Indiana

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Indiana Dunes National Park

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100 years ago, Alice Gray chose to live in the dunes above for ten years, camping out, swimming nude, and eschewing the working life in Chicago, visible across the lake. She became known as ‘Diana of the Dunes’, and more than anyone else is responsible for the park. She protested the removal of the huge sand dunes for glass, industry and fill. She urged that the dunes be preserved in media interviews and at a speech to the Prairie Club.

“Besides its nearness to Chicago and its beauty, its spiritual power,
there is between the Dune Country and the city a more than sentimental bond—a family tie.
To see the Dunes destroyed would be for Chicago the sacrilegious sin which is not forgiven.”

Alice Mabel Gray, aka Diana of the Dunes, in 1917

The park comprises several sections, including a Heron Rookery, an Ice Age Bog, seven named beaches and a lake, besides the dunes themselves. There’s an eponymous state park within the bounds of the site. The ranger suggested that the 1 mile Dune Succession Trail which includes Diana’s Dunes above is the best in the park, but the attached 1 mile West Beach Loop Trail to Long Lake is worth taking too to see more birds. I saw well over a dozen species of birds, including the American Bittern, and there were turtles and evidence of beavers as well.

Unfortunately, sections of shoreline within the park are also taken by steel mills, power plants, train stations, and development. The hum of cars is constant and passing trains drown out the birdsong. A local dog-walker explained how many nests have been destroyed and how developers always seem to evade environmental restrictions. Once gone, these homes for wildlife will never return, given the fragile ecosystems and manmade pollution. Saving species means reserving more wetlands and restricting development, but everywhere I go, most folks seem more concerned with their lawns than the Climate Crisis.

Lincoln Boyhood National Memorial

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When Lincoln’s father left Abe’s birthplace in search of a new home that wouldn’t be stolen, he took the family here, deep into the forest to make their new home from scratch. The park has a living historical farm (above) with crops, chickens and sheep that does a good job of showing life in the early 1800’s, when Abe lived here from age 7 to 21. Much emphasis is placed on the log cabins, to show Lincoln’s humble roots. The visitor center film explains the loss of his closest family members, mostly buried here. There is a trail with stones commemorating Lincoln’s lifetime milestones.

But for me, it is the initial experience that Lincoln had that defines him. His family had literally arrived at the end of the road, being “the poorest people”, and his father must have said, ‘let’s keep going, we’ll make our own road from here’. And they did. Lincoln became a log splitter in boyhood, because the first step at the end of that road was to chop down trees to make a path.

Yes, he was poor and hard-working. But more importantly, Lincoln was a path-making thinker. Unlike formally educated people who are provided answers and common ways of thinking, Lincoln had precious few educational resources available to him, requiring him to be a self-starting, inventive thinker, to use common sense and observation to extrapolate answers to a broad range of questions he had. His mother, who had taught his father how to read, died, and his step mother brought three children with her and about as many books. Faced with a life of endless labor without security that his father had endured and given him, Lincoln viewed knowledge as his pathway into a bigger and broader world.

One of his formative experiences on an early journey was when he got sued for ferrying folks out to catch passing steamboats. The ferry operator said that he was encroaching on their business without a license. Lincoln, arguing his own case in court, said that he wasn’t carrying people all the way across the river, just halfway. And he won.

Another was when he traveled down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers to Natchez, where he saw slaves auctioned. His family was against slavery, but seeing the cruelty up close made a powerful impression on him. He would spend the rest of his life convincing people to abolish slavery.

Where other people in his time may have been educated to believe that slavery was normal and even justifiable, Lincoln was used to forming his own thoughts. Arguing against those who thought slavery normal, he noted that none of them are willing to volunteer for it themselves. He argued to those who believe that slavery is justified by skin shade, intellect or self-interest, that they should logically become the slaves of anyone lighter in color, smarter or greedier than they are. His arguments persuaded people.

The times were leading to an inevitable bloody conflict to choose slavery or Democracy, and Lincoln would be the one to find the path forward.

George Rogers Clark National Historical Park

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Someone in Hollywood needs to tell this story, because I don’t think enough Americans know about the older brother of William Clark (of the Lewis & Clark Expedition) or how 150 men took the territory that became Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. It’s one of my favorites.

The Revolutionary War in this area between the northern Mississippi and Ohio rivers was sort of a rematch of the French & Indian War. The French wanted revenge against the British, so they sided with the American colonists. The British were paying Native American mercenaries to fight for them, even though the natives were on the French side before. And the American colonists had antagonized the natives by taking their lands.

Clark was 19 when he started surveying the territory west of Virginia and joined the militia just before the war started in Concord, Massachusetts. Although young, he knew the area, the tribes, the conflicts and he showed initiative. He negotiated a territorial dispute with Governor Patrick Henry, representing settlers like Daniel Boone. He led Kentucky militia to defend settlements against British-funded native raids. So when the fighting broke out, he presented a bold plan to seize three British outposts in what’s now southern Illinois. Governor Henry approved the plan, gave him a promotion, but little else.

For the rest of the story, you have to watch the park film, or read a book or wait for the Hollywood blockbuster. But let me just say it involves many French settlers who help Clark, an Italian merchant who tells Clark when the British are vulnerable, Native Americans who decide to stay out of the conflict, a brutal winter march through floods, Kentucky sharpshooters, much military deception, and a desperate pre-emptive strike against a superior defensive force.

Whatever Clark did in the rest of his life to die an impoverished alcoholic, should not take away from what he accomplished at age 26: an incredible underdog victory by 150 men, whom Clark convinced to fight and trained, resulting in five states ceded by Britain to the US. (I had neither graduated from college nor gotten my drivers license by age 26.)