Exploring the Heel of Illinois or I do not Even Know Where I’m We’d a destination whenever we started. It had been nowhere grass festival in Bean Blossom Indiana. This season was special because it celebrated the 100th birthday from the father of blue grass, Bill Monroe. We had attended once before but never camped so we picked a sizable open field hoping for some peace and quiet. This property was previously Bill Monroe’s home and farm where he lived and enjoyed making music with friends and fox hunitng. We followed the bright sound of strumming banjos and guitars to the stage. Soon i was taping our toes and reminiscing about the songs our grand daddies sang despite the fact that we was raised in Indianapolis far from the hills of southern Indiana. Dr. Ralph Stanley topped from the evening with his rendition of “Oh Death, Won’t You Spare Me Over for an additional Year,” made famous within the movie, Oh Brother Where Art Thou? We made our method to our tent at about ten o’clock and lay down for any peaceful sleep. Unfortunately the children on golf carts had other ideas. They were still racing around the field, revving their engines and shining their headlights into our tent after i finally looked at my watch. It read a shocking 2:30 a.m., and that we pulled up our tent stakes and headed for Nashville, Indiana along with a Comfort Inn were these were doing an audit and couldn’t access the pc. We finally reached sleep around three in the morning.
The next day we were on our way to New Harmony a place where the Rappites and Owens had attempted to establish Utopian societies in the 19th century, to go to my pal, an artist who paints subjects from the 50s and architecture along old highways like US 40 and Route 66. Serendipitously she found an old drive-in restaurant on state road 66 and converted it into a studio. We enjoyed seeing pictures of James Dean, Hank Williams, women entirely skirts and heels ironing using their new Steam-o-matic’s or admiring their snow white electric washing machines or ranges. One couple danced round the kitchen before their new refrigerator looking like they’d just returned from the prom. Giant frozen treats cones atop tiny restaurants promised relief from summer time heat with no worries about fat or calories. No worries about Chesterfields or Lucky Strikes either. No worries period. Just the commitment of suburban bliss or Utopia 50′s style.
It is then that people strayed in the beaten path by crossing the toll bridge just a block from my friend’s studio across the Wabash into southern Illinois. Here would be a different world which we had unsuspectingly entered into the previous evening whenever we visited hear a folksinger in Grayville. Everything seemed fine if a bit surreal. He sang of a minor league baseball player who spent time in Lynchburg and were left with a pinched nerve. A few songs later he launched into “South of Solitude” about entering into the labyrinthine roads of southern Illinois and becoming lost inducing the lyrics, “I don’t know where I’m,” and ending using the lyrics, “I don’t even know who I am.” We couldn’t know it then, but we would soon live the song. There were a grand total of nine or ten people in attendance, four of whom were some young German guys not paying an excessive amount of attention to the singer. We weren’t too surprised to see them as southern Indiana is full of descendents of German settlers and German restaurants. Travelers will never be too much from the good sausage and sauerkraut dinner. But here in Grayville the waitresses seemed quite surprised and happy to see them as they actually spoke German and were young and not too hard around the eyes. We discovered that they were around to operate in the coal mine for eight days and were enjoying some Grayville nightlife. The singer ended with a few Dylan songs and his friend accompanied him around the harmonica. “That’s what you get for Loving Me” seemed appropriate to finish the set, and the German guys smiled and said goodbye in English.
The next day, in the suggestion of my pal, we ventured over the bridge again carrying out a vintage Airstream travel trailor, which again lent an aura of the fifty’s, into surreal southern Illinois again to determine the Garden of the Gods. We’d seen the one of the same name in Colorado Springs and were not expecting much in comparison. But i was amazed through the beautiful and strange looking rock formations in the Shawnee National Forest. The wilderness area is over three hundred and twenty million years of age and includes over 3,300 acres of lovely old growth forest. The sediment rock in this area has ended four miles deep and also the fractured bedrock has created some interesting rock formations that represent various objects like anvils, camels, and mushrooms. Next we traveled south towards the Ohio River and saw Pirates’ Cave at Cave in the Rock. Two riverboats have been built and had burned here, but now there is only the ferry taking cars and trucks across the river at no cost. Once we reached the Kentucky side of the Ohio River, a truck by having an oversize load as an earth mover was waiting to board the ferry. We were glad we had crossed in the company of small cars.
We were now on the Trail of Tears which the original Americans had been forced to take when their land was confiscated through the pioneer settlers. In 1830, Congress passed a bill permitting removing all native Indians living east from the Mississippi River. For the following twenty years, Indians were marched west to reservations in Arkansas and Oklahoma, such as the bands from the Illini Indians in Illinois. Within the Fall and Winter of 1838-39, Cherokee Indians were marched from Georgia and also the Carolinas across Southern Illinois to reservations in the west. It was estimated that two thousand to 4,000 Cherokee men, women, and children died during this a thousand mile journey west. It became referred to as Trail of Tears because of the many hardships and sorrows it brought to the Indians. The Buel Family told the storyline of their ancestor Sarah (Jones) Buel who gone to live in Golconda on Sept. 2, 1836. Two years later the Cherokees passed through Golconda. “My great-great-grandmother was acookin’ pumpkin an’ keepin’ track of her baby when she heard an unusual noise outside. Before she knew it, the front door popped open there stood two Cherokee Indian braves just alookin’ at her….They’d smelled the pumpkin cookin’ as they passed by, but my grandmother had no way of knowin’ that. Finally, she understood what they wanted, and those Indians were mighty thankful when she gave them some of the cooked pumpkin. I ‘spect she was just as thankful when they left,” she added.*
Our trip in to Kentucky was mostly through farm country therefore we headed to Illinois lured by Old Shawnee Town into the spotlight. When we arrived it wasn’t only old but a ghost town. A massive Greek architectural style bank dwarfed everything else in sight. We later found that it had been the very first bank to become chartered in Illinois in 1816. It had been also the very first building used solely to house a bank in Illinois and was adopted before the 1920s. Someone told us it had refused financing to some bank in Chicago if this was initially developing, since it didn’t think Chicago will be a successful settlement. HogDaddy’s bar was over the deserted street from the bank. An indication on the door said closed for that winter, but it was obviously closed for the summer as well. We also learned later that the worse flooding in decades had closed the town down. Two wooden cut-out figures of Lewis and Clark established that they had passed through Shawnee town, but they looked as forlorn as we did when we discovered HogDaddy’s was closed. We drove south out of town thinking i was around the Lincoln trail but ended up on a gravel road. Good sense would have dictated going back towards the main road, but we desired to see the confluence from the Wabash and the Ohio. We were soon lost inside a labyrinth of corn fields. We had a deer and her fawn in the center of the road drinking from the mud puddle. We kept turning right when we must have turned left to get back to the main road, however the river beckoned.
Then unexpectedly our engine sputtered and stopped. Walking was out of the question in the heat and humidity. We waited hoping the engine would start but after half an hour, we tried with a tow truck. Luckily i was in a position to reach Triple A, but were not so successful in trying to tell them were i was. “Well there’s a corn field around the right and a forest on the left, and we were on Round Pond Road, then Long Pond road, and then Pond Church Road, then Big Hill Road.” While we were calling, a farmer arrived, and that we flagged him down. He would be a gift from Heaven because he had GPS and gave us our coordinates. Much more amazing was that he knew the guy we were speaking with on the phone personally despite the fact that he is at Indiana. They’d grown up together and the tow truck guy knew the farms bordering the road where i was. The excellent farmer stayed and talked to us before the tow truck arrived. He’d some sad stories about flooding in the area causing late planting and ammonia used in farming being stolen by people making meth. We had the feeling that people might not be safe despite the fact that far from the big city. An even sadder story involved his son, who had served two stints in Iraq, returning home and drowning while swimming in a quarry.
The tow truck guy soon arrived, greeted uncle, and invited us to climb in to the front seat of his truck. He continued the tale of woe stating that the economy in southern Illinois had been ruined by the politicians in Chicago even though some of them have been sent to Washington. Younger crowd mentioned meth problems in the region acerbated through the bad economy and worse weather. We again felt like we couldn’t know where i was, or maybe we had strayed into Mexico. However, if we crossed back into Indiana, he cheered up just a little naming various industrial sites that we passed such as Marathon and Bristol Myers Squib. Ethanol plants were prospering while using corn we had been lost in. It seemed more industrialized, although not necessarily better. However in his opinion there were more business incentives offered in Indiana and politicians. He was glad to relate his life story saying he had wanted to be a chiropractor but had opted for nursing. Burnout caused him to go into business as a service station owner. When his business in Illinois wasn’t doing this well he asked God to give him a sign if he should transfer to Indiana and start a towing service. That night the roof on his filling station caved in. He now does missionary work every year in Honduras with the Baptist Church where his training as a nurse serves him and them well. He treats people for everything from parasites to gangrene.
These guys from southern Illinois were a couple of the nicest guys I’ve ever met and representative of others who are attempting to survive in spite of large corporations overtaking family farms and politicians passing legislation not favorable to smaller businesses, and they are retaining their values of the same quality Samaritans too. We appreciated the 277,500 acre Shawnee national Forest with its diverse population of plant, animal, and bird life. It offers habitat to many endangered or threatened species and is an attractive place to visit. It’s tough to think that el born area used to be included in a shallow ocean and inhabited by sea creatures prior to the Mississippian people, the Illini and other Indian tribes, the French, British and finally settlers of English, German, Scottish and Irish descent, as well as freed slaves arrived. If we visit the Ohio River Valley in southern Illinois again, it will likely be to see Metropolis, the house of Super Man and Harrah’s Metropolis casino/hotel.
The tourist market is big here also due to Kincaid, the home of a complex society that was area of the Mississippian culture. People first arrived in the Ohio River Valley around 12,000 B.C. The culture reached its peak about 1100 AD and a large city was built at Cahokia, near present-day Collinsville, Illinois. Its people built large earthworks and related structures, many of which remain. Mississippian culture regional centers arose through the Ohio minimizing Mississippian valleys, one at Angel Mounds in Evansville which we would visit later. The rivers were part of widespread trading routes. The French settled in the region in 1757 before the victorious British found claim the territory. Sometime in the 1830s, Southern Illinois became referred to as Egypt or Little Egypt because settlers from northern Illinois came south to purchase grain during years when they had poor harvests within the 1830s just like ancient people had traveled to Egypt to buy grain (Genesis 41:57 and 42:1-3). Later, towns in Southern Illinois were named Cairo, Thebes, and Karnak, as in the nation of Egypt. We were pleased to reach Evansville and turn our car to Pep Boys.
The next day we rented a car and visited the Evansville museums around the riverfront and visited Angel Mounds. From 1100 to 1450 A. D., an urban area on this website was the place to find people of the Middle Mississippian culture, who engaged in hunting and farming on the rich bottom lands of the Ohio River. Several thousand people lived within this town protected with a stockade made of wattle and daub. Because Angel Mounds was a chiefdom (the home of the main) it had been the regional center of a big community that grew outward from this for many miles. Roving bands of Shawnee, Miami, along with other groups moved into this area about 1650 A. D., long afterwards the Mississippians abandoned the town at Angel. Later, white settlers farmed the land. Much like the Indigenous peoples, these were lured through the rich soil and temperate growing season. One of the families to settle in Southwestern Indiana was headed by Mathias Angel. He’d a farmstead on the site of Angel Mounds from 1852 until his death in 1899. His brothers owned adjacent farms, and also the land remained in the Angel family until 1938.
Angel Mounds State Historic Website is named following this family. I’d participated in an archaeological dig near there during college at Indiana University. We lived at Angel Mounds and used the Glen Black Laboratory there. WPA workers had excavated at Angel Mounds throughout the nineteen thirties. There is a restored village along with a museum. We had photographed the website using box cameras and developed large prints at nighttime room. We’d used surveying equipment to find our site in the center of a field. We found post holes that were a home, bones, pottery, as well as an inscribed stone that appeared as if a numbering system. Description of how the probably use today’s technology such as photography and GPS to find and focus the traditional technologies of the inhabitants including chipping flint spear points, decorating with wax resist pottery techniques, and basket weaving.
We ventured back to Kentucky again to Henderson to see the John James Audubon Museum. He had an amazing life drawing birds, but left his devoted Quaker wife alone for a long time at a time and eventually needed to file for bankruptcy. He was a dedicated artist and his son later joined him in the passion for recording birds and animals in the wilderness. This museum includes a complete Double Elephant edition of Birds of America, the need for that is within the millions. It’s displayed only one page at a time, understandably. This museum was worth the eleven mile trip from Evansville. We’d to laugh because everywhere we went on this trip appeared to be eleven miles in the previous place or, if not, a multiple of eleven. Eleven is our lucky number! We acquired our car from Pep Boys and headed home. The windshield wipers came on once we used the turn signal, but at least the fuel pump was working, and we were on the highway again. My next story may be about all the places our car has broken down and the opportunities it’s provided to become familiar with people in the region proving that older vehicles get their advantages. Road trips within the Ohio Valley will always be fun and provide numerous opportunities for enjoying nature, traveling through background and meeting fascinating people.