The territory known as Missouri was included in the Louisiana Purchase of 1803.
Soon after, the Delaware Native Americans received treaty land where Springfield’s Sequiota Park and the antique stores of its Galloway Village stand today. To the west, 500 Kickapoo Native Americans built wickiups on the prairie that still bears their name.
Missouri became a state on August 10, 1821, and in 1833 the legislature designated most of the southern portion a single county. It was named for Revolutionary War General Nathanael Greene, largely through a campaign by Springfield’s founder, John Polk Campbell.
The origin of the name Springfield remains unclear; however, the most common view is that the city was named for Springfield, Massachusetts. One account holds that a James Wilson, who lived in the then-unnamed city, offered free whiskey to everyone who would vote for naming it after his home town of Springfield, Massachusetts.
In 1883, the historian R. I. Holcombe wrote, to the contrary, “The town took its name from the circumstance of there being a spring under the hill, on the creek, while on top of the hill, where the principal portion of the town lay, there was a field.”
Springfield was incorporated in 1838. That same year, Cherokee Native Americans were forcibly removed by the U.S. government from their homelands in Tennessee, Alabama, North Carolina and Georgia to the “Indian Territory.”
Their route became known as the Trail of Tears due to the thousands of Cherokee deaths on the journey and as a result of the relocation. The Trail of Tears passed through the Springfield area via what is known today as the Old Wire Road.
The city of Springfield is mainly flat with rolling hills and cliffs surrounding the south, east, and north parts of the city. Springfield is located on the Springfield Plateau of the Ozarks, which reaches from Northwest Arkansas to Central Missouri. The majority of the plateau is characterized by forest, pastures and shrub-scrub habitats.
Many streams and tributaries such as the James River, Galloway Creek and Jordan Creek flow within or near the city.
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Independence Day honors the birthday of the United States of America and the adoption of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776.
On July 4, 1776, United States claimed our independence from Britain and Democracy was born.
Every day thousands leave their homeland to come to the “land of the free and the home of the brave” so they can begin their American Dream.
Drafted by Thomas Jefferson between June 11 and June 28, 1776, the Declaration of Independence is at once the nation’s most cherished symbol of liberty and Jefferson’s most enduring monument. Here, in exalted and unforgettable phrases, Jefferson expressed the convictions in the minds and hearts of the American people.
The political philosophy of the Declaration was not new; its ideals of individual liberty had already been expressed by John Locke and the Continental philosophers. What Jefferson did was to summarize this philosophy in “self-evident truths” and set forth a list of grievances against the King in order to justify before the world the breaking of ties between the colonies and the mother country.
The United States is truly a diverse nation made up of dynamic people. Each year on July 4, Americans celebrate that freedom and independence with barbecues, picnics, and family gatherings.
Through the Internet we are learning about and communicating with people of different nations, with different languages and different races throughout the world. Bringing the world closer with understanding and knowledge can only benefit all nations.
At different times Missouri was inhabited by the Osages, Missouris, Iowas, Sacs, Foxes, Kickapoos, Shawnees and Delawares. In 1810 there were an estimated 20,000 Indians in Missouri. In 1823, the Delawares built a town in Christian County, they also lived in Stone County.
Under the pressure of a constantly advancing white immigration, the Indian tribes which had originally occupied the Illinois country migrated west of the Mississippi River. Several fragmentary tribes pitched their wigwams within St. Louis County.
The Osage were longtime residents of the regions in Missouri south of the Missouri River and in northern Arkansas. They lived north of the Missouri River as well but were forced out by the Sauk and Fox nations by the late 1790s. The Osage were divided into three bands. One band, the Great Osage, lived in what is now southeast Bates County in Missouri, the Little Osage that lived near the mouth of the Osage River and the Arkansas band on the Verdigris River, a tributary of Arkansas.
In 1808, the Grand and Little Osage bands signed a treaty with the United States at Fort Osage. They gave up any claims the land to the east of a line from Fort Osage south to the Arkansas River, north of the Arkansas to its mouth, west of the Mississippi River to the mouth of the Missouri and south of the Missouri back to Fort Osage.
Even though the Osage had ceded the land to the government, they still used the land for hunting and saw the Delaware as intruders. The Osage were exception horse thieves and stole many Delaware horses. They attacked a Delaware hunting party in 1824 and made a horse-stealing raid in 1826. These events caused the Delaware and the Kickapoo to unite against the Osage. Government intervention was required to prevent a war and a treaty was signed in St. Louis by all the parties in 1826.
The Delaware Indians were forced to move westward for many years. In 1818, the Delaware remaining in Indiana signed the St. Mary’s Treaty ceding all of their land in Indiana and agreed to move west of the Mississippi. They were given land in southwest Missouri and moved to the James River in that area between 1820 and 1822. A town was established on the James about ten mile southwest of Springfield, but other villages were scattered up and down the James and on the banks of Wilson’s Creek. Many homes were built of logs with wood floors and some even had two or three rooms.
In 1829, the Delaware still in Ohio ceded their land to the government and agreed to move west and join the Delaware already in Missouri. Yet the Missouri Delaware didn’t know how they could feed another 100 mouths so they agreed to give up their Missouri lands and move to a reserve in Kansas just north of the Shawnee.
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Nu na hi du na tlo hi lu I
Trail of Where They Cried
“One by one Indian people were removed to the West. The Delaware, the Ottawa, Shawnee, Pawnee and Potawatomi, the Sauk and Fox, Miami and Kickapoo, the Choctaw, Chicksaw, Creek and Seminole. In some 90,000 Indians were relocated. The Cherokee were among the last to go. Almost two thousand of them died along the route westward which they remembered as the Trail of Tears.”
During the roundup intimidation and acts of cruelty at the hands of the troops, along with the theft and destruction of property by local residents, further alienated the Cherokees. Finally, Chief Ross appealed to President Van Buren to permit the Cherokees to oversee their own removal. Van Buren consented, and Ross and his brother Lewis administered the effort. The Cherokees were divided into 16 detachments of about 1,000 each.
Three detachments of Cherokees, totaling about 2,800 persons, traveled by river to Indian Territory. The first of these groups left on June 6th by steamboat and barge from Ross’s Landing on the Tennessee River. They followed the Tennessee as it wound across northern Alabama, including a short railroad detour around the shoals between Decatur and Tuscumbia Landing. The route then headed north through central Tennessee and Kentucky to the Ohio River. The Ohio took them to the Mississippi River, which they followed to the mouth of the Arkansas River. The Arkansas led northwest to Indian Territory, and they arrived aboard a steamboat at the mouth of Salisaw Creek near Fort Coffee on June 19th.
The rest of the Principal People traveled to Indian Territory overland on existing roads. They were organized in detachments ranging in size from 700 to 1,600 with each detachment headed by a conductor and an assistant conductor appointed by John Ross.
The most commonly used overland route followed a northern alignment, while other detachments followed more southern routes. The northern route started at Tennessee, and crossed central Tennessee, southwestern Kentucky, and southern Illinois. After crossing the Mississippi River north of Cape Girardeau, Missouri, these detachments trekked across southern Missouri and the northwest corner of Arkansas.
Road conditions, illness, and the distress of winter, particularly in Southern Illinois while detachments waited to cross the ice-choked Mississippi, made death a daily occurrence. Mortality rates for the entire removal and its aftermath were substantial, totaling approximately 8,000.
“I saw the helpless Cherokees arrested and dragged from their homes, and driven at the bayonet point into the stockades. The trail of exiles was a trail of death. They had to sleep in wagons and on the ground without fire.” – Private John G. Burnette
In the Indian Territory problems quickly developed among the new arrivals and Cherokees who had already settled, especially as reprisals were taken against the contingent who had signed the Treaty of New Echota. As these problems were resolved, the Cherokees proceeded to adapt to their new homeland and they reestablished their own system of government, which was modeled on that of the United States.
“A common ancestry promotes understanding between Cherokee full bloods and mixed bloods. They are poles apart in many respects but, under the skin, are still brothers. For one thing, they have Cherokee traditions in common and no amount of white blood can dilute the remembrance of what happened in centuries past to the Cherokee people” – Grace Steele Woodward.
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The town Kaskakia, Illinois is named after the Kaskaskia River, an area originally inhabitated by Indians for thousands of years. It wasn’t until 1703 when French Jesuit missionaries established a mission with the goal of converting the Illini Native Americans to Catholicism.
From its beginning, Kaskaskia was a French/Indian settlement consisting of a few French men and numerous Illinois and other American Indians. The different cultures coexisted peacefully for a time. In 1733 the French built Fort Kaskaskia however it was destroyed by the British in 1763 during the French and Indian War where the Kaskaskia Indians sided with the French. Rather than live under Britsh rule after France ceded the territory east of the river, many French speaking people from Kaskaskia and other colonial towns moved west of the Mississippi to St. Louis.
The city fell on July 4, 1778 to George Rogers Clark and his force of 200 men during one of the western most battles of the American Revolution. The parish rang the church bell in celebration.
Kaskaskia served as the capital of Illinois Territory from 1809 until statehood was gained in 1818 and as a state capital until 1819. From St. Louis to the confluence of the Ohio River, the Mississippi became wider and more shallow, causing severe flooding. Much of Kaskaskia and other French colonial towns have been lost. Following the Great Flood of 1844, Kaskaskia relocated to the south and the original location of Kaskaskia became an island surrounded by the Mississippi River.
By 1950 only 112 people lived in Kaskaskia. By 1970, the population fell to 79 and by 1980 only 33 residents remained. By 2000, it was recorded that only 9 residents remained in the town making it the least populous incorporated community in the State of Illinois.
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The Trail of Tears was a monumental event in both United States and Cherokee histories. As a result of many years of treaty negotiations and United States policies regarding the treatment and disposition of American Indians as early as 1776, its effects were far-reaching.
In 1835, a small, unauthorized faction of Cherokee signed a treaty with the U.S. in New Echota, Georgia. They Treaty of New Echota was ratified by Congress in 1836, and ceded all Cherokee lands east of the Mississippi to the U.S. in exchange for $5,000,000 and lands in eastern Oklahoma. 15,000 Cherokee opposed the treaty by signing a petition, but were unable to sway the decision.
The treaty gave the Cherokee two years to remove themselves voluntarily which began in 1837. Since only a small ground participated, President Andrew Jackson’s administration initiated forced military removal and by July 1838, more than 13,000 Cherokee were held captive in military stockades. They traveled to the Indian Territory over both land and water routes, collectively known as the Trail of Tears.
During this time, Springfield was becoming a gateway to the west and the intersection of several major transportation routes (the Springfield-to-Fayetteville Road, the Old White River Road, and the Springfield to St. Louis Road). The White River Road also served as the Trail of Tears route.
Around 4,000 Cherokee Indians perished during the Trail of Tears. Today around 2,200 miles of trails were authorized by Federal law to mark the Trail of Tears as a National Historic Trail.
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The Lenni-Lenape have a rich tradition of passing down their history and beliefs from generation to generation. The Wallum Olum, also called the Walam Olum, is a song written in red symbols on a wooden tablet. It means Red Record or the Red Score. It describes the rise to glory of the Lenni-Lenape and their family as well as their journey across Asia and North America to their new home along the Delaware River.
In 1820, Dr. Ward, a Moravian missionary and physician who lived alongside the Lenni-Lenape for a number of years, received the Wallum Olum as payment for medical services from a widely respected village historian. While the Wallum Olum had passed through many hands throughout the course of time, few could decipher its true meaning.
The Walam Olum was first published in 1836 in a work entitled “The American Nations,” by Constantine Samuel Rafinesque, an erratic French scholar, who spent a number of years in this country, dying in Philadelphia in 1840. He asserted that it was a translation of a manuscript in the Delaware language, which was an interpretation of an ancient sacred metrical legend of the tribe, recorded in pictographs cut upon wood, which had been obtained in 1820 by a Dr Ward from the Delawares then living in Indiana. He claimed that the original pictograph record had first been obtained, but without explanation, until two years later, when the accompanying songs were procured in the Lenape language from another individual, these being then translated by himself with the aid of various dictionaries. Although considerable doubt was cast at the time upon the alleged Indian record, Brinton, after a critical investigation, arrived at the conclusion that it was a genuine native production, and it is now known that similar ritual records upon wood or birchbark are common to several cognate tribes, notably the Chippewa.
It wasn’t until 1976 when David McCutchen, a graduate of the University of California at Santa Barbara, was hired to research the history of the Delaware Nation. He came upon the wooden record during his work and took the results of his research as well as photographs of the record to Linda Poolaw, the Grand Chief of the Delaware Nation Grand Council of North America in Oklahoma.
As it turns out, the mysterious record tells a magnificent story. It begins with the Lenni-Lenape story of the Creation – with Adam and Eve and the Snake of Eden – each with a Native name. The story of man’s struggle continues through the Great Flood, and the re-settling of the land after the waters receded. At the time of the re-settling, there came a common understanding shared by all the people that a great body of water lay to their east and that it was their destiny to reach that body of water, so they migrated.
The Lenape set out from the ancestral home near the border between China, Mongolia and Russia towards the east. They reached the Bering Straight, a land bridge with a small strip of swift and treacherous water between them and the shores of present day Alaska. The Lenape camped along the shore waiting for the waters to freeze over before crossing into the North American Continent.
During their journey, the Lenape encountered many Natives already living and working on the land. When they reached fertile areas where the fishing, hunting and farming were good, they would settle for a time and learn to hunt, and farm. While the main body of the migration would continue their search for the great water in the east, various groups would remain behind because they had become accustomed to the area and its life.
The Indians found that the Mississippi River Valley was lush and fertile. Many Lenape established this area as a permanent settlement. They followed the river downstream to its junction with the Missouri River where they came face to face with the might Talega, the Moundbuilders. Highly sophisticated and intellectual, the center of Talega land was the walled city of Cahokia near present day East St. Louis.
A message was sent to the Talega leader asking permission for the Lenape to settle as friends and allies in the area but permission was denied. The Talega warriors were terrified by the sheer size of the Lenape population that they ordered an attack on the Lenape who crossed the river. Thus, the Lenape asked for help from the Iroquois and together they fought the Talega. It was described as one of the largest wars ever fought on the ancient continent. The war raged over lifetimes of 4 Lenni-Lenape chiefs before the Lenape could claim victory.
After 9,000 miles, the Lenape finally reached that great body of water in the east and stood on the shores of the Atlantic Ocean near Delaware.
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Pierre Laclede Liguest, recipient of a land grant from the King of France, and his 13-year-old scout, Auguste Chouteau, selected the site of St. Louis in 1764 as a fur trading post. Laclede and Chouteau chose the location because it was not subject to flooding and was near the confluence of the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers. Construction of a village, named for Louis IX of France, began the following year. Most of the early settlers were French; many were associated with the fur trade. St. Louis transferred to the Spanish in 1770, returned to France under a secret treaty with Napoleon and, following the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, became part of the United States. According to legend, on the day of transfer of the territory to the United States in 1803, St. Louis flew under three flags in one day–French, Spanish, and American.
The town gained fame in 1803 as the jumping-off point for the Louisiana Purchase Expedition of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark. After 1804, more New Englanders and other East Coast emigrants settled in St. Louis, but the population remained predominantly French until well into the 19th-Century. St. Louis incorporated as a city in 1823. During the 19th-Century, St. Louis grew into an important center of commerce and trade, attracting thousands of immigrants eager to find a new life on the edge of the frontier.
Between 1840 and 1860, the population exploded with the arrival of many new immigrants. Germans and Irish were the dominant ethnic groups settling in St. Louis, especially in the wake of the German Revolution and the Irish Potato Famine. St. Louis was a strategic location during the American Civil War, but it stayed firmly under Union control–in large part because of the fiercely loyal German influence.
St. Louis’s current boundaries were established in 1876, when voters approved separation from St Louis County and establishment of a home rule charter. St. Louis was the nation’s first home rule city, but unlike most, it was separated from any county.
Although this boundary would in the future prove a severe limitation to the City of St. Louis, at the time there was ample room for the city to grow within its fixed boundaries. After the Civil War, St. Louis continued its rapid growth, and by 1900 was a major manufacturing center. Industries grew in St. Louis because of the city’s dominance in the region, its access to rail and water transportation, and the city’s central location in the nation. The 1874 construction of the Eads Bridge made St. Louis an important link in the continuing growth of transcontinental rail travel–but came too late to prevent Chicago from overtaking it as the largest rail hub in the nation. By the 1890s, St. Louis was the nation’s fourth largest city.
One of the City’s great moments came in 1904, when it hosted a World’s Fair: the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, in Forest Park and the city’s western edge. The 1904 Olympic games were also held in St. Louis, at Washington University’s Francis Field, in conjunction with the fair. More than 20 million people visited the fair during its seven-month run, immortalized in the song “Meet Me in St. Louie, Louie.”
Through the early 20th-Century, St. Louis continued to industrialize. The increasing popularity of the automobile caused congestion in the downtown area as early as the 1920s. Rapid transit schemes were proposed but never seriously considered. St. Louis was home to the nation’s first gasoline station and first automobile accident;
The Gateway Arch, or Gateway to the West, is an arch that is the centerpiece of the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial in St. Louis, Missouri. It was built as a monument to the westward expansion of the United States. At 630 feet (192 m), it is the tallest man-made monument in the United States, Missouri’s tallest accessible building, and the largest architectural structure designed as a weighted or flattened catenary arch.
Located on the west bank of the Mississippi River where the city of St. Louis was founded, the arch was designed by Finnish American architect Eero Saarinen and structural engineer Hannskarl Bandel in 1947. Construction began on February 12, 1963, and ended on October 28, 1965.
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East St. Louis is directly across the Mississippi River from St. Louis, Missouri. The Lenape Indians inhabitated both sides of the Mississippi River and created villages and complex earthwork mounds along the river. The location of the original earthwork mounds is now St. Louis and East St. Louis as well as the urban complex of Cahokia to the north of East St. Louis within present-day Collinsville. Settlers reported that before the Civil War, up to 50 mounds in that area existed in what is now East St. Louis.The name was given to area after the United States acquired the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. The village was first name Illionistown.
In 1917, East St. Louis had a strong industrial economy boosted by World War I. There were many job openings at the Aluminum Ore Company and the American Steel Company because the US Army initially rejected many black volunteers in the years before an integrated military. The new workers arrived and resenement was formed between the blacks and the whites. At a white labor meeting on May 28th, men traded rumors regarding black men and white women and fraternizing relations. Three thousand white men left the meeting and headed as a mob for the downtown where they randomly attacked black men on the street. Before it was over 244 buildings were destroyed. These events were known as the East St. Louis riots of 1917.
Yet in 1958, East St. Louis was named an All-American City having retained prosperity through the decades. The city’s musicians were an integral creative force in blues, rock and roll and jazz. However after deindustrialization and railroad restructuring, the city suffered a decline.
In the 1990s, archeological surveys and excavations revealed evidence of important prehistoric structures. The researchers discovered the remains of several earthwork mounds, the largest was believed to have been 40 feet high with a base nearly the size of a football field. There is a complex known as the East St. Louis Mound group and serves as a popular destination for heritage tourism.
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Preserving the remains of an ancient Native American city near Collinsville, Illinois, the Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site is across the Mississippi River from St. Louis, Missouri. Covering more than 2,000 acres, Cahokia is the only prehistoric Indian city north of Mexico.
Best known for large, man-made earthen structures, the city of Cahokia was inhabited from about A.D. 700 to 1400. Built by ancient peoples known as the Mound Builders, Cahokia’s original population was thought to have been only about 1,000 until about the 11th century when it expanded to tens of thousands.
At its peak from 1,100 to 1,200 A.D., the city covered nearly six square miles and boasted a population of as many as 100,000 people. Houses were arranged in rows around open plazas. Agricultural fields and a number of smaller villages surrounded and supplied the city. The Cahokians were known to have traded with other tribes as far away as Minnesota.
The original name of the city is unknown and the inhabitants apparently never utilized writing skills. The name Cahokia is that of a unrelated tribe that was living in the area when the first French explorers arrived in the late 17th century.
These ancient Indians built more than 120 earthen mounds in the city, 109 of which have been recorded and 68 of which are preserved within the site. Many others are thought to have been altered or destroyed by farming and construction. While some are no more than a gentle rise on the land, others reach 100 feet into the sky. Made entirely of earth these ancient people transported the soil on their backs in baskets to the construction sites, most of which show evidence of several construction stages. More than 50 million cubic feet of earth was moved for the construction of the mounds, leaving large depressions called borrow pits, which can still be seen in the area.
Many people still consider the Cahokia site to be a sacred place and Native Americans and metaphysical groups believe Cahokia is a source of powerful psychic energy.
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