Before French explorers entered the Illinois Valley or white settlers sowed crops and built homes here, the valley was populated by Native American Indian tribes. They recognized the conflux of the Illinois and Fox Rivers as an ideal trading center, and thousands settled in a grand village along what is now Dee Bennett Road between Ottawa and Utica.

These early residents relied on that great beast of the plains, the buffalo, as a source of food, clothing, medicine and other items necessary for their daily lives.

Armed with bows and arrows, the hunters wanted to make the most of their ammunition. They rounded up buffalo herds in canyons to make the animals easy targets. The ritual “buffalo run” has given the state park, Buffalo Rock, its name.

The magnificence of the buffalo and the drama of the hunt are captured superbly in the 2004 mural, “Ottawa’s Earliest Residents,” painted by Oregon artist Roger Cooke.

Above your head as you glance above the second-story windows, a quartet of wooly bison jostle each other in their rush to escape, seeming ready to stampede onto La Salle Street traffic! In the foreground, two hunters kneel and take aim, their sinewy arms drawing back the bowstrings and their eyes narrowing intensely as they focus on their targets.

In the distance, the tawny grass of an Illinois Valley bluff stretches to the blue-gray horizon and the Illinois River. Among the Illinois tribe, hunting expeditions generally were undertaken by individuals or small groups, but each summer most people left a village for communal bison hunts, according to Dr. Michael Wiant, director of Dickson Mounds Museum in Lewiston and an acknowledged expert in Native American history.

Upon finding a herd, runners would surround the bison and drive them toward the remainder of the hunting party. One French fur trader witnessed a communal hunt that yielded more than 1,200 bison.

After skinning and butchering the animals, women and girls would preserve the meat by placing it on wooden drying racks and smoking it with small fires placed on the ground below.

Written reports of bison date to the early French explorers. While traveling the Illinois rivers in the late 1600s, Pere Marquette, a Jesuit missionary, spoke of them with awe and respect. Modern day archaeological excavations have found 2,000 year old skeletal remains of the beasts at Native American sites, including traces at the Grand Village.

By the 1820s, bison had disappeared from the Illinois landscape, their herds hunted to extinction. The wholesale destruction of the bison on the Great Plains had only begun when the last of the bison disappeared in Illinois.

The people, the animals – even some of the terrain pictured in the mural -- have vanished from our local landscape, but have been vividly recreated by a masterful artist.