Chicago Wildlife News: Des Plaines River Journal: The seasons of our lives

Des Plaines River Journal: The seasons of our lives

(POSTED: 10/26/09) Fall temperatures came a bit early to the Dam Number Four Woods on the Des Plaines River (some would say as early as July!), and fall colors a bit late. Now, as I walk in mid-October, maple leaves are tipped with red and yellow, my nose and fingers tipped with a chill. As colored, dead leaves accumulate upon the forest floor, small scampering rodents make enough noise to startle you, as though an entire person were lumbering your way.

After Labor Day, there are fewer hikers and bikers out on the trails, though fine weekend weather still brings out forest lovers. Families, sometimes with romping dogs, swish through leafy trails. Runners from nearby Maine South High School, collegial groups of both boys and girls, whiz through the woods at times. On Saturday afternoons when Maine South is playing football at home, the sounds of the public address announcer and half-time marching bands echo through the woods near Devon Avenue.

Any change of season might remind us of an old proverb, "life is change," but fall seems particularly to be that time of year that causes our thoughts to turn towards transitions and losses. Spring speaks of hope -- of what might be -- yet autumn, even in the midst of brilliant color, speaks of what was and is no more. It was a cool and lovely summer here. Now it is over, and we head towards the sharp and lengthy cold of a Midwestern winter, while lingering in fall's golden glow for a time.

For just over 100 years, many Chicagoans have enjoyed a yearly re-printing of John T. McCutcheon's beloved column, "Indian Summer." This column, with accompanying cartoon by the author, first appeared in the Chicago Tribune in September of 1907. In an imaginary conversation, a grandfather tells his grandson, as they look out over an Indiana cornfield, of the spirits and shades of American Indians that yet haunt the rural landscape. If you "look real hard," Grandpa tells the boy, you'll see that the corn shocks are really teepees, and that smoke in the air comes not from burning leaves but Indian campfires and pipes. Like the Scottish villagers in "Brigadoon," McCutcheon's Indian shades make a yearly appearance, and then vanish.

The tone of McCutcheon's column is poignant, nostalgic. I often have wondered as I have walked these woods, and especially in autumn, about these first Americans. Like McCutcheon's boy, I have strained to picture them -- their villages, their campfires, their lodgings, and the songs and dances that surely echoed through the forest here. What were their formal ceremonies and proceedings like? About what did they speak in informal, everyday moments? What did they eat, and how did they prepare their food? What did they wear?

Collectors, museums and nature centers throughout the area display arrow heads, axes and other stone tools. Some of our local place names are derived from Indian words ("Chicageau" is a Frenchman's attempt at an Indian word for "wild onion." And "Michigan" is an approximation of another Indian term.) Of immediate evidence of their lives here, there is not much more than this.

McCutcheon's imaginary conversation between a rural white grandfather and boy is respectful towards our indigenous predecessors, but inaccurate in at least one way: "They all went away and died, so they ain't no more left," the man tells the boy of the Indians. Yet the native people did not just "die out." There are many native folks living in communities throughout the U.S.A. Native Americans -- in this area they were mostly called "Potawatomi" -- were in fact forcibly removed from these woods in the 1820s, with the weight of federal government policy and the support of the U.S. Army. After Chief Black Hawk's final and unsuccessful assertion of Indian rights east of the Mississippi in the 1830s, Potawatomi people from the Chicago area settled in communities in northern Wisconsin and west of the Mississippi. A "Prairie Potawatomi" group in Kansas still exists, and traces its roots to this area. Though indigenous Indian communities are long gone from this area, Chicago has attracted a large population of native people from all over the U.S. to live and work in the modern city, many of them remembering old ways as best they can. The American Indian Center on Wilson Avenue, founded in 1953, is an active community and education center for native people currently living in Chicago.

I have seen on maps of the forest preserve near me that an Indian village lay on what is now the northeast corner of Touhy Avenue and the Des Plaines River. I've walked about that area, wondering exactly where that village might have been located (admittedly, I do not know if the Des Plaines River is exactly where it was 180 years ago.) A bluff on the north side of Touhy Avenue overlooks the river, and I wonder if that was the site of the village -- near the water, yet not bogged down in a flood plain below the bluff that today borders the river. If a village existed here it was certainly because of its strategic worth as a portage location. Travelers could walk and haul cargo between here and the North Branch of the Chicago River using the footpath that preceded today's busy motorized thoroughfare.

I recall a charming, miniature Potawatomi Village scene on display in the Early Americas section at the Field Museum. In the display, figurines of Potawatomi people go about their daily business within a village of bark-covered wigwams. This aids my imagination, but with planes flowing overheard nearly constantly, cars and bikes speeding by on land, and -- maybe worst of all -- a great deal of litter in the forest preserve, my imagination is challenged. It is hard to know, difficult to feel, what life was like for these peoples.

However, in listening to a few native elders through the years, I've learned one thing with certainty: that these people lived intimately with their environment and with the seasonal changes that transformed it regularly. The Lakota holy man, Black Elk, said to John Neihardt, "Everything the power of the world does is in a circle. The sky is round and I have heard that the earth is round like a ball. . . . The sun comes forth and goes down again in a circle. The moon does the same. Even the seasons form a great circle in their changing, and always come back again to where they were."

Those people are gone now, and it seems that we modern folks seldom consider that we, too, shall be gone one day. Native people generally placed the survival of tribal identity and custom far above that of individual survival. A dying member of a strongly knit community left the earth knowing at the very least that tribe and -- barring catastrophe of nature -- natural environment will continue. People and wildlife will regenerate. This fine Des Plaines River will continue to flow southwards.

Do we have such stability in our psyches these days? As we move through the seasons of our lives, do we feel secure that a happy earthly future will continue with or without us? Do the large steel and concrete buildings edging the forest preserve and the roadways that knife through our lives provide personal comfort? Our modern constructions are surely useful, but more comforting to me is the thought that this forest preserve will weather the coming winter, bloom in the coming spring and once again dazzle with color next fall.

By Jeff Wagner, for ChicagoWildlifeNews

Jeffrey Wagner, a graduate of Northwestern University and Indiana University, is a Chicago-area musician and writer who has published numerous articles in Clavier Magazine, and other journals. Since boyhood, he has loved the outdoors, and has hiked, camped and back-packed all over the United States.

Contact: [email protected] or [email protected]

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