Neither the Illinois River nor the Sangamon is usually mentioned in the same breath with the Mississippi, the Columbia, the Colorado, or the Ohio. The Illinois meanders across the state–for some 420 miles–from the confluence of the Des Plaines and Kankakee rivers near Joliet to its rendezvous with the Mississippi near Alton. The Sangamon is one of the Illinois’ more significant tributaries, entering it from the east. It drains the once-grand prairie on which Champaign-Urbana, Bloomington, Decatur, and Springfield now stand.
While not great in themselves, then, these rivers were the scene of great events. Their stories are told here in unconventional books that combine history and fiction. Each book has a mood but no real theme, and each is about as organized as an attic storeroom. Readers who have spent a pleasant afternoon or two poking around attic storerooms, however, may think the clutter part of their charm.
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Gray’s way with an anecdote is almost cinematic. It isn’t hard to imagine Steamboat Elsie in a John Ford film, or Chief Black Hawk, or those wild boys from Clary’s Grove who “distracted themselves by rolling complaisant drunkards downhill in barrels.” Gray also had the knack for a phrase that used to mark the better class of newspaper writer. French governor Frontenac, he tells us, was “always zestfully on the make.” La Salle “boiled with principles.” The Iroquois were “artists in destruction.” As for the river itself, the Illinois “made its bed ages ago, and continues, dutifully, to lie in it.”
In Gray’s view, the Illinois River’s Indian past was as much farce as tragedy. So he dismissed the “orthodox” story of the death of the Ottawa chief Pontiac, who was reportedly ambushed after a debauch, as insufficiently uplifting. Gray offered instead an improved version in which the ambushed Pontiac is revealed as an impostor and the real chief done in by an Illinois chief named Kineboo. The murder thus acquires a political dimension, serving as a satisfactory provocation for the internecine war that concluded so melodramatically with the siege of Kineboo’s Illinois tribe by Pontiac’s allied tribes atop Starved Rock.
Fortunately, the reader doesn’t have to believe Masters to enjoy him. The Sangamon may be foolishly romantic, but it’s rich with personality and anecdote. Religion provided as much amusement in those days as it does today: A country church turned out one of its members for having publicly taken the temperance pledge–apparently he’d contravened some doctrine–at the same time it ousted another member for having been publicly drunk. “Whereupon,” relates Masters, “a tipsy wag arose in the church, and holding a bottle of whiskey, called out, ‘Brethering . . . I want to ask a question. It is this: How much of the critter does one have to drink in order to remain in full fellowship in this church?’”
Gray was not a novelist but a journalist who published novels. He spent most of his working life in Minnesota, but was literary editor of the Chicago Daily News and lectured in creative writing at the University of Chicago in the late 1940s. Unlike Masters, in 1940 Gray was at the beginning of his writing career; The Illinois was his first book, and probably his best.
Human life had not. The impulse toward prosperity, that mania for “improvement” that transformed the Sangamon wilderness, also destroyed it. Masters’s grandmother, he recalls, when she arrived in the Sangamon country was dismayed by this virgin land’s loneliness. “But when miles of corn began to wave their banners,” he writes, “and the land was diversified by houses and barns and divided by rail fences, the scene became beautiful.” And in some ways barren, as the forests were cleared for houses, farm fields bled topsoil into the rivers, and hunters wasted the game. You can’t have your cake and Eden too.
