Sentimental Sunday: "Indian Boundary Club - Controlled Shooting Area" - November 11, 1951

Last year, while cleaning out the study of my late father, Frederick Henry Pape (1929-2017), I found a number of old black-and-white photos from the early and mid-1950s.  Some of them appear to have been taken by his father, my Grandpa, Paul Robert Pape (1896-1970), and may have been sent to my dad during his time in Korea.  Grandpa put numbers on the front of the images, and also wrote captions on the back.  This one had a very long caption:

Taken at Indian Boundary Club - Controlled Shooting Area 11/11/51.  In case you can't see them, there are 2 Cock Pheasants in my right hand. "Mine Boy" was on duty that day.  I had a hell of a time keeping him from getting out too far ahead of us.

The "us" referred to Grandpa and his friend, Bill Doyle (born 1889), who's in the photo below, also with two pheasants and with "Mine Boy," the family dog, Lucky.  This photo was captioned "Taken 11/11/51 My friendly enemy (Bill Doyle) The guy who always gets in my hair."

I'm not quite sure where the "Indian Boundary Club - Controlled Shooting Area" was.  The Indian Boundary Line itself was an old Native American trail that the 1816 Treaty of St. Louis designated as a boundary dividing the land between the Native Americans and white settlers.  It's the yellow highlighted line on this 1910 map of Chicago (where the city limits are marked in red):

The maps above and below are adapted from the The Rand McNally new standard map of Chicago.  The original maps--and the files--are from the University of Chicago Library's Map Collection.

The map section above shows the West Ridge / Rogers Park neighborhoods of Chicago, where the eastern end of the northern Indian Boundary Line began (click on the map to make it bigger).  Besides the yellow highlighting of the Indian Boundary Line, I also added (the blue square) the location of the future Indian Boundary Park, which was established in 1916, and which was just down Lunt street from where my grandfather was living in 1951 (where the blue star is).

I don't think the controlled shooting area my grandfather refers to is anywhere near this Indian Boundary Park.  It's only about 13 acres in size, and by 1951, was completely surrounded by development.

Instead, I think the shooting area may have been near the Indian Boundary Golf Club, further southwest along the northern Indian Boundary Line.

Here is a map from the Forest Preserve District of Cook County of that area, dating back to the 1930s and 1940s (click on the image to make it larger).  I've taken the original (pictured just below it), rotated it 90 degrees to the right (to more closely match the orientation of the maps above), cropped and color-adjusted it, and highlighted both the Indian Boundary Line (in yellow) and the "tentative alignment of superhighway" (in blue).  The latter may have referred to what is now Interstate 294, which actually went in a little west of this, although there are Metra rail lines roughly in this area.  Hunting was not allowed in the Cook County Forest Preserve itself, but I'm wondering if this "controlled shooting area" might have been in some of the then-unacquired future preserve areas, or perhaps in the area where the superhighway was intended to go, if it was still an undeveloped area in 1951.

Above image adapted from image below: 
Control Plan, scale: 1"=400' - FPDCC_06_01_0000_0015_015, Forest Preserve District of Cook County Records, University of Illinois at Chicago Library.  Used with permission of the Forest Preserve District of Cook County, Illinois.

© Amanda Pape - 2019 - e-mail me!