BUSHNELL] NATIVE VILLAGES AND VILLAGE SITES 45 
These villages on the banks of Rock River dated from the early 
part of the eighteenth century, and probably presented all the 
characteristic features of the western Algonquian settlements. 
Their habitations undoubtedly resembled those of the southern 
Ojibway, an oval, dome-shaped frame covered with sheets of bark 
or rush mats. A typical example of the latter, as it stood on the 
south shore of Mille Lac, Minnesota, during the spring of 1900, is 
shown in plate 2, b. The description of the large fields of corn is 
interesting, and this would probably have applied to the settlements 
of the Cahokia and Tamaroa a century earlier. These two Illinois 
tribes, as already mentioned, occupied the wide lowland on the 
left bank of the Mississippi opposite the present city of St. Louis. 
The crests of the bluffs bordering this area on the east reveal many 
traces of the period of Indian occupancy, with innumerable graves 
on the higher points. And during past centuries the sunny slopes 
of the bluffs may have been covered by the gardens and cornfields 
of the native tribes who then claimed this fertile region. 
The Sauk village near the mouth of Rock River was the birth- 
place, in the year 1767, of the great leader Black Hawk, who, some 
65 years later, during the early part of 1832, led his people against 
the frontier settlements of Illinois. His village had been destroyed 
by the militia June 15, 1831, after the escape of its inhabitants, but 
at the present time large groups of small burial mounds mark the 
positions of these late native settlements. 
From the preceding quotations it will be understood how a region 
once occupied by a few thousand families in after years would pre- 
sent the appearance of formerly having been the home of a great 
multitude. Moving from place to place, they would leave traces 
of their villages and more temporary camps, ashes and refuse would 
accumulate, bits of pottery and objects of stone would remain lost 
and scattered over the surface, to be found at the present day. 
Often a cemetery or a few graves may be discovered near the site 
of the wigwams. Evidently the central village, often surrounded 
by or in the vicinity of the extensive cornfields, would be occupied 
during the spring, summer, and early autumn, and later in the 
year, after the harvest, it would be temporarily abandoned, the fami- 
lies removing to the forests, there to hunt during the ensuing sea- 
son. Thus one group of families, a few hundred persons, within a 
single generation, would have occupied several widely separated 
and distinct sites. Such was the condition in the ‘‘country of 
the Illinois” and elsewhere from the Mississippi to the Atlantic. 
Among the eastern Algonquian tribes, as related by Pére Sébastien 
Rasles when describing the customs of the Abnaki; by Roger 
Williams, who wrote of the movements of the Narraganset; and by 
Strachey when he recorded the habits of the confederated tribes of 
