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SPRINGFIELD — State Historian William K. Alderfer announced publication of the first of three special issues ofthe Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society commemorating the Bicentennial of the American Revolution.The, May 1976 Journal contains seven articles that are concerned primarily with the post-Revolutionary War era. ■“Illinois had no tradition of decisive battles or well-knownpolitical and military figures during the war and the early national period,’’ Alderfer pointed out. “Yet the Illinois country attracted wave after wave of new Americans in the post-Revolutionary War era and contributed greatly to the creation of our present democratic institutions.”Four of the seven contributors are members of Illinois state college and university faculties. Emory G. Evans, professor of history at Northern Illinois University, DeKalb, opens the issue with a discussion of “The Colonial View of the West.” From the earliest days of American settlement, such speculators in western lands as George Washington expected America to become a “mighty Empire.”Professor Reginald Horsman of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and Professor Emeritus John Francis Ban-non, S. J., of St. Louis University discuss, respectively, the British and the Spanish influence in the Illinois country. By 1780, Horsman says, the British had “no real foothold in the Illinois country.” George Rogers Clark’s successive occupations of Kaskaskia and Vincennes were therefore hollow victories. Earlier British failure to capture the lower Mississippi and New Orleans from the Spanish — and not Clark’s actions — was the decisive factor in American control of the Illinois country.In 1762, Bannon points out, France convinced Spain to accept the Trans-Mississippi half of Louisiana, along with the Isle of Orleans, so that the “whole of mid-continent North America would not end in British hands as a result of forthcoming (French and Indian War) peace negotiations.” Thus, at the time of the Revolution, Spain controlled the vast American lands west of the Mississippi, and during the revolution sent a militaryexpedition across Illinois to Michigan. The Spanish leader Don Eugenio Purre was the equal in daring and bravery of George Rogers Clark, Bannon says, but we do not know of him because the Virginians, not the Spaniards, were on the winning side.IndiansThe final three articles in the May Journal are concerned with Indians in Illinois. Natalia Maree Belting, also of the University of Illinois history faculty, discusses “The Native American as Myth and Fact.” An authority on the colonial history of America, Dr. Belting delineates the many ways the American Indians have been misunderstood by successive conquerors. She concludes that even today we know very little about the Indians who lived east of the Mississippi in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It is far past time,” she says, “we gave up supposing the technical civilization of western man is superior to the rich and sophisticated stone age cultures of the Native Americans, just because it is our culture and we have been to the moon. For that matter, according to the Natchez, their
Newspaper Details
Morris Daily Herald
Morris, Illinois, US
Wed, Jun 09, 1976
Page 10
Full Page
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