The Prehistoric Makanda Stone Fort, Jackson County, Illinois.

The Stone Forts of Illinois.

One of the unique prehistoric phenomena of Southern Illinois is the ruins of stone walls which have traditionally been known as "stone forts." They appear in the rough east-west alignment across the hill country and appear to form a broken chain between the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers. These ruins have similar geographic site characteristics. They are generally located on bluffs, which are often finger-like promontories of land with steep cliffs on three sides and a gradual incline on the fourth. It was across these inclines leading to the top of the bluff that these stone walls are most generally located, hence the theory of a pound or game trap, has been advanced.

Many of the walls have long been torn down and removed for building purposes. Early settlers, in most instances, removed the better slab-like stones for building foundations, leaving only the rubble. These early white pioneers saw the walls and thought of them in terms of their own experiences, particularly from the standpoint of defense against the Indians. Though they called them stone forts, these sites would be very poor places to carry on prolonged fights.

If a small band took refuge behind the wall, they might be pushed over the cliff by a larger attacking force. Or a larger force could lay siege to the place, and the band would be cut off from both food and water and soon starve to death. Although they called them "forts," many people did not accept such a theory, and speculation continued.

Archaeologists believe that particularly in Ohio, the Hopewellian Indians probably were responsible for some of the walls, but the identity is not known. These walls represent a major accomplishment for a people who had only primitive digging implements and methods of carrying or moving heavy stones. These unknown builders piled rock completely across summits, leaving inside enclosures sometimes as large as 50 acres, depending upon the size of the bluff.

The Makanda Township Stone Fort in Southern Illinois lies between the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers.

The Makanda Stone Fort is a quarter of a mile northeast of the village of Makanda, Jackson County, Illinois, and is a part of Giant City State Park.

About 1000 years ago, when Indian cultures were enjoying the area’s abundant resources (water, wildlife, nuts, berries, and roots) in the Shawnee National Forest, a stone fort was found. It is thought to have been built during the Late Woodland Period (1000 BC - 1000 AD), probably between 600 to 900 AD. 

A Shawnee National Forest Overlook.

These prehistoric forts were constructed on a raised mass of land known as a promontory (a point of high land that juts out into a large body of water), while some others were built on hilltops that provided an excellent overlook giving them a vantage point to see for miles across Illinois' premier forest.

The massive stone wall was at one time 285 feet long, six feet high, and nine feet thick on 1.4 acres of land. The appearance of a “stone fort” or stone wall located in Giant City State Park, which is part of the Shawnee National Forest, sits atop a sloped ridge

There are actually about ten of these old structures in the southern Illinois area, and they are believed to have been either a military fortification as a meeting place or a ceremonial temple.

Most of these sites were not habitation sites (villages) in the usual sense. There was only a modest amount of artifacts, which is common among places of sporadic use for short periods of time. Debris found on this site includes sherds of grit or grog-tempered cord-marked pottery and stone tools, like projectile points. Many Late Woodland tribes lived in large, intensively occupied villages located near major rivers and streams such as Cahokia and East St. Louis. They had a mixed economy of hunting, gathering, and cultivated a series of native plants like barley, sumpweed, maygrass, and squash.

For years archaeologists have wondered about the stone fort’s usage. Some say that these were “sacred spaces” reserved for periodic activity. Archaeological digs have located items that prove that the Indians of Southern Illinois were part of an extensive trading network. They believe the trading network followed the trails in Southern Illinois that became the early pioneer roads centuries later. Archaeologists suggest the possibility that stone forts were designated areas where different tribes or sub-tribes could meet, socialize, and trade on neutral ground.

The original wall was dismantled by European settlers, who used the stones in order to build their own structures; the stone base is all that remains of the original wall. It was reconstructed in 1934 by the CCC (Civilian Conservation Corp) workforce gathered the scattered stone and rebuilt the wall in its original location, but has since fallen into ruins again.

The location of this wall leads one to believe it was built for a fortification of some kind and as the building must have required a great deal of time and labor. It was surely built for more than just temporary use. The distance to the edge of the bluff in front is over 500 feet, thus affording room for quite a party taking refuge therein. The bluffs that form three sides of the enclosures are unscalable without the use of ropes and ladders except in two places, and these are easily protected from above for they are just narrow crevices up which one could, with difficulty, climb and then only by the aid of the jagged edges of the protruding rocks. One man could lie behind boulders at either place and easily protect it against a number of his enemies with crude stone-age weapons, traces of which were found everywhere in the vicinity and all through this section. Several pieces of flint and arrowheads have been picked up on the top of the bluff. 

Another reason for believing that this fortification was built as a defense against tribesmen is that it is at the upper end of the valley where the opposite bluff is not over 200 yards distant, and is higher, though not so precipitous. From this bluff, one with a rifle could easily shoot into the fort, but with bows and arrows, very little damage could be done. In fact, it is by far the best location in the valley. Water is easily accessible and flows from a little stream within 100 feet of the cliff where it is scalable and at several places in the brooks are springs. 

Ancient features more closely related to a seasonal hunting camp where hunters would take advantage of game resources, then move on.

Other theories included the notion it was actually early European explorers, such as DeSoto, who created the rock fortresses while making inroads to conquer the land. No such evidence of European construction exists, of course.

The oldest settlers in Jackson County say that the area was covered with bushes when they first came here. No one knows the early history of the fort as a certainty and there is little likelihood of it ever coming to light. Parts of the wall of this fort were standing as late as 1870 and were torn down by a Doctor CalIon in hunting for relics. None were found which is more strong evidence that the fort was built by someone other than Indians. George W. Owens, still living in 1931, who came to Makanda in 1862, tells of a small, one-pounder cannon that was found in the wall of the old fort. It was used in Fourth-of-July celebrations around Makanda for 50 years and finally sold to a junk dealer. The French Lieutenant Aubrey, passed this way from Kaskaskia in 1720 with 30 French and 300 Indians on his way to Fort Massac on the Ohio River to thwart the English, who were reported to be on their way down the Ohio River toward Kaskaskia. Aubrey had three brass cannons of this description. This may have been one of them. 

The first professional archaeological investigation of the fort site was conducted in 1956 by archaeologists from Southern Illinois University. An explanation for the large hole in the front of the wall is unknown, although it most likely represents the work of treasure hunters. The hole was there when the site was officially recorded as an archaeological site in 1956.

In the fall of 2000, archaeologists from Southern Illinois University Carbondale conducted an investigation of the Stone Fort site. Of the 153 shovel tests executed south of the wall, all were positive for prehistoric artifacts. This led the scientists to nominate Giant City’s Stone Fort for the National Register of Historic Places. The Giant City Stone Fort Site was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on August 9, 2002

The Stone Fort Trail in Giant City State Park is a little-known path that leads to some truly intriguing ruins. It is less than half a mile in length and is a loop trail.

Compiled by Dr. Neil Gale, Ph.D.

What Were President Abraham Lincoln's Last Words?

Rumors of President Lincoln's last words spoken in Ford's Theatre led to consulting the experts at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum.in Springfield, Illinois

President Abraham Lincoln's box at Ford's Theater, Washington DC, April 1865.

Abraham Lincoln’s last words have been the subject of debate among scholars for well over a century. The 16th president of the United States was shot on April 14, 1865, and died on the 15th. He was shot by Confederate sympathizer and stage actor John Wilkes Booth while sitting in Ford’s Theatre in Washington, D.C.

Reportedly, Lincoln’s “likely last words” were published as: “We will visit the Holy Land, and see those places hallowed by the footsteps of the Savior. There is no city on earth I so much desire to see as Jerusalem.”

It would be difficult to confirm the last words of someone who died over 155 years ago, to say the least. In order to establish authenticity, we would need to see official records that left no doubt of their genuine nature. Unfortunately, no solid evidence exists in the case of Abraham Lincoln. However, this does not mean that no records exist at all.

We consulted about the former president’s last words with the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum. Lincoln was born in Kentucky, but he began his political career in Illinois. He also met his future wife, Mary Todd (marriage), in the Prairie State.

Christian McWhirter is a Lincoln historian at the museum. We asked him about the “Holy Land” quote. He told us that the quote “originates from an unpublished 1882 manuscript by the Rev. Noyes Miner, a Springfield neighbor, and friend of the Lincolns.” The manuscript resides in the museum’s collection.

The two sentences are actually lifted from two different parts of the same paragraph, in which Miner discusses things Mary Lincoln (life history) has told him about her husband’s plans for his post-presidential life. The first part about the “Holy Land” is from a more general description and the second sentence is actually paraphrased in the quote.

Miner’s actual quote reads: “He was saying there was no city on Earth he so much desired to see as Jerusalem; and with that word half spoken on his tongue, the bullet from the pistol of the [assassin] entered his brain.”

Many Lincoln scholars, however, are skeptical of this story. That it first appeared almost two decades after the fact and at least three steps removed from the source provides some reason for doubt. It also seems like an odd thing to say in the middle of enjoying a stage comedy.

More likely, Lincoln conveyed these sentiments during a better-documented carriage ride with Mary earlier that day, during which Mary herself recalls he was especially cheerful and spoke of their future.

In fact, Lincoln’s last words can’t be confirmed with certainty but there is a more reliable account from another Springfield friend, Dr. Anson Henry, who wrote on April 19, 1865 (only 4 days after Lincoln died):

“She [Mary] sat close to him and was leaning on his lap looking up at his face when the fatal shot was fired, his last words being in answer to her question ‘What will Miss Harris [one of their guests in the presidential box] think of my hanging on to you so?’—’She won’t think anything about it.'”

McWhirter said that this is still secondhand and should be handled with care. However, he continued, it is close enough to the event and the people involved that it can be said that Lincoln likely said it during the play, possibly as his last words.

Lincoln’s last words will likely be debated forever without coming to a definitive answer.

By Jordan Liles

Edited by Dr. Neil Gale, Ph.D.

The Lighthouse at Grosse Pointe, Illinois.

In 1870, the Department of the Treasury's Lighthouse Board recommended that the cast-iron lighthouse, in use since 1859 on the North Pier in Chicago, be relocated to Grosse Pointe (Evanston), thirteen miles to the north, where “it would there serve what it was intended for, to mark the approach to Chicago, and a prominent point of the coast.” The North Pier at Chicago had been extended 1,200 feet lakeward since the iron lighthouse was erected. The smoke of the numerous nearby steamers and factories often obscured the tower’s light.

Fog signal house with a large sound deflector was installed in 1901 to reduce disturbance to neighbors.

For some reason, this plan was rejected, and the lighthouse remained in Chicago until it was dismantled in 1894, and parts of it were used at Twin River (Rawley Point), Wisconsin. Grosse Pointe instead received a magnificent brick tower linked to an Italianate duplex.

The twenty-five-foot bluff on which the lighthouse was built had been known as Grosse Pointe (great point) since French fur trappers frequented the area in the seventeenth century. Explorer and Jesuit Missionary Jacques Marquette recorded camping on “Grosse Pointe” on December 3rd during his 1674 expedition to what would become Chicago.

The PS Lady Elgin (paddle steamer) was a double-decked, wood-hull, sidewheel steamship that sank in Lake Michigan off the fledgling town of Port Clinton, Illinois, whose geography is now in the City of Fort Sheridan, after she was rammed by the schooner Augusta in a Gale in the early hours of Saturday, September 8, 1860. Other shipwrecks occurred off Grosse Pointe during the next decade, spurring the residents of Evanston to petition Congress for a lighthouse.

In 1871, Congress appropriated $35,000 for a lighthouse on Grosse Pointe, and a 100 by 550-foot site was purchased for $1,200. Orlando Metcalfe Poe was appointed Chief Engineer of the Upper Great Lakes Lighthouse District in 1870 and, in this capacity, designed many of the tall, graceful brick towers that adorn the Great Lakes. Poe drew up plans and specifications for Grosse Pointe Lighthouse in 1872, and after proposals for the construction of the station were solicited by advertisement, they were opened on August 13, 1872. The lowest bid was accepted, and the excavation for the tower's foundations, covered way, and dwelling commenced in September. By the end of the working season in November, the stonework of the dwelling had been brought up to ground level.

Work resumed the following April, and over a two-month period, the brickwork of the dwelling was nearly completed. Ninety-one piles were driven to a depth of fifteen feet and overlaid by a four-foot-thick concrete footing to support the tower. By the end of June, the passageway, the stonework for the tower’s foundation, and the outside of the dwelling were nearly completed. During the rest of the year, the 113-foot-tall brick tower, which tapers from a diameter of twenty-two feet at its base to thirteen feet three inches at the parapet, gradually rose above the attached dwelling.

A second-order Fresnel lens, manufactured in Paris by Henry-Lepaute, was installed in the lantern room, and the light was activated on March 1, 1874. Three panels of red glass were slowly rotated around the fixed lens by a clockwork mechanism powered by a sixty-pound weight that was suspended within the tower’s double walls. Click here to see a photograph of Keeper Edwin Moore winding up the weight in the tower’s lantern room. The light’s characteristic was fixed white, varied by a ten-second red flash every three minutes. A second-order Fresnel lens is the largest size ever used on the Great Lakes, and Grosse Pointe’s second-order lens was the first one installed on the lakes and the only one that remains active today.

Grosse Pointe Lighthouse in 1914.

According to a newspaper account in 1924, the Grosse Pointe lens was one of three purchased in France for $10,000 apiece in 1860. Two of these lenses were sent to Florida where lighthouses were under construction, but the outbreak of the Civil War prevented their installation. The lenses were buried in an isolated spot to prevent them from falling into rebel hands, and after the conflict, they were dug up, and one was eventually sent to Grosse Pointe.

The keeper’s duplex stands seventy-three feet west of the tower and has seven rooms in each of its two apartments. The head keeper resided on the south side of the duplex, while the first assistant was given four rooms on the other side, and the second assistant had the remaining three rooms. The station originally had just one assistant, but a second was added in 1880 to help with the extra workload caused by the new fog signal.

In 1871, Chicago was America’s busiest port. Despite being closed in the winter, more ships arrived in Chicago than New York and San Francisco combined. The Evanston Index reported in 1885 that 8,787 sailing vessels and 3,566 steam vessels had passed Grosse Pointe during the navigation season. When traveling south on Lake Michigan from the Straits of Mackinac toward Chicago, mariners would steer for Grosse Pointe and then follow the shore to Chicago. Grosse Pointe thus functioned as a landfall light, and in 1880 two buildings were built seaward of the tower to house duplicate steam sirens to help mariners during times of poor visibility. In 1892, ten-inch steam whistles were substituted for the sirens. Between 1885 and 1894, the fog signal, which gave five-second blasts separated alternately by twenty and forty seconds, was in operation an average of 245 hours each year.

On July 26, 1888, Anthony Hagan, head keeper of Grosse Pointe Lighthouse, wrote the following to Inspector C.E. Clark: “Mr. Palmer, 2nd Asst., quit work at 10:30 a.m. as I was cleaning leaves in the Tower and told me that he did not care for the Light-house, now that I am left alone and the Light all upside down, I most respectfully request that Assistant will be sent me that will obey my orders. I shall get the Light to light tonight if the fog doesn’t get up.” There must have been more to the story as Keeper Hagan was removed from office less than two weeks later. Edwin J. Moore was appointed head keeper in his place and served at Grosse Pointe for thirty-six years until his death in 1924 at the age of seventy-three.

Keeper Moore started his lightkeeper career as the second assistant at Grosse Pointe in 1883. He left in 1885 to become the head keeper of Calumet Pierhead Lighthouse and then returned in 1888 to take charge of Grosse Pointe Lighthouse. According to a newspaper article on March 3, 1924, announcing his death, Keeper Moore’s last thoughts were of his duty. “'Is the light all right, mother?’ he asked his wife as he collapsed from heart failure, a few minutes after he had descended from the 147-foot tower, where he had turned on the light for what was to be the last time.” Keeper Moore was sixty-nine years old when he passed away on March 1, 1924.

Due to the deterioration of the bricks used to construct the lighthouse, scaffolding was erected around the tower in 1914, and it was encased in reinforced concrete for $2,679.

In 1934, the station was electrified, and the fog signal was discontinued. These actions allowed the light to be operated by a photoelectric cell, and the last keeper left the station in 1935. With the help of its Congressmen, the City of Evanston acquired the station in 1935 and the tower itself in 1945. The North East Park District, now known as the Lighthouse Park District, manages the site.

Grosse Pointe’s light was discontinued in 1941 when lighted buoys were anchored seven miles offshore. The tower’s Fresnel lens was reactivated in February of 1946 and now serves as a private aid to navigation, showing a group of two flashes every fifteen seconds. During World War II, the lighthouse was used by two physicists from nearby Northwestern University to conduct experiments on photocells for detecting infrared light. Prototypes of these devices were used in advanced radar detection systems to monitor enemy aircraft movements.

Newly completed Grosse Pointe Lighthouse.

Around the time the station was de-staffed, the passageway connecting the tower and dwelling was removed, as was the one-and-a-half-story wing on the north side of the dwelling, which had begun to separate from the main part of the house. The passageway was reconstructed in 1984 using the original 1873 specifications, and in 1993, the missing wing was rebuilt. The fully restored light station now fits in nicely with the mansions that dot the shoreline of this historic neighborhood.

The north side of the duplex houses a museum for visitors and an office for the park district, while a “keeper,” a position held by Don Terras for many years, lives on the south side of the duplex. Grosse Pointe Lighthouse was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1976 and designated a National Historic Landmark in 1999.

Historical Timeline:
1860 – Schooner Augusta rammed the side-wheel passenger steamer Lady Elgin, prompting calls for a lighthouse at Grosse Pointe.
1871 – Congress appropriated $35,000 for the lighthouse.
1872 – Construction began.
1874 – Construction of tower completed.
1881 – Fog signal installed.
1892 – Steam sirens replaced by a steam whistle.
1900 – Oil house built.
1914 – Walls of tower covered with 4” of concrete.
1923 – Lighthouse electrified.
1933 – Fog signal discontinued; photoelectric cell installed in the tower to automatically turn the light on.
1934 – Bureau of Lighthouses discontinued the position of Keeper at Grosse Pointe.
1935 – Lighthouse property was transferred to the city of Evanston, Illinois, which leased it to the North East Park District.
1941 – Federal government abandoned lighthouse; light extinguished due to WWII.
1942 – Light tower transferred to the city.
1946 – Control of tower given from North East Park District to Evanston Historical Society. Beacon re-lit.
1976 – Lighthouse placed on the National Registry of Historic Places.

Compiled by Dr. Neil Gale, Ph.D.

The History of the Paleo-Indian, the Hopewell Culture, of the Albany Mounds, in Albany, Illinois.

One of the most important archaeological sites in Illinois, Albany Mounds, contains continuous human occupation over the last 10,000 years. The Albany Mounds date from the Middle Woodland (Hopewell) period (200 BC to 500 AD), older than either the Cahokia Mounds (700 AD to 1650 AD) or Dickson Mounds (800 AD to 1250 AD) of the Mississippian period.

The indigenous people who lived here as early as 500 BC were part of the Hopewell culture, so named because their existence was first learned of on the Hopewell farm in Ohio, where similar mounds had been built. It is not known what the people called themselves or what language they spoke.

The region around Chillicothe, Ohio, was the center of the ancient Hopewell Culture. This Paleo-Indian culture had trade routes extending to the Rocky Mountains. They built earthen mounds for ceremonial and burial purposes.

The "Hopewell culture" doesn't refer to a particular Indian tribe; instead, it’s a name for a distinctive set of artifacts, earthworks, and burial practices characteristic of sites found in Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois.

These artifacts show significant artwork of the Hopewell-Havana phase.
Vessels A and B were about the size of a modern 5-gallon bucket.

While still obtaining food largely through hunting and gathering, Woodland peoples began practicing basic horticulture of native plants. Woodland peoples are distinguished from earlier inhabitants by developing pottery and the building of raised mounds near large villages for death and burial ceremonies.

It is believed that their culture seemed to decline somewhere about 350 AD. From about 200 BC to 300 AD, the Albany Hopewell constructed over 96 burial mounds at this site. It was, and still is, one of the largest mound groups in the nation. It is the largest Hopewell culture mound group in Illinois. The Albany Hopewell built their mounds on the bluff tops above the village and on the terraces adjacent to the village.

The site was well suited to the Hopewell culture, which was not an Indian tribe but rather a term referring to the period of time in Paleo-Indian history marked by trade, communication, and a sharing of ideas throughout an extensive area of the continent. They preferred to build their villages at the base of bluffs along the floodplains of major rivers, such as the Mississippi, that offered transportation. At Albany, with the adjacent Meredosia Slough, which served as flood drainage for the Mississippi and Rock Rivers, there was an abundant source of food and water. The waters, forest, and prairie provided food and fuel for the Hopewell.

Today, about 50 mounds remain; thirty-nine of the mounds remain in good condition, while eight have been partially destroyed through erosion, excavation, or cultivation. Other mounds were totally destroyed by agricultural activities, railroad, and highway construction, site looter. Still, others were destroyed in the process of being scientifically excavated in the early 1900s by the Davenport Academy of Natural Sciences.

Burial artifacts include non-local materials indicating the existence of trading networks with Indians from other areas. The site of the nearby village remains privately owned. The mounds were placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1974.

In the 1990s, the site was “restored" to a natural appearance, and of about one hundred acres of the prairie was re-established.

Compiled by Dr. Neil Gale, Ph.D.

The History of the Milk Pail Restaurant, Country Tea Room, and Country Stores that were located in unincorporated Dundee Township, Kane County, Illinois.

The Milk Pail, formerly the Country Tea Room, and its grounds are steeped in history. 

The northern Fox River Valley was first settled in the 1830s. Originally profiting from its natural resources, the region eventually expanded into manufacturing, earning connections to the Chicago and North Western Railroad in Carpentersville. Increase C. Bosworth, a wealthy businessman from Chicago, settled in the area in 1837. He purchased a 136-acre property from Mr. Clark in 1860. He constructed a farm by the 1860s that featured a farmhouse, windmill, and creamery. The house was in the gable-front style with Italianate details.

Illinois State Route 25 was to be built in the early 20th century to serve the east side of the Fox River, running from Oswego to Algonquin.

"Pepper" the Ostrich

Bosworth's residence was located on grounds adjacent to the planned highway. Seeing an opportunity for development, Max McGraw, who later formed the Toastmaster Co. and the McGraw Edison Co., purchased the property in 1926. McGraw was beginning to accrue tremendous wealth in manufacturing due to the success of his Toastmasters products.

Not to be confused with the Milk Pail Grocery Store (with Wally's Deli inside) in Lincolnwood, Illinois.

He added a single-story extension later that year. Route 25 was opened in 1929, and the Country Tea Room flourished like many roadside restaurants in its day. The road was an important shipping route for dairy products and provided a route for tourists visiting Wisconsin to the north. Customers enjoyed toasting their bread with McGraw's invention, and some bought Toastmasters for their homes. 

When the restaurant opened, automobile travelers' dining options were limited to picnics or fancy hotels. Roadside restaurants filled travelers' need for other options in the 1920s and 1930s. McGraw also maintained the dairy operations of the farm until 1939.

By the end of the 1930s, roadside eateries were spread throughout most major highways. To stay competitive, restaurants needed to provide variety for their patrons to stand out from other establishments. The Country Tea Room initially struggled with this change. To meet the demands of travelers' changing tastes in the 1930s, the teahouse was converted into a full restaurant featuring a game from McGraw's nearby game preserve. Reinventing itself as the Milk Pail Restaurant, a full restaurant with unique entrees.

Part of the property was converted into the "Fin 'N Feather" catalog, which sold smoked game, some featured on the Milk Pail menu. McGraw bought the surrounding land, named it the McGraw Wildlife Foundation, and opened it as a private game preserve. 

The original building faces east, while the 1926 addition faces south. The barn, creamery, and stable that once served the farm still stand to the southwest, although they have been modified throughout their existence and do not contribute to the site's historical value. A parking lot lies to the main building's north and east. The two-story house is a small one-story addition built before the early 1900s. 

The Country Tea House extension 1926 was built on the west side of the house. The vernacular, wood panel house sits on a stone foundation. A chimney is found on the north side of the building. Windows on the east and south elevations feature wooden pediments, and those on the north do not. Asphalt shingles adorn the roof. 

I usually ordered the Ostrich Steak with a double-baked potato. 

The businesses and the restaurant closed in 1996. The main building was added to the National Register of Historic Places on February 25, 1999.

VISIT OUR MILK PAIL SOUVENIR SHOP

INDEX TO MY ILLINOIS AND CHICAGO FOOD & RESTAURANT ARTICLES.

Compiled by Dr. Neil Gale, Ph.D.

Elsah, Illinois... A Village Frozen In Time.

Unheard of by most, this tiny village of Elsah on the Illinois side of the Mississippi River is one of the loveliest places to visit. Preserved in its 19th-century condition, it was cut off from the rest of the state and is now a time machine to the past. 

James Semple, a local lawyer, a prominent politician and United States Senator from Illinois, founded Elsah in 1853 and offered free lots to anyone who built a house with stone from his nearby quarry. It's believed Semple named the village after Ailsa Craig, a Scottish island that was the last bit of land his family saw as they left Scotland for the United States.

Elsah flourished as a shipping point for Jersey County farmers and a critical link to the Mississippi River.

Hidden by a valley of bluffs and forests, Elsah was once a vibrant riverside town that lost popularity once the railroad came through this area, as tracks could not be built through these rock formations. Due to being cut off physically and economically, the town never developed past its 19th-century roots and maintains the original buildings constructed during the village's settlement. 

The village's beauty can be attributed to its founder, who insisted that anyone who moved there build their residence foundations out of stone, which today adds romantic charm to this riverside wonderland. It is beautiful at any time of year and will take you back to a simpler time. Elsah is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and contains many wonders, including several inns and an old-fashioned general store. 

Illinois' best-kept secret is a village frozen in time that will show you what life was like centuries ago. Take your time meandering through the bluffs and enjoy the lovely scenery around Elsah.

By 1861, the village had grown to its current size, as geographic and economic limitations prevented further expansion.

The village of Elsah experienced a revival when Principia College opened, a 2,600-acre campus on the bluffs of the Mississippi River in 1930. In 1934, Principia's new four-year liberal arts college graduated its first class. Principia College is a private liberal arts, Christian Science college founded in 1898 in St. Louis.

CLICK FOR FULL-SIZE MAP.

Compiled by Dr. Neil Gale, Ph.D.

Looters of Prehistoric Native American Archeological Sites is a Big Problem in Illinois and the Mississippi Valley.

CATCHING PREHISTORIC SITE LOOTERS
Southern Illinois District Court vs, Mr. Leslie Jones (results below in sub-section).

As Geoff Donaldson sprinted across a barren southern Illinois crop field at dusk on January 26, 2007, he breathed aloud a prayer: "Lord, please make me invisible."

The 35-year-old uniformed officer of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service was trying to wriggle into his Ghillie suit, full-body camouflage that makes a turkey hunter resemble a mossy tree stump. He wasn't hunting turkey that evening, though. He was stalking a thief. And, after a year of cat-and-mouse, Donaldson wanted his man.

Disguised in deep-cover camouflage known as a Ghillie suit,
Geoff Donaldson of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in
Southern Illinois caught a major looter on video.

In March of 2006, Donaldson received a tip: A car was often seen parked on private land near a remote corner of Cypress Creek National Wildlife Refuge, about 25 miles east of Cape Girardeau. He found the vehicle, peeked inside and found some hand-digging tools. People sometimes gather ginseng in these parts, he knew. But something didn't feel right.

The next day Donaldson was hiking along a creek bottom when he spied a man upon a ridge spur below a bluff acting "skittish." His name was Leslie Jones, of Creal Springs, Illinois. Jones had facial hair, Donaldson recalls, and a trim, muscular physique, "the picture of an axman."

Among tall oaks and maple trees, Jones kept hunkering over something, then glancing up. Donaldson dropped out of sight and tried to sneak in for a closer look. When he arrived a few minutes later, Jones was gone, though his handiwork remained: Hundreds of square yards of federal soil were torn up.

"It looked like hogs had gotten into it," Donaldson recalls. He noted several piles of broken spear points and stone chips. It appeared that Jones, for months, had been systematically unearthing Native American artifacts.

Picking up an arrowhead or digging a small hole on federal property might lead to a citation, but looting that causes damage in excess of $500 is a felony. Donaldson contacted the U.S. attorney's office, which listed the evidence they'd need for a felony conviction: a video of Jones excavating the material, then pocketing it and returning home. "You've got to be kidding me," Donaldson thought.

For the next ten months, he and his colleagues spent more than 300 man-hours spread out in the woods, waiting for Jones. Digital cameras at the ready, they sat on watch through sweltering summer humidity and cold winter rains. Sometimes, officers from the U.S. Forest Service or Illinois Department of Natural Resources joined the party.

"We kept just missing him," Donaldson groans.

Around 4 a.m. on that late January day in 2007, the team took up positions in the shadows of the forest. Hours crawled by and still no sign of the thief. Late that afternoon Donaldson radioed to the others: Pack it up. On their drive back to the staging area in Marion, Illinois, word came that Jones' car was parked near the refuge.

Donaldson remembers racing back to Cypress Creek under a darkening sky. "The idea is to become one with nature," he says. He reached the top of the bluff and scanned below for Jones. Nothing.

Then he inched down the slope toward Jones' "honey hole" — the site of the most intense digging. A tedious half-hour later, he was standing smack in the middle of it. All was quiet for several moments. Then he heard the thrashing of leaves.

Donaldson peered over his left shoulder and froze. A mere twenty feet away, Leslie Jones had stopped in his tracks. He was gripping a hand shovel and staring at Donaldson's neck. The officer assumed his cover was blown and prepared to show his badge. But Jones only blinked, looked past him and trudged off to dig someplace else. The camouflage had worked. "It was a heart-pounding experience," Donaldson recalls.

Geoff Donaldson and other agents at the federal and state levels spent nearly a year chasing down artifact thief Leslie Jones.

He shot enough incriminating video of Jones to secure a search warrant. When federal and state agents raided Jones' residence the next day, they discovered thousands of artifacts stored in old ammunition boxes, coolers and paint buckets.

Archaeologists later determined that about 900 artifacts came from the refuge. A third of these were stone tools left by Native Americans that no human hands had likely touched since about 1,000 BC, or earlier, the scientists reported.

But authorities also seized an additional 12,000 Indian artifacts of uncertain origin. Among these were needles and hooks made from animal bone, clay figurines, pottery shards and something more unsettling: fragments of human skulls, femurs, jaws, and teeth.

"It was particularly disturbing that there was no hesitation picking up human remains," says Tim Santel, a Fish and Wildlife special agent.

Jones confessed to making money off the stolen artifacts by selling them to collectors. "He may have gotten spear points worth hundreds of dollars," suggests Mark Wagner, a Southern Illinois University Carbondale archaeologist who evaluated the seized items. "We don't know. They've all disappeared into this dealer network."

In his illegal hunt for artifacts, Leslie Jones, 50, of Creal Springs, Illinois, tore up enough federal soil to fill a semitrailer.

Leslie Jones was a familiar face to local law enforcement, having been arrested twice for growing marijuana on someone else's land. "I assume he was selling it," says Sheriff Elry Faulkner. That he was mixed up in the illicit trade for both artifacts and drugs was no isolated incident.

Folks have been picking around for arrowheads throughout the Midwest for generations. But now, archaeologists report that a nefarious breed of looter is stripping history wholesale from public and private soil. The worst ones are essentially grave robbers who come armed, often in the dark of night, to plunder Native American burial grounds. Some hawk the artifacts on eBay or other sites. Others use them as currency for drugs.

Deep in the Ozark Mountains, where authorities say the methamphetamine epidemic is again gaining steam, addicts known as "twiggers" (tweakers who dig) have been mining rock shelters and caves for anything of value — possibly even skeletal remains. The weird nexus between looting and meth has been noted by experts for several years, especially in the Pacific Northwest. Today, these shady characters are leaving their footprints in America's heartland.

"What's really frustrating is that archaeological sites are nonrenewable," says Neal Lopinot, a Missouri State University archaeologist. "Once they're destroyed, that's it. They're gone."

The bluff line running south from Cahokia Mounds to Dupo, Illinois, is "crawling" with archaeological sites, observes Julie Holt, who chairs the anthropology department at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. "You can't put a shovel in the ground without hitting something," she says.

Extensive looting of an archaeological site.

In the 1800s digging into Indian burials was something families did on Sunday outings. At the time, it was widely believed that the earthwork mounds along the Mississippi and eastward had been built by an advanced race that was squeezed out by the more primitive Native Americans.

As a result, if you plucked an intriguing item from a mound, you'd probably have no qualms about taking it home to display on the mantel, says Iowa-based archaeological researcher Bob Palmer.

"In some parts of the country people still find mound-digging to be acceptable," Palmer notes. Last fall, roughly 60 miles downriver from St. Louis, a landowner reported the damage to the burial mound on his property, prompting Dawn Cobb of the Illinois historic preservation office to drive down to investigate.

"There was this huge, gaping hole with human remains scattered around," Cobb remembers. Illinois, like Missouri and Arkansas, has a law protecting unmarked graves. If someone gets an owner's permission, they can dig on private property. However, if they hit bone, they must stop. That law clearly failed to deter anyone in this case.

"We had no leads," Cobb says. "The hole was at least a year old. There's nothing the landowner can do from a legal standpoint."

South of the bootheel, on the Arkansas side of the Central Mississippi Valley, Terry Melton feels that frustration. The 42-year-old chicken farmer has been running looters off his family's land in the Strawberry and Black river bottoms for at least a decade. None has been convicted. On one occasion, he felt threatened enough by a trio of them to brandish an AK-47.

"There's got to be something down here worth selling, otherwise the idiots wouldn't keep coming back," Melton says, bouncing his pickup truck over a potholed dirt road as he heads toward a remote soybean field surrounding two small burial mounds.

The Meltons have been farming this flat expanse for at least a century. Humans first occupied it 10,000 years ago, according to radiocarbon dating of artifacts. Scientists have identified at least 40 ancient human skeletons in this area, where looters have struck three times since last October.

Juliet Morrow of the Arkansas Archaeological Survey began a meticulous excavation of one of the mounds in June 2009. "It's really depressing," she says. With a furrowed brow, she points out bone fragments and evidence of haphazard digging. The site is important, she says, because nothing is known about the Archaic period (8,000 BC to 1,000 BC) in Arkansas.

Melton says he's found so much trash over the years that he knows which brand of cigarettes and beer the trespassers like most (Marlboro Lights and Busch). He once even found a sock that someone used to wipe his butt.

Other clues are more subtle. The reason that dozens of small holes dot the soil, Morrow notes, is that looters slide fishing rods and old radio antennas deep into the ground to feel for something hard. Sometimes, they'll paint their shovels white to make them easier to see in the dark. You can tell they come at night, she adds, because they inadvertently leave behind perfect spear points, some 4,000 years old.

She can't say how much one of those might be worth to a looter. "Professional archaeologists do not appraise anything," she explains. "It's priceless; you can't put a dollar value on it."

The major prize for looters in this area used to be decorated ceramic pots dating back to the time of first European contact 500 years ago. But whole vessels are fairly rare now, and on these northeast Arkansan mounds, only shards remain.

Terry Melton's cousin, Jamie Nunnally, has parked his truck and joined the group. Clad in camouflage overalls, he says he once fired shots in the air to scare looters off his nearby field. "We'll probably never get it stopped," he says. "I quit calling the law."

Both cousins remember the wild nighttime chase of June 13, 2005. They caught two thieves leaving the mound around 12:30 a.m. and pursued them at high speeds through the bottoms. The perpetrators not only dropped their bag of stolen artifacts, but they also jumped a small bridge, lost their muffler and ditched their pickup, leaving a shovel inside. The sheriff's deputies from two different counties showed up. No convictions resulted.

Melton complains that the judge won't discipline the looters, even though it's always the same crowd. Nunnally claims these individuals have also been picked up by the sheriff on drug-related charges. He's convinced they sell artifacts to buy dope.

The situation makes Morrow furious. "Maybe the judge or prosecuting attorneys consider this a petty crime," she says, exasperated. "But it's a felony."

A deputy did recently come out and collect evidence, she notes. But that only happened because the sheriff's office was pressured by Carrie Wilson, a member of the Quapaw Tribe of Oklahoma, which claims the area as ancestral territory.

"I can be very persistent," Wilson says later in a phone interview. "But Julie needs to be careful. I need to be careful. There would be people very glad to see us go away. You have to understand, there is a contingent that's dangerous. And sometimes, you're not dealing with somebody with a full deck."

After the scientists leave, Melton and Nunnally stroll through the field, searching for arrowheads. They regularly plow through the mound sites to plant crops. For Melton, that's not the same as digging into a grave. Farming activities are exempt under the burial protection law, he points out.

Back in his pickup, climbing out of the bottoms toward the nearest town, Melton admits, "I love history, and I'd love to dig. But I won't, out of the simple reason that there are dead people down there. It's about respect. Even if they're 4,000 years old, it's still a person."

Farmers in Missouri's Franklin and Jefferson counties have been bristling lately, says Joe Harl of the Archaeological Research Center in St. Louis. Here, where the Ozark Mountains begin to roll west and south, he hears more and more landowners complaining of unwelcome surface collectors — and sometimes diggers — on their property.

"Many have said they're going to get guns," Harl reports. "It's worse than the [illegal] deer hunters."

The problem is not confined to private land. Mark Twain National Forest covers approximately 1.5 million acres of Missouri, most of it in the state's southeastern quarter. Heritage program manager Keri Hicks says Mark Twain has the most caves in the national forest system, and a majority "have been looted into oblivion" since about the 1950s.

These days, an e-mail will trickle in every couple of months from a forest employee who's discovered a hole, shovel or screen, says Hicks. When someone checks on it, they might find that the disturbance is a couple years old or more.

"We don't have enough law enforcement to be effective with trying to protect or monitor it," Hicks says.

Archaeologist James Halpern says he and another employee have been assigned to 515,000 acres in the southwestern portion of the forest. "It's pretty hard to check everything," says Halpern. "There are tons of sites and places on the forest I've never even heard of, let alone been to."

On the Ozark National Scenic Riverways, where 135 miles of the Jacks Fork and Current rivers are designated federal property, authorities write about five citations per year for pilfering arrowheads, says park archaeologist James Price. Each carries a $225 fine.

There was one major case there in the last decade, says Jodi Towery, a federal law enforcer on the Riverways. Looters wearing headlamps came cruising in at night on ATVs. They tore two feet down into a 20-by-30-foot plot. Towery caught them on camera but couldn't positively ID them. When a mushroom hunter stole one of her cameras, word spread that the site was under surveillance — and the digging ceased.

This particular case taught her one thing: "Some of the people who collect artifacts are also known to do drugs. It's kind of the same crowd."

Sergeant Kevin Glaser of the Southeast Missouri Drug Task Force has also noticed that connection. The number of meth-lab incidents has tripled from 2008 to 2009 in the ten counties under his supervision, he says. And he's noticed something odd: "We've gone into meth houses, and we'll literally find tubs of arrowheads."

Larry Keen, the supervisor of the Southwest Missouri Drug Task Force, also reports that he often finds artifacts during meth busts. Keen says "I think whenever they get high, they've got to do something, so they wander around and get arrowheads and rocks."

There's probably more to it than that, says Richard Rawson, a professor at UCLA's School of Medicine. For 35 years he has studied addiction, with an emphasis on methamphetamines. He says meth users can stay up for days, focusing intensely on a redundant task until they collapse from fatigue.

Rawson says he has not heard of any link between meth users and arrowhead hunting, but, he reasons, "Somewhere in the background of their thinking, there's some motive for getting these things. They're not out there collecting leaves."

Special agent Robert Still recalls catching a woman stealing artifacts from the Buffalo National River in northwest Arkansas. She grew so agitated that she pulled out a revolver and a large knife. "I had to disarm her," says Still. Then there was the looter who came lunging at him with a jagged-edged garden tool. "We've had officers shot over this type of stuff."

If theft here is more dramatic, so is the scenery. The flinty blue hills arcing across the horizon — known as the Boston Mountains — are the highest on the Ozark Plateau. Steep slopes of cedar, hardwood, and pine drop down into streams lined by limestone bluffs. Tucked back into the hillsides are hundreds of rock shelters and caves, all of them rife with history — and vulnerable to plunder.

"Industrial-strength looters" have been invading the Buffalo River for several years, says federal archaeologist Caven Clark. He's worked at numerous parks in the western United States, including the Ozark National Scenic Riverways. Southeastern Missouri has a problem, he adds, but not like here. "When I got here, what I found was more looting than I'd ever seen before." Much if it, he says, is linked to drugs.

Of the 350 caves and rock shelters in and around the Buffalo, more than 95 percent of them have been worked over, Clark estimates. In the last three years, he says, 22 serious cases were reported, some of which went to federal court where the pillagers were prosecuted under the federal Archaeological Resources Protection Act. Passed in 1979, the act prohibits looting on federal property.

Crooks target the sheltered sites because humans have huddled in them for millenniums and artifacts have accumulated. Compared to the wet caves of the eastern Ozarks, the sites here are relatively dry, which has helped preserve the bark fiber sandals, fabrics, and cordage. "Those things would fetch an unbelievable price," Clark says, but they are very rare.

The serious thieves wear camouflage and burrow ferociously into the ground. "I've seen some holes you could probably drop a Volkswagen into," says Clark, adding that they also leave plenty of trash. "We joke that Mountain Dew might as well be probable cause."

Special agent Still estimates that 70 percent of the archaeological crimes he's worked have some drug connection. Caven Clark has seen the same correlation. "Bad boys are bad boys," he says.

What complicates investigations, he continues, is that the artifacts are often used as currency and bartered for drugs. Looters know, for example, that a nice Dalton point (8,500 BC to 7,900 BC) might be sold on the Internet for a couple hundred dollars or more, while a more generic point might get $10 to $40 from a collector.

"If you're in a bluff shelter all day," Clark says, "you're all pumped up on drugs, and you find six points you can turn into $20 each — there's money to be made."

Outside federal property in this part of the state, "a new wave of looting has been seen in epidemic proportions" over the last ten years, according to Jerry Hilliard, assistant station archaeologist at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville. He fields eight to ten calls a year from a landowner or sheriff's deputy about such crime. "And that's the tip of the iceberg," he says, "because university people are sometimes the last people to get called."

Landowners can't report looting if they're not aware of it, according to Arkansas state archaeologist Dr. Ann Early. But even if they're aware of illicit digging, she adds, they might still keep mum to avoid unwanted attention. "A lot of digging may be going on in the counties, and the sheriffs may know nothing about it," says Early.

Hilliard is alarmed by the scale of the thievery. He says backhoes and dump trucks have been used to secretly haul huge amounts of unsifted soil away from sites. In 2003 a group in Madison County rigged a pump from a stream to a power-sprayer then blasted the inside of a nearby cave to uncover valuable items.

More recently, in Carroll County, another gang fired up a generator and ran lights into a cave. There, they cooked crank and dug several trenches five feet deep in search of ancient objects. Authorities on the scene later collected scattered human leg bones.

The group even tried to sell a human skull at a flea market, Hilliard says. "I think there is a weird underworld of selling, buying and trading of human skeletal material because I've heard these kinds of stories over the years," Hilliard says. "I'm not sure I'd want to get into that world.

Special agent Still believes there is a black market for human remains, though he's had no direct contact with it in the Midwest. After interrogating numerous grave robbers, he's noticed that "typically human remains still tend to give people the heebie-jeebies." They might use a human bone as a poker for their campfire or play with them and bat them around, he says, but generally, they leave the bones onsite.

If you stumble across ancient remains on federal property and then fail to report them, secretly remove them or try to sell them, you're guilty of violating the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act enacted by Congress in 1990. Anti-looting laws have not been warmly received in the deep Ozarks, where, jokes Clark, "digging is a custom among our people."

Hilliard agrees that quirks of highland culture play a role at the state level, too. "Government intervention has always been something that rural folks in the Ozarks have been very skeptical of," he says. "They don't want to be told what they can or can't do on their land."

Agent Still remembers how one man guilty of looting informed him in 2007 that only a prison term could stop him from digging. Sure enough, during the sentencing process, he was caught stealing in the exact area of his original offense.

"It's an addiction," Still says.

The artifact collector show held annually in Collinsville, Illinois, is one of the largest in the country. Before this year's [2010] event, on March 20 and 21, organizer Floyd Ritter said he'd be welcoming 3,000 visitors from across the nation. But anybody trying to hawk items unearthed from burial grounds, he says, was banned.

Asked how he could tell if an artifact was robbed, Ritter responds, "There's no way to tell."

Many archaeologists distinguish between good and bad collectors. The good ones, they say, display a good-natured curiosity about an arrowhead. The bad ones disregard the law and the artifact's history and care only about finding the highest bidder. They amass their inventories from low-level looters.

The finest specimens find their way to major dealers, who in turn sell them overseas, mostly to the Japanese, says Larry Zimmerman, an anthropology professor at Indiana and Purdue universities. "On the high-end stuff," he says, "Americans have been pretty much the middleman."

Zimmerman says collectors' shows, such as the one at Collinsville, are often "an archaeologist's nightmare." But eBay also worries him. Five years ago, as chair of the Society for American Archaeology's ethics committee, he lobbied the auction site to at least concede that the online antiquities trade is keeping looters in business.

"They basically said, 'Thank you very much for your concern,'" remembers Zimmerman. "They weren't very helpful." But he does point out that eBay will shut down any auction of human remains or artifacts known to be stolen.

"The problem is that eBay is so big, it's unmanageable," Zimmerman says. "Even if they had ten eBay cops, they couldn't control the antiquities trade."

Leslie Jones was sentenced January 25 in the Southern District of Illinois for his crimes at Cypress Creek National Wildlife Refuge. Archaeologists calculated that he had churned up enough soil to fill a semitrailer, (details below).

"That's going to haunt him for the rest of his life," says Geoff Donaldson.

Dr. Julie Holt of SIUE was not as impressed. "The judge gave that guy a slap on the wrist," she complains. "Do you think if he dug up your grandma, he'd get 30 days? No. He'd be in prison for a long time with psychological testing. But somehow, it's OK if it's a Native American burial."

Donaldson says the origin of the skeletal material seized from Jones' residence is still under investigation. The offender declined to comment for this story.

Unlike Jones, most people sentenced for Archaeological Resources Protection Act violations don't end up in prison. In Bob Palmer's analysis of federal prosecutions from 1996 to 2005, he determined that 83 looters were found guilty. Of these, less than a fourth of them did any time and the ones who did serve no more than a year.

Last June federal agents swooped into southern Utah and arrested two dozen people suspected of playing a role in a network of illicit Indian artifact trading. (Curiously, two suspects and one informant have since committed suicide.) Announcing the raid, Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar hailed a "new chapter" for protecting such items. The time of the U.S. government "simply looking the other way," he said, "is over."

Meanwhile, Native Americans like Carrie Wilson look with anxiety toward the future. "Somebody's looting a site every day, whether a rock shelter or some other place," says Wilson, who consults for various Native American tribes and claims Quapaw, Peoria, and Eastern Shawnee heritage.

"If they're not looting, agriculture is destroying our sites in such numbers that in a few years, there won't be sites left."

SOUTHERN ILLINOIS DISTRICT COURT VS. MR. LESLIE JONES

In January 2007, Mr. Leslie Jones was observed by Fish & Wildlife Service Refuge Officers digging and removing these artifacts from an archeological site on the Refuge. The site, as it was later determined, minimally dates to the Middle to Late Archaic to Middle Woodland periods (6000 BC to 400 AD). It is suggested that, based on the artifacts found, Indians used this site for stone tool production, cooking, and other domestic activities.

In late January of 2007, law enforcement officers and special agents from the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, U.S. Forest Service, Illinois Department of Natural Resources, and Johnson County Sheriff’s Office seized 13,232 artifacts from Jones’ residence during the execution of a federal search warrant. These artifacts included pottery, clay figurines, tools, and over 200 pieces of human skeletal material. Jones later admitted living off the artifacts he collected and sold. 

Seized Indian artifacts from Leslie Jones residence.

“The damage caused by Leslie Jones can’t be measured in simple dollars,” said Tim Santel, Resident Agent-in-Charge for the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service (Indiana, Illinois, Missouri). “These sites give us an unprecedented glimpse into the past. He has done devastating harm to the site, as many of these artifacts are lost forever, denying the American public much in the way of understanding past human existence.”

Staff from the Shawnee National Forest and Southern Illinois University-Carbondale assessed the estimated value of the damage to the site at more than $150,000.  

“Archeological sites are similar to a museum,” said Mark Wagner, Staff Archaeologist, Center for Archaeological Investigations at Southern Illinois University – Carbondale. “We wouldn't tolerate someone going into a museum and removing an object because they felt like it. These items don’t belong to archeologists, they were stolen from the American public.”

According to Mary McCorvie, Forest Archaeologist at Shawnee National Forest, public awareness and interest play a role in combating and preventing similar crimes.

“In Southern Illinois, we have a rich history of human occupation for 12-14 thousand years,” said McCorvie. Taking these pieces destroys critical pieces of our historical puzzle. It's important the public know how important and fragile these links to the past are, and the role they can play in combating this.

We've found that the public's interest in preservation is critical to reducing vandalism. People are aware of a number of sites like this that contain significant cultural resources, and we'd love them to both refrains from taking found artifacts, and report suspected incidences of vandalism or theft.”

Under the Archaeological Resources Protection Act, it is a felony to disturb, alter, remove or damage archaeological sites and objects that are over 100 years old on Federal lands. Archaeological sites and artifacts are also protected by 36 Code of Federal Regulations, which prohibits digging in, excavating, disturbing, injuring, destroying, or in any way damaging prehistoric, historic, or archaeological resources, structure, site, artifact, property; or removing said items. Persons found guilty of offenses against the Archaeological Resources Protection Act could be punished by not more than two years in prison and not more than $250,000.00 for the first offense. 

On January 20, 2010, Leslie Jones, (then 50), of Creal Springs, Illinois, was sentenced to 30 days in a federal prison, 500 hours community service [ditch digging (he is experienced)], five years of probation, and to pay $150,326.06 in restitution to Cypress Creek National Wildlife Refuge, for excavating, collecting, and transporting illegally taken archaeological resources from a prehistoric Indian site on the southern Illinois refuge. In his plea agreement, signed October 2009, Jones admitted selling the articles to interested collectors to supplement his income. Jones's case was prosecuted by the U.S. Attorney’s office for the Southern District of Illinois.

Compiled by Dr.Neil Gale, Ph.D. 

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Help preserve our history by leaving archaeological sites and artifacts undisturbed and reporting any looters or evidence of looting activity that you see.

The mission of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is to work with others to conserve, protect and enhance fish, wildlife, plants, and their habitats for the continuing benefit of the American people.

---Department of the Interior, U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service.