Kindness of an ‘Indian princess’ keeps her name alive
In the closing month of 2021 the Will County Historical Museum began sharing a series of daily social media posts highlighting items from its collection.
They called it the “31 Days of Will County,” and it was a neat way to highlight seldom-seen items, such as a photograph of the first soldier from the county to be killed in World War I and landgrant documents for the I&M Canal signed by Presidents James Polk, Millard Fillmore and Franklin Pierce.
The first item shared was a 1974 newspaper account of a joint effort between historical societies in Will County and Jackson County in southern Illinois to erect a bronze historical marker honoring Conrad Will, an early industrialist and state legislator who established businesses in
Jackson County and is the namesake of Will County.
The marker was placed near the site of Brownsville, a ghost town a few miles outside of Murphysboro, Illinois, that was once the Jackson County seat. Like many metal markers, the Conrad Will monument has since disappeared, though a new one was rededicated in 2016 on the lawn of the Jackson County Courthouse in Murphysboro.
A few weeks after that post I asked Sandy Vasko, the Will County Historical Museum’s executive director, about the monument and if they’d ever heard of any efforts to locate the original marker.
Her answer surprised me. “Conrad Will was a known slave owner,” she said. “We’re not going to push really hard to find that monument.”
Among the businesses in southern Illinois established by Will County’s namesake were salt mines.
“He couldn’t find anyone to work there because that’s a crappy job,” Vasko said.
So Will imported enslaved people from Kentucky to unearth salt.
“And he never stepped foot in Will County,” Vasko said. “He died before Will County was
created.”
So why was his name chosen when a new county was formed in 1836 out of Cook and Iroquois counties, a year after he died?
“I’ve read he was a nice, fun-loving guy who was always smiling and had a joke for every occasion, and everyone liked him,” Vasko said. “That’s as much thought as the whole thing had.
“It’s not such an auspicious beginning, is it?”
These days “nobody knows who this guy is,” she said, and that’s OK with her. When the new Will County courthouse came into service, a plaque commemorating Conrad Will was removed from the side of the old building.
Besides lauding someone who didn’t deserve it, the monument contained misinformation and exaggerations about Will’s contributions to Illinois.
The truth about Will, Vasko said, “is not such a great story.”
“Everyone likes a great, wonderful story about the pioneers — the wonderful people who found a new place,” Vasko said. “But it’s just not true.”
It’s nice to fill in the holes in the early history of our hometowns with pleasant stories and folkloric concepts.
The early 1800s in what would become the south suburbs are pockmarked with storybook images and pleasant tales of heroic deeds. Early histories written in the late 1800s of the area incorporate Indian princesses and rescue rides that evoke Paul Revere imagery.
One character from those early histories has both.
Gurdon Hubbard’s fingerprints are all over the south suburbs. A successful fur trapper when Illinois was still a French territory, Hubbard was unquestionably industrious. He turned his trapping success into a profitable trading concern, moving supplies between a network of trading posts from Chicago to Vincennes, Indiana, the regional seat of government in early times.
The path he blazed became known as “Hubbard’s Trail,” and he used it during an amazingly fast journey to recruit reinforcements when Chicago’s Fort Dearborn was threatened with attack.
After the northeastern Illinois wilderness had been tamed and its Indigenous people were removed, he was one of the first people to quarry limestone in Thornton and was among the Chicago city fathers who helped make the Illinois and Michigan
Canal a reality.
And he married an Indian princess. It was like a Disney movie.
That “princess,” Watchekee, eventually became the mispronounced namesake for Watseka, a city of about 5,000 people along Illinois Route 1 that’s the Iroquois County seat.
George Godfrey, “one of the many, many, many great-grandchildren of Watchekee” who has written several books about his ancestor, said he was in Watseka a while back to watch his daughter perform in a show choir event. He approached an older man and asked “What do you know about this Watchekee?”
“He actually put his nose in the air and said, ‘That’s Princess Watchekee,’
” Godfrey told scores of people Wednesday at the Homewood Historical Society. “Don’t ever take the ‘princess’ out of the people’s interpretation of Watchekee in the town of Watseka.”
Watchekee isn’t the only Indian princess to be enshrined in the name of an area town.
Monee owes its moniker to the mispronounced name of Marie LeFevre, a Potawatomi woman who married a notable fur trapper, Joseph Bailley, whose homestead in Porter County, Indiana, is an attraction in Indiana Dunes State Park.
Both LeFevre and Watchekee were said to be related to the famous Potawatomi chief Shabonna, a link that might have generated their princess status among late19th-century publicists.
But life for Watchekee was nothing like that of a princess, according to Godfrey. For one thing, she was promised as a wife to Hubbard at a very young age.
“One of the tendencies during that period was for traders to marry a young woman, which would help cement business relationships and family relationships,” he said. “It was said a Potawatomi leader wanted Hubbard to marry his daughter, but he thought she was ugly, and he said, ‘What about that little girl over there?’ It happened to be Watchekee, who was 10 at the time.”
Hubbard didn’t acknowledge his relationship with Watchekee until 50 years later, when he discussed their two-year marriage to a writer compiling a history of Iroquois County that was published in 1880.
After they split, Hubbard went on to pursue business exploits while Watchekee’s future included two more marriages, plus being “removed” from Illinois with her people several times at the behest of the government. She made her way back in each instance to northeast Illinois before finally settling with her third husband along the Kansas River.
In the 1870s, long after Indigenous people had been resettled west, city leaders in Middleport, Illinois, hatched the idea of renaming their town after erstwhile resident Watchekee.
But Godfrey said local lore in Watseka indicates that move was not so much because of her status as a “princess” but because of lasting memories of her kindness when she lived there, particularly during “the winter of the deep snow, which was 1832 or thereabouts.”
Godfrey wrote in his book “Watchekee (Overseer): Walking in Two Cultures” that his ancestor “eventually found a life of security and stability in Kansas,” though she moved one last time to Indian Territory in Oklahoma shortly before she died around 1873.
Few people call the old trade route between Chicago and Vincennes, Indiana, Hubbard’s Trail anymore. The bulk of it was renamed Dixie Highway in the 1920s, and parts subsequently became Illinois Route 1.
But it still goes through Watseka.