[Prairie Fire Theme Song] Welcome to a winter edition of Prairie Fire.

I'm Sarah Edwards.

We decided to get out of the studio and enjoy a little bit of this fresh snow for this episode.

Now, a few months ago, when it was a little bit warmer, we had the chance to visit with an artist from Bloomington, Illinois who makes beautiful artworks inspired by the Midwest.

He and his wife have had a huge impact on the Bloomington art scene, and you're really going to love his personality.

Meet Herb Eaton.

I never decided to become an artist.

I just never quit being one.

When I grew up, the area of west Peoria, where I grew up, was Township, and it was still quite rural, but I did have the chance to go wander about and against all parental directions, my buddies and I would disappear into the woods, and so a lot of what matters in my brain is woods and thickets and river.

I had not so good arts education.

This was in the 50s, and I was 23 before I ever actually took an art class.

I was 19 before I ever actually went into an art gallery.

And then there's a sad side to it...and that is the only professionally trained male artist in my area was this guy who beat his wife, beat his dog, beat his kids, and he was on my paper route, he tried to beat me out of money all the time.

And so what happened was my parents decided that if you become a professional artist, professionally trained, you're going to end up like this man.

And I tell you, that functioned in my brain for...till I was in my 30s.

It made it really difficult to go to art school.

But I couldn't resist, so I kept drawing.

There were too many kids in the family, so nobody could actually control me, you know.

And I have woods to go play in, all right.

What more do you want out of life?

I got fortunate, and basically my wife of today was the girlfriend in high school, and she wanted to become a teacher, and we moved to Bloomington so she could go to ISU, and then we were going to boogie out, and I would go anywhere, you know, Kuala Lumpur, I don't care, just anywhere.

But here finally, you start looking at a place like Bloomington and as over and over again, people say it's easy.

This is an easy place to raise kids.

It's an easy place to be an artist, and as a consequence, you can feel part of stuff, participate.

My wife, Pam and I do not agree on very much, but we have managed to make it through, in part because I think both of us at our core, have that sense that we are to participate and not inhibit other participation.

Tiny things are necessary, not major things, small little things, if you're participating,.

And I'm just thinking that maybe there's an aura about the whole thing that says it's easy, it's not wonderful, it's not great, it's not stupendous, it's not outlandish, but it is easy.

So that's why I stay here.

How do I characterize myself?

A-D-D, come on, you don't need any more than three letters, all right, you know.

You don't even have to be good at spelling.

What basically happened for a long time was very upsetting, and that I could not focus myself on getting a body of work that would appeal to galleries, that would get me a teaching gig or whatever have you.

I had volumes, stacks of stuff done.

The one nice thing about that was that when I had another idea, okay, when I was getting out of graduate school, I was doing this series of things that was based on a circus idea, and I ended up with this scribble on my wall of these two characters that you could see them.

It looked like there was a man and a woman.

Well, that's kind of cool.

This is the A-D-D brain.

Boom.

I go that direction, the woman I always gave this sort of elegance to, but you can't see what her face looks like, because she's kind of perfect.

And the guy, he would often have a mask on, so you didn't know what he looked like, but he was also kind of a doofus.

He seldom moves out of that, as I've been doing this now for 35 years or something, he's actually become less the doofus and more just trying to stumble through and find a way the landscape.

It's a character I spent quite a few years wandering the Mackinac river painting in my whole life.

That would be the one time, if you met me out there when you would find and say, oh, man, he's like the Smiling Buddha, you know.

I mean, I was like, but throughout the whole thing, there's always been this idea of narration, kind of drama, if you want to have it that way, storytelling, if you want to have it that way.

I like it when I sell them.

And I have sold several of them, but I don't really it's like, oh, you know, I actually did this.

I often tell people, if I really wanted my art to be good...Okay, what I do is, every day I'd have detachable hands, and I'd throw them in the studio, then I go, you know, watch a ball game, drink some coffee, you know, sit around and not do anything, and then come back and my hands would have produced it.

You know, that's the way I look at it, because I don't think of myself as actually being all that important, that this guy, whatever this is, but I do think that what my hands do as like, I've said, almost like a pull them up, detachable element of me, allowing them to just start doing stuff.

That's what matters.

People are very kind to me, and I am often puzzled, like I don't think I'm that good of a person.

Most artists have depression issues.

There's that sense of some trauma.

Ill defined.

You know, just growing up, is trauma enough.

And you end up with this bad definition of yourself that isn't really true.

I know it's not actually true, you know, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

But one of the things that I've always thought of is, oh, but I can do things, or these things, you know, can go out in the world and do things, and so, in many ways it's really good, because I only have to take care of them.

All my life.

I would scribble, like this.

I'd scribble thoughts, okay, worth every nickel that's in this three by five card, okay?

And I thought, you know, guy had any sense, he would put all those thoughts together in a comprehensive fashion.

So I didn't tell my wife, I didn't tell my kids, I didn't tell my friends, I didn't tell anybody.

I just would come down here to the gallery, and I digested it all.

And mixed into that was I love Hamlet, the play.

I just always, this seems to me, just this perfection.

I always was puzzled.

They'd always show Hamlet, but actually, what they're showing is Yorick's skull.

And I got thinking, you know, maybe it's Yorick we should pay attention to.

So I started writing, basically, I wrote Yorick's biography.

I just came up with Yorick's world, and...and then he ends up coming back to life, and he travels for 400 years, and he ends up living out here in the Illinois prairie.

My DNA, my, you know, genetics, basically gives me 20 years more.

You know, not all of that now.

Every day clicks past., and I'm really trying to look at, if I do something, do I really want to do it?

Is that what I really want to do with the last 20 years of my life?

And I realize, I'm 76 years old, and one of my daughters said, "Well, Dad, what do you want on your tombstone?"

Awwfff.

But, you know, I got thinking about it one time, and what do people say?

And what would be truthful?

And I just want to have on the tombstone: "He made things."

That's what it was.

That's what it is: He made things.

Let's head back inside now for the first of two songs by singer Charity Davis.

We were very fortunate that Charity could come spend some time with us, because she is in much demand as a vocalist, and she has serious credits to her name.

She performs with people like Eric Benét and Lady Gaga and Robin Thicke, and she's also a soloist and a vocal coach for the University of Illinois Black Chorus.

Here's Charity singing, "Mary, Did You Know?"

[Mary Did You Know - Performed by Charity Davis] of the Boston Tea at stake.

But chances are you're not quite as familiar with how the Illinois Country as it was known back then, played into the conflict.

But turns out control of what was this part of the Midwest was critical to the outcome of the war.

So here's a little 101 primer about the Illinois Country's role in the American Revolution.

Really, the American Revolution has a lot to do with the West, and we need to remember that we know the story.

Everybody knows the story of the American Revolution and the coming of the American Revolution that's centered in places like Boston and Philadelphia, the resentment over the sugar tax, the resentment over the Stamp Tax, all of the uprising and unrest in dramatic moments like the Boston Tea Party, we're very familiar with that story.

Lesser known is how important the West and the Ohio Valley in particular was to the coming of the American Revolution in 1763 when at the end of the Seven Years War, Great Britain took possession, at least on paper, of basically all of North America East of the Mississippi.

They had a challenge there in how to govern all of that territory, and in order to minimize conflicts with indigenous people, native nations that occupied that great expanse of territory.

They passed a piece of legislation in 1763 which essentially banned settlement in the territory west of the Appalachians.

For American colonists, problem was that many colonists, and elite colonists in particular, many of them quite familiar characters, people like George Washington, Ben Franklin, Patrick Henry, many of them were involved in land speculation companies, where they had a real financial interest in acquiring that land and then selling it on to settlers.

And so they resented this proclamation that banned not only settlement, but the purchase and sale of that land as well.

Meanwhile, in those western territories, of course, are indigenous nations for whom these territories are homelands, and they intend for those territories to remain homelands.

So they have a very strong stake in these questions as well.

All of this is to say that as much as the American Revolution, the coming of the American Revolution, is a story about abstract principles like liberty and independence, it's also a question about land and who's going to control this massive territory in the American West.

Oftentimes we forget that, oftentimes we ignore it.

And we sometimes ignore it, because what's going on in the west at this time seems sort of sleepy.

It seems kind of inconsequential, and the characters are unfamiliar, right?

The French colonists and the Indians that are the inhabitants of the Illinois country and the West, they don't usually make it into the cast of characters that we recognize as the agents of the American Revolution, but they were no less consequential in terms of bringing it about.

And the American Revolution was no less consequential for them.

It was truly a revolutionary experience for these people out here on the frontier during the Revolutionary years.

So George Rogers Clark, a Virginian who in 1778 is appointed by Virginia officials to lead this campaign.

He's an ambitious kind of a military strategist and thinker who believes that the American Revolution will not the Mississippi River, and he wants to do that himself.

So he leads this army of roughly 175 people down the Ohio River in 1778 they arrive at the town of Kaskaskia, which they take control of without firing a shot, and then later take control of Cahokia, another French settlement there in the Illinois country.

In the winter of 1779 they go and they take possession of Vincennes, Indiana, a French outpost.

All of these areas were at that time under the control of Britain.

Clark helps us understand the extent to which the American Revolution was indeed a fight for control of land.

We think of it as a fight for independence from colonial authority.

In its way, it was also a fight for Colonial authority.

And Clark was kind of a colonial agent in a certain way of thinking.

His arrival again was a watershed moment, because it meant that at the Treaty of Paris in 1783 Great Britain ceded all of the territory that it had claimed in the trans Appalachian West to the Americans.

Again, left out of that treaty, and oftentimes left out of this heroic story of George Rogers Clark, is the fact that this land, of course, is the homeland of many indigenous nations who were not consulted in 1783 at the Treaty of Paris, and who still, of course, claimed sovereignty in that territory.

And it was Clark's arrival that inspired many of those indigenous nations to cooperate together to begin to resist the arrival of the Americans.

Clark's importance is lasts much beyond the American Revolution, because it sets the stage right for these later conflicts that the United States will engage with the indigenous people of the Midwest.

For more information about any of our stories and some pictures, you can visit our website at will.illinois.edu/prairiefire.

We leave you now with Charity Davis singing her own version of our theme song, "Prairie Fire."

[Prairie Fire theme song performed by Charity Davis]