Name This Peoria Landmark

A fellow encountered a bear in a wasteland. There was nobody else there. Both were frightened and ran away. Fellow to the north, bear to the west. Suddenly the fellow stopped, aimed his gun to the south and shot the bear. What color was the bear?

Sign for Wildlife Prairie on Route 150 in Kickapoo, and the bear was indeed shot at the North Pole, therefore was a White Polar Bear.

I’m going to take a leap of faith here and assume that the town of Kickapoo was named after the Kickapoo Indians. Here’s a brief history of their time in Illinois courtesy of NativeAmericans.com:

“Kickapoo Native North Americans, whose language belongs to the Algonquian branch of the Algonquian-Wakashan linguistic stock and who in the late 17th cent. occupied SW Wisconsin. They were closely related to the Sac and Fox. The culture of the Kickapoo was essentially that of the Eastern Woodlands area, but they also hunted buffalo, one of the few traits that the Kickapoo adopted from their neighbors in the Plains area. After the allied Kickapoo, Ojibwa, Ottawa, Potawatomi, and Sac and Fox tribes massacred (c.1769) the Illinois, they partitioned the Illinois territory. The Kickapoo, numbering about 3,000, moved south to central Illinois. Later they split in two; the Vermilion group settled on the Vermilion River, a tributary of the Wabash, and the Prairie group on the Sangamon River. The Kickapoo, a power in the region, sided with the British in the American Revolution and in the War of 1812, when they aided the Shawnee chief Tecumseh. By the Treaty of Edwardsville (1819) the Kickapoo ceded all their lands in Illinois to the United States.”

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 3rd, 2008 at 8:07 pm and is filed under Kickapoo, Wildlife Prairie State Park. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.