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A number of scholarly studies, along with anecdotal evidence suggests that modern life is becoming ever more stressful because of the rapid pace of change. It seems especially difficult these days for many to know what the norm is.
Years ago, the cast of “Star Trek” used small flip-top communicators to contact their space ship, the Enterprise. Nowadays, flip phones are old hat and school kids use even smaller devices to call their parents and friends – or their grandparents in Florida – check their class schedules, text their friends, play games, take high-resolution videos of their friends, search the Internet for facts and all manner of other things.
Likewise, many of the Fox Valley fields that just a few years ago grew corn and soybeans are now sprouting homes, stores and schools. Once-quiet rural lanes are now heavily traveled arterial highways, and it’s possible to walk along the sidewalk downtown and never meet a person you know.
But no matter what we may think, as frenetic as the pace of change seems to be these days, it doesn’t hold a candle to what was going on here the 1830s.
Subsequent decades of the 19th century get a lot of interest from historians and the public. The antebellum years of the 1850s with war clouds on the horizon and the Underground Railroad; the Civil War years with its tragic and horrific bloodshed; the Gilded Age of the 1870s and 1880s with the Robber Barons; and the Gay ‘90s with their social and technological advances are all justly studied for the important things that happened during those eras. But hereabouts, the go-go 1830s saw a population explosion unmatched until the early 2000s.
When the 1830s began, Kendall County and the rest of the Fox Valley was home to more Indians than whites. Fur traders still plied their trade, and the only roads in the area were traces and trails left by wild game and Native People. In fact, Kendall County in 1830 was the wild frontier.
But by the time the decade ended, almost all existing Kendall County towns except Plano had been established. The U.S. government had surveyed the area, and land sales were ongoing. The actual frontiersmen here when the first permanent settlers arrived, men like Peter Specie and Frederick Countryman, were either dead, had succumbed to civilization, or had moved on to wilder pastures. Fur traders of French descent like Vetal Vermet and Specie had settled down with wives and families, and roads had been surveyed and laid out to tie the growing port at Chicago to river ports like Galena and Ottawa.
Most important of all, Illinois’ last war with Native People had been fought and won, and the tribes, the last impediment to unrestrained White settlement, had been forcibly removed to reservations west of the Mississippi River.
When the decade began, only a few hardy settlers had ventured into the fringes of the county to stake claims that were, for the most part, illegal under existing treaties with the local indigenous tribes. True, some land had been legally ceded by the tribes on either side of a line down the DesPlaines and Illinois rivers from Chicago to Ottawa for a canal to link the Illinois River with Lake Michigan. But the rest of northern Illinois had yet to be acquired by the government; it was still Indian Country.
Nonetheless, families continued to emigrate until 1832 when the Black Hawk War broke out. The one-sided conflict was fought between a ragtag band of Sauk and Fox Indians led by the charismatic warrior Black Hawk on one side and the Illinois militia and the U.S. Army on the other. The war was also an excuse for local tribesmen to settle long-standing scores with the squatters who had been moving onto Indian land. Such an incident was the Indian Creek Massacre during which 14 men, women and children were killed at the William Davis claim, located just south of what would one day become the Kendall County line in LaSalle County.
With the war over, settlement boomed. The communities of Oswego, Newark, Plattville, Little Rock, Bristol, Yorkville, Pavilion and Lisbon were established, seemingly overnight. Even then, we were starting to diversify. In 1834, the first two Black residents came to Kendall County, “indentured servants” – slaves in all but name – brought from South Carolina by the families of W.R. Carnes and J.S. Murray.
With hundreds of White settlers moving to northern Illinois, there was simply no room left for the original inhabitants, and the local tribes were forced west in 1836.
That same year, bridges were built across the Fox River, dams were thrown up and mills constructed. The infrastructure of White America preceded many settlers so that those who arrived in 1837 found many areas already settled. Although land was not legally available for sale, a lively business in claims was going on. Not until 1842 would the federal land office at Chicago open land sales in what had become Kendall County the year before.
But the presence of the government surveyors themselves had already promised that frontier days were ending. During their work in the county in 1836 and 1837, the surveyors noted a growing number of regular roads that were used by stagecoaches bringing passengers and mail to towns up and down the Fox Valley. In August 1837, the surveyors found that Oswego was a fast-growing town of “20 or 30 wood buildings” located on the south bank of the Fox River. Farm fields dotted the prairies where formerly Indian ponies, deer, and elk grazed, and mill dams slowed not only the flow of the Fox River abut also virtually every major creek in the county.
Afterwards, the county’s land was held in a sort of trust by farmers, a trust that is now being dissolved as subdivisions, factories and shopping centers grow instead of crops on those former farm fields.
We can only wonder if the resident Potawatomi, Ottawa and Chippewa tribespeople felt the same way as they watched the changes engulfing the Fox Valley in the booming 1830s.
Interested in more local history?