A soldier named Elizabeth A fort on the Apple River was attacked by more than 200 Indians on June 24, 1832, during the Black Hawk War. The settlers rushed to the fort, where their defense was led by a woman, Elizabeth Armstrong, because the men were away. They succeeded in driving away the INdians, with a loss of only about 50 horses. The town that was later built on the site of the fort was called Elizabeth in her honor. About 1779 Jean Baptiste Point Du Sable, a black from Haiti, was released by the British, who had imprisoned him when the Revolution started. Du Sable settled on the north bank of the Chicago River near Lake Michigan and opened a trading post, becoming the first permanent settler at what would become Chicago. In 1800, he and his Potawatomi wife moved to Peoria. The family with feet The members of the Eaton family of early Palestine were known far and wide for their extra-large feet. When the family decided to build their own fort because Fort LaMotte was too crowded, the new fort became known as Fort Foot. You know the Donner Party was no party. It was a group of about 80 pioneers who sought a new land and who got caught by the worst winter snows the Sierra Nevada of northern California had seen in decades. Many of those who survived did so only because they ate the corpses of their fellow travelers. What you might not know is that the Donner party started from Illinois. George and Jacob Donner put together a group of hardy souls from Kentucky and southern Illinois and arranged to depart from the grounds of the capital building in Springfield on April 16, 1846. Unfortunately, the Donner men took advice from the wrong people and poorly timed their journey through the distant mountains. The place where so many died is now called Donner pass, and it's a mojor eight-lane highway. The first Monday in March is celebrated as the birthday of General Casimir Pulaski. An outcast Polish general who left Poland because he had been falsely suspected of trying to murder the king, Pulaski ran across Benjamin Franklin in Paris and was enticed into coming to America to help George Washington stage a revolution. One of the sights that greeted the wondering eyes of pioneers was the millions of black, white and orange butterfiles that fluttered across the tall prairie grasses. Called gorgone checkerspot butterfiles, they disappeared along with the prairie. The Illinois Nature Conservancy acquired a 700-acre prairie site, called Nashua Grasslands, near Dixon, to which natualists are bringing rare checkerspots--when they can be found--back to the prairie. unlike most prairie species, the checkerspot was never able to adapt to the rough grasslands that usually replaced prairies. It needs a specific plant, the prairie sunflower, in order to survive. There is also a move afoot to reintroduce buffalo to the refuge by the year 2000. In 1805, the old town of Kaskaskia was swept away by a Mississippi River flood. The river also changed it course and a part of Illinois was left on the west side of the river by Missouri. In 1937, the Ohio River flooded, covering most of Gallatin County with ten feet of water. When the waters reached the second floor of the main bank in Shawneetown, many residents, having been through this before, decided that it was time to do something drastic. An entirely new town was constructed on the hills above the old town. Steamboats were of critical importance on the Mississippi River from about 1817, when Zebulon Pike brought one up to St. Louis, until diesel engines took over in the twentieth century. However, the roaring river was not always placid, and steam engines themselves were dangerous. A 1867 study of the river between Cairo and St. Louis found an area called the Graveyard to contain 133 sunken steamboats. Carrol Mick [email protected] www.iltrails.org/ford www.iltrails.org/iroquois --------------------------------- Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail - 250MB free storage. Do more. Manage less.