Chebanse: The Little Duck

The name Chebanse comes from the Potawatomi language, from a word meaning the little duck, a nod to the waterfowl that once crowded the marshes along the Iroquois River here. The Potawatomi used this corridor for travel and trade for generations before the eighteen thirty-three Treaty of Chicago displaced them westward. By the time settlers from the east began farming the township in the eighteen forties, the people who named this stretch of river were already gone. Chebanse became a village in eighteen fifty-four as the first railroad stop south of Kankakee on the Illinois Central's main line, and the station name kept the old Potawatomi word alive even as the landscape around it changed entirely.