Sometimes, in the pale moonlight of a sylvan night or in the whispers of a still afternoon in the backyard, you can hear the footsteps of previous cultures. The cadence is as regular as a heartbeat, and it is called by the relentless bellow of time.
And then, just for a few fluttering seconds you must know that you are not the center of the universe but rather a recruit in the platoon of succession that marches with the colors of mankind.
This land is our land only for the blink of an eye, and then it will belong to others, and we will be with those people of the past, destined to march eternally with them down the strange, echoing streets of cultural evolution.
But, hey, it`s not bad company, and certainly not a boring group in a place like Du Page County: mammoth killers, buffalo hunters, mound builders. So lean back and relax for a few of your allotted minutes and take a quick look at those who came before you.
This is the scene, as structured with some imagination from archeologic records and the special help of Douglas Kullen, an archeologist in Warrenville who has compiled the cultural history of the area:
Regress now for some 14,000 years, back through the centuries with one grand leap of time. The Wisconsin Glacier is retreating before southern breezes and a warming sun. Its shadow looms off to the north like a great hulking beast and the grinding crunch of its ice mass echoes across the land as the moans of death itself. Melt water trickles in a thousand tiny streams, cutting through sprawls of outwash and joining to form gushing rivers. The rivers twist off into the spruce trees that poke up out of the new soil like quills, and over it all there is the conflicting aura of old and new, as if a time warp war had just been fought and the future had won, but just barely.
In a low area of bogs and marsh, a ponderous mammoth tries to make its way to higher ground, but it steps into a depression that is disguised by a mixture of clay and water. It struggles mightily, tossing its trunk about and thrashing at the soupy clay with its huge curled tusks.
Suddenly before the doomed creature, a man appears. It is the first human resident of Du Page County, a Paleoindian who is wrapped in a rugged fur and who carries a crude spear. He is part of a small band of traveling hunters who descended from the Asians that migrated centuries ago across the temporary land mass between Alaska and Siberia. He is a man of opportunity, and the great beast trapped in glacial glue is his ticket to survival for days to come.
The mammoth`s death is hastened with clubs and spears, and the man and his fellow travelers use their stone tools to hack off pieces of hide and flesh. They stay in the area of the mammoth`s remains, shelterless or in rough animal-hide tents, until the dead beast sinks into the gray muck, and then they move on to be swallowed up in the cold, wet mist and rain of their time.
So the first residents were transients, and the record of their presence is sparse, a few crude spear points made from stone.
”There is some thought that these hunting bands figured in the extinction of some of the large land mammals,” Kullen said, ”the mammoths, camels and sloths.”
There is something ominous in that speculation, that man`s first appearance in Du Page County coincided with conditions that made it possible for him to tip the population balance of such awesome animals.
In any case, as those huge creatures disappeared, the Paleoindians moved on to be replaced by the early Archaic Indians who were around from about 6000 to 5000 B.C.
So now, where the flesh of the trapped mammoth fed the first man, there were bands of hunters who concentrated on smaller game species such as deer and who still traveled in quest of food but not so widely as their
predecessors.
”There were some major changes in the climate,” Kullen said. ”It became warmer and drier, and among the inhabitants there was increased use of stone tools, grinding stones and notched points, for example. They probably used tent-like shelters, with more permanent structures such as lean-tos at base camps.”
From 5000 to 3500 B.C., called the Middle Archaic period by the archeologists, the size of Indian bands increased, housing became more permanent and there was more use made of plants for food. Fishing tools-bone hooks and nets-were developed, and the Indian dead were ceremoniously buried on ridges or hills along with some of their personal belongings.
In the Late Archaic period, from 3500 to 1500 B.C., social groups became larger and more complex and the first regional trade apparently occurred. Stone axes were added to the tools.
From 1500 B.C. to 1600 A.D. Du Page County was occupied by people from what the archeologists call the three Woodland periods. In the first of these periods, from 1500 to 200 B.C., the first domestic plants appeared, along with such things as hoes.
”Pottery also developed at this time, and the people lived in large permanent villages,” Kullen said.
Du Page County is on the edge of what was a vast Indian culture known as Hopewell in central Illinois and southern Ohio from about 200 B.C. to 500 A.D. This involved a ranked social system and regional trade and the building of large burial mounds.
The remains of only three burial mounds have survived in Du Page County. They are in the Winfield Mounds Forest Preserve and have been excavated by vandals and scientists. They exist now as three mounds about 15 feet in diameter and three feet high.
The late Woodland Period begins with the collapse of the Hopewell culture in about the year 500 when the Effigy Mound culture emerged to be replaced by the Oneota culture, which lasted up to the time of the first European settlers.
During the Woodland periods, pottery making and agriculture became more refined, and stockaded villages were used in some places (none are known to have existed in Du Page County).
”Unfortunately, the Woodland periods, like earlier prehistoric periods, have not been adequately investigated in northeastern Illinois,” Kullen said. It is a source of considerable irritation to Kullen that more and more sites that might have archeologic significance are lost to development in Du Page County.
”Until quite recently,” Kullen said, ”surprisingly little archeological work has been undertaken in northeastern Illinois in general and in Du Page County in particular. I think we have a moral obligation to learn as much as we can about the people who lived here before we did.”
Only about a half dozen prehistoric sites from Du Page County have been excavated and reported in archeologic literature, Kullen said. He added that the bibliography of the Illinois Archeological Survey lists only 26 entries for Du Page County compared to 150 entries for Pike County and 550 entries for Madison County.
Kullen`s own surveys, done in part to satisfy environmental impact statements, have found that there were an estimated 3,244 Indian sites in the county, with about half of these having been destroyed by development.
”It is critical that more sites be studied before they are run over by the bulldozers,” Kullen said.
The Historic Indian period with the first written records, begins around 1673, Kullen says, when the first French explorers and traders arrived, and ends in 1832, two years after the Blackhawk war when the last of the Potawotomi were removed from northern Illinois.
This was not a time of great glory in the passing of the Du Page County people parade. The little prairie people, as the Potawatomi came to be called, were of great assistance to the early explorers and settlers. The French explorers found them to be very friendly, and the first oxen-drawn wagons followed Indian trails into the county. Five major Indian trails have been identified in the county, one of the major ones leading to the most prominent Indian village in what is now Glen Ellyn and the Churchill Woods Forest Preserve. Other villages were in Oak Brook, Naperville, Elmhurst and the Morton Arboretum in Lisle.
But as the two cultures tried to occupy the same area, trouble was inevitable. There had to be winners and losers. The Potawatomi were the losers.
As Kullen describes it in a cultural history he prepared earlier this year, ”Tribes were decimated by epidemic diseases introduced by Euro-Americans. Intertribal warfare took its toll, as did Indian involvement in the disputes between colonial powers. A rare few of the natives managed to adapt quickly to the Euro-American culture, and they became successful traders or businessmen. Most, however, tried to carry on their traditional lifeways as best they could, even though their subsistence was becoming increasingly dependent upon the food and trade goods distributed annually as annuity payments from treaty concessions. Eventually, the Potawotomi were convinced to give up claim to all lands in Illinois in exchange for these `presents.` ”
The Potawatomi and others left behind a rich store of stone artifacts:
projectile points, scrapers, knives and drills. Thousands of these have been found and collected by residents over the years. There are obviously thousands more to be found.
If you would hunt them, look in fields or places where topsoil has been disturbed at locations where you think a camp might have existed. The artifacts will be close to the surface, and the best hunting is after a rain when the stone objects have been washed clean and are easy to spot.
Those who find artifacts often speak reverentially of the thrill of holding in their hand something that has transcended the centuries from one culture to another.
It is somehow like a personal message from long ago, one that defies complete comprehension and one that stays with you forever.
And now the parade comes down to the present and the current citizenry of Du Page County. If you would take your place respectfully and with reverence for your lifetime, you might walk the old trails, say along the Du Page River, and then if you are very lucky, maybe you will hear the old whispers. They will tell you incredible things.
