Reflections: Women’s lot was hard on the Illinois prairie

Log cabin living on the northern Illinois prairies of the 1830s has a romantic back-to-nature ring to our 21st century ears. But in reality, frontier prairie life, especially for pioneer women, consisted of lonely weeks of dull routine and drudgery, occasionally – very occasionally – punctuated by moments of shear terror.

Writing in her old age, Juliette M. Kinzie, wife of fur trader John H. Kinzie Jr., left the first account by a woman of what life was like during the settlement period in some of the sparse settlements across northern Illinois. John Kinzie, son of the founder of modern Chicago, was an Indian agent and trader stationed at today’s Portage, Wisconsin.

In 1831, he and Juliette traveled overland to Chicago roughly following what would become, three years later, the southern road from Chicago to Galena. On the way, they stopped at Dixon’s Ferry (now Dixon, Illinois) and eventually crossed the Fox River near Oswego.

The women Mrs. Kinzie met on her trip ranged from Mrs. Oliver Kellogg, settled with her husband in Kellogg’s Grove (now Timm’s Grove in Stephenson County) to Mrs. Bernard Lawton, who was living near the present site of Riverside on the Des Plaines River.

Mrs. Kinzie described Mrs. Kellogg as “a very respectable-looking matron” who set a surprisingly good table, despite her isolation at Kellogg’s Grove.

After a hard, cold eastward march across the prairie, the Kinzies’ party reached the Fox River. They were fortunate to cross just before a winter storm hit. The party stayed overnight at Peter Specie’s cabin in Specie Grove, just south of today’s Oswego. After another day’s travel, they arrived at Lawton’s on the Des Plaines River – modern Riverside, Illinois.

The sharp-eyed Mrs. Kinzie described Lawton’s inn as “very comfortable ... carpeted, and with a warm stove.”

However, young Mrs. Lawton was not at all happy with her life on the Illinois frontier. Her husband was not only an innkeeper, but also was an Indian trader. His brother, David, may have been living near Oswego with his Potowatomi wife, Waish-kee-shaw in the AuSable Grove, part of what is today Waa Kee Sha Park.

According to Mrs. Kinzie: “Mrs. Lawton was a young woman, and not ill-looking. She complained bitterly of the loneliness of her condition, and having been ‘brought out there into the woods; which was a thing she had not expected when she came from the East. We did not ask her with what expectations she had come to a wild, unsettled country; but we tried to comfort her with the assurance that things would grow better in a few years.”

Things hadn’t gotten much better a few years later when an English wheelwright, William P. Young, and his 17 year-old bride arrived in Chicago. There, Isaac Townsend persuaded them to work for him in what would one day be Kendall County at Townsend’s sawmill, located in the AuSable timber he’d bought from Davi Laughton’s wife. When the couple arrived at the home of Townsend’s neighbor, William Davis, Mrs. Young was greeted by Davis’ Irish housekeeper, who exclaimed to the startled girl, “I haven’t seen a woman in three months!”

Another pioneer couple, Mr. and Mrs. Chester House, settled on the wide open prairie of Kendall County’s Seward Township in 1833. His wife, Lucinda Wheeler House, who enjoyed what company she could find, kept a candle burning in her window each night. It was later said the candle could be seen at a distance of several miles across the prairie, serving as a welcome beacon for travelers.

Added to the sometimes crushing loneliness was the terror of the occasional what was then known as the Indian war and yearly prairie fires. Illinois’ last uprising, the Black Hawk War, erupted in 1832, forcing most of the Fox Valley’s families to flee either to Chicago or Ottawa.

In the bloodiest attack in the war, three women were killed in what has become known as the Indian Creek Massacre in LaSalle County, just across the Kendall County line, about an eighth of a mile upstream from the Fox River.

Martha Davis and her husband William, who caused the attack by his violent treatment of their Native American neighbors, Eleanor Pettigrew and her husband Charles, and Mary Jane Hall and her husband William were all killed in the attack, along with nine other men and children.

Prairie fires were most dangerous in the early spring and in the late fall when lightning set the dried prairie grasses and other plants afire. The Fox Valley’s pioneer farmers kept fires away from their farmsteads in those early years by plowing a number of furrows around their farmsteads, while wives and children patrolled the fire break line to make sure the blaze didn’t jump the plowed ground and set the buildings ablaze.

Wrote Kendall County historian Oliver Johnson in 1941: “Clouds of smoke over the prairies were warnings. Neighbors would hastily gather from miles away to help fight prairie fires.”

Added to the danger and loneliness was the danger of childbirth and just plain overwork. Mrs. Peter Minkler arrived in Illinois from Albany County, N.Y. in May 1833 with her husband Smith and their son and his family. Just a few months after arriving, however, Mrs. Minkler, weakened by the long, hard journey, became ill and died.

It might seem amazing in this day and age when risks are seen as things to be avoided at all costs that women would have followed their men to the wild frontier that was Illinois in the 1830s, but they did. The grave risks the pioneers faced from natural disaster, war, natural disasters, and disease were all seen as normal and were handled as they arose. Will our descendants going on two centuries from today look at life in the 21st century with as much consternation as we view that of our ancestors?

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