Lake Michigan is a vital part of the Midwest’s pioneer history

One thing about the upper Midwest, the place we call home, is that we never have to deal with monotonous weather, especially this time of year. Windy, cold, snow, rain, sunshine, mild spells – sometimes all the same day – enliven up in this part of the world.

But one weather-related thing we can depend on is the effect of Lake Michigan on our weather out here 40 miles west of the lakeshore. From the “lake effect” snow that is annually dumped on our friends over in Michigan and Indiana to the local meteorologists’ warning during the summer that “it will be cooler by the lake,” the effects are constant and sometimes profound.

Lake Michigan was the roadway the first European explorers of northern Illinois used to penetrate the rich – and to them unknown and mysterious – Midwest. Like a huge maritime dagger, the lake stabs south into the old Northwest, penetrating from northern pine and birch forests down into the tallgrass prairie lands that would one day become arguably the richest farmland in the U.S.

When the very first Native People arrived in our area several thousand years ago as the end of a long period of glaciation was taking place, Lakes Michigan, Superior, and Huron formed one huge body of water, called by geologists ancient Lake Nipissing. As the climate warmed and the glaciers slowly retreated northward, the very land began to rise as it was freed of the tremendous weight of ice sheets that had been thousands of feet thick. At a rate of about a foot every I00 years, land around the western Great Lakes rose cutting off and creating the individual lakes we know today.

The Stone Age people who followed the retreating ice north as they hunted the giant bison, mastodons, and other Ice Age mammals then populating the area slowly gave up their purely hunting culture as the big animals died out. Today, many paleontologists believe that while their habitat was slowly disappearing, the over-sized Ice Age mammals were hunted to final extinction by efficient, organized groups of Paleo-Indians.

Thousands of years passed, during which the cultures of the indigenous residents underwent numerous and extensive changes. By the time the first white Europeans wandered into the area in the early l600s, the Native People of the Great Lakes region had developed into a great many tribes with traditions and cultures that ranged from primitive hunter-gatherers to large scale farmers to maritime traders.

Those early European interlopers were out to make a buck and quickly grasped the fact that the Great Lakes were a wonderful water highway from the European colonies on the Atlantic Coast into the vast interior of North America. Adopting and adapting the excellent birch bark canoes invented by the Chippewa people, French traders and trappers penetrated the entirety of North America, even paddling up the Missouri River well into the shortgrass prairies of the Great Plains.

The first Europeans to legally travel through Illinois, Father Jacques Marquette, S.J. and Louis Jolliet, both remarked about the rich land lying on both sides of the Illinois River. It took about a century and a half, but the fur trade here in the upper Midwest finally ended as the animals it required were hunted and trapped to near extinction. And as it did, White farmers soon moved into the area to exploit the rich land that had been observed by those two explorers so many years before.

Here in Kendall County, the first settlers came by land from southern Illinois, following the Illinois and Fox Rivers as well as the old overland fur trade route known as Hubbard’s Trace north. But as word got back east about how rich the prairie land in the Fox Valley really was, setters by the thousands began using Lake Michigan as their main transportation route to their new homes.

Many of our early pioneers came from Pennsylvania and New York. They used the Erie Canal to get to Lake Erie from their homes. From Buffalo, New York, on the shores of that lake, they traveled by lake schooner or steam ship past Detroit (another old French trading settlement) through Lake Huron and south on Lake Michigan to Chicago.

From its settlement, Chicago was a low, muddy, swampy place where disease was rampant. Those sturdy New Yorkers, New Englanders and Pennsylvanians wanted nothing to do with such a dismal place and moved west onto the prairie as quickly, as possible.

During the Black Hawk War of I832, the U.S. Army used the lake as a major transportation route, as troops were brought from back east to the “front” at Chicago. The troops, who were supposed to fight the Sauk warrior Black Hawk and his people, ended up eliminating far more settlers than the hostile tribesmen did by bringing the dreaded Asiatic Cholera with them, infecting the entire region.

In the decades following, after the Army dug a canal through the sandbar at the mouth of the Chicago River creating a safe harbor, Lake Michigan became the major transportation route of the upper Midwest. And when the Illinois and Michigan Canal connected the lake with the Mississippi River system, northern Illinois became an economic power that even today outranks many of the world’s sovereign nations.

The economic benefits of the lake to our east do not leave off with its transportation value, however. As noted above, the climate of Northern Illinois is heavily influenced by the effect of the lake’s waters. On quiet summer evenings, lake mist can be seen and smelled here in Kendall County if the breeze is in the right direction.

It would have been interesting to have been one of those Paleo-Indian hunters following the herds of giant grazers around the base of the glaciers 10,000 years ago or so in the Kendall County area. As those glaciers retreated, it would have been fascinating to watch the giant lakes that formed dominate the land much the way those ancestral glaciers did.

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