Page 15 - Always Virginia

Always Virginia 3

the Protestant British occupiers since the time of the first Queen
Elizabeth.
Because Tipperary is only 130 miles from Ireland’s sacred
burial cairn Newgrange that at 5000-years-old predates Stone-
henge and the Pyramids, the new colonist may have appreciated
the ancient burial mounds on the land he bought in the fertile
delta between the Mississippi and the Illinois rivers known as the
“Nile of North America.” Calhoun County as a peninsula becomes
virtually an island like Ireland when frequent flooding closes the
bridges and ferries isolating the residents. The first known white
men to contact the indigenous people were the explorers Father
Marquette and Louis Joliet who recorded landing in 1673 near
what would become Kampsville. They were followed in 1680 by
the French fur-trader and explorer Lasalle. Because trappers, moun-
tain men, and arrowhead collectors had been trafficking ever since
around this ancient Indian Territory, he may have learned from the
cracker-barrel tales of local migratory history and myth that his
was just the most recent generation to be living on the site of the
oldest civilization in North America—settled consistently for over
9,000 years by native peoples whose prehistoric aboriginal culture
and burial mounds would in the 1970s rise to fame worldwide as
the largest archeological dig in North America.
Settling into a forested Indian hunting ground of wilderness
and underbrush teeming with wolves and rattlesnakes and wild
turkey and deer, he would have learned from local lore that the first
white settler, an Acadian French trapper known only as O’Neal,
lived there from 1801 to his death in 1842. He would have known
that the peaceful local Illinois tribe was decimated by the Iroquois
around the time of the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, just as the
explorers Lewis and Clark barged by on their keelboat in 1804.
After the aggrieved tribe signed a piece of paper in 1816 giving
their land to the United States government, they were overcome
when the State of Illinois—founded in 1818 and named after
their tribe—renamed their homeland “Calhoun County” in 1825,