Granted, portions of this have been clearly imagined by me. I have no idea if Shick Shack really sat on the banks overlooking the Sangamon River, digging his feet into the sand, and considering his life. The majority of the essay is based on facts that have been recorded either through scholarly research or through the passing down of stories from settlers who knew the Indian chief personally. It seems there is very little information available about Shick Shack. I'm certain if I devoted a significant portion of my time to tracking down information on him, I could. Unfortunately, I don't have a lot of time right now to do so. Maybe someday. This essay stands only as a reconstruction of his story from the sources I have located. I hope you find it interesting and worthwhile.
Additional note: I consulted several websites regarding Native American culture to decide how I should refer to Shick Shack and his people. I chose to use "Indian" instead of "Native American," because when I was a kid, I used the term Indian, and it seemed to work more consistently throughout.
Chief Shick Shack: On Finding Peace
He is middle-aged. His skin darkened, tanned like hides left to dry in the late summer sun. Smile lines carve a happiness out of face; his eyes light toward wisdom and knowledge. He smokes a pipe, exhales lazily. Everything as far as the eye can see is his domain. He rests along the banks of the Sa-qui-mont, the river that will some day come to be known as the Sangamon. Watches the the fish bubble to the surface and slip away again like a whisper on the wind. Smoke wafts, drawing lines between earth and sky. The heavens breathe in smoke from campfires to the east and west, each line of smoke a reminder that all is well for his children. He digs his bare feet into the sand, noting the cool pack between his toes. He has known war, but now he knows peace. He is happy here. This place is home. He closes his eyes and dreams.
Grandpa and I used to go for long drives through the country in Grandpa’s old blue Ford pickup. Grandpa would putter along the old country roads telling stories of the old days. I would listen and find myself getting lost in the low green hills and the distant horizon.
One day when I was six or seven years old, we’d gone to Tallula to breakfast with Uncle Jim in Tallula. Coming back, we snaked our way slowly through the backroads of what was known to the settlers of this land as Clary’s Grove, an area of rolling farmland as quiet and serene as any in the entire midwest. As we emerged from the low hills along Lynn Road, headed north toward the Oakford-Chandlerville blacktop, the distinct mound known as Shick Shack hill stood proudly on our left. The sky was clear and blue, and Shick Shack hill had the presence of magical luster to me.
“Grandpa, what’s that?” I said, pointing to the hill. As long as I can remember I knew about Shick Shack Hill and its namesake, the peace-loving Pottawatomie chief who lived in Sandridge when the white settlers arrived. But I knew the story in the way that one so often knows the stories of their home. There’s a residual knowledge that comes with overhearing bits of conversation. From being immersed in this place, I knew the name Shick Shack, but I never really knew who Shick Shack was or his story until this day.
“Shick Shack hill,” he said.
“But what is it?” I asked, looking for more.
“Well,” Grandpa said, his gears turning. He pulled the truck to a stop. “A long time ago, Indians lived out here in this part of the country. That’s where they buried their dead. All I knowed is that their Chief was named Shick Shack and he’s buried in there, too, with the rest of ‘em.”
I nodded and looked around at the sweeping landscape before me. Low fields of beans and corn still in the early growth of a still-green summer. In the distance I could barely see where the muddy Sangamon River slithered its way through the bottomland. I tried to imagine what this land would have looked like back then when Indians lived here. I imagined no roads and no fields. I imagined tall wild grasses waving in the wind. I imagined stands of trees. I imagined lines of white smoke broadcast across the landscape. These visions of Shick Shack and his Indian people, who once had lived where I lived, filled my soul. It made me feel connected to something ancient and great. Like the feeling of holding an ancient artifact in your hands and knowing that some distant human relative once crafted it out of bone.
We drove slowly away from Shick Shack hill, and I watched it fade from sight as we turned onto the blacktop and headed east toward home. From that day on, every time I found myself on the Oakford-Chandlerville blacktop, I looked hard at Shick Shack hill, hopeful that maybe some clue would come clear to me about the people who lived here before the whites settled the land.
Sign indicating Lincoln's encounter with Shick Shack. Lincolnmet Shick Shack shortly before the start of the Blackhawk War.
A few years later, my dad went to work for the Lynn family, who own the land where Shick Shack hill sits. Their farm is called Shick Shack farm, and the Lynn family has farmed this land for many generations. One day, I was with Dad, and we were in a big grain truck on our way to town.
At the time, my young mind was filled with Hollywood images of haunted Indian burial grounds, leading me to imagine the spectral Shick Shack and his tribespeople stalking the farmland and holding undead rain dances by the light of the moon. I asked Dad if he thought the Lynn house was haunted, owing to its close proximity to the hill.
“What, no?” he said, surprised and shaking his head. “Why?”
“Well, the burial ground,” I pointed to the hill. “Shick Shack.”
“That ain’t a burial ground,” he said, lighting a cigarette. “It’s just an old hill.”
“It is?” I questioned.
“Yeah. The way I heard it, Shick Shack and his people lived on the hill in the summer. In the winter, they moved down closer to the river. But they came back here every summer.”
“Why?”
“Well, ‘cause this is pretty land.”
I couldn’t argue with that. It was beautiful land, especially when everything turned gold and red in the fall. “Is Shick Shack buried in there?” I asked.
“I don’t think so, Johnny.” He shook his head and downshifted as we approached a tight curve.
The farm known as Shick Shack farm.I spent the rest of my childhood imagining all sorts of scenarios that played out with Shick Shack and his people. Every Indian stereotype from cowboy movies played out in my head. I had visions of enemy Indians attacking local settlers before finally being driven off by the rough and tumble pioneers. Other days I imagined friendly Indians who helped the settlers grow maize and shared in their bountiful hunts.
From time to time, I would ask teachers at school what they knew about Shick Shack, and they mostly shook their heads and said they didn’t know anything. While we studied the great voyages of Christopher Columbus, I longed to know about the local history of Shick Shack and his tribe. So much history we learned in school took place in places far away. I longed to know the history of this place.
One day, I talked to Froggy Jones at Grandpa’s bar. He and Grandpa and some of the other regulars were getting ready to play cards. Froggy once let me put on his train engineer’s hat, and I felt like he and I got on pretty well together. He knew a lot about history, and so I put him to the test. “What do you know about Shick Shack?” I asked him.
“Not much,” he said. “He was a whipped Indian.”
“What?” I didn’t know what he meant.
“Well, he was afraid to fight. He let the settlers come here and move in on his land, and he never once tried to fight with them. He was friendly to them, and I’ve heard that a lot of the settlers back then even struck up friendships with him.”
“Wow!” I said, imagining being friends with a real Indian chief. “What happened to him?”
“He left when the Blackhawk War started. He was afraid to fight so he took off.”
“Did he ever come back?”
“I don’t know if he did or not,” Froggy said. He mussed the hair on my head and turned to settle up at the bar for a game.
My mind spun out of control. Shick Shack was afraid to fight? He was whipped? I imagined him now not so much as a proud man, but as a man who found a home along the Sangamon River, tucked away from the violence of the world. I pictured a man and his people in hiding, holing themselves away from the encroaching violence that would erupt between whites and Indians as the whites swept across the nation to fulfill their manifest destiny.
Growing up, the story of Shick Shack stuck with me. As I’ve grown older, I’ve remained interested in learning more about Shick Shack and his people. Was Shick Shack afraid to fight? Did he flee the region because of the threat of violence brought on by the Blackhawk War? Was he really friends with the settlers who came to the Sangamon River valley?
To this day, I’ve been, to an extent, consumed with learning the story of Shick Shack and his people. I may go weeks, months, or even years without thinking about Shick Shack, but then one day it all comes rushing back to me. The questions. The visions. The desire to know this great man.
Late in the day. The sun is setting on the horizon. He meanders through the tall prairie grass. His eyes are wet with reminiscence, but his face is stone. He has come to say good-bye. He has come to bid farewell to his white friends. He has already said good-bye to the great Sa-qui-mont. He has already said good-bye to the spirits of bounty who cared so well for his people as they made this place a home. Long days and nights lay ahead of him. This place, the river valley which seemed to him to be the only clean place in the broad universe, the only safe place in the world, is no longer a home to him or his people. It passes into the hands of these rugged white men and women and children. It passes into their hands now.
When the first settlers came to the area that would someday become Oakford, there were 50 or 60 Pottawatomie Indians living here. They spent their winters hunkered down in the timber near the Sangamon River. Their summers were spent atop a nearby hill, the hill that I grew up knowing as Shick Shack Hill. When asked by some of the settlers why he and his people chose to live on top of the hill in the summers, Shick Shack responded plainly, “Skeeters no bother.”
Shick Shack was a good friend to the settlers who came to the area. He was a friendly chief, who came to visit many of the local settlers regularly. He never crossed the settlers, and he was most helpful to them. All he wanted was a peaceful life for his people. When the white settlers moved into the area, they recall that the wilderness was teeming with deer and other game. The Sangamon, called the Sa-qui-mont by the natives, was flooded with fish. Shick Shack and his tribe lived a happy and peaceful life in Central Illinois.
Shick Shack wanted peace so much that he is often referred to in accounts by settlers as being “whipped.” As he was known to the settlers of the Sangamon Valley and later to the Iowans he met as an old man, he refused violence in any form. It was, in fact, the Black Hawk War that drove Shick Shack and his tribe from Central Illinois. He knew that the white settlers and the Indians would soon be engaged in a violent struggle. He had friends on both sides, and he did not want to find himself or his people caught in the thick of battle.
After saying good-bye to his settler friends in the Sangamon Valley, Shick Shack and his people moved north to Fort Clark, which is today Peoria. As the Black Hawk War began, Shick Shack and his people continued to move north in order to avoide trouble. I have found little information on Shick Shack after his departure from the Sangamon Valley. Apparently he had met with much hardship because the next and only account I have of Shick Shack indicates that he was no longer with a tribe at all. Instead, he shows up in story as a fugitive, traveling with his wife, his daughter, and his son-in-law, a young Indian named Oshmeat.
The place was Fort Darnell in the area known today as LaSalle County, Illinois. Fort Darnell was a small, simple fort built for protection from Indian attacks. A young soldier, James Darnell, recalls that Shick Shack was a frequent visitor to the fort. Shick Shack acted as a messenger between the Indians and the whites. He was well-known to the men of Fort Darnell.
One night, late, there was a skirmish underway between the whites and the Indians. Shick Shack, his wife, daughter, and the young Oshmeat came to the fort asking for protection. Shick Shack feared that the angry and hostile Indians would kill him and his people just as quickly as if they were white. He was seen by the Indians as a traitor for his relationships with whites.
The men of Fort Darnell asked Shick Shack if he would fight alongside the soldiers if it came to it. Shick Shack refused. The thought disgusted him. He absolutely would not take up arms against another human being, let alone his very own people. As such, the soldiers refused Shick Shack and his party entry into the fort. They were, however, allowed to camp just outside the fort, within close proximity to a guard shack, where James Darnell was standing guard.
Mr. Darnell recalls hearing Shick Shack and his family chanting prayers of protection throughout the night. He became so interested in the prayers that he sat in with the family and asked to be taught. They gladly welcomed him, and Darnell spent the night with Shick Shack and his family, warding off the dangers that lurked in the wilderness.
No attack was made on Fort Darnell that night, and the next day, Shick Shack and his family moved on. Many years later, in Kansas, James Darnell ran into an Indian who went by the name of Smith. This “Smith” turned out to be Oshmeat, the young Indian now all grown up. Darnell, recognizing Oshmeat, struck up a conversation with the son-in-law of Shick Shack.
“Where did you and Shick Shack go to keep out of the Black Hawk War?” Darnell asked Oshmeat.
Oshmeat responded that Shick Shack had withdrawn the family to an area along the Mazon Creek. The areas was a densely wooded marshland. Living there was rough, but it offered them a great deal of protection. Here, Shick Shack and the rest of his small group waited out the end of the Black Hawk War. Shick Shack was a very old man at the time and mostly helpless. Oshmeat recalled that he personally killed only what they could eat and that they led a very reclusive life. These were the waning years of Shick Shack’s life, and he died shortly after the Black Hawk War ended.
I’m left with one question. Why was Shick Shack such a pacifist? It was violent times on the frontier. Indians were waging ongoing battles with each other as a result of generations of bad blood. The people of the frontier struggled with one another. Indians and whites fought back and forth over farmlands and hunting grounds. Maybe Shick Shack was above it all? Maybe he saw no need to contibute more violence to a world that already had so much?
Shick Shack recalled once to a settler named Daniel Dimmick along the shores of the Illinois River the story of an Ottawa hunting party. The Ottawa Indians had used a particular spot near Pike Creek as a hunting ground each spring. They had done so for many generations. One spring, without warning, the Ottawa were viciously attacked by the Illiniwek. Many of the Ottawa were killed and Pontiac, the great war chief of the Ottawa, was injured. From that day on, the Ottawa (friends of the Pottawatomie) were at war with the Illiniwek. They continued to war with each other until all the Illiniwek were killed, which occurred when the Ottawa and Pottawatomie drove the Illiniwek onto a 125-foot sandstone butte. Here, the Illiniwek literally starved to death, thus giving rise to the name Starved Rock.
Shick Shack shared this story with Mr. Dimmick, and I can’t help but imagine that he told the story as one of great tragedy. That he couldn’t understand the needless bloodshed. I think of Shick Shack as a great philosopher chief. A man who, in life, sought peace and harmony and balance. Is this the cause of Shick Shack’s pacifism?
Maybe. Or maybe the reason the great Chief refused to fight was because he had committed enough bloodshed himself as a young warrior to last a lifetime. Perhaps he was engaged in enough ruthless slaughter as a young man that he carried the burden with him for the rest of his days. Imagine for a minute the possibility that this man’s soul had been washed in the blood of many enemies long before any of our stories of the friendly old “whipped” Indian who didn’t like to fight.
He is young now. Lithe, athletic, raw. The clamor of battle explodes around him. The zip and chunk of arrows zinging past and landing fast in their targets. Screams of men chopped down, dying, but not dead yet. Dirt underfoot turned to mud in the bloody trample. Grass slick with pain. This day he moves among the masses more powerfully, more swiftly, more invisibly, than any other warrior on the battle grounds. Sliding from victim to victim like a dancer and then suddenly the clamor is gone and silence fills the evening as the blood-red sun draws the day to a mournful close. The only sounds now are the final gasps of men giving themselves over to the darkness. There is blood. There is pain. His body is soft with fatigue. He drops his knife and walks away.
Here’s the scene as portrayed by Karen Bazzani Zach in her 2003 book, Crawfordsville, Athens of Indiana. In September of 1775, there was a great battle between the Pottawatomie/Kickapoo tribes and the Miami. When the battle began, there were over 600 men waging war on the battlefield. When the day came to a close, only 12 men remained. A young Shick Shack was one of them.
Was this great tragedy, a day when over 500 men were slaughtered in the heat of close combat, enough to drive Shick Shack to a peaceful life? Did the lives of those he’d killed weigh so heavily on him that he swore off violence for the rest of his life? We may never know, but I like to think that Shick Shack turned his back on the violence of the frontier. I like to imagine that the Shick Shack of the Sangamon River valley was a man who had found peace in the joys of the natural world. If only for a brief time, I like to imagine that Shick Shack and his people lived blissfully on old Shick Shack hill, where the mosquitoes wouldn’t bother them and where they could fill their bellies with roasted venison and fresh channel catfish and they could enjoy the sprawling, lush landscape stretching off in all directions under them. I like to imagine that in the Sangamon River valley, Shick Shack found peace.
Works Cited
Hash, Charles. “Biography of Zachariah Hash.” Historical Sketches. Ed. J. N. Gridley. Virginia: Virginia Enquirer, 1907.
Matson, N. A Series of Sketches Relating to Events that Occurred Previous to 1813, Narratives of Many Thrilling Incidents Connected with the Early Settlement of the West, Drawn from History, Tradition, and Personal Reminiscences. Chicago: Knight and Leonard, 1882.
Zach, Karen Bazzani. Crawfordsville, Athens of Indiana. Chicago: Arcadia Publishing, 2003.
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1 comments:
Lovely essay . . . and great portrait of how a child's ideas morph and grow with knowledge and age. Thanks.
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