While we’ll be celebrating Kendall County’s 185th birthday this year and the nation’s 250th birthday, we ought to also keep in mind that by 1776, Illinois had already been settled for a century.
And our own Fox River Valley had been considered an economic jewel by European powers for that long as well.
Why? If one word had to be used to explain why French explorers made their way to Illinois in the 17th Century where they established military posts and thriving towns and why the commercial arms of other European powers, including the Spanish and British coveted it, it would have to be: Fashion. Hats, in particular.
Men’s fashion in the 16th and 17th centuries, extending right up through the 19th Century, dictated that the well-dressed male wear varying styles of broad brimmed hats. The hats popular during that period were all made of felt, and hatters had discovered the very best felt was made from beaver fur.
Because beavers spend much of their lives in the water, their fur is thick and layered. During the cold winter months, it gets even thicker. In addition, although smooth to the touch, it actually contains microscopic barbs that cause it to tightly interlock like modern Velcro. In the manufacture of felt, this was a great advantage because it created a tough, durable material, that once it was created tended to stay tightly meshed together, even when wet.
By the latter years of the 16th Century, though, the European beaver population had been largely exterminated in the drive to manufacture enough hats to satisfy men’s fashion. Which is why Europeans were so overjoyed to discover that the New World they were just beginning to fully explore was so thickly populated with fur-bearing animals. Bear, wolf, buffalo, muskrats and minks and other weasels were all trapped for their valuable fur. But it was North America’s huge beaver population that caused European hat makers and the fur traders who fed their market to truly salivate.
Early on, French, Dutch and English colonists dealt directly with the continent’s Native American People furs, utilizing their existing trading networks, primarily the ones developed by the Ottawa People.
As soon as the tribes discovered that Europeans would trade such valuable items as brass pots, brightly colored glass beads and wonderfully thick woolen blanket cloth for the pelts of fur-bearing animals, they began to vie with each other to produce as many furs as possible. By the 1670s, Eastern Canada and much of British North America along the Atlantic Coast east of the Appalachians were denuded of valuable fur-bearing animals. As a result, traders began looking farther and farther west towards other Native American tribes the industry’s wants and needs.
The Iroquois Confederacy, based in New York’s Hudson and Mohawk River valleys, quickly discerned that those who controlled the flow of furs from the western lands rich in pelts to the colonial fur traders were in line to become rich themselves by acting as middlemen in the trade.
As a result, they launched years of destructive warfare on tribes near and far. Among their exploits were ferocious attacks on the Western Great Lakes, including the Illinois Country, made from the Iroquois’ New York base. Some entire tribes, such as the unfortunate Neutrals, were completely wiped out. Others, such as the Hurons, were nearly exterminated.
The Illinois Confederacy that controlled our own Fox River Valley as one of their prime hunting regions was driven west of the Mississippi River for a couple years by the ferocity of the Iroquois’ attacks.
The French were no fans of the Iroquois, and visa versa. Samuel de Champlain had earned the confederacy’s undying enmity when he took the side of Algonquian people against the Iroquois in the 1500s. After that, the Iroquois attacked French settlements every chance they got. At one point, the French were in danger of being completely driven from Canada.
But in 1673, the governor of New France dispatched an exploration expedition from the French post at Michilimackinac at the strait between lakes Huron and Michigan to determine the geography—and commercial prospects—of the interior of North America.
Expedition leader Louis Jolliet was joined by linguist and Jesuit Father Jacques Marquette and a small group of French canoe men. The party explored Lake Michigan’s western shore and the Wisconsin and Mississippi rivers south to the Arkansas River before turning back north. On their way back to Lake Michigan, they paddled up the Illinois River, which, they were told, was notable among local Native People for its numbers of fur-bearing animals.
A few years later, Robert Cavalier, Seur de la Salle, obtained the fur trade monopoly for the Illinois Country, and the settlement of what would one day become the heart of the Midwest began.
The first permanent French settlement was Fort St. Louis atop Starved Rock. Within a decade, French villages were established at Kaskaskia and Cahokia, plus Peoria and a number of other smaller locations. Fortified fur trade posts were built at important portages, including Chicago, Green Bay, Outatinon (now Lafayette, Ind.) and St. Joseph, Mich.
Schools, churches, stores and farms were all built in Illinois by French colonials, and the area began supplying grain to New Orleans. But the primary business of the French was always the fur trade. Wars were fought among European powers over the trade, culminating in the Seven Years War—called the French and Indian War in North America—following which England took over sole possession of North America in 1763.
By the late 1820s when settlers started to arrive here in the Fox Valley, most fur-bearing animals had long been cleaned out by the Native America tribes whose culture had been submerged in the fur trade. In the early 1830s, the fur trade in northern Illinois ended with a whimper instead of a bang, moving west to the Rocky Mountains, and hundreds of years of economic warfare quietly ended.
But it remains one of history’s colossal practical jokes that Illinois’ earliest colonizers and other Europeans were drawn here, settled here, and fought and died here because of haberdashery fashions in Europe.
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