Last month, state senate president Emil Jones threatened to “scrutinize” the University of Illinois’ budget unless the school bans its mascot, Chief Illiniwek, from dancing at Fighting Illini football and basketball games.
When it came to fighting, though, the Illini were patsies.
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In 1680 the Iroquois of the Great Lakes region were on the warpath, seeking new lands in which to trap the beaver they traded to the Dutch and the English for tools and weapons. Disciplined and militaristic, the Iroquois were the Prussians of North America. They terrorized other tribes, amusing themselves by “caressing” their prisoners–slicing off their fingers with clamshells, setting hot coals on their naked bodies, burning them alive. On September 10 of that year, a Shawanoe Indian raced into an Illini village near the present site of Utica bearing a dire message: the Iroquois were coming.
“The men fled, and very few of them were killed,” writes Parkman. “But the women and children were captured to the number, it is said, of seven hundred.”
By 1926 the Illini had been gone from Illinois for over a hundred years. With no living models around, U. of I. football coach Bob Zuppke was free to romanticize them as avatars of the “complete human being–the strong, agile human body; the unfettered human intellect; the indomitable human spirit.” Zuppke suggested Chief Illiniwek as a mascot. Ray Dvorak, the assistant band director, loved the idea, and asked a student to don a turkey-feather bonnet and hop around in a war dance during games.
Illinois’ one unifying characteristic is the worship of Abraham Lincoln, so why not the Railsplitters, or the Fightin’ Abes? We know how Lincoln dressed and how he danced. At halftime a tall student in a frock coat, stovepipe hat, and fake beard could run out onto the field and chase the opposition’s mascot with an ax. Then Abe could drop the ax and whirl around the 50-yard line doing the reel with a woman in a bustle while the marching band played “Turkey in the Straw.”
