Introduction

Abstract

This chapter provides an overview of the history of Starved Rock in Illinois. The land that today comprises Starved Rock State Park and the adjacent countryside was nearly continuously occupied by Native Americans until the early nineteenth century. Although the Rock itself was not an occupied Native American site per se, like a semi-permanent village, it was a place where, for millennia, Native Americans camped, sojourned, and in a few instances had their earthly remains interred. West and north of Starved Rock, along the ancient river channels that once crisscrossed the Illinois Valley, aboriginal people hunted, fished, and farmed. Oblivious to the movement of Europeans from the Old World to the New, the Indians in the Starved Rock area established a village named Kaskaskia. European trade goods that made the chores of killing, cleaning, and cooking easier reached the Kaskaskia a decade or so before French missionaries and traders made their debut at Starved Rock. By the early nineteenth century, American frontier settlers would arrive and change the entire dynamic of the Starved Rock area. Their attitudes concerning the use of lands and waterways, and their exploitation of natural resources, embodied values that would have seemed utterly foreign to the Indians who proceeded them.