The ordinary garments of the Indian men were a shirt reaching almost ,o the knees, a breechclout, and leggings which came up to the thigh and were fastened to the belt on either side. In earliest times all their clothing was made of leather, but by 1818 this material had been generally replaced sy trade cloth. The women wore a two-piece garment, short leggings to the knees, and moccasins; they also employed the customary Indian ornamentation of quills and beads. Both sexes wore the robe, Ind later the trade blanket. The men painted their faces in various ways, while the women painted very little or not at all.
The principal manufacturing operations of these tribes were tanning, weaving, and the making of pottery; although the last named industry had practically been given up by 18IS. The central Algonkin were not familiar with the loom, but they twisted a twine from the inner hark of the linden, and with this wove excellent bags of various sorts, which they used for a great variety of purposes. These were decorated by weaving in geometric designs and conventional representations of animals. They also made reed mats sewed with twine, which were used as coverings for floors, and as roofing for the winter houses. The pottery was of a rather inferior sort, burned in an open fire, or simply sundried, and decorated with a few incised lines. With the coming of the whites, this native ware was rapidly replaced by the trade kettle.
All the tribes living in Illinois used two types of houses, one for summer, the other for winter. The summer houses as described by Forsyth, were "built in the form of an oblong, a bench on each of the long sides about three feet high and four feet wide, parallel to each other, a door at each end, and a passage through the center of about six feet wide, some of those huts are fifty or sixty feet long and capable of lodging fifty or sixty persons.
Their winter lodges are made by driving long poles in the ground in two rows nearly at equal distances from each other, bending the tops so as to overlap, then covering them with mats made of a kind of rushes or flags. A bearskin generally serves for a door, which is suspended at the top and hangs down. When finished, it is not unlike an oven with the fire in the center and the smoke emits through the top." It is evident that the Indian had nothing that could be called a formal civil government. Most affairs were left to individual initiative; the love of freedom was one of the Indians' chief characteristics; and they suffered their personal liberty to be only slightly limited even by the authority of the chiefs and sachems.
In ISIS, the Indians retained but little of the independence and self sufficiency of their forefathers. Their agriculture was of a rude and primitive sort, and they had come to rely upon the white trader for a large number of articles which, once unknown, had become necessities of life; and these they secured in exchange for the returns of their hunts.
The Indians leave Illinois.—The first government land sales in Illinois took place in 1S14. Southern Illinois was first opened to settlement. Central and northern Illinois were opened soon after statehood was attained, and by 1833 all Indian tribes had ceded their Illinois lands to the United States and agreed to removal to lands west of the Mississippi. Thus in 160 years from the first appearance of the white man in Illinois, the land of the state had passed from the exclusive ownership of the Indians into the permanent possession of another race.