AN age was to pass and a mode of life, that had persisted for cen-turies was to dwindle away, decade by decade, until the last of the Indians had passed from the valley, leaving only their dead, their camp sites, their weapons and their legends for the white man, who was to take over their corn lands, their hunting grounds, their burial grounds and their fishing sites.

Here the Indian had built his lodge, had learned to know of the wild-erness it's secrets, learned to keep alive in a primitive civilization, learned of the wild animals, their habits, learned of the wild plants and bushes what would help him in his illness, what would help fill his larder against the bitter days of winter, what he should plant and what he should shun.

Here the red man lived in peace for the most part, but when the war drums throbbed, there was terror in the villages, sprawled in protected places.

Here the women and children dwelt in fear, when the warriors took the trail against their enemies, lived in terror, lest the war whoops resound, through the defenseless viallages, and waited in dread lest the toma-hawk, the knife, the spear and the club do their deadly work or the torture of the stake take its toll in burning and agonized flesh of helpless prisoners.

Here in the winter the snow lay deep and the waters of the Illinois bordering the great Kaskaskia village and later that of LaVantum froze thick and blue, hard and cold, the snow and ice keeping the warriors in the cabin, keeping the deer in their yard and the other small game deep in their winter quarters.

Here famine then lay its terrible clutches on the silent villages, where the Indians huddled in misery in his cabin warmed only by the smallest of wood fires.

Here in these days of the deep winter, it was not possible to get to corn heaps in the rock caves near the village. The game was not at hand to be killed, the fish could not be speared, there were no birds to be shot.

When these dark days had passed, when the warm south wind heralded the coming of spring, then the Indian lived in a paradise of beauty. The soft green of new verdure clothed the bluffs, brought the grass to the land again, brought the wild duck and the wild goose north on their annual flight of thousands in a flock. It brought the time to plant the corn and beans, and pumpkins in the patches at the village sites, brought the song of the blue bird and the lark to the land again and foretold of the coming of the long lazy summer (lays, and shortening days of autumn, when the same bluffs would be clothed in brilliant red. in Chinese man- darin yellow, in deep brown and mixed colors. Then the time would be at hand to gather the hard flinty corn and store it away for the winter, and the time would be near to fletch the hide of the deer and the buffalo to make them soft to provide clothing. The time to gather reeds from the marshes to make mats would be approaching and the south bound migra-tion of the ducks and geese now foretold of the winter to come.

Such was the endless cycle of the centuries, in the beautiful valley of the Illinois, when the coming of the white men told that, for better or for worse, this age was to pass.

The white man had left his foot in the valley, with the coming of Father Marquette and his companion Joliet, one of the truly great figures of French colonial days, whose exploration and travels extended over the many years and for whom the modern Joliet was named.

Men mouldered to dust and bones, with their squaws and their chil-dren and lay in flat lands along the river. The camp sites vanished and the game dwindled to a fraction of what it had been, and only the endless cycle of the years persisted.

Then long centuries later came the white man, with his science and his trowels and his knowledge of how to resurrect the buried past, from what lay underground in the corn fields and pasture lands where the Indian had lived.

So through three summers 1947-48-49 these men and women burned brown, by the hot summer sun dug carefully to see what the Indian had left behind to show his mode of living and where his villages were.

Trenches were carefully excavated and brushes and trowels used to clear away the dirt and dust, so that nothing would be lost or misplaced as the work proceeded.

Now the post holes for the lodges were uncovered, showing where they had stood. Here were the garbage pits or midden heaps to use the term of the archeologists. Here were uncovered the artifacts-the spears points, the arrows and war clubs~long buried.

Bits of rusty metal came to light showing the Indians had had contact with the white man and thus fixing the date of the village Site as after 1673. Here were the beads worn by the Indian women, who loved their finery as did their white successors.

Most pitiful of all, now and then a skeleton was uncovered of some dead man, woman, or child who had lived in one of the most primitive civilizations the world had ever know, sans law, sans medical service of any kind, sans education, sans even the rudimentary comforts of life, sans religion except their own belief in the goodness and justice of a God, that looked after them in the wilderness.

What tl'e scientists found in the flat lands and fields of the Zimmer-man-Danner fields east of Starved Rock, on the north side of the river was only part of what actually had lain there so many decades ago.

The white explorers and missionaries, who came into the valley of the Illinois in such numbers in the 17th and 18th centuries dreamed of a waterway that would link Lake Michigan and the Fathers of Waters v:a the broad Illinois past the Indian camp sites of Kaskaskia and LaVantum.

That waterway was realized in one way in 1848, when the Illinois-Michigan canal was built from Chicago to Peru. It passed to the north of the great camps of the Illini Indians and their friends and the gangs of toil-ing laborers, mainly Irish imigrants, who dug the ditch, may have un-earthed some of the camp sites and corn lands of the long departed Indian.

There was agitation in the early part of the 19th century for a new and modern lake to the gulf waterway. Leading the movement in Ottawa were such civic leaders as Richard Jordan, hardware merchant, Judge H. M. Johnson, former Mayor Al. Schoch and others.

In 1908 the people of Illinois approved a $20,000,000 bond issue tor digging the channel and building the necessary locks on the Illinois river for the new waterway.

The work started in the middle 1920's and was finished by the United States goverenment, which now runs the waterway from Chicago to the Mississippi river at Alton.

The closing of the dam gates at Starved Rock, above the site of old Fort St. Louis in 1933 doomed part of the Indian villages site to watery grave. It was not possible for scientists of the University of Chicago, the University of Illinois and the Illinois State Museum then, to excavate more of the Indian village sites.

Their findings were taken into a base camp atop Buffalo Rock and there carefully tagged and cataloged prior to being taken to museums for study.

The last of the excavating was done on top of Starved Rock in the summer of 1949. There the same kind of careful patient work uncovered artifacts, bits of rusty gun pieces, the beads, the bullets, the tiny stone fragments of arrows or whole ones the evidence of past ages as found when they were run through a fine screen.

It was evident, then, that the rock had been used for hundreds of years by the Indians until the white man acquired title to it through diplo-matic circles of the great powers of the world~first Spain, then France, Great Britain and finally the infant United States.

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