ALL morning the clop, clop, of carriage horses and the sturdier tread of farm horses, each bearing visitors, had echoed through the canyons and bluffs, now clad in their early fall finery as 2,000 to 3,000 people made their way to Starved Rock early in September 1873.

They were gathering to mark the 200th anniversary of the coming of Father Marquette and Louis Joliet, first white men to look on the craggy sandstone bluffs around which so much Illinois history has revolved.

They came also to hear, from historians of the time, some of the legends, which gave it its present day name, Starved Rock and that it was there that a band of Illini Indians were presumably starved to death, in the late 1760's, by their allied enemies.

Of what actually took place, there is no written account from any of the survivors taken at a time, when their memories might still have been clearer.

Legend and fiction, some of it the product of those with fertile imagi-nations and no historical background, are endless on "the siege."

Picnic lunches were spread on the ground, of what is now the state park, at the base of the famous old pile of sandstone and, after that had been disposed of, the visitors settled back to hear the accounts of the historians.

The original speaker, says the Ottawa Republican, was to have been Supreme Court Justice Sidney Breese, but the judge begged off from the assignment, saying his eyesight was failing and he could not read manu-script as well as he should. The Republican editor commented tartly that Judge Breese then had no business being on the bench, if he could not read manuscript.

So the story of how the Illini Indians were trapped on the Rock, according to legend, fell to Perry Armstrong of Morris, a leading his-torian of his day, who wrote, "The Sauk and Black Hawk war," still a good account of the Black Hawk war of 1832, then fading from the minds of those, who had survived its terrors in the early days of LaSalle county.

Memory is the most fallible of all human faculties, a treacherous thing, a thing that is liable to mislead one into mistakes of all kinds, particularly in historical matters.

So the account of Armstrong must be taken with a lifting of one eye-brow in some respects.

He got it, he says, from one Shick Shack famous old Indian chief, of the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

But Shick Shack was 104 years old, when he told the story of the seige of Starved Rock, as he recalled, it to Armstrong. The latter was nine years old, at the time (1831) and he waited 40 years to put it down in writing, which renders it suspect.

The story told by the aged chief, was that the Illini, once the mighty Indian nation of what is now a great part of Illinois, had been almost exterminated by endless wars against their enemies and by the raid on their grcat village opposite Starved Rock in September 1680. That was by the blood thirsty Iroquois, who also had known of their own captives being roasted alive by the Illinois, when they were captured.

As Shick Shack told the story to Armstrong and Armstrong related it to the 2,000 to 3,000 visitors at Starved Rock on that autumn day in 1873 the combined Miamis, Kickapoos and Pottawattomies finally drove a remnant of the Illini to the top of Starved Rock late in the fall.

There they were trapped for an indefinite period, while their beseigers made themselves at home on what was known to the people of 1873 as Camp Rock or Lover's Leap, as some with an imagination later called it. That is the bluff, east of Starved Rock with a little stream coming out of French canyon between the two bluffs.

Shick Shack told Armstrong the Illini suffered from lack of food and water and the bullets of their enemies but that smallpox added their terrors to their horrible predicament. That caused them, he said to dig pits around the outside of the Rock in the soft dirt, in which they could roll to ease their agony.

Finally, so Shick Shack said, some of the trapped Illini tried to escape and the woods echoed to the death shrieks of the Illini as club, spear and tomahawk did terrible work. Others were carried off to the torture stake leaving the other victims lifeless on the rock.

Shick Shack contended that some of the Illinoi escaped, stole the cam)es of their besiegers and fled to Indian friends and the French along the Mississippi for shelter. Their tracks, he said, were covered by light snow, that fell that night and their escape was not discovered until too late for an effective prusuit by their savage besiegers.

The aged chief recalled also one event, after the siege of Starved Rock, that remained in the memory of the Indians for many years. That was the terrible winter in the 1770's, when the game starved because of the deep 5flOW5 and the Indians huddled day after day in the miserable huts enduring the combined terrorS of a merciless winter and famine.

Justice John Dean Caton of Ottawa, a chronicler of early Illinois his-tory, whose works are invaluable heard still another version of the siege of Starved Rock.

It was told to him by one Meachelle in the later 1830's. But Judge Caton waited until 1870 before he told it in a paper read to the Chicago Historical Society December 13, 1870; once again memory may have played false over the long period of years.

Meachelle was then a Pottowattomie chief who said he was a youth at the time the Illini were driven to the top of the Rock. Probably he was am~~ng theSe who squatted on Camp Rock on the fringe of the warriors cycing Starved Rock for any Illini foolish enough to expose themselves to musket fire from Camp Rock.

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