•October 24, 2018•

By Jim Nowlan
NP Guest Columnist

Much of Downstate Illinois (the vast 94-county region outside the 8 metro-Chicago counties) appears to be dying.
Recently at mid-day, I went out onto the three-block main street of my county-seat town—and there wasn’t a solitary auto on the streets of my once-lively little burg!
Mid-size cities like Peoria and Decatur have also been hurt, by the flight of flagship corporate offices to Chicagoland. Several downstate public universities have seen enrollments implode, their host communities twisting in the wind.
The population loss that Illinois suffered in recent years is almost wholly from Downstate.
Our state is one of interdependent regions. The suburbs wouldn’t exist were it not for Chicago. And Chicago wouldn’t exist absent the 19th Century synergies with Downstate (and the Midwest), which sent its corn and hogs to Chicago, and then to the East.
Today, however, metropolitan Chicago has to prop up Downstate schools, universities, parks and social services. Chicagoland sends much more in taxes to Springfield than it gets back in services. Downstate takes the rest.
We’re better than that, Downstate. We don’t want to be a drag on Illinois.
But where and how to start, if we want over time to rebuild our region? Read More

Photo courtesy of Rock Island Arsenal Museum
Antoine LeClaire, an early area settler, Illinois Gov. John Reynolds and Gen. Winfield Scott, at the table, are depicted in this mural of the signing of Black Hawk Purchase Treaty of 1832. Agreed to in the wake of the Black Hawk War, the sale conveyed Sauk lands in Iowa to the United States.

•October 24, 2018•

By Roger Ruthhart
IP Guest Columnist

Saukenuk was well-known as one of the largest Native American villages in North America, but one of its residents, the warrior Black Hawk, was even better known.
Although born in Saukenuk, which was located where Rock Island stands today, his father Pyesa and mother Summer Rain and other relatives could trace their ancestry back thousands of years. According to their oral traditions, both the Sauk and Meskwaki tribes were living in Canada 12,000 years ago at the time of the last glacial retreat. Many centuries later they were displaced from their Canadian home by the Iroquois.
The Sauk and Meskwaki migrated through New England and New York to the area near Niagara Falls. By 1640, the Meskwaki had settled at the west end of Lake Erie, near present-day Detroit, and the Sauk near Saginaw Bay in Michigan.
In 1701, the decades-long war began between the French and the Meskwaki, which almost led to the tribe’s extinction. Weakened, they joined the Sauk and together they migrated to the Mississippi River, where for nearly 100 years the tribes lived in their own villages and farmed, hunted and traded. Read More