Due to their dwindling courage and lack of incentive, more perhaps than to their losses in enemy raids, the Illini tribes decreased rapidly in numbers and importance. When they were removed to the west of the [Mississippi] in 1832, the population of the once great Illini Confederacy totalled little more than one hundred persons.
Even before this, the Miami had been pushed out of Illinois due to inroads of the Kickapoo and Potawatomi. The Shawnee, too, probably abandoned their permanent settlements in southern Illinois early in the contact [period] though these lower counties may have still been considered their territory. Other groups did not settle or hunt there and the Shawnee did establish some villages there (e.g. Shawneetown) briefly in the eighteenth century. Bands of Shawnee continued to hunt in this region until 1828 or later.
The Sauk, Fox, Kickapoo and Potawatomi did not long enjoy the territory they had wrested from the Illini and Miami. Immediately after the Black Hawk [War] in 1832, steps were taken to move all Indians from the state. By the Treaty of Chicago, the Indians gave up all their lands in Illinois, and in 1837 the last bands (Potawatomi) crossed to the western bank of the [Mississippi]. No land is reserved today in this state for Indians. Its former resident tribes now live in reservations in Iowa, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska and in the state of Coahuila in Mexico.
SUMMARY OF ILLINOIS PREHISTORY
The [archaeology] of Illinois in its present position seems to indicate that the state did not at any time form a distinct single [culture] or [subculture] but that it was rather the meeting place of many, due possibly to the rivers that enclose, lead to and intersect its territory. It was at one and the same time a part of one or more widespread patterns or phases and a patchwork of subcultures that [extended] into neighboring states. There was a tendency for the cultures of the northern four-fifths of the state (roughly north of a line joining East St. Louis with Evansville, Indiana) to be more like the adjacent regions, while those of the remaining counties were more closely related to those of Kentucky, Tennessee, southern Indiana and Missouri and rather readily distinguishable from those of their northern neighbors.
There are few instances when it appears probable that a part of the state was invaded by a [people] of a distinctly differing [culture]. The Paleo-Indian Big Game Hunters presumably found in Illinois virgin country without previous human occupants. The Baumerians probably entered Illinois from south of the Ohio and expelled or absorbed the conservative Terminal Archaics. Possibly Mortonians intruded into the Black Sand-Red Ocre culture of Illinois from the northwest. Less plausibly, the [Stone Vault Grave] people may have pushed their way into Adams County from the Gasconade River region of Missouri.
The emphasis in this paper has been placed perhaps on the change of cultures. To keep one from getting an erroneous impression of cultural stability, it should be said that, in the writer’s opinion, a [culture] and [subculture] contained in greater or smaller areas change gradually through a process of invention here and there and through interchanges of improvements back and forth over a long time. When the change is sufficient to be noted as a “new” culture, the various cultural elements or features are apt to be widely distributed over much the same area. Thus, Baumer seems to have existed for a time alongside Terminal [Archaic] but finally spread through the southern counties; Hopewellian may have persisted in Calhoun County for a century or more after its collapse to the north and east; and the [Final phase] may have lingered on in remote portions of the state until Cahokia was past the height of its glory. In general, perhaps it could be said that the southern fifth and the remaining four-fifths of the state were out of step with each other most of the time.
As previously noted, some of the Paleo-Indian families, upon the retreat of the last glacier, settled in Illinois as they did in the neighboring states, adapted themselves to the changed surroundings, and in so doing developed the [Archaic] [culture] or way of life. This [phase] developed through a series of subcultures though not necessarily identical sequences in all the states or even within Illinois. In southern Illinois, Terminal Archaic seems to have persisted until about 2000 B.C. while in the north, it apparently had developed into Initial (early) [Woodland] a few centuries earlier. The Baumer [subculture], probably arising from the Archaic of Tennessee, appears to have been carried by its bearers into southeastern Illinois along the Tennessee and [Cumberland] rivers. Although widespread in the [Mississippi] Valley, the Archaic population was thinly scattered.
In northern Illinois and in Wisconsin the Black Sand-Red Ochre [culture] seems to have developed from the native Terminal [Archaic] (and Old Copper) possibly around 2500 B.C. The Morton (Central Basin) [people] appear to have had their cultural roots outside the state and to have combined with the native groups (Black Sand-Red Ochre) they found in the northern counties. Average populational distribution was still low with the small settlements perhaps somewhat more numerous though no more populous than during Archaic times. The early [Woodland] peoples differed from their predecessors mainly in being pottery-makers. In southern Illinois only they practiced storage of acorns and hickory nuts extensively.
About 500 B.C. in northern Illinois the Morton [people] more or less contemporaneously with similarly advanced peoples in Iowa, Wisconsin, Indiana, Michigan and Ohio, passed into the Hopewellian [civilization] which was erected on the cultivation of maize, beans, squash and tobacco, and the technologies of the earlier [Woodland] [period]. In southern Illinois Baumer developed into the [Crab Orchard] [culture] whose people traded with the more northern Hopewellians, intermarried with them and finally adopted the Hopewellian way of life about 100 B.C.