The major village of the Kickapoo Indians in central Illinois stood here, where the French first recorded a well established Kickapoo presence in 1752. The 1818 surveyor's map for the new state of Illinois showed the grand village and noted a population of two to three thousand with some five thousand grave sites. Eventually, these hunting grounds and villages were enclosed by American settlements, and the U.S. began negotiations in 1816 to extinguish all Indian land claims and to remove all of the tribes to west of the Mississippi River. In 1834, the last of the Kickapoo departed from Illinois.