Sauk Trail

Sauk Trail. . This mural depicts various aspects of the Joliet area's Native American heritage. Prominently featuring a map of the Great Sauk (or Sak) Trail, which many tribes used to traverse Will County, it also shows a Potawatomi child, examples of how Indians drew sustenance from the land for food and shelter, and a mother and infant in forced flight from Illinois. The painting is rendered largely in earth tones - browns, greens, and ochres - to underscore Native American's crucial relationship with the land., Since the 1600's, many different Indian nations had made the Upper Illinois River region their home; first and foremost were the Illinois. After the Illinois departed from the area because of intertribal warfare and the general westward spread of European settlers, several other Algonquin-speaking peoples extensively utilized what is now Will County; most prominent were the Potawatomi and the associated Ottawa and Ojibwa. The Potawatomi, formerly of the Upper Great Lakes, was the last and largest tribe to inhabit the region. Many of these semi-sedentary Indians lived in small villages on lands adjacent to Hickory Creek near the Sauk Trail, primarily in what are now the Joliet and New Lenox Townships. Here they hunted, fished, farmed, gathered berries, and fashioned flints from the nearby hills. , The Sauk Trail was a major Midwestern Indian route, traversing the Illinois Basin. Perhaps originally made by wild game like buffalo, the trail was blazed by the Sauk on journeys from their village of Saukenuk (near Rock Island on the Mississippi River) to Fort Malden at Amherstburg, Ontario (near Detroit), where they received annual payments from the British Government. Today U.S. 30 follows much of the original trail. , Lead artist: Javier Chavira. Assistant artist: Ilario Silva. Mural sponsored by the City of Joliet. Plaque sponsored by the Joliet/Will County Center for Economic Development Foundation. Copyright Friends of Community Public Art 1996