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This story begins on Mother’s Day 1980, when my friend John Samuel took his family down to Starved Rock to enjoy the beautiful spring weather. As his two sons and his wife walked around the top of the rock, John sat down on a sandstone outcrop and idly scratched at the sand on the path with a twig. As he scratched the white silica sand of which Starved Rock is comprised, what appeared to be a small stone gradually appeared. John stared at it intently, because he immediately realized it was no stone, it was a piece of bone. Very old bone.
Let me interject here that John was an artifact collector who had – he died this past January, a great loss to his family and many friends – an almost preternatural talent at finding things with Native American connections that no one else could. And successful searcher and identifier he was, he realized what he was looking at was not only a bit of bone, but was a bit of human bone.
A little more surreptitious scratching turned up another tiny bone and then another. Leaving the bits of bone in place, he carefully covered them with sand again, still making sure no one was watching. John rejoined his family, and they all enjoyed the rest of their afternoon at the rock, he taking his secret home with him.
The next morning, he called me, recounted his story, and wondered what to do about it. At the time, I was working for the Fox Valley Sentinel as a part-time historical columnist and reporter. I immediately figured it had the makings of a great story. But first things first. I told him I thought the thing to do was for him to call the folks at the Illinois State Museum and tell them the whole story, which John did. Meanwhile, the tiny circle of people who knew what had happened kept quiet.
At first, state officials were skeptical, but they finally agreed to meet John atop The Rock to see if he’d really found something. It turned out to be a quick, eye-opening survey. The area was immediately roped off when some carefully brushing away of sand made it clear that what John had discovered wasn’t just a few random bits of bone. Actually, he’d discovered a human burial right in the middle of the main walking path around the top of one of Illinois’ most important and busiest historic sites.
The state museum quickly assembled a crack archaeological team – bureaucracy can move quickly if the issue is important enough to them – headed by Dr. Ed Jelks. The team was tasked with conducting an emergency recovery dig to safely, sensitively, and professionally retrieve the remains.
The weather cooperated as the team worked to carefully recover the body as well as to see what they could learn during the dig. As it turned out, the body was that of a young Native American woman who had been buried inside and next to the wall of Fort St. Louis, probably in the late 1600s or very early 1700s.
French adventurer and explorer René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle and his deputy, Henri de Tonti established Fort St. Louis, with its wooden palisade walls, atop Starved Rock in 1682 as a trading post and military base to protect Native American tribes living in the area from incursions by the Iroquois Confederacy.
The fort was abandoned and the French and their Native American allies moved south to Lake Peoria in 1691. The old fort burned at some later date.
The archaeological dig proved the young woman’s body was almost touching the fort wall. She had been buried with a bone matting hook, a tool used to weave the reed mats the Native People who lived around The Rock used to cover their lodges and for many other purposes.
The feet of thousands of visitors who had strolled along the path that had been created over her unmarked gravesite had abraded away some of her bones, the ones that remained were in remarkably good shape. At that late date, some 300 years after her death, it was impossible to determine how she’d died. But that she was buried inside the fort suggested she may have been an important person or was perhaps the wife of a French soldier or trader.
The Illinois State Museum folks were excited at the find; it was one more piece in fleshing out the history of Starved Rock and Fort St. Louis. The folks at the Illinois Department of Conservation were excited because Starved Rock had been confirmed, once again, as the state’s most historic state park. John Samuel was excited because he had helped fill in one of the many blanks in our state’s rich history and had saved the body of a young Native American woman from additional unintentional damage by state park visitors.
And I was excited because I had a great story to report. As it turned out, it was an award-winner; my first piece to win the Best Local Feature Story in the Northern Illinois Newspaper Association’s annual Better Newspaper Contest.
The body of the young lady, who I had dubbed “The Weaver of Starved Rock,” was given a reverential and proper burial elsewhere in the bounds of Starved Rock State Park. The location was kept secret to shield her body from curious crackpots and to assure she would remain connected with the area that had been her home so many centuries ago.
And best of all, within a year, the wooden walkway had been installed atop The Rock to assure that no other undiscovered graves would be disturbed by the tens of thousands of visitors who stroll around The Rock every year.
Some years ago when we visited Starved Rock again, and climbed to the top to look out over the Illinois River Valley, I sat and watched couples and parents with children enjoy walking around the walkway and taking in the spectacular view, I felt a certain amount of satisfaction at the outcome of that great story that got started one Mother’s Day many years before.
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