38 ILLINOIS ACADEMY OF SCIENCE. 



The chief pressing and universal requirements of our aborig- 

 ines were food, clothing, shelter, instruments of transportation, 

 and articles of barter, the last especially important after white 

 traders began to come among them. Our native Illinoisans were 

 mixed feeders, like the North American Indians generally, but 

 ■ with a marked preference for animal food. We have no data 

 sufificiently detailed for an intelligent judgment of the relative 

 importance to be assigned to the corn, beans and squashes, on the 

 one hand, raised by their women on their bottom-land fields, and 

 to the products of their hunting, on the other ; but our Indians 

 were clearly hunting tribes — governed in their movements to 

 and fro by the migrations of their game — rather than truly seden- 

 tary agricultural people like those farther to the south. Hunting 

 and fishing were their principal economic pursuits, and their men- 

 tal and physical development was most strongly influenced by 

 their contact with the animals of their environment, which they 

 must outwit or master or outrun in order to gain a living for 

 themselves and their families. Their fuel was, of course, mainly 

 wood, with buffalo chips, perhaps, as an occasional convenience. 

 Their clothing was almost wholly made from the skins of animals, 

 with buckskin as the chief material. Their boats and their per- 

 manent shelters were mainly of forest products, the frames of 

 their huts of wood and the covering of mats woven from strips 

 of bark; but the objects of their barter, particularly with the 

 whites, were almost wholly furs and skins obtained by hunting 

 and trapping. 



Notwithstanding this steady draft upon the native animal 

 resources of the country, the original number of our Indian 

 inhabitants — estimated at something like 200,000 for all North 

 America east of the Mississippi River — was too small to affect 

 in any overwhelming way the general system of animal life, 

 which would apparently have gone on but little changed if they 

 had been suddenly exterminated. In Illinois they probably influ- 

 enced the fauna of the State more powerfully by their prairie 

 fires than in any other way. 



The first appearance of the white man made little or no altera- 

 tion in these relations, for the discoverers and explorers of our 

 territory necessarily lived much as the Indians did ; and the 

 hunters and traders and earliest squatters, who were in part the 

 successors of the explorers, were similarly dependent on the 

 untamed products of the country — especially so upon its animals, 

 which gave them not only the major part of their food but also 



