One 19th-century historian called it the “oldest piece of art” made in Chicago, and in 1976 the Tribune described it as “probably the first so-called statue” in the city’s history. Yet you won’t find it in an art museum or park. The three-foot-high, 3,000-pound boulder–which has a carved face, a hollowed-out top, and two holes on either side–is on permanent display at the Chicago Historical Society, where it once served as a drinking fountain. Few visitors realize it’s an object of mystery.
The Rosetta stone of Waubansee Stone scholarship is “Something About the Chief Wabansa, and His Statue,” an eight-page chapter in the 1881 book Chicago Antiquities by Henry H. Hurlbut, a member of the Chicago and Wisconsin historical societies. Hurlbut didn’t rely on records or documentation, but he “confidently” ascribes certain facts to “suppose[d] tradition” and what he’d heard over the years. Most of what’s been written on the rock’s early history can be traced to Hurlbut’s florid, often overimaginative account, with succeeding writers tacking on their own colorful theories and details.
One soldier apparently had loftier aims. Hurlbut asserts that this “incipient Praxitiles or Michael Angelo”–his name is lost in history–induced Waubansee to pose in exchange for gifts of tobacco. This would have happened by 1823, when the garrison was withdrawn (though the fort continued to be used intermittently until 1837). Hurlbut paints the scene: “We may say that the portrait pleased the Indians…for a party of them admitted within the stockade to see it, whooped and leaped as if they had achieved a victory, and with many uncouth gestures, they danced in a triumphant circle around the rock.” He later adds cautiously, “If the question shall be asked, whether or no Wabansa really sat for the portrait, it may be answered that such is understood to be the fact.” Hurlbut also has it on good account that the artist intended to sculpt a full-length likeness, but never completed the work, perhaps because he was transferred. Only “a medallion sort of head” remained.
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In 1866 Fuller sold the Waubansee Stone to Congressman Isaac N. Arnold, an art collector and friend of Abraham Lincoln. Arnold placed the stone fountain in the garden of his mansion, whose grounds occupied the entire block west of Pine (now Michigan) between Erie and Huron. The Great Fire of 1871 destroyed Arnold’s home–including his art collection, 8,000-book library, and Lincoln memorabilia–but “old ‘Waubansa,’” Kirkland notes, “passed through the flames with the same unmoved look which he had preserved through his earlier vicissitudes.” (The Arnold family survived the fire by fleeing to the lake.) When he rebuilt his home on the same plot, Arnold created a makeshift fire memorial in his side yard, surrounding the fountain with debris retrieved from nearby houses.
The Mound Builders were actually several Indian cultures that flourished in the midwest and the south from about 1000 BC to 1300 AD. Their largest and most impressive site, Cahokia, in downstate Illinois, was a great population and ceremonial center that peaked between 1050 and 1250, and was marked by 120 temple mounds, burial mounds, and other earthworks (about 70 remain). The Cahokians are known to have ritually killed young men and women, interring their bodies along with those of important leaders to accompany them to the afterlife. Artisans carved figurines in stone, though apparently nothing on the scale of the Waubansee Stone. But despite the similarities of their temple mounds and sacrifices, there are no proven links between the Mound Builders and the Aztec or Maya.
The rock’s two side holes, both two inches deep, wouldn’t seem to serve any purpose for a fountain; neither would a four-inch hole between the face’s parted lips. A drawing of Arnold’s fountain in Hurlbut’s Chicago Antiquities shows a pipe sticking out of the top of the stone, yet today there’s no opening or drain in the basin. It’s possible, however, that the Chicago Historical Society altered the piping system when it transformed the relic into a drinking fountain before sealing it up altogether.
