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Figure 1. Like the salt lick nearby, the lane behind
Dog Walk Hill leads to nowhere, as if suspended in time. The little
house it served was eventually lost to mine reclamation.
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From the newlywed’s shack, Half Moon Lick was about a mile east-southeast….as
the crow flies, that is. That was the distance from the old salt lick below
Equality to where the couple and their newborn spent his first two years.
Nestled in the woods not far from Saline River, their little cottage set
down a lane on the back of Dog Walk Hill. In the backyard, a tailings pile
from an old strip cut loomed high above the house like it might someday swallow
it. The woods were still wild back there on the Saline-Gallatin County line.
In the lush stands of oaks and hickories, owls and whip-poor-wills mourned
the nights then roosted at dawn, to rest and serenade the sleeping again.
Coyotes quarreled and cried at the stars, when new moons wouldn’t shine.
Back there the back roads had no names and come spring, often disappeared
in the Saline’s backwater. His only recollection of the place was falling
in the steep, cinder strewn driveway and crying like the two-year-old toddler
he’d grown to be.
South and east they had settled. A farm-boy groom had taken his city-girl
bride to live in the woods near the Saline at the southeast corner of Big
Simon’s farm. The farm was in the Township of Cottage, southeast part,
which incidentally lies at the southeast corner of Saline County of southeastern
Illinois. The young city bride could handle three years of the backwoods
life before she packed up the toddler and skedaddled back to Harrisburg.
Daddy soon went too…lock, stock and barrel. The following years weren’t
pretty, but through the example of his daddy’s dogged work ethic and
staunch Christian values, the boy would pull through.
Working the farm as a teenager, Half Moon Lick was the farthest thing from
his mind. Even though it was just over his shoulder, it’d be a while
till he wrapped his head around it. One day while discing the black, brick
scattered mound across the road from the abandoned love shack, he unearthed
a rusty iron kettle that looked to be a thirty galloner. Turns out it was
a nineteenth century relic from the salt industry that later made the local
paper’s front page - Grandpa Simon alongside the kettle….big
stuff back then! Rock hard evidence that pioneer entrepreneurs had rendered
salt from Half Moon’s water right there on grandpa’s black mound!
He became aware of the lick then and how salt was produced in the early
days. Duffy peoples from the Little Wabash had worked it in their time and
the French as early as 1735. Native Americans finally ceded it to the United
States government in 1803 along about the time Lewis and Clark were steering
the Corps of Discovery down the Ohio. Isaac White, a Virginian, was commissioned
in 1811 by his friend, Northwest Territory Governor Henry Harrison, to oversee
the lick, but that same year he ran off to fight Tecumseh at the Battle of
Tippecanoe. White died fighting Tecumseh’s brother…believe they
called him The Prophet! Tecumseh died too a few months later in a battle
across Lake Erie. (1997, Sugden) Darn shame too… two good ole boys
gone, fighting for what they believed in. But that’s a story for another
day. Enough of the history of Half Moon Lick. How about a peek through the
window of pre-history. Here’s a short version of how he sees it.
Half Moon Lick
When European settlers began pushing across the Ohio River around 1800, into
what would eventually become Southeastern Illinois, the virgin landscape
was essentially as pristine as it had been for thousands of years. The
newcomers had heard that within this promising new frontier were “briny” springs,
springs whose waters were brackish with salt that might someday offer them
a decent living. The phenomenon had provided subsistence for the Indians
and French, and was now producing salt for contractors leasing the springs
from the United States government. It’s likely that Paleo hunters
first discovered the salt springs of the lower Saline River in Gallatin
County, Illinois as far back as thirteen thousand years ago.(2002, Tankersley)
The spring attracted a diversity of creatures and early man knew it. Fauna
trails worn deep from repetitive pilgrimages and continuous traffic surely
radiated from the site, flagging the attention of Paleo Indians as to game-harvesting
possibilities(1877, Sellers). Eventually, in the Late Woodland Period (750
A.D.), settling groups from the Duffy Complex(1967, Winters) became proficient
at extracting the water’s salt and vigorously defended the spring
and it’s coveted white currency.
Upon arriving in the new frontier, the Euro settlers knew that just off
the northern bank of Saline River, near what is now the historic village
of Equality, a salt industry existed. The Indians had called it ...
Read the complete "Half Moon Lick: A Prehistoric Marvel on Southeastern
Illinois’ Lower Saline River" column
in the Central States Archaeological Societies 2022
April Journal which can be purchased on-line after March 2022
