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Elgin museum uses $5K grant to help revamp LaSalle exhibit, set to reopen this month as new ‘Encounter’

A work two years in the making, the Elgin Public Museum will be unveiling the revamped version of its exhibit about the LaSalle Expedition, which those who put it together say now offers lessons in science as well as history.

Events are planned for April 9 and April 13.

“Now called ‘The Encounter,’ the exhibit is designed to be contemplative, as we show the good and the bad — the cultural exchanges that changed lives all over the world, but ultimately at a great cost to Native Peoples and the environment,” said museum Director Sharry Blazier.

The original focus of the exhibit was the 3,300-mile journey Frenchman René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de LaSalle and his party took from 1681 to 1682, making their way from Montreal along the St. Lawrence River to the Great Lakes, then down the continent’s interior rivers to the Mississippi River and the Gulf of Mexico.

With hundreds of new items on display, the exhibit now provides more context about how the expedition’s interactions with indigenous people impacted those people and Europeans and the environment, said Rich Gross.

Gross, a retired teacher and retired Elgin firefighter, has published papers about LaSalle and has been working as a volunteer on the revisions to the LaSalle exhibit.

LaSalle named the territory Louisiane after France’s King Louis XIV. He developed relationships and forged alliances with Native American tribes and wound up establishing forts in North America’s midsection.

“But a big reason LaSalle was here was for bison. The king had promised him a monopoly on the fur trade,” Gross said.

The European desire for the animal’s hide contributed to almost wiping out bison on the continent, Gross said. So did trading muskets with natives for fur pelts, as indigenous people also then hunted with guns.

Having guns, cloth and metal objects, including knives, axes, pots, pans and brass wire, changed the way of life for tribes, Gross said. That included how wars would be waged, not with bows and arrows, but guns and other European weaponry, upping the body count.

LaSalle and other Europeans also desired beaver pelts for making items such as wide brimmed hats. That decimated the beaver population, too, Gross said.

From 1976 to 1977, Elgin Larkin High School teacher Reid Lewis led a reenactment of the journey on a trip that included other local adults as well as Elgin area high school students, including Gross. Dubbed “LaSalle Expedition II,”  that journey was the inspiration for the original exhibit, which first opened around 2001, Blazier said.

The updated exhibit still features many items from the 1970s adventure, including a canoe, paddles and clothing participants wore during their trek.

“But the exhibit was always one that had unrealized educational potential. It somehow felt incomplete, lacking context for both general visitors and school field trip programs,” Blazier said.

So, using a $5,000 grant from the Florence B. and Cornelia A. Palmer Foundation, Blazier and others involved with the projects worked with Elgin School District U-46 to incorporate state mandated Native American history as well as science into the new look.

Blazier said that the reenactment itself will be the subject of “phase two” of the LaSalle Expedition project. That phase will be on display adjacent to the revamped exhibit room and should be open in a year or so, she said.

The reenactment also is the subject of a documentary, filmed in part at the museum, which will debut at an invitation-only preview of the revamped exhibit April 9. The exhibit opens to the general public April 13.

All told, the museum’s second floor will tell a contiguous story that isn’t particularly pretty, but more cautionary, Blazier said.

“As one leaves The Encounter exhibit — a cautionary tale in itself — the natural progression is through the lost tree coverage of Elgin since its inception, to our Ice Age landscape, to the many endangered species in this region today,” Blazier said. “While we don’t aim to specifically depress people, there’s something serious to contemplate here. Change may be inevitable, but going forward, can we do it in a way that doesn’t so horribly affect other human beings and the environment?”

Mike Danahey is a freelancer.