The Heartland

by Kristin L. Hoganson

  In addition to moving vast distances over the years, the Kickapoos were seasonally mobile: they congregated in villages during the planting season and dispersed to hunt in winter. When the soil was exhausted, they established new villages elsewhere.

  It was not unusual for Kickapoos to intermarry with related groups, especially the Mascoutens and Potawatomis.14 They also absorbed captives—not all of them Native American—and mingled with neighboring peoples who were culturally and linguistically distant.15 Given the Kickapoos’ incorporation of non-Kickapoos, any effort to identify one particular place of origin would have to value some ancestral histories over others.

  The more than two thousand Kickapoos of the nineteenth century lived in bands of about fifty to four hundred people.16 Although the Kickapoos visited across bands and sometimes shifted their membership from one band to another, they did not all live in close proximity. In time of war, bands broke into smaller groups to avoid crushing defeats.17 Bands also broke up for hunting. By the early nineteenth century, the Kickapoos of central Illinois and western Indiana had divided into two major bands. A man named Kenekuk led the band with a notable admixture of Potawatomis, and a man named Mecina played a leadership role in the other group.18

  What mattered most to Kickapoo identity was not a specific, bounded, common location, but social relations and linguistic, cultural, and spiritual ties.

  Ke-chím-qua, also known as the Big Bear, likely posed for this portrait at Fort Leavenworth (in today’s Kansas) in 1830. Around his neck he wears wampum beads: a trade good from the Atlantic coast. His woven white shirt also hints at the trade relations in which he and other Kickapoos were enmeshed. The artist, George Catlin, would have been one of many strangers that Ke-chím-qua encountered at the polyglot fort.

  George Catlin, Ke-chím-qua, Big Bear, Gilcrease Museum, Tulsa, Oklahoma.

  A’h-tee-wát-o-mee apparently sat for this portrait around the same time that Ke-chím-qua, Big Bear, sat for his. She, too, wears a mix of trade goods, including silver brooches that resemble ones manufactured in Germany. Though posed in a sitting position, A’h-tee-wát-o-mee was by no means sedentary; she would have traveled long distances from the Kickapoo villages near the Illinois-Indiana state line to reach Fort Leavenworth.

  George Catlin, A’h-tee-wát-o-mee, a Woman, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C./Art Resource, New York.

  KICKAPOO GEOGRAPHIES

  Although it is impossible to fully trace all the nineteenth-century Kickapoo geographies, even a partial mapping reveals that they were remarkably extensive, given the routes and means of transport at the time. Following their arrival in the Illinois country, Kickapoos hunted west of the Mississippi, in the present-day states of Iowa and Missouri.19 They traveled hundreds of miles to trade as well as to hunt, often to the post at St. Louis.20 They also journeyed many miles to find salt.21

  In addition to covering vast distances to provision themselves, the Kickapoos did so for diplomacy and in the course of warfare.22 Early in the century, a group of Kickapoos took prisoners about 135 miles “west of the Natchez,” putting them in western Tennessee and Mississippi.23 In 1814, “wandering hordes” of the Kickapoo nation committed “many depredations on the white inhabitants residing near the Floridas.”24 The year after that, some British-allied Kickapoos attended a peace conference at Fort Michilimackinac, at the confluence of Lakes Huron and Michigan. In the 1820s, “disaffected” Kickapoos surfaced in reports of trouble north of Fort Towson (in present-day Oklahoma), in Texas, and in Arkansas.25

  The Kickapoos followed their own footpaths and (especially when farther afield) those under the purview of other groups.26 They traveled by water, relying on pirogues (shallow draft boats, sometimes made from hollowed logs) and canoes.27 They also waded and swam across ponds, creeks, and rivers.28 By the 1760s, some Kickapoos had obtained horses, which they came to rely on for hunting and long-distance travel. Their vocabulary hints at some of the challenges they encountered while en route: aahkatahoko means to be stranded by water or snow and pietapenee, to arrive hungry.29

  Their captives told tales of exhausting journeys. A British Indian agent taken by some Kickapoos in 1765 reported traveling about forty-two miles the first day and about thirty miles a day thereafter, “crossing a great many swamps, morasses, and beaver ponds” on the way.30 Another captive, taken as a youth in 1793 near the Ohio River, reported running all day and pressing on all night, so that he was “much fatigued, and well nigh worn out by means of constant and hard traveling.” Stopping did not necessarily mean resting, because the Kickapoo captors “danced the war-dance, and made their young prisoners walk round with them, and would have had them dance, had they not been too much exhausted.”31 Mary Smith, taken captive in the War of 1812, claimed to have traveled “nearly six miles an hour,” at the cost of beatings and death threats for a slackened pace. By her account, the group went nearly forty miles in one day, sustained by roasted bear meat.32

  The challenges faced by the Kickapoos in covering so much ground can be deduced by their enemies’ struggles to negotiate Kickapoo landscapes, or, to be more precise: Kickapoo land and waterscapes. When General Charles Scott launched an expedition against the Kickapoos in May 1791, he had to travel about 135 miles from the Ohio River.33 This “long laborious march” through sodden wetlands so exhausted his horses and men that Scott turned back before reaching the Kickapoo villages of central Illinois.34

  Lieutenant Colonel James Wilkinson had a similar experience, only worse. In his 1791 effort to locate a Kickapoo town, he had to cross a deep bog, “which injured several of my horses exceedingly.” Conditions did not improve. He found, as he pressed forward, that the country was “pondy, in every direction.” He pushed on, “through bog after bog, to the saddle skirts in mud and water” until he found himself surrounded on all sides “with morasses which forbade my advancing.” The horses had softened the route so much that the men had to dismount and slog through armpit-deep mud. “Under these circumstances,” wrote Wilkinson, “I was compelled to abandon my designs upon the Kickapoos of the prairie.”35 The Kickapoos’ ability to navigate terrain that invaders found impassable offered them protection from attack as well as advantages in eluding pursuit.

  Their pursuers gained the edge over time, however. They drained the wet prairies. They constructed roads. They dug canals, launched steamships, and laid railroad tracks. They saw these engineering accomplishments as more than a means of establishing control, they saw them as proof of their alliance with progress. To the pioneers, enhanced mobility was a sign of civilizational attainment, though only for themselves, not for Kickapoos, whose mobility struck the pioneers as evidence of their savagery.

  Just as eighteenth-century Kickapoos embraced horses, nineteenth-century Kickapoos took advantage of new routes and forms of transportation to expand their range and quicken their pace. They traveled on the roads constructed by settler colonists.36 They used ferries to cross the Mississippi and they traveled by steamer to St. Louis to testify in court.37 They also took advantage of railroads, though not always as fare-paying passengers.38 Keyword searching “Kickapoo” in nineteenth-century newspapers turns up multiple accounts of terrible accidents involving trains. The Kickapoos who were struck while walking on the tracks may have been using the railbed as a trail but were most likely killed while trying to jump on.39

  Their ability to move through space enabled the Kickapoos to make use of more resources than those in the immediate vicinity of their villages. It enabled them to develop alliances, seek redress, and socialize; to inhabit challenging terrain and to evade pursuit. To a people who invested much meaning in the landscape—in trees, rocks, rivers, and streams—mobility enabled a kind of spiritual expansiveness. As their dancing and mastery of dangerous feats of horsemanship suggest, the Kickapoos opened up to the world through different types of movement.40 Through mixing village life and life on the trace, the Ki
ckapoos blurred the distinctions between home and the world even in the face of empire.

  THE LOCAL HISTORY STAKES

  Having navigated place and space among similarly wayfaring peoples for generations, the Kickapoos ultimately found their foil in the pioneers. Their ideological foil, that is, for the pioneers were far more like the Kickapoos in reality than they cared to admit. Well before the creation of the heartland myth, the pioneers projected locality onto places where it had never existed. They did so, in large part, through published reminiscences, county histories, and the formation of nostalgic old-settler societies.41

  Having started out in many cases as squatters, as devoid of legal titles as the people they displaced, the pioneers and their descendants approached local histories as a way to register and publicize their claims.42 These original local histories advanced two propositions, both pertaining to community and place. The first was that place could determine community. This assumption made sense for pioneers who relocated as individuals or in family units. Their experience was not one of fully fledged groups drawing well-defined boundaries, but of geographic proximity creating collective identity over time. In distinguishing between insiders and outsiders, local historians relied on residence.

  Yet even as these local histories defined belonging in geographic terms, they also made it clear that some residents belonged more than others. Leading citizens, mostly male, had particular claims to prominence—and to the political authority that followed—because of their property holdings. Local histories also heralded smaller stakeholders who had put down sufficient roots. But marginal people and newcomers merited scant attention, and transients, travelers, and sojourners even less. The people at the center of local histories were the ones who literally owned the place.

  These propositions may seem to be self-evident. And even if not, they may seem an unimportant aspect of fusty old accounts—the kinds of books that make you sneeze from so many years on the shelf. Yet these underlying assumptions are fundamental to understanding the politics of the heartland myth. To understand the nature of these politics and their significance, we need only ask: Where did these assumptions leave the Kickapoos?

  There is a narrative trajectory to local histories that starts with colonial contacts and ends with snug farms and fenced fields. In between, there are stories of danger, savage beasts, and Indians. The point of these in-between stories is that the pioneers earned their central position in the community through their struggles to secure their homes. As the authors of a history of Champaign County put it, “We are prone, in the midst of the activities of the present, to forget our obligations to the bold, self-sacrificing pioneers and early settlers who, amid privations and dangers, founded an empire in the wilderness and thus made passable the comforts and blessings of civilization that we, today, enjoy.”43 Those pioneers and settlers were, in other words, colonists. They had forged an empire by overcoming dangers, chief among them the people they supplanted.

  For all the self-congratulation, there is also a note of anxiety in these celebrations of pioneer deeds. In calling for gratitude and veneration, such histories address the possibility that newer arrivals might not defer to old-timers. To the contrary, newcomers might interpret the pioneer story to mean that anybody could dislodge older occupants, thereby claiming place for themselves. They might see the pioneers and their offspring less as founders than as natives, who could in turn be pushed aside.

  These local histories foreclose the possibility of such a subversive reading by casting the pioneer experience as fundamentally different from that of later immigration streams. What made it different (according to these histories) was that the people who preceded the pioneers had not put down roots. Unlike the pioneers and their offspring, Indians had never fully laid claim to place because they were too mobile. The pioneers had not really displaced anybody, because Indians had never made the place their own. The whole pioneering enterprise rested on that deceit. Without it, the pioneers would have been recognized as colonists from the start.

  Pioneering local histories present Indians as people who came and went, wandering at will. As Milton W. Mathews and Lewis A. McLean put it in Early History and Pioneers of Champaign County: “Wild Indians roamed and hunted at pleasure over these prairies and through these groves.” In addition to roaming, the Kickapoos ranged—“with all the freedom of wild turkeys.” They also roved, so much so that one observer described them as addicted to it.44 They did not truly live in the area, they merely camped. Insofar as they left a mark on the landscape, it was in the form of trails and paths. When told to clear out, they “gathered up ponies, dogs, squaws, tents, and papooses, and never returned.”45

  Purported Indian experts shared the pioneers’ views of the Kickapoos as ever on the move. An English traveler who saw Kickapoos at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, in the 1830s described them as “constantly coming and going.”46 In his 1851 tome on American Indians, Henry Rowe Schoolcraft characterized the Kickapoos as an “erratic race.” They have “skipped over half the continent,” he wrote, “to the manifest discomfort of both German and American philologists and ethnographers.”47 Other Indian agents took advantage of their vast geographic knowledge by hiring them as messengers and guides.48

  Depicting Native Americans as comparatively mobile—frustratingly so to those who would categorize them according to geography—served expropriative purposes well beyond the Kickapoos. European colonists came to North America with disparaging views of pastoralists, gypsies, and vagabonds. From their first contacts with native peoples, they regarded mobility as evidence of savagery and attenuated ties to place.49 They claimed that Native Americans merely used land without fully possessing it to justify their seizure of that land.50 An 1827 tract championing Indian removal cited the example of the Kickapoos (among other groups) to demonstrate that Indians were mobile even without being forced and hence that they “may be removed by fair and honorable measures.”51

  THE GREAT ERASURE

  Just as the propertied inhabitants of the nineteenth-century United States regarded tramps as social outsiders deserving of punishment, rehabilitation, and incarceration, they regarded Native Americans as shiftless vagrants.52 The local histories that sprang up in Champaign typically ceased to mention native peoples after the first few pages. Out of sight, out of mind. Or, as one history of central Illinois put it, “The Indian is gone . . . doomed to extinction.” That the Illinois pioneers were not alone in this conviction can be seen in an article on the sale of Kickapoo Indian land in Oklahoma, where some of the Kickapoos had gone after the pioneers had pushed them out of Illinois. This article observed that the Kickapoo reservation would soon be “owned and occupied entirely by white people and their heirs, inheritors and assigns forever. Thus another step will be taken in the wiping out of the name Kickapoo from the map of the United States, as it will be eventually dropped from history and from the memory of men.”53

  The Kickapoos were not wiped off the map. To the contrary, the more they were displaced, the more they appeared upon it. From Kickapoo Creek to Kickapoo River, Kickapoo Hills, Kickapoo coal mines, Kickapoo Falls, Kickapoo Prairie, Kickapoo City, Kickapoo Cave, and the Kickapoo road, place names in at least fourteen states have borne witness to the Kickapoos’ onetime presence.54 In large part, however, Kickapoo places are now without visible Kickapoos. The practice of naming places after Native American groups paradoxically underscored the pioneers’ claims to place, for it was, after all, the pioneers who affixed words like Kickapoo to their maps. If there is any doubt that settler colonists asserted their own power through naming things after Native Americans, consider the Kickapoo bomb. The U.S. government detonated this over the South Pacific in 1956, as part of the Redwing tests. The seventeen atomic bombs in this series may have seemed to honor indigenous people, each being named after a Native American nation. But these seventeen bombs spewed their fallout on the indigenous people of the Marshall Islands.55 Kickapoo traces, without
Kickapoos.

  Removal so fully effaced the Kickapoos from the consciousness of settlers that when some local historians in the early twentieth century became interested in Native American precursors, they did not know where the Kickapoos of Illinois had gone. This was true for Milo Custer, who lived near the Kickapoo Grand Village site about fifteen miles west of the Champaign County line. After doing some basic research on removal, Custer started to correspond with John Masquequa, a Kickapoo man living in Kansas. Custer described his fervent hopes of learning more about Masquequa’s people: “I have always wanted to know about the Kickapoo Indians for they once lived here in the country where I was born, and I have heard some of the old people who live here tell about them and I wanted to know more.”56

  When the youthful Custer finally saved enough money to travel to Kansas, he sought out Kickapoo elders, hoping for stories of Illinois. The oldest woman he met, Omubyah, was not forthcoming. Custer sadly reported that, having left Illinois when she was eight, she did not “remember anything in particular about our locality.” The oldest man, Old Jesse, had been born in Missouri. He told Custer of “a tradition of the ‘Salt Lands’ in Illinois.” Despite Old Jesse’s knowledge of a place he had never seen, Custer did not think to ask younger Kickapoos what Illinois meant to them. It did not occur to Custer that Illinois may have had meanings that passed on through the generations. This became especially apparent in Custer’s farewell address. Before going home, Custer spoke at the Kickapoo School. “I was able to tell them more about the past history of the Kickapoos than they had ever heard before,” he noted, oblivious to the possibility that the Kickapoos had their own histories, ones that certainly included stories of Illinois from as recently as their parents’ and grandparents’ times.57