1. MIDDLE AMERICA - Fort Crevecoeur and Where I Began (January 15, 2019)
Jared Grabb “Prison Bars (Middle America Version)”
1A
It seems like every teenage kid hates their hometown. And when I grew up here, it felt like the cornfields surrounding our cookie cutter suburban housing were endless. Us kids were safe, but the nightlife was duller than dull. AND sooner or later, everyone was destined to work for Caterpillar Earthmoving Equipment. That’s certainly where my father worked, where my neighbor worked, where my best friend’s father worked, where the Sunday school teacher worked, and on and on. We might as well have been a company town.
I did well in school. I didn’t like it, but I got good grades. As long as I could draw comic book heroes in the margins and on the backs of test papers, I got by. But, I can’t say it made me the most popular kid. I couldn’t hit a baseball, and I never understood the rules of American football. I mean, I call it American football...
I didn’t go to parties. I barely talked. But as I said, I did well in school… honor roll all the way through.
Well, sometime around the middle of high school, I started to see my future. I’d go to college, become an engineer like my father, work long hours, wear suits to work, start a family, live in a two story house in a quiet neighborhood, and live my days on repeat.
But no, that wasn’t for me. I was an artist. Looking back now, this feels like arrogance. But then, it felt like hope.
Against the suggestion of my parents, I didn’t go to college for engineering. I didn’t go for their second suggestion of business. I went for ART, which is also known as “filling a big bag with money and setting it on fire.” That’s not to say I didn’t work hard, and that’s not to say I didn’t learn something. It is to say that it’s a tough degree to turn into a profitable livelihood.
By the time I graduated, my roots had gone too deep. Maybe it has to do with that saying that “hate is just another form of love.” The harder I pushed away, the further it tightened its grasp. I had begun seeing this town as part of my own identity. It no longer seemed escapable.
Although, I tried.
I played a little guitar and wrote some songs. The punk DIY community was thriving in the U.S. back in the late 1990s and early 2000s with resources like Maximum Rocknroll’s BYOFL. So, with a few friends, I hit the road.
Within a few months, we had seen much of the continental United States. We slept on dirty floors, drove through blizzards, and cuddled with flea covered kittens. I felt alive.
The well of experience seemed to be overflowing, and I was getting to share all of it with my closest friends. Strange and new adventures awaited each and every day for us young musicians as we made our way on the road.
But, in time I found that the cities that really resonated, the cities that truly felt filled with my brothers and sisters, were industrial towns like the place I was running from. Cities like Flint and Cincinnati, where the people were no strangers to hard work and labor disputes, felt like home.
And, at the end of every tour, there was a bed waiting for me back at my parents’ and a job serving fast food waiting back in town. Not all of my friends had that safety net, and adulthood caught up with all of us in time. In order to keep touring, band members started to get replaced, and the closeness of the pack started to dissolve.
It wasn’t until I had already been touring on and off for five years that I finally left this town for real, and that felt like a last resort. Adulthood had eventually caught us all. It seemed that the well had run dry.
Scouts Honor “I Lost Myself Even Before I Lost My Love”
1B
Artifacts recovered locally have dated human habitation back to sometime around 10,000 BC. When the first white men entered the region, leaving us with written records, the year was 1673 AD. At that time, the land was populated by the Illini of the Algonquin Nation. That is to say, the Illini were an alliance of tribes and that they spoke the Algonquin language. These local Illini tribes were the Peoria, Kaskaskia, Michigamea, Cahokia, and Tamaroa.
The first Europeans to come into contact with these native peoples were Father Jacques Marquette and Louis Joliet. Along with five other Frenchmen, they made peaceful contact with the Peoria tribe first along the Mississippi River, somewhere near present-day Keokuk, Iowa. The French were presented with a calumet (now commonly referred to as a peace pipe), which later saved their lives upon encountering a hostile tribe to the south, in present day Arkansas. The tribe was armed with Spanish guns, and as such, Marquette, Joliet, and their men retreated north, in fear of encountering the men who had provided these weapons. On their trip back north, the French turned off onto the Illinois river and were pleased to again encounter the Peoria tribe somewhere near where I now record.
Seven years later, the French returned under the leadership of Robert Rene Cavalier, Sieur de LaSalle (that is “Lord of LaSalle”) and his lieutenant, Henri de Tonti, otherwise known as Henri Iron Hand. The group had set out with some 30 men from Fort Frontenac in present-day Kingston, Ontario, Canada. The traveling was difficult, and the French often found themselves struggling to acquire sustenance. Upon passing a native village near present-day Starved Rock, the men chose to steal 40 bushels of corn to sustain themselves. The village was abandoned for the winter, as the custom was to hunt during the winter and then return to plant in the spring.
It was early-January when they guided their 8 canoes down the Illinois River. Upon rounding a bend, the French found themselves amidst Illini camps on both sides. The natives were startled, but LaSalle was luckily able to calm them with assurances that his men did not side with the feared Iroquois, whom LaSalle had actually camped with at Frontenac. During these assurances, LaSalle discussed his intentions of traveling further south on the river. In response, the Illini warned of grave dangers including hostile tribes, monsters, and serpents that would await them if they continued. During the following evening, six Frenchmen disserted to the north in fear.
Jared Grabb “Two Paths” first verse
1C
The remaining French camped for 10 days, negotiating a peace with the tribes that they often referred to as savages in their personal notes.
On the evening of January 15, 1680, after a thaw that allowed them to cross the river, the French began construction of a fort on a small hill on the east side of the river. Henri de Tonti named their construction Fort Crevecoeur. Some historians argue that this was simply the name of a noble French family across the ocean. Others believe that it was named as such to celebrate King Louis XIV’s capture of a Fort Creve-Coeur in the Netherlands. Tonti’s fellow traveler at the time, Father Louis Hennepin, took the more poetic understanding that it stood for the two separated words of “Creve” and “Coeur,” meaning “heart break.” The heart break, to him, was in the desertions and near constant struggle to remain fed.
The fort was a simple wooden structure, with its back resting on the hill’s peak. 15-foot ravines ran just outside the northern and southern walls, while the peak side was partially surrounded by ravine as well. The walls were constructed with 25-foot timbers placed 3 feet deep in the ground. Each inside corner of the fort held a building, with 2 holding the general population of men, one holding arms, and the forth holding the Recollet Brothers, that is the religious missionaries within the group.
Once the buildings were constructed, the men began building a larger water-fairing vessel, to replace the 40-ton Le Griffon, which had been lost months earlier.
By March 1st, LaSalle found the group in need of supplies and rigging for the ship. As such, he commanded half of the men to then head north on foot with him back to Fort Frontenac. Upon again passing present day Starved Rock, he decided it also would make a good location for a French fortification and commanded that Henri de Tonti take a group of men to begin the building process.
Tonti followed orders and headed to Starved Rock on April 15th, 1680.
The next day, 8 of the remaining 9 Frenchmen at Fort Crevecoeur followed the guidance of Martin Chartier and mutinied against LaSalle and Tonti. The fort was pillaged and then burned. Most of the men then fled north to Canada, then known as New France, while Chartier headed east and joined the Shawnee. This was merely 3 months after the fort’s construction.
Etienne Renault, the last loyal man in the camp, was said to have burned the phrase “Nous sommes tous des sauvages,” into the side of the camp’s partially-constructed ship before heading north to join Tonti. In English that reads, “We are all savages.”
Scouts Honor “Highway Son” re-master
 
1D
Soon after my daughter was born, we chose to move back to this city. Houses were cheap, and my parents would be available to help with child care.
I dreaded the return but welcomed the existence of stars in the sky and woods at the edge of town. You don’t realize how much your own childhood affects what upbringing you wish to have for your child until you are there making another person’s life-directing decisions. It made me realize that I did fondly recall running through yards and jumping fences with my two brothers. I loved running free and riding bikes through the neighborhood streets. Maybe the return would not be so dire.
My initial settling was rough. I had taken a job with a poorly run market. It was an attempt to live life as I had up north, but it was short-lived. As always, the larger corporations weren’t the ones dreaming and innovating here.
Luckily, an old friend who had booked my music years earlier crossed my path one day at work. Point blank or as a half-joke, she told me that I should leave the job and live a more true life. Well, she told me that I should work someplace where I could grow my beard back. In either case, she was right.
I then landed at a small locally-owned foodie business. This brought me back into the creative do-it-yourself community that I had cherished in my youth. The people around me were dreamers. They had vision and a hunger for the world around them.
The neighborhood surrounding our house started to feel cozy, with packs of small children running from yard to yard. Large sections of grassy ground cover were converted into garden after my wife developed skills on a local organic farm.
I began hiking and exploring with my daughter in local parks and nature preserves. Old friends once again became my closest and dearest pals.
This year I came to realization. You see, I went to college. I work long hours. I started a family. I live in a two-story house in a quiet neighborhood. And, I live my days on repeat. I might not wear a suit, and I might not be an engineer, but being like my father isn’t so bad. He was making the necessary sacrifices to care for the ones he loved, as do I.
Here I am, a middle-child of a middle-class family now in middle-age. Here I am, back where I began.
This is Middle America.
Jared Grabb “Prison Bars (Instrumental Middle America Version)”