graduating in 1951 and were married in 1952. After farming a few years they started the vacation farm operation as a sideline in 1963, almost 50 years ago. I foolishly asked our octogenarian hosts if they were planning to retire or sell the farm. They looked at each other, and then at me, as if five decades of breakfast table conversation with guests had never resulted in such a stupid question. They made no response.

Sensing unsettled ground underfoot, I mentioned to Mrs. Hobson that I had been in River Forest, near her Oak Park childhood home, a week earlier visiting a sculpture restoration studio. I reported that this studio had just been engaged to restore the beloved Lorado Taft Alma Mater bronze statue which would soon be dismantled and brought from the University of Illinois in Champaign to the studio for repair. My mention of Lorado Taft prompted Mr. Hobson to observe that the great granddaughter of the founding John Russell was the subject of a nearby Taft sculpture. I asked if this was Annie Keller who was killed in 1927 when a tornado struck the one-room schoolhouse where she was teaching, and he said “Yes, and she is buried out front in our family cemetery. Her sister went to Chicago to pose for the Taft sculpture, and the memorial is in the nearby town of White Hall.” I knew of this story having made a special trip to White Hall a year earlier to observe and photograph the Annie Keller sculpture for a forthcoming Lorado Taft biography. What Mr. Hobson did not say was that Annie Keller’s sister, who posed for Taft, was his own mother, also buried just a few years ago in the same close by family cemetery. Small world; sacred ground; everything connected. Annie Russell Keller first saw to the safety of her students and then lost her own life, facing the storm and keeping watch over them.

b. Cahokia. After the Illinois River joins the Mississippi at Grafton, Illinois, the Missouri River enters from the west within just a few miles. This has resulted over the centuries in a great floodplain on the east side of the Mississippi known as the American Bottom. It abuts limestone bluffs on the east and varies in width from 9 to 2-3 miles over its 80 mile length. It is the home of the Cahokia archaeological site, by far the largest remains of any native North American civilization. As you leave St. Louis on Interstate 55 headed to Chicago, the largest mound at Cahokia, Monks Mound, can be observed on your right. Never mind that part of the historic site was destroyed to build this road, or that a billboard obstructs your view driving past. Essentially all of the companion mounds on the St. Louis side of the river succumbed over the years to construction in the City. Question. Why is this monumental Illinois site, one of fewer than a dozen man-made UNESCO World Heritage Sites located in the United States, not better known? You would not expect to read a history of Egypt which failed to mention pyramids, or of Britain which skipped Stonehenge, but Cahokia is given little or no emphasis or even reference in many histories of America.

The Cahokia site is part of Mississippian culture, identified as starting between A.D. 600 and 1000. During those years sedentary communities came to establish long-term agriculture (especially the cultivation of corn or maize) and more dense settlements along the rich river outwash plains of the Midwest. Something in the nature of a cultural big bang may have occurred, with things getting quite big and dense very fast. At its peak, Cahokia may have been home to a community of more than 15,000 persons. It is evident that significant levels of social organization and hierarchy were necessary to support such a population and to mobilize the labor force needed to construct the mounds and other architectural features of the site.

In addition the site contains fine ceramics, elaborate pottery, jewelry (some in the form of hammered sheet copper), a beaded birdman formed by more than 20,000 shell beads and used as a burial shroud, projectile points by the thousands of exquisite craftsmanship, a series of circular woodhenges (some overlapping) made of huge timbers placed in geometrically precise points to form circles and with points of equinoctial alignment in spring and fall. In sum, the Cahokia site is evidence of people having significant capacities in science, material arts and a strong aesthetic sense. There was also ample evidence of human cruelty to animals as well as to each other. The artifacts at Cahokia evidence trading relations with far distant people hundreds of miles to the south and west.

By 1400 the people were gone and the Cahokia site, as well as other mound sites in the Midwest, were abandoned by the culture and people who had built them. The Cahokians were present for a mere 300 years or so, with a peak period of perhaps half that. Why? There is no clear answer. Possibilities include: exhaustion of resources, especially wood for fires, shelter and defensive structures; pollution from dense settlement; conflict; disease; overpopulation; and even a little ice age in which all of Northern Europe and North America were significantly colder from about A.D. 1300 to 1850 than today. This cooling was on the heels of a medieval warm period from about A.D. 950 to 1100 which could have facilitated the large scale settlement and construction at Cahokia. Small groups can move away from cold, pestilence or the depletion of resources much more readily than large settlement-bound groups, particularly if the settled group is vulnerable to attack and internal conflict.

It is 156 steps to the top of Monk’s Mound, which covers 14 acres at its base. The view is spectacular --- essentially all of the 175 square miles of the American Bottom with the surrounding bluffs on both sides of the Mississippi River can be surveyed on a clear day. How many baskets of earth were required by how many people working over how long a period to construct this monument? The numbers are as elusive as the site is impressive and puzzling. Cahokia is so large and still so little understood that archaeologists and paleo anthropologists are unlikely to exhaust the study of its remains or unravel many of its secrets in our time.

5. Whose River Is It?

Let’s come back to the River which has served as our point of narrative departure and inspiration. The Illinois River serves and has served many masters. It is home or an avenue of seasonal passage to much wildlife – aquatic, avian and mammalian. It has been an important source of food for humans for thousands of years. Its wetlands and shores continue to provide refuge and food for millions of birds using the River as a flyway on their biannual migrations north and south. It is an important part of the intrastate and interstate transportation system with barges and towboats moving huge quantities, especially of bulk commodities up and down the River. These include coal, refined petroleum products, sand, gravel, scrap metal and grain. The barges pause only at the eight points between Chicago and Grafton where Panama Canal sized locks, dams and installations managed by the United States Army Corps of Engineers regulate the level of the River and maintain a navigation channel at least nine feet deep.

Some of the most fertile land in Illinois is farmed on the outwash plains, many now protected from flooding in ordinary times by levees and dikes. From the advent of the Industrial Revolution in post-Colonial times to the present, the River has attracted industry, manufacturers and commodity processors because of its ability to transport and convey raw materials and finished products. No competing form of transportation, neither railroads, trucks nor the airplane has diminished the River’s transport function. Finally, the River is the State’s largest single playground and recreation facility, accommodating thousands of boaters, fisherman, duck and goose hunters and lovers of river and wetland scenery each year. A touring road network called the Great River Road parallels the River from top to bottom, crossing the River several times and never straying far from its banks. A traveler along the River is never more than a few miles from a state park, a state or Federal wildlife or conservation area or a public nature preserve. Notable among these is the great river wetland refuge and restoration project called Emiquon near Havana proceeding under the leadership of the Nature Conservancy and the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Until the early 1900s the central and lower Illinois River and plains were arguably the most abundant in the nation for the harvesting of fish and game. Only the Columbia River in Oregon produced more commercial fish during the 1890 – 1920 period. Pearl button production resulted in the virtual elimination of viable mussel stocks in the River as they were harvested with dredges and steam shovels by the millions to produce buttons, the meat and most of the shell being discarded. Ducks by the many thousand were shot, cleaned and shipped off to Chicago and other markets. In winter ice was harvested to help keep, store and transfer all the fresh product from the River. This was all effectively brought almost to an end by the polluting impact of the Chicago area drainage and industrial installations all along the River, as well as the depletion of fish and game stocks from over-harvesting. The River has also been negatively impacted by the presence of invasive species such as the Asian carp. Our own Clark Wagner delivered a paper titled Carp Wars in February 2004 ( published by CLC in 2005) detailing the ongoing struggle with these pesky intruders. Still, the abundance potential and recovery capacity of the River have been dramatically demonstrated, especially as restoration efforts and environmental awareness increased in recent years.

6. Final Thoughts

Let’s step back for a moment to the time of the so-called Archaic people living along the River more than 6,000 years ago. The archaeological record shows in broad terms their kinds of shelter, aspects of their diet, the mostly lithic or stone tools they fashioned, the residue of their fires and some evidence of how they disposed of the remains of their dead. There is no evidence of conflict among groups of these people, and not much to suggest what natural or unnatural forces they believed were at work in their lives. One fact which did not surprise me emerged. They left their small communities for points unknown in late fall as winter loomed on the horizon, returning sometimes to the same site in the following year, and sometimes not for several years.

If you stand outside for a few hours on a cool, blustery early November day, with chilly rain falling, I ask you to imagine a life in which the temperature is unlikely to rise much for the next 150 days, and in which you will be exposed to these elements for 24 hours a day without relief, and for much of which time the ground around you will be wet or frozen, often covered in snow, and with very limited access to running water. If there is any way to escape these conditions, you will do so, and that is what our ancestors did – most likely I believe by loading their few tools, families and some stored food on canoes or whatever contrivance would float down the river with some semblance of security to a place or places where conditions were less harsh. Then in the spring, or perhaps two or three springs in the future the abundance of the lower Illinois River would beckon, and they would either walk or slowly paddle back to a place like the Koster site to be welcomed by a virtual food court with a Ritz Carlton on the left bank and a Four Seasons on the right bank, there to reestablish their small community for another season of abundance.

To get to the time of Marquette and Jolliet we have to leapfrog some 6,000 years forward. The Archaic period ends about 500 B.C. with the emergent Woodland and more settled societies, adding to the cultural mix pottery, agriculture (especially corn) and bows and arrows (pots, plots and shots) by about 1,000 A.D. We then come to the relatively brief but remarkable Mississippian cultures, the mound builders at Cahokia and elsewhere with extensive trading networks who came to prominence before their communities disappeared by around 1400 A.D. to the conditions as they existed for our French travelers in 1673. While they found the native Americans to be generally welcoming and friendly, their numbers were not great and their small bands and communities were fragmented and in constant flux. So-called tribal identities were much more blurred than is generally supposed. The Illini, Fox, Kaskaskia, Peoria, Kickapoo, Potawatomi and others found around the Illinois River watershed do not seem to have been present in the area for many years, at most for decades rather than centuries. They lived in small groups of dozens or hundreds and had few established settlements of any permanence. Many factors may have contributed to this seeming disarray among native Americans over the 400 years prior to 1800: much colder weather than now; the arrival of Europeans on the Eastern coasts and in Mexico with great disruption, conflict and new disease outbreaks among indigenous people; ripple effects all across the continent even before Europeans arrived on the interior scene as tribal groups in the east moved west, and those in the southwest were pushed or fled north and east. The land was culturally disturbed in 1673, but had been so for over 200 years before Marquette and Jolliet arrived. As settlers of European origin arrived, mostly in small numbers until after 1820, they found an abundant Illinois river valley with fertile adjacent lands mostly vacant but very inviting.

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We sometimes wake up in one of our favorite campgrounds at Illini State Park -- within a few feet of the River at Marseilles, Illinois, to wave to a passing barge, observe noisy Canada geese flying overhead, hear fisherman talking over their outboards as they head to a favorite spot, watch a mother Mallard giving swimming and navigation lessons to her young brood. We stare in wonder at the glassy surface of the River, sometimes with a faint mist rising into cool morning air. One river supporting all this presence and activity, year after year, asking for nothing in return. Demanding only our respect for the power and permanence of the flow of water.

When I first conceived of this paper my plan was to focus on the physical history and character of the Illinois River, and on water ecology in the broadest sense. As time progressed I found that, fascinating as this huge subject is, what had really drawn me to think and write about the River was its rich cultural or human history, some of it touching my own brief life down to this day. And looking back to this undertaking I was struck by the realization that there was scarcely a fact about or impression of the River of which I had any real knowledge prior to the age of 60, despite having lived here for most of a lifetime. It makes me wonder how much else there is about which I could learn much more.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The listing below includes the principal books and pamphlets upon which I have relied for this paper. There are in addition literally hundreds of good websites with information about the Illinois River and related historical and archaeological matters. Many of these were of great use to me, but they are so readily accessible that they are not listed here.

1. A River Through Illinois, Daniel Overturf and Gary Marx (Southern Illinois Univ Press, 2007). 233 pp of great pictures and narrative. A book to browse, not read straight through.

2. Discover Illinois Archaeology, Alice Berkson and Michael Wiant eds. ( Published by the Illinois Association for Advancement of Archaeology and the Illinois Archaeological Survey, 2001). Pamphlet format, 28pp. An excellent, scholarly and concise presentation of the cultural history of Illinois.

3. Cahokia, The Great Native American Metropolis, Biloine Young and Melvin Fowler (Univ of Illinois Press, 2000). This is the definitive detailed account of how this UNESCO World Heritage Site was ignored for centuries and then partially rescued as the Interstate Highway system was constructed in the mid 20th Century, 366pp.

4. Koster, Americans in Search of Their Prehistoric Past, Stuart Struever and Felicia Holton (Waveland Press, 1979, Epilogue 1985). The definitive account of excavations at the Koster site by the man who conceived, executed and managed the project.

5. Land of Big Rivers, French & Indian Illinois, 1699-1778, M. J. Morgan (Southern Illinois Univ Press, 2010). The big rivers are the Mississippi, the Illinois and the Missouri as they converge just above the American Bottom and the account is of settlement and conflict in the American Bottom over a period of almost 100 years. 207 pp text and 80 pp Notes and Index.

6. Starved Rock Through the Centuries, J. B. Mc Donnell and Lloyd Reeve (The Service Press, Champaign, 1924). Soft covers, about 80 pp. So far as I can determine, the definitive scholarly, carefully documented account of events over the last 350 years in the Starved Rock area remains to be written.

7. Handbook of North American Indians, Volume 15, Northeast, Bruce Trigger, Volume Editor (Smithsonian Institution, 1978). This is a remarkable and carefully presented resource, 924 pp, albeit presented in the carefully phrased language of the many contributing scholars.

8. Side Channels, A Collection Of Nature Writing And Memoir, Thomas V Lerczak (Mill City Press, MN 2011). This is a delightful collection written by a personal friend who has lived near the Illinois River and studied it with care for more than 20 years during his service with the Illinois Department of Natural Resources.

9. Life Along the Illinois River, Photographs, Photo Captions and Introduction by David Zalaznik (Univ of Illinois Press, 2009). 110 pp of striking photography and thoughtful commentary.

10. Illinois Waterway Navigation Charts, US Army Corps of Engineers, 1998). This compilation contains 142 maps, one to a page with a scale of 1 inch = 1,000 feet showing the River and its main channel, as well as side channels, backwaters, adjacent lakes, all bridges, power lines and river obstructions in great detail from its confluence with the Mississippi at Grafton to its connection with Lake Michigan at the Chicago and Calumet Harbors. Invaluable if you are afloat on or touring close by the River.

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A map is attached to this paper illustrating the main waterways within the boundaries of the State of Illinois.