Even before the Kickapoos reached their new lands, white critics complained that they should have been moved farther still, beyond the Rocky Mountains, “to the remotest space that can be found for them on this side of the Pacific.”102 In response to such demands, the U.S. government seized some of the Kickapoos’ Kansas lands in the 1860s. It relocated those who objected to Indian Territory, in what later became Oklahoma.103 By the time of this removal, the Kickapoos had good reason to worry that no matter where they went, land-hungry white settlers would soon follow. Despite their claims to locality, the pioneers and their children had a tendency to see opportunity wherever they saw Indians, and this opportunity typically meant forcing Indians to go elsewhere.
KICKAPOO PRESENCES
So many Kickapoos left Illinois for Missouri in 1820 that it took the ferries of St. Louis fifteen days to carry them and their wagons of household goods across. Nonetheless, several bands remained in central Illinois into the 1830s. As Indian Agent William Clark reported more than a decade after the Edwardsville treaty, those who opposed it “have continued their resistance to the wishes of the Government, and have withstood every inducement to move to their own lands west of the Mississippi.”104
When some Kickapoos joined Black Hawk’s supporters in 1832, Champaign settlers fearful of attack appointed a committee to tell the “red men” in the vicinity to go. According to a later pioneer history, the Indians subsequently left.105 Yet Kickapoos were still in the area the following year, when an Indian agent reported that “their situation is now very deploring, being in a country thickly inhabited and affording little or no game.”106 The last of the Kickapoos reportedly crossed the Mississippi in the spring of 1834, leaving only their dead behind.107
Rather than interring their dead in the ground, the Kickapoos who had not adopted Christian burial practices preferred to hang them in slings from the lower limbs of trees. Although the Kickapoos believed that the dead traveled to the spirit world, they treated the bodies of the dead with respect because of the possibility that they still harbored spirits.108 This respect for the deceased had contributed to the Kickapoos’ unwillingness to sell their land, for to sell it meant to sell the bodies of family members, an act akin to selling their own flesh.109 As the pioneers saw the last of the Kickapoo wagons roll past, they may have thought the Kickapoos gone, but from a Kickapoo perspective, their people remained, many of them still swaying in the breeze.
Their ongoing ties to the land of their ancestors help explain another development glossed over by the pioneer histories: why some Kickapoos returned. One pioneer who arrived near the southwest corner of Champaign County in 1837—four years after the last of the Kickapoos had supposedly crossed the Mississippi—found that “the smoke of the camp-fire of the Indians still ascended from the Big Grove.”110 In the 1840s, a stricken Kickapoo man died in Urbana after being bled by an ineffective doctor summoned to his side.111 In 1854, twenty years after the Kickapoos had ostensibly left, a Kickapoo man from Kansas returned to the scenes of his boyhood, where he told curious residents about his life prior to removal and about his parents, whose bodies had been laid to rest nearby.112 An English immigrant who arrived in Champaign in 1867 claimed that there were still “many Indians” there and that he saw them performing their dances.113
An 1887 dispatch from Tuscola, Illinois (about five miles south of the Champaign County line), also hints at ongoing Kickapoo attachments to east-central Illinois. “For many years past a small band of Indians has been accustomed to encamp on the banks of the Okau, about nine miles southeast of this city, near Uncle Eph Gardner’s farm, and there spend several days.” One of the men in the encampment explained that “sixty years ago, when that tribe of red men made this section of country their hunting grounds, a great chief was buried on a prominence overlooking the Okau, near that point, and that they came to do honor to his memory.” The article went on to confirm that there had been a “great camping grounds and headquarters of the Kickapoos” in the vicinity.114
Over fifty years after removal, some Kickapoos either had never left or had come back. Sometime in the spring or early summer they went from Tuscola north to Paxton (about fifty miles away), where they set up camp. This would have gone unnoticed in the historical record, except they gave bow and arrow shooting demonstrations as part of the Fourth of July festivities, and this spectacle got a passing mention in the papers.115
That the Kickapoos continued to see east-central Illinois as meaningful can be seen in another, still later, return. In the 1990s, farm owners Bill and Doris Emmett came to realize not only that their land in McLean County encompassed part of the onetime Grand Village of the Kickapoos, but also that a mega–hog farm proposed for an adjacent parcel would desecrate the Kickapoos’ grove for the dead. Using their life savings and pension funds, they purchased 250 more acres of land.116 Then, with the help of friends and volunteers, they established a private park and organized a homecoming. The three hundred or so Kickapoos who attended the 1998 gathering came from Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, and Mexico.117 Among them was Texas resident Marguerita Salazar, age 104. She had grown up hearing her grandparents’ stories about the Illinois territory, for both her grandmother Kelkowah and her grandfather Neepaha had lived at the Grand Village.118 For Salazar and the other Kickapoos who danced in sight of the trees that had held their ancestors’ remains, Illinois had never lost meaning.
THE CONCEIT OF THE LOCAL
Although the pioneers admitted the ties between place and space when they filled their local histories with discussions of wide-branching family trees and jottings on who went where when, these histories advanced the fundamental premise that they had carved locality from the vast expanses of the West. They grounded the supposition that place could be severed from space, that the local could stand on its own.
This premise has long survived them. Even as other places have come to seem connected to the global, the heartland’s position in the middle has seemed to buffer it from the world. Its rural areas and small towns have seemed especially impervious to connection, seen more as outcroppings in the middle of nowhere than as junctions in the very thick of things.
To construe this seeming locality as inherent to place misconstrues both its fabrication and its nature. Locality began, in the heartland as elsewhere in the United States, as an ideology of conquest. By suggesting that Euro-American settlers were rooted in place, local histories turned groups such as the Kickapoos into outsiders, existing only in space. In addition to mischaracterizing people like the Kickapoos, who valued their homes as much as any pioneer and who maintained attachments to place long after becoming displaced, such distinctions exaggerated the pioneers’ ties to place, for they, too, valued mobility and they, too, cherished ties based more on affinity than on geography.
Those who disdain the rural Midwest as a last holdout of locality misread its history. Since the beginning, the seeming locality of the Midwest has served colonialist politics, having originated in colonial denial.
ARCHIVAL TRACES
Not enough of the war to ‘go round’
Urbana Clarion, 1860: “The colored residents of Urbana and Champaign celebrated the anniversary of emancipation in the British West Indies, on Wednesday, by a pic-nic.”1
The Illinois Farmer, 1864: The Canada thistle “is sometimes called the ‘cursed thistle’—and very properly too. It is certainly a curse and accursed! But we do not suppose it is so called because ‘cursed’ is synonymous with Canada! We would not be so understood. But there is no sort of doubt but Canada is cursed with it, as well as some of the United States . . . The seed has wings. It is migratory. It travels in the air, in crockery crates, on railway trains, in emigrant wagons, in dry goods boxes, in tree packages, with grass seed, grain, and it is not altogether impossible that the government may distribute it through its Agricultural Department . . .”2
From The History of Champaign County, 1878: Charles Miner came to Champa
ign in 1849, obtaining his land with Mexican land warrants, that is, with bounty payments from his service in Mexico.3
From The History of Champaign County, 1905: “The late war with Spain, entered into on account of the cruel oppressions and misgovernment of the Island of Cuba, near the American coast, while not in defense of the integrity of American territory, was truly in defense of American honor. . . . The only trouble that most of our patriotic young men encountered during the progress of this war, was that there was not enough of the war to ‘go round’ and give all a chance.”4
Urbana Daily Courier, 1909: “Señor Zeferino Dominguez, a prominent farmer and land owner of Mexico, is organizing a party of wealthy Mexican farmers for a trip through the corn belt of the United States during the coming year. The Señor has written that this party will consist of about 100 people who will travel by special train. The purpose of the organizer is to convince his countrymen what is being done along scientific lines in the United States particularly in corn raising.” The group will visit the University of Illinois and the Funk Brothers Seed Company.5
Urbana Courier, 1909: The story of the dash to the North Pole “will be told in graphic pictures at the Walker Opera House on Christmas day.” The pictures show the frozen regions of the Arctic and “why the polar prize fell to America.” The program also includes Big Guns in Action, Algeria, Canada, and twenty other features.6
Urbana Courier, 1912: “Mrs. R. A. Wells of this city, who for some time has been visiting her daughter at Mexico City, Mexico, has fled with the latter and family across the Rio Grande into Texas, following the ultimatum that Americans in Mexico would be slaughtered at the first appearance of United States troops across the border.”7
2
MEAT IN THE MIDDLE
Converging Borderlands in the U.S. Midwest
FROM MIDDLE GROUND TO BORDERLANDS, BY WAY OF THE OLD NORTHWEST
Even before the coming of the pioneers, the place that became the heartland already lay in the thick of things. In the years leading up to the American Revolution, indigenous polities and European empires struggled mightily for power there, with the outcome up for grabs. Though later historians have characterized this contested area as a middle ground, eastern mapmakers saw it at the time as an edge.8 From U.S. independence to the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, the nation officially ended at the Mississippi. When the nation leapt beyond that squiggly line, Illinois moved from the dynamic far horizon of the nation—from a place in what was variously called the Old Northwest, Great West, or West—toward the stodgy center. As pioneers wrote themselves into local history, nation builders wrote Illinois out of the wild landscape of diplomatic maneuvering, exploration, and warfare, and into the thoroughly domestic landscape of the Midwest.9
The idea of the heartland as an insulated core is so entrenched that it is easy to forget the history of the middle ground, stretching across what is now the U.S.-Canadian border and south along the Mississippi as it flowed toward the Gulf. But the history of the middle ground is worth recalling if we are to understand what followed its demise, for this history reminds us that the middle has existed in the round. Before the nation closed in, the Midwest lay between all the compass points, not just east and west. By pinning it between the two coasts, nation builders fixed it solidly in the middle of the country.
But country has a second meaning: an expanse of land. Maps that end at the nation’s borders hide this larger sense. The seeming insularity of the heartland may tell us more about our angle of vision than the scope of the field. If we tilt the axis, the Midwest suddenly emerges as a place between two borderlands.
The term borderlands refers to an intermediate area between two separate states. Upon originating in studies of the U.S. Southwest, borderlands scholarship focused on the communities that have abutted—and transcended—the U.S.-Mexican border. More recent scholarship has taken a borderlands approach to peoples and places along the U.S.-Canadian line, finding spillage and mixing there, too. Yet although such studies have begun to open up our understanding of national dividing lines, they have done little to shake up the myth of heartland insularity. Borderlands just seem to move the real borders inward a bit, not to suggest the permeability of the nation as a whole.10 They peter out on the fringes of the heartland, daring to reach only so far. The possibility that a state such as Illinois may have had its own borderlands histories seems too much of a stretch, unless the subject were its relations with Indiana, Kentucky, Missouri, Iowa, or Wisconsin.
But where do borderlands end? What if they just keep receding until they finally converge, in places such as the flat fields of central Illinois? How insular would the Midwest seem then? Given the heartland metaphor, it seems fitting to approach these questions with blood in mind. Animal blood, that is, in keeping with nineteenth-century farmers’ tendency to use blood as shorthand for all the attributes of breed. If their attention to blood reveals quite a bit about race-making and boundary drawing in an agrarian society, their animals and the paths they traveled tell us just as much about the cross-border history of a region.
THE RISE AND FALL OF THE MIDWESTERN RANGE
Texas and other states west of the Mississippi did not become the center of the U.S. beef-raising industry until after the Civil War. Starting in the mid-1830s, the cattle frontier could be found on the prairies of what is now the Midwest.11 Among the counties that offered rich pasturage was Champaign: In 1850, four years before the Illinois Central Railroad connected Champaign to Chicago, fewer than three thousand people lived in its 1,004 square miles.12 It was no accident that this was one of the last parts of the state to be intensively settled by the pioneers. Besides lacking natural transportation routes, the county consisted largely of wetlands (hence the term wet prairie to characterize this ecological region) that were ill suited for cultivation. But the vast expanses of inexpensive land did lend themselves to grazing.13
Cattle pioneers benefited from the unsettled nature of the prairie insofar as they could pasture their stock free of charge on the “unclaimed” land recently taken from Native Americans. Federal land distribution policies also proved favorable to white cattle raisers. Those who had accumulated some capital as small-scale herders or drovers took advantage of the U.S. government’s cheap prices for marshy land and the Illinois Central’s willingness to dispose of its land grant in big parcels, more suitable for grazing than plowing. In the mid-nineteenth century, Champaign contained some of the largest farms in the state. By 1870, ten of its farms contained one thousand or more acres, too large for family cultivation but well suited for commercial stock raising.14 Many of the men who populate the late-nineteenth-century directories of Champaign’s leading citizens made their fortunes in the livestock business.15
One of Champaign’s most prominent stockmen, Benjamin Franklin Harris, started purchasing cattle in Illinois in 1835 to drive them to Pennsylvania markets. This demanding three-month trip required Harris and his herds to swim the Wabash, the Ohio, and several other formidable rivers and then climb the Allegheny Mountains en route to Lancaster. After seven such drives, Harris understandably tired of the work. In 1841, he purchased a farm in Champaign. Harris sold his cattle to drovers, who herded them to farms in Ohio to be fattened before slaughter.16 With the arrival of the railroad in the early 1850s, there was no need to fatten his animals close to market, so Harris did it himself, with tremendous success. He specialized in the heavy cattle popular at the time, mostly in the four-thousand-pound range but some over five thousand pounds. Following his death in 1905, an obituary noted that Harris had once sold the heaviest one-hundred-head lot of cattle ever marketed in the United States “and, so far as the records show, in the world.” Harris sold his herds to railroad shippers, including the Boston Exporting Company, which delivered them to the slaughterhouse and then marketed the meat in the northeastern United States and Britain.17
Although the large farms of Illinois started to break up after 1870, giving way to mixed fa
rming on smaller holdings, the state’s cattle industry did not peak until around 1890.18 In 1850, Champaign had fewer than 1.5 beef cattle per one hundred acres; by 1890, it had over 4.6. Champaign cattle producers remained competitive for so long by adjusting their operations, taking advantage of their increasing capacity to grow corn to shift their emphasis from grazing to the feedlot-style fattening of range cattle.
Corn-feeding in central Illinois in the 1870s. Note the pigs gleaning in the lot.
Joseph G. McCoy, Historic Sketches of the Cattle Trade of the West and Southwest (Kansas City, Mo., Ramsey, Millett & Hudson, 1874), 170. The Newberry Library.
They also used their capital and livestock expertise to breed and raise animals that matured faster (meaning they could be sold at two years, instead of four), fattened more readily (thereby reducing feed costs), and marbled so finely as to appeal to the most discriminating consumers.19
These competitive strategies can be seen in the case of Broadlands, the largest farm in the county, indeed, the largest in the Old Northwest. The Ohio livestock grazier Michael L. Sullivant established the farm in 1853 on 20,000 acres, which grew to 26,500 after he sold the farm to John T. Alexander, a former drover, in 1866.20 For a number of years, Alexander fattened Texan stock on his land. He also bought cattle from fellow feeders to ship to eastern markets. In 1870, he shipped 70,000 head, an achievement that earned him the sobriquet “the cattle king of the world.” In 1873, he was elected president of the Live Stock Men’s National Association.21 But soon after, losses from disease bankrupted Alexander, and by the end of the century, the center of the Illinois cattle production had shifted to the northwest corner of the state.22
The Heartland Page 5
