The Garden of the Gods: Shawnee National Forest and the Southern Illinois Confederacy

The Shawnee National Forest covers about two hundred eighty thousand acres in the southernmost tip of Illinois, where the Ohio River forms the state's eastern boundary and the Mississippi River its western edge. It is the only national forest in Illinois, and it occupies a corner of the state with a character that has almost nothing in common with the rest of it: eroded sandstone formations, hardwood hollows, and a Civil War history that ran sharply against the Union grain that Illinois is typically associated with.

The Garden of the Gods wilderness, in the Shawnee's eastern unit, is the landscape most visitors come to see. The sandstone outcroppings here are three hundred twenty million years old, shaped by erosion into formations that stand above the surrounding forest with names like Camel Rock, Anvil Rock, and Mushroom Rock. The rock layers record an ancient sea that covered this part of North America in the Carboniferous period. The Illinois Ozarks, as some call the Shawnee uplands, are geologically distinct from the glaciated flatlands to the north.

The political character of this corner of Illinois during the Civil War reflected its geography as much as its geology. Southern Illinois was settled predominantly from Kentucky and Tennessee, and its sympathies during the conflict were famously divided. The Egypt region, as southern Illinoisans called their counties, contained active Copperhead organizing and significant pro-Confederate sentiment. Cairo, at the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi, was the critical Union supply base that Grant used for his western campaigns. The soldiers and the sympathizers were sometimes in the same county.

The Trail of Tears crossed this landscape. The Cherokee removal routes from the southeast passed through southern Illinois in the winter of eighteen thirty-eight to thirty-nine, and the Shawnee National Forest today marks several of those crossing points.