By Ted Kleine
“If this stone is authentic, it’s as important as the Plymouth Rock or the Liberty Bell,” says Politsch, an amateur historian who conducts his research out of the bedroom of his house in Quincy, Illinois. “It’s important evidence of exploration in the Mississippi Valley.”
La Salle, the man whose claim Politsch has taken up, was an Odysseus. He was the first man to descend the Mississippi all the way to the Gulf of Mexico. When he reached the mouth of the river, he had the audacity to claim “the Mississippi and all its tributaries”–an area stretching from Pennsylvania to Montana–for Louis XIV.
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La Salle was the most stalwart adventurer who ever walked in buckskins, hardier even than Lewis and Clark. In March of 1680, La Salle and his men were encamped at Fort Crevecoeur, near today’s Peoria, waiting for provisions from Canada. The supply ship, which should have unloaded at the foot of Lake Michigan the previous autumn, was long overdue. With the rivers still frozen, there was only one way to find out what had happened to it: walk back to Fort Frontenac, the French settlement on the northern shore of Lake Ontario. La Salle and a small party made the trip in 65 days, trudging across prairies on snowshoes and wading through knee-deep marshes.
He is an inspiration to anyone with a quest.
And why waste an hour in a restaurant? He had so much to show me. So he sat me down at his metal desk, heated me a Banquet chicken parmesan, and while I ate began unspooling the tale of the stone, which he’s dubbed the Ellington Stone because it was discovered in Ellington Township. While certainly not as obsessed as La Salle, he seemed just as determined. He’s been trying to prove the stone’s authenticity for 43 years, as many years as La Salle lived.
“I examined it, and I’m inclined to think it’s genuine,” said an elderly voice on the tape recorder. “That was put there by somebody, and whoever it was saw the Mississippi in 1671.”
