Nature Bulletin No. 697   December 8, 1962
Forest Preserve District of Cook County
Seymour Simon, President
Roberts Mann, Conservation Editor

****:THE ILLINIWEK

The first white men who came to Illinois found a wilderness inhabited 
by Stone Age people with brown skins. They called themselves Illini 
("man") or Illiniwek ("the men") and had been a powerful 
confederation of six tribes. The Illinois River valley was more thickly 
populated with Indians than almost any other region in North America. 
Why?

Because this was a land of plenty and that great river was the central 
feature. Formed by the union of the Des Plaines with the Kankakee, it 
was the main artery of travel between Lake Michigan and the 
Mississippi. It provided access to the interiors by way of the Fox, 
Vermilion, Mackinaw, Spoon and Sangamon rivers and the many 
creeks that flow into it.

There were virgin forests in the northern, western and southern parts of 
the future state. It contained a remarkable number of rivers and creeks -
- with wooded valleys -- swamps and sloughs. Much of it was prairie -- 
fertile luxuriant prairies far different from grasslands on the Great 
Plains.

Consequently the Illinois Indians had plenty of many kinds of wood for 
dwellings, fuel, implements and weapons. They had good soil and a 
favorable climate for growing corn, beans, squashes, pumpkins and 
tobacco. The streams and lakes teemed with fish. There were turkeys, 
grouse, and "prodigious numbers" of waterfowl. Deer, elk, and herds of 
buffalo were plentiful.

Also, and it was to cause a drastic change in the Indian's way of life, the 
Illinois country was rich in fur bearers whose pelts were coveted by the 
white men: marten, fisher, otter, mink, foxes, black bear, muskrat, and 
that industrious animal which became the mainstay and currency of the 
fur trade -- the beaver.

The Indians lived in harmony with the land and their environment. 
Although life was hard and rude, they were self-sustaining. They used 
almost every part of an animal, including the entrails. They had some 
use for almost every plant: for shelters, as food or a beverage, for its 
fibers, in dyes, as medicine, as a lure or a fetish, or in some ceremony.

The warriors and hunters were armed with knives, arrowheads, spear 
points and tomahawks laboriously fashioned from rocks. Using clumsy 
stone axes and fire, alternately, they deadened trees, felled them, and 
the Illiniwek made dugout canoes as much as 50 feet in length from 
cottonwood logs.

Their squaws tilled the soil with antlers of deer and elk or the shoulder 
bones of bison, and hoed the crops with mussel shells. Their vessels and 
utensils were made of wood, clay, shells, a buffalo's skull or its horns. 
Using awls and needles of bone or thorns, they sewed with the tendons 
and sinews of animals, fibers from plants such as nettles and the inner 
bark of basswood, or willow roots. Their only domestic animal was the 
dog. They were Stone Age people.

An Illini had three homes. In early spring they congregated in large 
tribal villages on the banks of streams. Each dwelling, with substantial 
frames of poles covered with woven mats of rushes or with bark, 
accommodated at least two and sometimes eight "fires" or families. 
After the crops were planted, most of the able-bodied people left on a 
communal bison hunt that lasted several weeks during which they lived 
in family wigwams of saplings covered with mats or hides. In autumn, 
after the crops had been harvested and stored in underground bins or 
caches, the summer village broke up into bands and each of those went 
to a favorite location where, in semi-permanent huts, they spent the 
winter.

Such was the Illiniwek way of life. Then came the white men -- the 
explorers, Black Robes, traders and voyageurs.