Although local historians such as Custer professed greater interest in the Kickapoos by the early twentieth century, their intentions were strictly historical—to understand the past, not the possibility that the Kickapoos’ attachments to Illinois continued into the present. As one late-nineteenth-century account put it: “The Kickapoos are, or were, a red Indian tribe.”58 Were. Out of sight, out of the ongoing stream of time—except as symbols of mobility.
Even as pioneering accounts declared the Kickapoos gone, newspapers across the country ran testimonials from a Champaign resident (among others) who attributed his restored health to a Kickapoo tonic.59 This was due to the advertising campaign of the Kickapoo Indian Medicine Company, based in New Haven, Connecticut. The company sold a variety of products that cured diseases of the kidney and other vitality-sapping ailments. All its tonics and exotic-sounding “sagwas” purportedly came from the secret herbal formulas of the Kickapoos. To hawk its products, the company sent agents—many of them real Indians, though fake Kickapoos—to travel the country, as far as the new territory of Hawaii,* performing Wild West show feats of daring. Its printed materials—which circulated even more widely—trumpeted the Canadian, Egyptian, Mexican, and European markets for the company’s various rheumatism, neuralgia, cough, and worm medicines. These materials depicted scenes of buffalo hunts on the open plains and white women astride fast-moving horses, clasped firmly in the arms of bare-chested Indian men.60
An excerpt from an advertisement for Kickapoo Indian Remedies, from 1897. It hawks Kickapoo Indian Sagwa as the cure for “a general breaking down of the system” and for disordered kidneys, liver, stomach, and blood.
“Woman’s Hope,” Milwaukee Journal, April 15, 1897, 19th-Century U.S. Newspapers.
Along with turning the Kickapoo people into commodified symbols of vigor, patent medicine ads spread bogus representations of Kickapoo culture.
Everett W. Doane, Life and Scenes Among the Kickapoo Indians, New Haven: Healy & Bigelow [nd].
That at least some readers took this message to heart can be seen in the newspaper stories reporting on white girls eloping with the Indian sales agents. It can also be seen in the decision of a Traveling Men’s Union chapter to call itself the “order of the Kickapoos.”61 Thanks to the Kickapoo Indian Medicine Company, the Kickapoos became placeless symbols of vigorous movement, whose name continues to circulate in connection with Kickapoo Joy Juice, a gingery soft drink popular in Malaysia and Singapore and now on offer in my grocery store in Champaign.62
HOME ON THE RANGE
The pioneer vein of local history is deeply ironic, though not intentionally so. Those who dismissed the Kickapoos as ramblers did not seem to realize that the Kickapoo people could have written their own accounts of roving outsiders, with the roles reversed. Most of the white Americans the Kickapoos met were people on the move. The Kickapoos encountered British travelers; Belgian missionaries who moved from post to post, as their Jesuit superiors determined; German émigrés newly arrived in America; a Prussian explorer heading up and down the Missouri.63 The Great Overland Trail to the far West cut through the land allotted the Kickapoos in the removal era. The emigrants who trudged along that trail stole the Kickapoos’ oxen, hitching them to their wagons heading west across the plains.64 The Kickapoos knew, as well as anyone, that it was the short-lived military man who did not travel from post to post, the unambitious Indian agent who was content to stay put, the pointless trader who obtained his goods in the neighborhood, the misnamed pioneer who hadn’t come from someplace else.
Despite their insistent claims to locality, the pioneers who penned the first local histories of the Midwest were not really locals. What made them pioneers was their mobility. Many of them moved several times before putting down roots, others just passed through the area, and some took off and came back. The settlers who figured so largely in histories of Champaign are no exception. They came from New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Indiana, Ohio, and Michigan; from North Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee, and Kentucky; from Ontario, England, Scotland, and Ireland; from Switzerland, Hannover, Bavaria, and the Kingdom of Württemberg. Some came from families with longer histories of mobility, as in the case of Thomas Jonathan Burrill, whose mother hailed from the vicinity of Belfast, Ireland, though “Scotch by ancestry,” and George Besore, whose Huguenot forebear had traveled from France to Pennsylvania via a German province.65 The ancestral homes of such pioneers were many removes away: as the wandering children of wandering parents, these pioneers felt no particular compulsion to stay.
Some of the founders of Champaign County had spent years on the move, working as slave traders, soldiers, drovers, salesmen, and sailors. Pennsylvania-born Henry Sadorus applied to accompany Lewis and Clark. Unsuccessful in that pursuit, he journeyed to Cuba instead. Another pioneer traveled the country with a menagerie, in charge of an elephant, two monkeys, and a tiger. The Ontario-born John Rogerson circled Lake Superior on snowshoes, in the company of two Indians. Elisha Stevenson, originally of Ohio, had “drifted about to different places,” practicing his trade as a hatter. One of the county’s Lutheran pastors had been born in Rio de Janeiro in 1847. The son of a minister, he studied at a mission institute in Hannover before coming to the United States. The Irish-born Father Shanly had studied for the priesthood for six years in Rome.66
Not only did the pioneers arrive after long and circuitous journeys, they refused to stay put. Malinda Busey Bryan, born in Kentucky in 1812, rode the same horse from Champaign back to Kentucky five times.67 Other pioneers hitched their ox teams to their wagons to trade in Chicago. They did business downriver in New Orleans. They drove hogs to the Wabash River in Indiana and got short-term jobs there in the pork-packing plants. They took off to California for the gold rush, some across the continent, some via Panama and Nicaragua. When the railroad came, they sought jobs as conductors. They departed for Arkansas to lay track, to Pike’s Peak, again in search of gold. They left for education, to serve in the legislature, to buy livestock, to exhibit stock in fairs, and just to “look around a little.” Sometimes settlers left for reasons unknown, as in the case of Myron Stoddard Brown, who “went away for a while but came back in 1858 with his wife.”68
As the desire to “look around” suggests, Champaign residents left for more than just economic reasons. Some left to fight—in the Blackhawk War, the Mormon War, and the Mexican War—motivated perhaps in part by the knowledge that since the Revolution, bounty-warrant acts had offered land to veterans of Indian and other campaigns.69 They served the Union in places such as Vicksburg, Chick-amauga, Atlanta, Mobile, Pensacola, Galveston, and Chickasaw Bayou. One scouted for the Union Army in Kansas; another escaped from Andersonville Prison, fleeing to freedom with a black man, hiding in swamps by day. Others left to visit family, including across the Atlantic. Men traveled east to secure a bride. One of the early pioneers, William Sadorus, took off on three-week hunting trips, living by the chase. The more that game dwindled in the area, the farther afield he went, traveling to Arkansas and other hunting grounds to the west. As the nineteenth century wore on, wealthy Champaign residents went to Florida for their health and to Europe and elsewhere for pleasure.70
Some of the moves were for good. The Early History of Champaign speaks of men who became restless over time and “sought broader fields in the far west.” As the population of the county grew, families packed up and went to Iowa, Wisconsin, and Oregon.71 Following in the footsteps of their forebears, many of the pioneers’ children displaced Native Americans down the road.72 The Early History mentions daughters settled from Michigan to Montana and sons from Texas to British Columbia. One son became a miner in “old Mexico,” one a baggage master in Las Vegas, one a vintner in San Diego; one a rancher near Leadville, Colorado. Anticipating a time when immigration and natural increase would lead to crowding and ever-smaller patches of inherited land, the Prairie Farmer newspaper
drew attention to real estate opportunities in Canada, Mexico, and the West Indies in the early 1870s.73 The Urbana Courier also tempted readers with advertisements for land. Read one for eight hundred acres in Alberta: “Choicest soil. Deep black loam, comes with a hog pen.”74 In 1890, sixteen men in Monticello, Illinois (one county to the west of Champaign), pooled their funds to purchase fruit farms in Honduras.75
In addition to moving themselves, the pioneers moved borders. They lived in a time of outward-pressing U.S. boundaries, with the mappings of their new homes likewise in flux. Those who colonized Illinois saw it change over time from Indian territory with European footholds, to a western edge of the United States, to a border state abutting the breakaway Confederacy, to a state smack in the center of the country. Such flux seemed unexceptional given simultaneous changes in the middle of Europe. The pioneers who spoke various German dialects came from several German kingdoms, only unified in 1871.76 They arrived with firsthand knowledge of Schleswig-Holstein falling to the Danes and Alsace-Lorraine to Germany; of growing up in jurisdictions, such as Austrian Poland, that could no longer be found on maps.77 Like their relatives who had advanced European imperialism in places such as the Transvaal and Ceylon, they treaded expansive new paths.78
If foreign relations is considered in a broad sense, so as to encompass relations with foreigners, then the presumption that Illinois was thoroughly domestic would have seemed nonsensical to the polyglot settlers who wrested it from Indians. Foreign relations could be found in money sent to sisters in Ireland and in everyday encounters with neighbors. It unfolded at home, between immigrant parents and Americanized children; naturalized citizens and European relatives. Marriages were often transnational alliances, joining Swiss to German, Danish to Canadian, Rhinelander to Irish.79 For the restless people who made the Midwest a tapestry of northern European diasporas, foreign relations was the stuff of daily life.
DISLODGMENT
It is not only the pioneers’ position in the midst of such a turbulent brew that makes their claims to locality so deeply ironic. Contrary to pioneer depictions of Kickapoo homelessness, the Kickapoos did indeed build homes, modeled after those of Kitzihiat, the Great Spirit.80 Built largely by women, Kickapoo wickiups had mat walls over a bentwood frame. Whether for winter or warmer-month use, they had a fire circle in the center and a smoke hole in the roof.81 The Kickapoos cherished their dwellings as spiritually significant places associated with warmth, cooking, and nighttime light. They also valued the land on which their dwellings were located.82 This can be seen in their resistance to land seizures and forced removal and in their spiritual beliefs that have carried forward through time, to today.
The Kickapoo poet Ekoneskaka (also known as Aurelio Valdez Garcia) revealed some meanings he attached to place in a 1992 oral history. Having arrived with a friend at his village, he gestured toward a rock. “Hey, hombre, come here, take a look at this,” he said. “Put your hands on it. See? This is the heart of Nacimiento [the name of his village, meaning birth or source in Spanish]. Everything goes out from here to there, and from there to here, and at the same moment it all goes back out again and on and further on around all these places we call Nacimiento. This is the living place of the rock. It’s the heart of the village too. See how the stone moves around inside the rock, as if all those grains of rock were moving like a pure river at dawn, and you can drink it. . . . This is the heart of Nacimiento and that is what our heart must do, even when we sleep, it’s breathing this place for us, beating and breathing out and breathing back in this place for us, our heart of Nacimiento.”83
Pioneer claims notwithstanding, place profoundly mattered for Kickapoos such as Ekoneskaka. Generations after his ancestors had been driven from Illinois, Ekoneskaka still felt a deep attachment to Nacimiento, the place where they had gone. There, in the northern Mexican state of Coahuila, they had started over. And yet they and their descendants had continued to go out into the world, including to places that had sustained the Kickapoos in the past. This sense of the connection between the solidity of place and fluidity of space helps explain his sense of the heart of his village as a living thing.
Recognizing the importance of place claims to the Kickapoos is not to say that the Kickapoos understood land in the same legal ownership terms as the pioneers. Their lands overlapped with the lands used by other groups such as the Delaware, Shawnee, Potawatomi, Eel River, Weea, Piankashaw, and Miami. Even as they negotiated their first treaties, the Kickapoos regarded land as something held in common, rather than by individuals. The idea of buying and selling land was alien to them, for they regarded land rights more in terms of use than in terms of permanent ownership. This conception of land rights helps explain why the Kickapoo men who signed the 1795 Treaty of Greenville, ceding lands in Illinois and Indiana to the federal government, insisted on a provision stipulating that they could continue to hunt on them, “without hinderance or molestation.”84 Whatever they had transferred, it was not the ability to replenish themselves on the land.
If anyone had asked what the Kickapoos thought about the pioneer accounts that disparaged them as rootless, they could have pointed out that in many cases, it was the pioneers’ fault. The homes the Kickapoo built south of the Great Lakes were no more secure than those they had left during earlier waves of colonial warfare. After the American Revolution (supported by most Illinois Kickapoos, at least by the end), pioneers flowed into the Old Northwest, precipitating retaliatory raids.85 In 1791, General Charles Scott and seven hundred Kentucky volunteers responded by destroying the Kickapoo village near the convergence of the Tippecanoe and Wabash Rivers (near present-day Lafayette, Indiana).86 The following month, General James Wilkinson and five hundred mounted Kentuckians destroyed another Kickapoo village, at the confluence of the Eel and Wabash Rivers, about twenty-eight miles upstream.87 “I have burnt a respectable Kickapoo village, and cut down at least 430 acres of corn, chiefly in the milk,” reported Wilkinson, fully aware that destroying the Kickapoos’ corn threatened their existence, that without their stores of provisions, they would suffer keenly in the impending winter and have no seeds to plant in the spring.88
The War of 1812 led to further displacement. In anticipation of war, the Kickapoos abandoned their villages.89 They had good reason to fear attack: as allies of Tecumseh, they had been resisting U.S. incursions.90 Illinois forces under Governor Ninian Edwards burned their deserted villages and then struck the encampment where the Kickapoos had concentrated. According to Edwards, he and his men destroyed “upwards of 1000 bushels of corn” at the principal Kickapoo village, along with “a prodigious quantity of Beans and dried Meat, Pumpions, Tallow, Furs, and Peltry.”91 This caused the Illinois Kickapoos to disperse and seek protection among the Sauk in northern Illinois. About a month later, a detachment of U.S. forces under Colonel Philip Barbour destroyed a “large Kickapoo village” on the Wabash River.92
In addition to fleeing villages in time of war, the Kickapoos deserted them during epidemics. Lacking inherited immunities to the diseases carried across the Atlantic, the Kickapoos suffered tremendously from colonial contagions. When smallpox ravaged the Kickapoos who lived along the Wabash in the late 1700s, the survivors abandoned the pestilential site and headed west, to Illinois.93
FORCED RELOCATION
Pioneer histories do not confess that U.S. forces burned down Kickapoo villages and fields. They do not acknowledge that colonial diseases had made them into places of death. They do not admit that hunger may have driven entire communities—gaunt women and men and their suffering children—to look elsewhere for the nourishment once provided by corn and more abundant game. They depict the Kickapoos as rovers by choice.
Things got worse when the pioneers embarked on a purposeful program of ethnic cleansing, known at the time and onward by an even more euphemistic term: removal. In their treatments of Indian removal, most textbooks emphasize the story of the “Five Civilized Tribes” from the Southeast—t
he Cherokee prominent among them—and the tragedy of the Trail of Tears. But Indian removal did not begin in Georgia, nor did it end there. The Midwest has its own terrible stories of Indian expulsions, including of the Kickapoos.94
The process of expelling the Kickapoos from their villages east of the Mississippi began in 1809, when the group living between the Wabash and Vermilion Rivers lost land in the Indiana Territory.95 The Edwardsville and Fort Harrison treaties that ceded land in Illinois followed within a decade. In exchange, the Kickapoos got a tract of land on the Osage River, “west of the contemplated boundary of the proposed state of Missouri.” The treaty writers cast this as a good deal for the Kickapoos, noting that their new tract was large and their title to it “indisputable.”96 This view of the transaction overlooked the Osages living along the river that bore their name, less than thirty miles from the Kickapoos’ new homes.97 Disregarding the Kickapoos’ connections to place, it assumed that moving from the wet prairies of central Illinois to the drier grasslands of Kansas would make no difference to a people thought to be inherent rovers.
According to War Department registers, more than two thousand Kickapoos had resettled along the Osage by 1820.98 Whatever their initial expectations, they found their new home to be a land of disappointment. As they told the Indian superintendent in St. Louis, instead of getting the expansive lands they anticipated, they had been placed “in a small hole.”99 The nature of the land selected for them compounded their frustrations. Defying instructions, they settled in Missouri instead of to the west of it. Yet even so, a nearby Indian agent reported them as being “destitute of every comfort.”100
The Kickapoos’ dissatisfactions contributed to the 1832 Treaty of Castor Hill, in which the Kickapoos who had recently settled in western Missouri exchanged their unsatisfactory new holdings for land “southwest of the Missouri river, as their permanent place of residence as long as they remain a tribe.” The treaty identified the boundaries of this new reservation as “lying generally north and west of Fort Leavenworth,” a vague designation for land in northeastern Kansas. Members of the Kickapoo band that had stayed in Illinois also signed the treaty, thereby leading U.S. officials to believe that the Kickapoos had relinquished all land claims in the state.101
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