Eisenberg: Sliding down Indian Hill’s slippery past

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Updated: March 1, 2012 8:07AM

I broke my leg as a child, while sledding down a hill that’s no longer there. The former hill is now a parking lot for the Homewood-Flossmoor Racquet and Fitness Club, and while a small, vain part of me thinks the broken femur and hill removal are related, the more sensible majority of me guesses that’s probably not the case. There weren’t many trees on the hill, but my fifth-grade self wanted to “make a field goal” between two of the saplings that did find purchase on the slope, an effort that ended badly.

Three months spent in traction and a body cast didn’t keep me away from sledding slopes in subsequent seasons, though I was forever wary of trees after my crash. I’d head to the retention pit where Governor’s Highway ends at 175th Street in Hazel Crest, where steep, treeless slopes caused unequaled sliding speeds. I’m guessing someone else got hurt there because that pit is now bereft of sledders, as it’s surrounded by chain link fencing topped with barbed wire.

My Chicago Heights friends frequented a different slope, one not listed on any community guide to family wintertime recreation. It was little more than a path in Woodrow Wilson Woods that led down a steep, tree-lined slope and ended up in Thorn Creek. As I recall, none of them ever broke legs, though there may have been a broken arm or two over the years. There certainly were a few unintended icy baths, but I heard about all those incidents second-hand. There were simply too many trees for me to even think about sledding there.

These days, area residents are directed towards the more benign slopes of Indian Hill, at 16th Street and Edgwood Avenue, for their sledding pleasure. I’ve seen the recommendation pop up a few times as the snows finally arrived this winter, but rather than tugging at my desire to pull out the sled, mention of that particular forest preserve bugs me a bit. I still haven’t been able to figure out why the hill is called that. Indian Hill is flanked on the west by Beacon Hill, probably named for a neighborhood in Boston judging by the street names in the Chicago Heights neighborhood, and on the east by Hungry Hill, so-named, I’m guessing, because it’s traditionally been home to the latest immigrants to move to the city.

I don’t think Indian Hill is an ancient Native American Mound, though that would be pretty awesome. Rather, it, along with its sister hills Beacon and Hungry, form the Chicago Heights portion of the Tinley Moraine, a ridgeline of raised earth that marks where a retreating glacier paused for a century or two on its way north.

Here’s why I think Indian Hill didn’t get its name arbitrarily: Thorn Creek traverses its base, and two Native American trails, now Chicago Road and Sauk Trail, are nearby. Along Thorn Creek to the north, a large Native American settlement is known to have been established near where Thornton is today. In the 1950s, archeologists from the Field Museum excavated a site along Butterfield Creek, a tributary to Thorn Creek, in Flossmoor and found lots of ancient artifacts.

Another dig found an even larger Native American settlement in the area where Interstates 80 and 94 merge just south of South Holland.

And while today Thorn Creek is sometimes navigable by kayak, prior to the development of the Thornton Quarry, the Sanitary and Ship Canal and the 26th Street dam, the creek was much deeper and wider. In fact, early settler records show that one resident even established a small steamboat service on the more northern reaches of the creek.

In other words, Thorn Creek was ideally suited for travel by Native Americans, and there were plenty of documented Native Americans just north of Indian Hill.

Yet aside from having used the area’s trails, I haven’t been able to find any documentation of Native American presence in Chicago Heights or its neighboring towns. Still, the Indian name mysteriously percolates up along Thorn Creek upstream of Indian Hill as well. Indianwood Boulevard in Park Forest is all that remains of the former Indianwood Resort that once occupied the land west of Western Avenue between Sauk Trail and Monee Road.

That resort dated back to the early 1900s, when settlement of the area was getting underway in earnest. Indian Hill was acquired by the Forest Preserve District of Cook County around the same time.

Presumably lost in that transition from settled farmland to a more modern suburbia was the lore surrounding any local Native American presence in our towns, leaving Indian Hill as one of the few clues to a forgotten past.

And aside from that, by all accounts, it’s a fun place to slide down a snowy slope.