I I HISTORY STORIE sjRHSrcics:!?: • Jl X • Class r ^9^ - (jsm^iW.. COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. ILLINOIS HISTORY STORIES FOR USE IN ELEMENTARY SCHOOLS BY W. H. CAMPBELL PRINCIPAL OF THE D. S. WENTWORTH SCHOOL, CHICAGO, ILLINOIS D. APPLETON AND COMPANY NEW YORK CHICAGO Copyright, 1910, by D. APPLETON AND COMPANY Copyright, 1908 BY THE FIELDING BALL PUBLISHING COMPANY (gCU25976 CONTENTS Chapter Page 1. The Physiography of the State 9 II. The Early Inhabitants 25 III. The Coming of the French — Marquette and Joliet 32 IV. The Story of La Salle 46 V. French Occupation of The Mississippi Valley . 59 VI. ' The Transfer of the Valley From the French to the English 71 VII. The Northwest Territory Passes to the United States 82 Story of George Rogers Clark. VIII. From the Revolution to Statehood — 1783-1818 . 95 The Fort Dearborn Massacre IX. Acquiring Title to the Soil 109 X. The State Constitutions 113 XI. Constitutional Boundary and Divisions . . .118 XII. The Capitals of Illinois . 127 XTII. Evolution of the Illinois School Law . . . .131 XIV. Slavery in Illinois .... 135 XV. The Black Hawk War 141 XVI. The Mormons in Illinois 156 XVII. The Illinois and Michigan Canal 164 XVIII. The Advent of the Railroads 170 CONTENTS Chapter Page XIX. State Educational, Charitable and Penal In- stitutions 175 Semi-Educational Institutions 176 The Penal and Reformatory Institutions . . 177 XX. Some of the Men Who Made the State . . . 179 XXI. The Making of Chicago . . . . . . . . 192 . The Chicago Water System 203 The Chicago Sewerage System 208 Industrial Life in Chicago . . . . . . .213 The Public Buildings 219 The Park System 221 City Government in Chicago . . . . . 222 The Elevated Roads .224 The Chicago Subway 224 XXII. Starved Rock 227 XXIII. A Land Flowing With Milk and Honey . . . 236 XXIV. A Word in Conclusion 243 Chronological Table . 245 PREFACE The stories about Illinois grouped together in this little book were used by the author in several classes before he had any thought of putting them into print. At the suggestion of a number of teachers who, doubt- less with more good will than critical judgment, be- lieved they might be as acceptable to other pupils as they had proven in the classes observed, the task of preparing them for the printer was undertaken and completed. The work has been done in the midst of a multitude of other duties which forbade more than an hour or two of continuous attention, A book produced under such circumstances must show many marks of haste, lack of close connection in places, unfortunate choice of phraseology and, perhaps, some mistakes in state- ments of facts. The above explanation is our apology for these faults. It is hoped that the book may be useful as supple- mentary reading matter in the seventh and eighth grades of the grammar schools, and helpful to those who are preparing to teach, and that it may also be an aid and incentive in the hands of the teachers of the lower grades for doing some oral teaching in the most interesting study of our own state geography and his- tory. In the preparation of this book thousands of pages have been read covering all the readily accessible sources 5 ILLINOIS HISTORY STORIES of information upon the Illinois country. It would be easy to compile a much larger book and any one else would doubtless make a different selection of topics, but it seemed to the writer that for the purposes in- tended the subjects selected cover the ground briefly and completely and emphasize the important epochs in the history of the state. For the facts contained in these pages we are ''debtor both to the Greeks and to the barbarians "; to the cul- tured essays and papers of such men as Mason, Caton and Parrish, and to the rude stories told by the fron- tiersmen who occupied the prairies and timbered val- leys of La Salle County, where as a child we became familiar with the endless reaches of waving grass and corn and listened with open-eyed wonder to the fire- side stories of early deeds of daring and privation. We are particularly indebted to Secretary of State James A. Rose for permission to reproduce for these pages some of the maps which appeared in the Blue Book, prepared under his supervision and through which many of our dates and facts have been verified. We also wish to acknowledge our indebtedness to the Central Scientific Company, from whose relief maps, prepared by Mr. C. E. Siebenthal, photographs for the maps of the Chicago plain were made. The map illus- trating the route of Black Hawk was reproduced, with permission from McClure's Magazine, illustrating Tar- bell's Life of Lincoln. The cuts of the State Capitol, Chicago River, Steel Mills of South Chicago, Dekalb Normal School,- and Black Hawk are furnished through the courtesy of Rand, McNally and Company, from their Illinois edition of the Dodge Geography. The map of Chicago used in Chapter XXI, will be recog- e PREFACE nizecl as belonging to the Tarr and McMarry Geography, by the courtesy of whose publishers, the Macmillan Company, it appears. The preparation and arrangement of these stories has been a source of great pleasure, and their presentation The D. S. Wentworth School, where these stories were made and first told to the boys and girls of the eighth grade in 1905-6. to the classes of boys and girls in the D. S. Wentworth School, where they have been tested, has been among the most enjoyable experiences w^e have had in the class room. Believing that the stories of heroism and consecration to duty that gather about the prairies and river valleys of Illinois are as interesting and as worthy a place in the pupils' book of remembrance as are the more dis- tant and vague stories of foreign lands and Atlantic 7 ILLINOIS HISTORY STORIES coast colonizations, we send this little book out without any great anticipations yet with the hope that it may find a place and welcome awaiting it in the schools of the state. W. H. Campbell. D. S. Wentworth School, Chicago, Illinois, March, 1908. ILLINOIS HISTORY STORIES CHAPTER I THE PHYSIOGRAPHY OF THE STATE When we speak of a man, of what do we think? Is it of his body and head and hands and feet ? Or is it of his mind and power to think and speak ? Or is it of his disposition and habits and social life ? Now it may be of any one of these or of all combined in the one person. We have many ways of thinking about the same person. But under all our thoughts, giving to them clearness and meaning, is the physical man. So close is the rela- tion between mind and body that whatever affects one reacts upon the other. We expect to find a strong vigor- ous mind in a strong vigorous body. Habits of life that tend to weaken or destroy muscle and nerve tissue leave their impress upon the mind. Somehow our mental and' spiritual forces are interwoven with the flesh and blood and nerves of the body. So true is this that when a man's thoughts are being presented to us we would like to see the man. It is not enough to hear the words; we want to see the form, we want to hear the utterance. What is true of the term "man" is equally true of the word "state." What is a state? Is it a certain number of square miles of hill and valley and plain? The state 9 ILLINOIS HISTORY STORIES of Illinois elected a governor. What elected him? The hills and valleys? "What constitutes a state? Not high raised battlement or labored mound, Thick wall or moated gate ; Not cities fair with spires and turrets crowned. No: — Men, high-minded men, With powers as far above dull brutes endued, In forest, brake or den. As beasts excel cold rocks and brambles rude — Men who their duties know, Know too their rights, and knowing, dare maintain." The people make the state. Then again we think of the state as a hive of industry, — ^its shuttles flying, its locomotives whistling and puffing, its mills blacking the heavens with their smoke, its cattle, its coal, its grain entrained for distant points, — and it is the industrial forms only that we see. Yet it is true that no matter whether it be the people in their sovereign power speaking through their laws and suf- frages, or whether it be the courts speaking in the name of the sovereign people, or whether it be the industrial and commercial spirit, or whether it be its historic past, — under it all giving clearness and understanding is the physical make-up of the state, — the hills and valleys shut in by certain well defined and legalized limits. All the life of the state is so interwoven with the natural features that we must come back to them for our final anchoring place, — for our reason why. The physiography of any country affects the char- acter of the people. Sublimity and beauty of scenery inspires to full expansion of lungs and to force of circu- lation. Dullness and monotony cramps and stunts. The 10 THE PHYSIOGRAPHY OF THE STATE ancient Greeks among their hills and near the bound- less sea, and the Swiss amid their towering mountains, are fair illustrations of the effect of nature upon a people. If this be true, it is well worth our while to study the physical make-up of our state and to become somewhat acquainted with its general form and sources of strength before attempting to read the incidental stories and tales that have woven themselves around these hills and vallej^s of Illinois. One of the most marked physical facts that presents itself when we come to study the maps and the charts is the comparatively low altitude of Illinois. Its average height above the sea is six hundred thirty-two feet. That of Indiana is seven hundred feet ; of Missouri, eight hundred feet ; of Michigan, nine hundred feet ; of Wisconsin, one thousand fifty feet; of Iowa, one thou- sand one hundred feet. If we erect proportional lines to indicate this we shall have a series somewhat as follows : ^ r1 u! u. ul LL Vl. ^ o IOWA WIS. MO. ILL. IND. MICH. Diagram Showing Comparative Altitudes. When the tops of these lines are connected we see what a basin Illinois seems to form among the adjoining states. What would be the natural inference from this 11 ILLINOIS HISTORY STORIES lay of the land ? The. rivers from all sides are toward this state. Of the boundary line, five fifty miles is made by the Mississippi, three miles by the Ohio and Wabash and sixty miles Michigan. Not only does the state have a long extent boundary, but it has numerous rivers within territory. The following outline will show at the principal streams with their outlets: directed hundred hundred by Lake of water its own a glance f St, Lawrence — Lake Michigan. Drainage System. f Apple. Plum. ( Calumet. \ Chicago. Rock. ( Pe( { Kis Mississippi. -| Pecatonica. shwaukee. Green. Edwards. Henderson. fDes Plaines Kankakee. Fox. Vermilion. Spoon. Mackinaw. I^Sangamon. Kaskaskia. Big Muddy. ( Cache. ^ Ohio. \ Saline. Wabash, i Illinois. Little Wabash. Embarrass. This outline at once suggests that the state is well watered and well drained. A region of country so sup- plied with streams, and their many tributaries, can have no place for desert sections. It suggests also that there must be a number of natural valleys and divides. A glance at a relief map of the state shows this to be true. During the early geological periods the various layers of rock were formed and in the many changes that occurred were partly washed away. In the process of formation these layers of early rocks were slightly wrin- kled by pressure and in places lifted up a little above 12 THE PHYSIOGRAPHY OF THE STATE the average level of the surrounding section. As we cross the state in different directions we find the out- croppings of these partially worn formations standing out from the drift and soil which cover most of the sur- face of the state. On the Rock river, near Oregon, we find an outcropping of the St. Peter's sandstone, which gives to that region a most picturesque and attractive scenery. There is probably no section of the state in which the natural scenery is more inviting than in the neighborhood of Oregon. On the Illinois river, around Ottawa, there is another outcropping of this same sand- stone, giving another region of unusual variety and beauty. Starved Rock, Deer Park, and the many beau- tiful caiions of La Salle county are all formed in the St. Peter's sandstone group. At Joliet and near Rock Island and in Calhoun county, and in several other localities, we find decided exposures of the Niagara lime- stone group. In other places we find the sub-carbonif- erous and the carboniferous, bearing coal, exposed to view. In all parts of the state if borings are sunk deep enough these early rocks may be found. Why do not these rock formations show in all parts of the state ? "Why is it that in most places, in digging for water, we have to bore through many feet of sand, gravel and boulders before coming to the bed rock? In many places this layer on top of the main rock is thirty feet deep ; in some places it is from one hundred to one hundred and fifty feet deep. How did all this come about ? This introduces us to another view of the phys- ical make-up of the state. Long after the first rock formations had been laid down, after they had many times been lifted above the waters and sunk again, after the lower Silurian lime- 13 ILLINOIS HISTORY STORIES stone around Galena had been filled with lead, and the fields covering the central parts of the state had been stored with sufficient coal to keep all the fires of the world burning for centuries, there came a great change over the face of the earth. No man knows exactly how or why it came about, but it grew very cold. For hundreds of years the plants and animals that had flourished where we now live were frozen out. Nothing could grow in all this northern region of the world. A cold barren reach of ice and snow gradually covered the land. It grew heavier and thicker, collecting upon the high lands of Canada and the regions to the north as it now collects upon the highest parts of the Alps in Europe, or of the coast range in our own Alaska. These great fields of ice, as they grew larger and heavier, began to move slowly towards the lower lands. As they moved down they pushed all obstructions before them. A grove of trees was less than a cobweb in their path. A projection of rock sticking up from the surface a hundred feet or more would be ground into fragments and carried along with the great ice mass moving toward the south. This great ice plow not only swept the sur- face bare as it went, but it dug into the earth, carving out holes hundreds of feet deep and thousands of miles in area. The rocks it carried along were rolled over and over again under the great ice mass until they were ground into huge marbles or boulders. But this ice march could not go on forever. There must come a place where the heat of the sun was suffi- cient to melt the front edge of this ice field. In Illinois this place was reached about sixty miles north of Cairo. Here the ice began to melt, and the dirt and gravel and sand it had ground up and carried along were dropped 14 THE PHYSIOGRAPHY OF THE STATE upon the old primary rock formations. Where the glacier stopped, all along its front end, a ridge of gravel and clay was built up and left. It is there to-day, so we can stand upon it and compare it with 'the land north and south of it, and know for ourselves that we are stajiding upon soil brought down by this great ice wagon from the north. Not only once, but twice and three times, perhaps oftener, did this happen, except that each time the front edge of the ice river stopped sooner than the time before. So over the northern part of the state three, at least, of these great glaciers swept covering the old rock in places very deep. This is why we have to dig through sand and gravel and boulders so many feet before striking the solid rock. This is why boulders, almost round, from six inches to five feet in diameter, can be found scattered over the surface of the state. This is why, chiefly, that we have Lake Michigan and' all the other northern lakes. The great holes scooped out by the moving ice fields were filled with water, when the glaciers melted, and there they are to this day. The loads of dirt carried were in some cases dropped in the beds of old rivers, filling them up so completely and solidly that when the glaciers were gone things had been so changed that the rivers had to dig out new channels. This was true of the Mississippi river near Rock Island and for forty or more miles below that point. This was true of the Illinois river near Henne- pin. Many other cases can be shown where this hap- pened. In places these terminal moraines formed basins, the dirt being piled up on all sides, thus shut- ting in thousands of acres of land. These areas could not get drainage and became the swamp lands that our 2 15 ILLINOIS HISTORY STORIES farmers are still draining with tile. In some of these basins the hest kind of soil has been deposited by growth and decay and the small streams seeping into them until now, when drained by the farmer, they are the richest lands to be had. There are farm- ers i n northern Illinois who are reaping sixty and seventy bushels per acre from fields in which they went duck hunting or swimming when they were boys. It is now time for us to look at a map of the state upon which these moraines are located. We see that the first moraine extends westward from Moraines of Illinois. , , . , near the point where the Wabash river leaves the Illinois state bound- ary. This moraine has been called .the Shelbyville moraine. You notice the Embarrass river has cut through it in order to reach its natural outlet. The 16 THE PHYSIOGRAPHY OF THE STATE second moraine is shaped something like an elbow, reaching from the eastern part of the state a few miles north of the Shelbyville moraine bending to the north at about the forty-first degree of latitude, and ending in the state of Wisconsin. This is known as the Champaign moraine. This is by far the largest and most prominent one in the state. You notice how the Illinois river has cut its way across this moraine. The third follows Lake Michigan and is located only a few miles to the west of its southern part. This is called the Valparaiso moraine; the Des Plaines river had to cut its way across it. Should we take the Illinois Central railroad at Chicago and travel to Cairo, we would cross the Valparaiso moraine, then the valley drained by the Kankakee and Vermilion rivers, then the Champaign moraine, then, following the ridge that divides the Embarrass from the Kaskaskia, we would enter the basin of the Big Muddy river, and in this basin would come to and cross that southern uplift known as the Ozark Highlands. South of these highlands there is no drift. This Ozark ridge of hills is not more than ten or twelve miles wide, but reaches across the state from Shawneetown on the Ohio to Grand Tower on the Mississippi. In places the elevations reach an altitude of seven or eight hundred feet, and in one place to one thousand forty-seven feet. One other little section of the state seems to have been left untouched by the great ice rivers. This is the extreme northwestern part of the state, a little corner comprising Jo Daviess county. Here we have the high- est point of land in the state, Charles Mound, which rises to an altitude of twelve hundred fifty-seven feet. A study of this map will show us that there are seven 17 ILLINOIS HISTORY STORIES distinct drainage basins in the state. These are drained respectively by the Rock river, the Illinois river, the Kaskaskia river, the Big Muddy river, the Embarrass river, the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, and Lake Michi- gan. Perhaps the smallest of all these areas is that drained by the lake. In the ice age the waters from the lake region poured out through the Illinois valley to the Mississippi, and thence to the Gulf. But as the height of the waters sank, the little elevation to the west cut the waters of the lake off in that direction and forced them to find an outlet by way of the north. The Chicago drainage channel has opened up this old water- way, giving the waters of Lake Michigan an outlet to the Gulf. In the places where the drift material was not de- posited, the old rock formations are at the top, making rugged scenery and furnishing picturesque building sites. In many such places even the abutments for bridges can be spared, as the natural formation gives ample support. We find the drift in other sections piled up in great mounds, as if done by hand. Joliet Mound, near Joliet, was a good example of this until the Rock Island railway company decided a few years ago that the material was needed for ballast. Where this drift covers the state, canal digging and railroad building can be done with comparative ease. There seems to have been considerable regularity in the deposition of the drift. It did not all drop' down in a heap, but the heavier parts settled down first, then the lighter were deposited layer after layer, something as the leaves of a book. In an early day the waters of Lake Michigan filled all the plain where the city of Chicago is now built, 18 THE PHYSIOGRAPHY OF THE STATE reaching to the edge of the Valparaiso moraine. In the midst of these ancient waters, Stony Island and Ancient Chicago Plain. Blue Island were spots of dry land, — oases in the desert of waters. As the waters receded, the lake shrunk 19 ILLINOIS HISTORY STORIES toward its present outline, and room was made for the building of the great city of the West. Present Chicago Plain. There are vast regions of Illinois almost as level as a floor. There are thousands of acres from which the 20 THE PHYSIOGRAPHY OF THE STATE first farmers did not have to cut a tree nor dig a stump before putting the plow to work. The natural drain- age with the wonderfully rich soil marks out these great reaches of prairie land as one of the best agricul- tural regions of the earth. An immense population could be supported from the fields of this state. We will look at another map before passing from this part of our subject. The storm maps of the United States show that most of the storms, the winds, the rains, the changes of temperature, follow three well- defined routes. One of these clings to the Atlantic seaboard. Another, beginning in the southwest, crosses the country diagonally to Maine. This route crosses Illinois along the Kaskaskia valley. The third begins in the Pacific ocean, or in the mountain regions of our Northwest, and crosses the country in an easterly direc- tion to Maine. This route crosses Illinois in the latitude of Chicago. You notice that there is no state except 21 Average Annual Temperature in Illinois. 22 Average Annual Rainfall in Illinois. 23 ILLINOIS HISTORY STORIES Illinois that is crossed by two of these storm routes until we reach New England. This will help us to under- stand why Illinois has such a variety of weather and perhaps more sudden changes of temperature than any other state in the Union. We should examine, also, two other charts, one show- ing the average temperature and the other the average rainfall for the state. In all such charts the same tem- perature is represented by very crooked lines. The altitude, the conformation of the drainage basins, the forests and prairies and the amount of rainfall all have an influence upon the temperature. Hardly any two places are exactly alike in these respects, so we should not expect to find many places alike in temperature records. In the extreme northern part of the state the average temperature is forty-six degrees, while in the extreme south it is fifty-eight degrees. This is a differ- ence of twelve degrees and means a difference of about three weeks in the season. On the chart showing the average rainfall we will see that there is quite a variation, reaching all the way from twenty-eight to forty-five inches per year. The average for the state is about thirty-eight inches. Now, we have attempted to get before us the physical outlook of the state, showing how it was made, of what its bone and muscle consist, whence its soil came, how its moisture and drainage are provided, and the conse- quent possibilities of this region for civilization and culture. "We have seen what nature has done for this region. What has man done to perfect her work? CHAPTi^R II THE EARLY INHABITANTS This was a beautiful prairie land reaching far and far away beyond the power of the eye to see. Miles and miles of it were almost as level as a floor. The drainage was nearly perfect. There was enough of timber to give variety to the landscape and to furnish the necessary building material for a moderate population of simple people. The soil left by the glaciers and added to by the natural growth of vegetation was as rich as a garden. Surely such a field as this was destined to a history of stirring events and of industrial life. What people first owned these lands, and how came they to leave them, and by whom were they succeeded? The native inhabitants were Indians. When Columbus added the western world to the geography of the middle ages, in 1492, he found a land that w^as beyond value in its resources and in its possibilities; but the people acquired with the land were of little value to the world 's history. They have been the means of putting to shame the records of Spanish, English and American explorers, colonists, and statesmen whose hands have been drenched in the blood of innocent savages, and whose treaties have been violated with impunity because made with these helpless children of the forest. But they have been a hopeless problem in all efforts to civilize them. They have not the inherited instincts of the 25 ILLINOIS HISTORY STORIES white man, and do not want to live as the white man lives. They were in possession of these boiuidless plains and interminable woods from Maine to California and from the Gulf of Mexico to the frozen regions of Alaska. They had their own institutions, their own manner of life, and their own religious beliefs and superstitions, as simple as the life they lived. They had their families, their tribes and their great clans, distinguished one from the other, as were the nations of Europe, by differences of dialect, language and customs. There is no satisfactory evidence that any race of people preceded the Indians in the occupation of this country. Some years ago the scientists thought there had been an older race of people, whom they called Mound Builders, who had erected great mounds in many sections of the country. These mounds still exist, such of them as have not been destroyed, most of them in river valleys not far removed from the streams. This one fact suggests a possible explanation of their origin, — they may have been devised for the purpose of pro- tecting the people from the great overflows of the rivers, which were probably much greater than now. We have seen one of these mounds some twelve miles or more from the usual channel of the Mississippi river in Mis- souri, built upon with corn cribs, barns, sheds and dwelling-house, the only spot above water for a distance of five miles in any direction. The farmer had taken advantage of one of the old Indian mounds for the same purpose for which the Indians had erected it, — to keep himself above the Mississippi overflow in the month of February. Many of these mounds have been found to contain skeletons, pottery and various other things, 26 THE EARLY INHABITANTS and from the remains found scattered about, a sort of culture, religious and industrial, had been supposed and defended. Nothing, however, has been found and Distribution of Land in North America Among the Three Classes of Indian Tribes. nothing proven that might not apply to the Indian tribes as they were in the olden times. A glance at a map will help us to understand that 27 ILLINOIS HISTORY STORIES at the time of the earliest white occupation of the country, North America was peopled by three great classes or grades of Indians. To the extreme north and west, beyond the Rocky mountains, were the savage nations. These lived wholly on the results of the chase and the streams, with what fruits and roots they could gather. They made no pretense at cultivating the ground, nor did they have any of the conveniences of life. To the east of the Rocky mountains, extending to the Atlantic and to the Gulf of Mexico, were the bar- barous tribes. These depended not alone upon the hunt and the streams, but made some rude attempts at cultivation. They grew fields of corn and beans and tobacco. They gathered their harvests and stored the grain for winter use. They used the bow and arrow pointed with flint, or hurled the spear, similar3.y pointed, in the chase or in war. For pastime they danced around their camp-fires, or their young men ran races or played at games of ball on the open fields. These were the Indians with whom the English and French had to do in this country. To the southwest and extreme south, reaching through Mexico and Cen- tral America, were the half-civilized races. These had a much higher degree of civilization. They had a system of counting and writing. They kept records of events and had a rude astronomy. They were skilled builders in stone, and some of their structures are the wonder of antiquarians to-day. These were the races with whom the Spaniards came in contact in Mexico and whose land they overran and whose civilization they destroyed without appreciating it. We see, then, that the Indians who occupied the country where we live were of the barbarous races. 28 THE EARLY INHABITANTS These Indians belonged chiefly to three great families or clans. These were the Iroquois, whose principal lands were in New York; the Algonquins," who covered an im- mense territory reaching from Labrador to the Missis- sippi, completely surrounding the Iroquois; and the Sioux, the latter living chiefly west of the Mississippi. Each of these families were divided up into a number of tribes. I n Illi- nois we have for the most part the tribes of the Illi- nois, the Miamis, Pottawattomies, Kickapoos and Winn ebagoes. All these except the Winnebagoes belong to the great Algonquin family. The Winn e b ag'oes were of the Sioux family. Of all the Indians i n North America, the Algonquins were the most amenable to civ- ilization. The Sioux were the most warlike and unapproachable. ,. . rr,. -, ^ Settlements of Indian Tribes in Illinois 1 hey have always in 1700. 29 V _ ^ jl J-^^\/ CO ) J> Jx' > i/Y . \f i. / ,-^ - iV " r^ J \ ^yl~p^^ I /"~"^L /(v r 1 \\ ~ ° / m I / z / '\V) ((^\ /) j/ ^\r^ '^Kr^ t -T ILLINOIS HISTORY STORIES been a proud, warring people. Sitting Bull, who lead his braves to the massacre of General Custer's little army a few years ago, was a Sioux Chief. A couple of maps showing the arrangement of the Indian tribes of Illinois in 1700 and again in 1760 will illustrate how they shifted from place to place and how the tribes seemed to shrink as war and the need of protection and food came upon them. Notice the territory of the Illinois tribe in the two maps. The Sioux sometimes crossed the river and made war upon the more peaceable Algonquins on the Illinois side. The warlike Iroquois from near Lake Ontario often took the warpath and, trailing the forests for more than five hundred miles, slaughtered the tribes in the valley of the Illinois and laid their fields waste, leaving their villages but smoking ruins. It was a cruel way of life, but it was all they knew. To this life they had been born, and their fathers for generations had known nothing better, nor did they wish for any other. They were willing to live their rude lives, much of the time in hunger and cold, and to die under the scalping knife or under the dreadful torture of the stake. In these valleys of the Rock river, the Illinois, the Kaskaskia, the Big Muddy, the Embarrass, and in the Chicago plain, the smoke from hundreds of little Indian villages rose to the clouds, and along these streams the rude savage caught his fish or his game, and here the squaws tilled the fields of squash and. Indian corn. Here they chased the buffalo and the deer, and after the successful big hunt in the autumn they had their dances and feasts lasting for days at a time. Here their children grew to manhood 30 THE EARLY INHABITANTS and womanhood, their sons and daughters were married and given in m a r- riage. The cra- dle and the grave were there as they are with us, to mark the two most eventful epochs in a hu- man life. The Indian had his way of looking at it as we have ours. Thus the In- dians of Illinois had been living for hundreds of years, and thus they were living in 1673, when the first glimmer of a new day and a different form gave promise of Settlements of Indian Tribes in Illinois in 1760. of life fell across their valley and marvelous changes. The palefaces reached the Illinois country, and with their coming, history really begins. Whence came the first white men to these valleys? Who were they and why did they come? 3 31 CHAPTER III THE COMING OF THE FRENCH — MARQUETTE AND JOLIET During the years 1541-1543 four historic events were taking place in different parts of North America which we may link together for the sake of memory help. .DeSoto was wandering across the southern wilderness, battling with wild beasts and still wilder men, probably penetrating as far as the present boundary of Kansas, finding in all his journeyings nothing so wonderful as his burying-place — the Mississippi river. Coronado, coming up from the northwestern part of Mexico, was searching for the marvelous city of Quivera, which existed only in diseased imaginations. In his dreary wanderings he came within a few hundred miles, perhaps within a few days' march, of DeSoto 's men. On the Pacific coast, Cabrillo, a third Spaniard, had discovered the shore line of the present California, and, wintering in the harbor of San Diego, had died there. Away off to the northeast, Cartier, sailing up the St. Lawrence river to the present site of Montreal, attempted to plant a colony. Cartier failed in this attempt but the French had entered upon the plan of colonizing, and they are to be dealt with in our history as an active force for a period of a little more than two hundred years. In 1608 a permanent settlement was made at Quebec. After three-quarters of a century, the French were at last firmly planted upon the soil of the New World. 32 THE COMING OF THE FRENCH In 1611 they established themselves at Montreal. With- in the next sixty years they went up the Ottawa river, crossed by portage to the Georgian Bay, and then to the Sault Ste. Marie rapids, where in 1641 they estab- lished a mission among the Indians and a post for the fur traders. Then they went on to the west, establish- ing another post at Pointe es Sprite, near the south- w^estern extremit}^ of Lake Superior, in 1665. Other posts were, established at Mackinac in 1669, at St. Xavier, on Green Bay in 1669, and at Frontenac in 1673. Dotting these places on our map, we shall see that the French during these years were exploring the region of the Great Lakes and were making the natural waterways the means of communication and travel. It is at this point that we in the Illinois country come into intimate touch with these exploring French. It will be interesting to follow with our map and pencil the development of the posts and forts established during the next three-quarters of a century. In 1679 we find Ft. Miami at the mouth of the St. Joseph river on Lake Michigan ; in 1670, Ft. Crevecoeur where Peoria now stands ; in 1682, Ft. St. Louis near the present town of Utica, Illinois ; in 1695, Kaskaskia ; in 1717, New Orleans; in 1735, Vincennes; in 1753, Le Boeuf, Venango, Ft. Duquesne, and other establish- ments in the neighborhood of the Great Lakes. (See map, page 84.) We have not named all the places where these enter- prising Frenchmen pushed their way among the In- dians, erecting their chapels, setting up their crucifixes, and building huts for the accommodation of the traders. Jt must not be supposed for a moment that these settle- ments stand for the same thing that the Pilgrim or 33 ILLINOIS HISTORY STORIES Puritan settlements of New England stand for, or those of Virginia and Carolina. Far from it. Yet they were way stations in the great valley of the Mississippi, planted upon all the routes of travel, and here were the lilies of France giving notice to all the world that Frenchmen had taken possession of this valley and claimed it as their own by right of original discovery and exploration. The most prominent and the most lovable character connected with the explorations of the Middle West was the heroic Father Marquette. His is one of the lives untouched by selfishness and untainted by greed, that stands out like a great promontory in the sea of passion and cruelty and scheming that swept over the New World during the first centuries of its history. He was molded of the material of which martyrs are made. He never desired ease or fame. He loved humanity and wild nature. He lived as he had hoped to live, and finally died as he had prayed to die, far from the habitations of men, in the midst of the interminable forests beside the water ways leading to the Great Lakes, his face turned toward heaven, and only a few faith- ful converts to mark his passing. Father Marquette was born near Paris, in France, in 1637. He came of a warlike family among the wealthy and noble of his time. He chose the priesthood for his profession and was educated in the schools of the Jesuits, a strict religious society belonging to the priest- hood of the Catholic church and devoted to the spread of their faith in all parts of the world. This society was organized about 1535, and from that day to this, wherever the Church has needed a man to take des- perate chances, — on the frontier, in the wilderness, in 34: THE COMING OF THE FRENCH battle, in slavery, beside the king's throne, or at the martyr's stake, — she has but to suggest, and there were men of this order waiting to do or die. Father Mar- quette belonged to this order and at the age of twenty- nine was set apart for missionary work in the wilderness of the New World. In September, 1666, he reached Quebec. Here he reported to his superior and thanked God that he was at last so near the field of work which he had been desir- ing for years. But much was needed by the young man before he was fully equipped for his work. In a few days he was sent up to Three Rivers, about seventy- five miles above Quebec, where he was placed under the instructions of an experienced teacher and mission- ary. Here he remained for three years, getting ready. He had to learn Indian languages and dialects; he had to learn how to provide himself with food in the wilder- ness, how to make rude huts and shelters, how to cook his own food, how to paddle canoes and swim swollen streams, and how to make his own clothing out of such material as the forest furnished. There was much be- sides books for this young priest to study, and he gave himself unflinchingly to the work. In the summer of 1668, Father Marquette was ready to go farther toward the frontier to make proof of the spirit that was in him. He set out with a small party for the station at Sault Ste. Marie, near the mouth of Lake Superior. Here there was a mission, as we have noted on our map. This seems to have been the most important station west of Montreal. They w^ent up the Ottawa river by canoe until opposite Georgian Bay, and carried their canoes across the portage to the bay, and then paddled along the shores of the lake until they 35 ILLINOIS HISTORY STORIES reached the mission at the Sault. This journey of nearly nine hundred miles probably occupied most of the sum- mer of 1668. A year later, September, " 1669, we find Marquette again on the move. This time he was sent to take charge of the mission at Pointe es Sprite, or La Pointe, near the southwestern extremity of Lake Superior. In about two years after his arrival at this place, the Indian tribes with whom he had labored were obliged to abandon their homes and flee from the in- vasion of warring tribes with whom they had become involved in quarrels. The mission was abandoned and, with the Indians, Marquette turned eastward and located on the island of Mackinac near where the waters of Superior find their entrance to Lake Huron. Here a misson station had already been established; a short time afterwards it was removed to the mainland on the north shore and was called St. Ignace. The thousands of tourists and visitors who every summer visit these straits and wander over the ground made memorable by the labors of these early missionaries, try to dream over the records suggested by the scanty markings and monuments, wondering what manner of men these must have been. On December 8, Marquette, here at the mission of St. Ignace, received the most joyful message he had heard since landing in the New World. Upon that day, just as winter was closing in, a lone traveler drew his birch- bark canoe up on the beach beside the mission station, and, meeting the priest, placed in his hands a message from the governor of Canada. This traveler was Joliet, and this day the names of Marquette and Joliet were to be joined for register and transmission side by side to coming generations. 36 THE COMING OF THE FRENCH . Joliet was the son of a wagon maker. He had been born and reared in Canada. He had studied for the priesthood, but after a time had given up this plan for the more adventurous and fascinating life of an ex- plorer. He was an unusually bright and capable man. His ability won the esteem and regard of all Avith whom he came in contact. He was brave, fearless, energetic, resourceful — an ideal man for explorations among the wild men of an unbroken wilderness. For years the governor of Canada had been hearing rumors of a great river to the south and west of the lakes, and he was desirous of knowing more about it. It was uncertain whether this river emptied into the Pacific or into the Atlantic. The country to the east of it was known as the Illinois country because the Illinois Indians were living along this river. It came about that, acting under orders of the French king who was anxious to discover this unknown river, the govern- or of Canada sought to find some one who could lead an expedition into the wilderness for this purpose. He selected Joliet, the son of the wagon maker. It was important to have in every exploring party a priest. This was important for several reasons. The church and the state were acting together as one in this work of opening up the New World. The priest was usually familiar with the Indian languages and dialects, and could thus act as an interpreter; he was known by his dress among all the tribes of the great valley, because where he had not been his fame had pre- ceded him, and the ''black robes" were known as the medicine men of the palefaces. Joliet had known Mar- quette in the early claj^s at Montreal and at Three Rivers, and the two had formed a liking for each other. It was 37 ILLINOIS HISTORY STORIES greatly to his delight that Father Marquette was named to accompany him on this trip. ^ It was this commission that Joliet placed in the hands of the priest on that eighth day of December, 1672. Marquette had for years been looking with longing eyes toward the Illinois country. He had prayed that it might be permitted him to go forth as a pioneer mis- sionary among these people, carrying them the gospel, living and dying among them. Upon this night his prayer was answered, and Marquette was happy. He had never been a rugged man. He had the physique of a scholar and a civilian rather than that of an explorer, and so it came about that the life to which this message consigned him was to lead to an early grave as the re- sult of exposure and over-exertion. All winter Marquette and Joliet were making their preparations for the journey. They gathered all the information they could about the country, its people, its languages and its streams. On the seventeenth of May, 1673, a little group of people gathered on the beach at St. Ignace to see the two depart. They took with them five oarsmen to propel their boats. With Joliet in one boat and Marquette in the other, after the prayers and blessings of the priest on shore, the boats were pushed out and the eventful voyage was begun. They followed the west shore of Lake Michigan to Green Bay. Entering this, they proceeded to the mission station of St. Xavier. Here they rested a while with the priests and people of this mission ; then, pushing on, they proceeded to the head of Green Bay, then up the Fox river to Winnebago lake ; then, branch- ing off to the west, they followed the Fox liver until 38 THE COMING OF THE FRENCH they came to the large Indian village of the Mascoutees. They had heard much of this village, and it was here they expected to receive information concerning the peoples and the lands they were to visit. They found the savages friendly and ready with information giving definite location to the great river which flowed away to the south, they knew not how far, but stated that it was beset with great monsters and that its banks were inhabited by blood-thirsty tribes that would permit none to pass. They tried to persuade the adventurers to re- turn the way they came, but, failing in this, they readily supplied guides to show them the way over the portage to a river which they said would flow into the great river. A short journey brought them to the river sought; it was what is now known as the Wisconsin. Here they held a religious service, then embarked, and in a few days, — on June 17, — they floated out through the mouth of the Wisconsin upon the bosom of the great river, the Mississippi. Perhaps these were the first Europeans since the days of DeSoto (1541) that had looked upon the waters of the great river. The dis- covery of DeSoto had been forgotten, so we may well say these men w^ere the discoverers of the river, coming upon it at the mouth of the Wisconsin. We cannot follow all the known details of this journey, but on the twenty-fifth of June they saw tracks on the west bank of the river. Joliet and Marquette landed, and after following the tracks for five or six miles across a beautiful prairie, they came to an Indian village. Calling aloud for some one to come out, they were answered by a swarm of savages who sent four of their old men to meet them bearing calumets, or peace- pipes. Marquette asked them who they were. They 39 ILLINOIS HISTORY STORIES ?>"•* »«y/ J i ^ ylJ* ' CO I— ( O M H ,0 ^ :§ I— I H pq o *S rC5 «• P SB o t(_i c3 O C QJ O o "3 w O) cS P ^ a" 'xi u c a ci ^ .^ 03 1 • fH G • 1-1 M Oi ^ OJ ^ k. o; r^ -+-> -P CS ^ -*J -Ti O) • rH 1— 1 Ph O) ;-i ^ O) ^ H 40 THE COMING OF THE FRENCH replied that they were Illini, which in their language means "men." By this name they were ever after known, and the name has come down to our state, and many times, under a more cultured civilization, the pale- faces have acted less like men than did these primitive red men of the prairies. Leaving this village, Mar- quette and Joliet proceeded on their journey, with many interesting incidents, until they had gone as far as the mouth of the Arkansas river. Here, fearing that the tribes along the shore might do them harm, and finding that some of them had firearms, and believing that they had determined the course and outlet of the great river, they decided to return. On their upward journey, when they reached the mouth of the Illinois river they decided to ascend it and attempt to get back to the lakes in that way. Marquette wrote that in all their wander- ings they had seen nothing like this valley of the Illinois "as to its fertility of soil, its prairie and its woods; its cattle, elk, deer and bustards, ducks and beavers." After more than two hundred years, we who live upon the produce of that valley agree most fully with his estimate of its riches. Below Ottawa, near the present site of Utica, they found a village of Kaskaskia Indians. They spent some time here and were furnished with guides to conduct them by the best route to the lake. They ascended the Illinois, then the Des Plaines, until they came to the divide which separates the Des Plaines valley from the lake, and, carrying their canoes over the ridge, were again able to paddle upon either the Chicago or the Calumet river — we are not sure which — to Lake Mich- igan. The travelers at once pushed for the north along the western shore of the lake, past the present, sites of 41 ILLINOIS HISTORY STORIES Evanston, Racine, Milwaukee, and on and on until they reached Green Bay and, at the end of September, pulled their worn canoes up at the mission of St. Xavier after an absence of little more than four months. What a journey they had made ! What a record to carry back to the governor of Canada and to send home to the French king ! Joliet could not go back to Canada during the winter, so he worked on his report. Mar- quette also wrote out a report of their expedition. By the irony of fate, the next spring, when he had reached within a few miles of Montreal, Joliet was capsized in his canoe, his crew were all drowned, and he barely escaped with his life, while his precious manuscripts were lost forever. So no written report of the itinerary could be made by him, and it was not until some years after that the report made by Marquette was obtained and published in France. Joliet does not seem to have been rewarded in any adequate way by the French for his wonderful achievement, and in history to this day his name is regarded as second to that of Marquette in the discoveries and explorations in which they shared. So this man, burning for fame and public recognition, was passed by, while the humble priest, who desired neither fame nor recognition, became the chief authority in this world-wide story. With the fortune of Joliet we have nothing more to do, but we shall follow Marquette a little longer. When they left the Kaskaskia Indians on the Illinois river, Father Marquette had promised them that he would return to them to teach them the gospel. He was very anxious to return as soon as possible. But the exposure on the trip had so broken his health that it was im- possible for him to start at once upon another journey. 42 THE COMING OF THE FRENCH Spring came, and he hoped that with the warmer weather he would grow stronger, but the days of sum- mer came and went, finding him still at the little mission station at Green Bay. But in the autumn he thought he had sufficiently recovered to undertake the journey. So in October, with two Frenchmen for companions and guides, he set out upon the trip. They slowly pulled their canoe along the shore, the priest walking much of the time, to vary the monotony and to relieve his sickness, which returned upon him and seemed worse in the cramped position in the boat. Finally, upon the fourth of December they pulled into the Chicago river, which was frozen to the depth of half a foot. Here Mar- quette was so much worse it was impossible to go farther. Making a rude sledge, his companions, aided by some friendly Pottawattomies, drew him over the ice to a place about five miles from the shore of the lake, and here, building a rude hut for shelter, they decided to winter. So here, upon the very site of our Chicago, out somewhere on the west branch of our river, this great man, heroic in his courage and faith, passed the dreary winter of 1674-5, far from his home and far from even the rude conveniences of life, yet happy and serene, waiting for what might yet be in store for him to do or endure. When spring came Marquette was better and they proceeded slowly upon their way. They spent eleven days in reaching the Kaskaskia village. The people here received him with every demonstration of joy. He taught them for a few days, establishing among them the mission of the Immaculate Conception, then calling them all together in the open air upon the plain, he preached to them his farewell sermon and gave them his parting advice and blessing. He felt that 43 ILLINOIS HISTORY STORIES d a r— 1 o ^ ni 'a3 fl ;?; cS o tfl 03 -M ^ CO <4 ^ Cl W 03 15- H ^ ce ^ d ti-i OJ g c c ft b m B >> li Ti a ■d ^ 44 THE COMING OF THE FRENCH he had only a few weeks longer to live, and wished, if he might, to reach St. Ignace in time to die. Many of the Kaskaskia Indians accompanied him almost to the lake, showing him every token of love possible to their rude natures. Crossing the portage to the Chicago river, they entered the lake, and, in order to reach St. Ignace, they paddled around the southern end of the lake and up its eastern shore. The journey w^as slow. Father Marquette was daily growing weaker. Near the spot where the city of Ludington, Michigan, now stands, they pulled their boats to shore. It was the good father's last landing. About midnight, sheltered by a rude hut of bark, gently talking and praying with the men who had been his companions, he quietly passed away. It was May 18, 1675. The next spring, some Indians, to whom Marquette had preached the gospel way over on the west end of Lake Superior, came to his grave in the woods and disinterring the body, cleaned the bones after the Indian fashion and reverently carried them to the mission of St. Ignace, where they found resting-place in the little chapel. We have spent so much time upon this narrative be- cause it seems that here we have a character that measured up to the full height of a type among the missionary explorers who opened up the interior of this country to civilization and settlement. No one, young or old, can study the life of Marquette without profit, and to us who live in the valley of the fertile rivers and along the great lake which his canoe threaded in his weary journeys, his name and life should be household themes. CHAPTER IV THE STORY OF LA SALLE Father Marquette died on the eighteenth of May, 1675. His bones had been lying for four summers under the little chapel where his loving followers had placed them in 1676, when one bright autumn morning the people of St. Ignace were startled by the appear- ance of a ship with sails approaching the beach. Savages, missionaries and traders gazed in astonishment at it as it swept proudly up to a place of anchorage. Then a discharge of cannon from her sides sent the frightened savages off on a run for shelter from this new engine of destruction which thus announced the advent of a floating fortress upon the Great Lakes. On board this ship were two of the most remarkable men ever sent from France to the New World. These men were La Salle and his Italian-born lieutenant, Henri de Tonti. It would be too long a story to tell of all of La Salle's experiences in Canada and around the lakes and rivers east of Michigan. Let it suffice to say that he came to Canada in 1666, the same year as Marquette. He had been educated for the priesthood but had chosen to turn aside for the life of an explorer and trader. He had probably discovered the Ohio river, and had possibly gone as far as Michigan, and perhaps had been on the Illinois river before we meet him on this September morning casting anchor on the beach at St. Ignace. He 46 THE STORY OF LA SALLE was one of the most Tinfortiinate men in all history. From the time we are first introduced to him until the day of his death his ill-fortune seldom varied. In all his career, from 1666, when he first landed in Canada, until 1687, when he was assassinated by a faithless follower in the swamps of Texas, we read of a con- tinuous series of disasters. He seems to have been gifted with the fatal quality of making enemies of all with whom he came in contact, except the wild Indians of the forest. Even the rosy, fat priest. Father Hen- nepin, whom he brought with him on this expedition, turned against him, lied about him when living and attempted to steal his laurels when dead. His brother, another priest, annoyed him, obstructed him, followed him from place to place, and in the last scene of his career was little better than an accomplice in his death. Yet, in spite of financial disasters, of the desertion by friends, of losses by fires and floods, of wanderings through trackless forests and amid freezing swamps for days together; in spite of sickness and of enemies, of betrayals and shipwreck, this remarkable man per- severed in his original purpose until he had threaded this vast country from the St. Lawrence to the mouth of the Mississippi back and forth several times, handing down to the future a record of endurance and heroism which his own times could neither understand nor appreciate. So far as is known, the only two human beings who were true to him in life and in death were his trusty lieutenant, the Italian Tonti, and his faith- ful Mohegan hunter, Nika. At Niagara, just above the falls, La Salle had built his ship, the Grijfon, of forty tons ' burden, and provided her with five cannon. He intended to use her to aid in 4 47 ILLINOIS HISTORY STORIES carrying on a trade in furs along the Lakes and to convey the supplies he might need from Canada to the foot of Lake Michigan. The great enterprise he had on his mind was to follow the Mississippi to its mouth, then to establish a line of forts and settlements from the Lakes to the Gulf, gathering the Indians into a great confederacy for trade. It was a great scheme. The Building of the Griffon. If the jealousies of white men had been no more bitter than the enmities of the red men, he might have accom- plished his purpose within a few years. The Griffon had brought her first load successfully to St. Ignace. Here she took on what furs the agent of La Salle had stored at that place, thence proceeded to Green Bay, where she received sufficient furs to load her. At this place La Salle turned her over to the pilot to be taken back to Niagara, where she was to be un- 48 THE STORY OF LA SALLE loaded, and taking on new supplies, was to meet him at the foot of Lake Michigan. On the eighteenth of September, 1679, the Griffon turned to the east on her homeward trip. La Salle never saw her more. Whether wrecked in a storm, sunk by accident or design, the prey of the elements or of his enemies, La Salle never knew. Her valuable cargo was lost. With the things they had taken from the Griffon for use in their trip, they loaded their canoes and, dividing into two parties, started down the lake. La Salle was to go by the western shore of Lake Michigan, along the same route taken some years before by Marquette, while Tonti with most of the men was to go by the eastern shore. They were to meet at a point designated near the foot of the lake. La Salle journeyed down the lake, passed the Chicago river, and, skirting the shore-line at the end of the lake, arrived at the mouth of the St. Joseph river. Here he should have met Tonti, but it was twenty days before Tonti arrived after a very dif- ficult journey down the lake. While waiting, La Salle built a fort, called Fort Miami, at the mouth of the St. Joseph. This was to be his way station between the Illinois country and the head of the Great Lakes. They waited here long enough for the Griffon to put in an appearance, but as she did not come. La Salle deter- mined to proceed as they were. Going up the St. Joseph river until they came to the bend, they shoul- dered their freight and their canoes, and in this way crossed the portage to the sources of the Kankakee river. There were thirty-three in the party at this time. It was on the third day of December, 1679, that they set out for the Illinois from Fort Miami. After reach- 49 ILLINOIS HISTORY STORIES ing the stream of the Kankakee their journey was not very difficult. The country through which they passed was attractive and pleasant, but at this time of the year game was scarce, so they suffered for food part of the time. In a few days they were floating between the bluffs at the present site of Ottawa, where the Fox river empties into the Illinois. Soon they came to the beautiful plain where Utica now stands, bordered on the south by high bluffs, the most notable point of which was the great rocky bluff known to us as Starved Rock. Here, spread out on the plain, was an Indian village. Hen- nepin says he counted four hundred and sixty lodges. They were made long like covered baggage-wagons, each one of them housing several families. A framework of poles was covered by woven mats, and the interior was divided into parts for the different families by stretch- ing mats across from side to side. An open place in the center was left for the common fire, and a hole in the roof permitted a part of the smoke to escape. When La Salle and his party landed at this village, during Christmas week of 1679, not a sign of life could be seen. There were the houses and all the indications of a populous town, but the people were not to be found. They had gone, as was their custom, upon their annual hunting expedition. La Salle was in need of food, and was much disappointed at not finding the Indians. They hunted about until they discovered the place where the Indians had buried their corn. La Salle took what he needed, leaving in its place hatchets, beads and other things to pay for the corn. They then pushed on down the river. On the first of January they reached Peoria Lake. Along this lake he met some of the Indians belonging to the village beside the rock. He 50 THE STOEY OF LA SALLE explained what he had done in taking the corn, and satisfied their demands. He gained permission from the Indians to build a fort and a ship on the river, but they were not very friendly, and, fearing to remain among them. La Salle took his men a little below the lake, and there on the bank of the river selected a spot on a slight elevation upon which to erect his fort. This fort, built of logs and surrounded by a palisade, he called Crevecoeur, the fort of the broken heart. He had given up all hope of hearing from his ship, the Griffon. He learned through a messenger that his creditors were seizing his property in Canada, and his men about him were growing discontented and sullen. It Avas a dark time, and Crevecoeur was a fitting name for the fort, the first built on the soil of Illinois. It was better named than he even then dreamed. Six of his men had already deserted. He began building a large boat, expecting to sail it down to the Mississippi and thence to the Gulf. This kept his people busy. He decided to return to Canada for additional supplies. In the meantime he decided to send Father Hennepin upon an exploring expedition down to the mouth of the Illinois and thence up the Mississippi. The adventures of Hennepin were thrill- ing and entertaining. Had he been honest, his name might have come down to us only second to that of his great leader in the expedition. It was the third of March, 1680, when La Salle started on that long journey of fifteen hundred miles through the pathless wilderness with no one to guide him. With his Indian hunter and four Frenchmen, the journey was begun. The river was frozen^ so most of the way they had to carry their canoes or drag them over the snow. 51 ILLINOIS HISTORY STORIES At the village by the Rock he found the people still absent, but he examined the location of the Rock and at the first opportunity sent word back to Tonti to occupy the place and build a fort on its top. On March 23rd they reached the mouth of the Calumet river, and on the 24th the mouth of the St. Joseph, where he found two men awaiting him in the fort. Here he learned of the total disappearance of the Griffon. He sent these two men on to Tonti with word to fortify the Rock while he pushed on to Canada. On this trip many times they were forced to wade through snow waist-deep for days together. Sometimes they were obliged to sleep for several nights in succes- sion upon the open prairie with nothing with which to build a fire. Their clothes, wet with rain and snow, if taken off for the night, froze stiff so they could not put them on in the morning. Yet in sixty-five days from starting they drew up at Fort Frontenac. We shall not pursue the details of La Salle's experi- ences with his creditors nor his efforts to get money and supplies. It was enough that he succeeded, and on the tenth of August, with twenty-five men, started back for the Illinois country to join Tonti. This time he went by the way of Georgian Bay and the Straits of Mack- inac. When he reached his fort at the mouth of the St. Joseph he found it destroyed. He heard rumors of a war party of Iroquois Indians. He hastened on to find Tonti, fearing he might have met with disaster. They made their way down the Illinois river as rapidly as they could. Where it had been so quiet on their previous trip they now found a multitude of living creatures. The prairies were filled with herds of buf- faloes. Wild game was abundant on every hand. They 52 THE STORY OF LA SALLE came to the Rock, but La Salle looked in vain for some sign of a palisade or other indication of Tonti's work. They came to the village of the Illinois ; here destruction of the worst type presented itself. Every hut had disappeared. Nothing but the blackened and burned remnants of the poles of the four hundred and sixty huts remained to tell that a great village had been there only a few weeks before. Worse than that, they found the ground covered with the bodies of the dead. Even the graves had been broken open, and the bones had been scattered about and the skulls set up on stakes. They looked in vain for signs of Frenchmen among the dead. Leaving three men hid with most of their supplies, La Salle, with the rest of his party, pushed down the river. They found that the Illinois had retreated down the west side of the river, while their enemies, the Iroquois, had followed on the opposite bank. Their camps had been made oppo- site each other as the retreat progressed. They came to Fort Crevecoeur. It also was in ruins. There were no signs to tell them what had become of Tonti. They continued their way down the river. Near its mouth they found that the Illinois had abandoned their women and had fled. The Iroquois had captured some- thing like a thousand women and children. Many of them they had tied to the stake and killed with horrible torture. Some of them they had eaten. The awful scenes were on every hand. La Salle continued until, on the sixth day of December, 1680, they floated out into the Mississippi. This was the first La Salle had seen of the great river of which he had dreamed by day and night through so many weary months. But he could not stop now. He must needs return at once; the ruins 53 ILLINOIS HISTORY STORIES behind him must be repaired, and the lost Tonti must be sought. On the eleventh of December he was back at the ruined village beside the Rock. Here they found the three men they had left with the supplies, and, collecting a quantity of half -burned corn from the ruins of the village, they started on their return up the river. On the sixth of January they reached the junc- tion of the Kankakee with the Illinois, and here La Salle discovered in the woods a piece of tree that had been cut with a saw. He was delighted, as he understood from this that Tonti must have passed this way and was probably safe. The river was frozen, so they left their canoes and proceeded on foot toward St. Joseph. It was very cold. Snow fell nineteen days in succession as they waded across one hundred and twenty miles of open prairie. They were half starved and almost worn out when at last they reached Fort Miami, where they found one of La Salle's lieutenants with twelve men who had reached this place and were awaiting some word from him before advancing. They had repaired the fort and had gathered plenty of fuel and provisions, but they had heard no word from Tonti. What had become of Tonti ? When La Salle left him the previous March his men at once became mutinous. They had lost faith in the success of La Salle, and did not believe they would ever get pay for the time they had put in with him. Some of them deserted, while others were surly and discontented. Then came the word from La Salle to fortify the Rock. Tonti set out to do this with part of the men, leaving the others at the fort. No sooner was he gone than part of the men deliberately dismantled the fort, threw the forge and tools into the river, destroyed everything they could, 54 THE STORY OF LA SALLE and left the place. The three or four trusty men left hurried up the river to inform Tonti. Tonti made a trip down the river, recovered the forge and part of the tools, and carried them back to the village by the Rock. To avoid all suspicion on the part of the Indians, Tonti took up his residence in a hut in the midst of the savages. Here he brought all that was left of their supplies, and here, with his half dozen companions, lived with the Indians during the summer. Early in the fall, without warning or suspicion, an alarmed scout brought word to the village that the Iroquois were coming, only a day's march away; and, what was worse, he reported that they were led by Frenchmen and that one of the leaders was La Salle. Tonti did all that he could to convince them that it could not be true, and offered to go out with them to fight the Iroquois. The angry Indians sacked his hut, took all his supplies, including the forge and tools, and threw them into the river. By great tact and courage, Tonti saved the lives of his party. But the Iroquois w^ere at hand; the attack was made. Tonti rushed in between the contending hosts and tried to bring about a cessation of the fight. After a parley with the Iro- quois an agreement was reached ; but when the Iroquois found what an easy victory they might win, they were very angry, and broke the treaty, telling Tonti and his companions to leave the country at once. Tonti could do no more for his friends ; they were doomed to certain defeat; so, stealing quietly away with a canoe, they set off up the river to find La Salle. Unfortunately, they went by the way of the Chicago river and Green Bay, while La Salle was on the opposite side of the lake. Months afterward they met at Michillimackinac, 55 ILLINOIS HISTORY STORIES It would seem that La Salle was ruined and that he would give up in despair. But he was not thus made. His courage was beyond measure. On December 21, 1681, we find La Salle and Tonti with a party of twenty-three Frenchmen and about a score of Indians once again starting from Fort Miami for the Illinois country. He had been carrying on negotiations with the various Illinois tribes, trying to persuade them to settle again at the old village, while he should fortify the Rock and act as their protector against the Iroquois Indians. He was now starting out to fulfill his part of the agreement. It was the dead of winter, and their canoes and luggage and the sick had to be placed on sledges and dragged over the snow. Thus they crossed the site of Chicago and the divide between the lake and the Des Plaines river. They reached the site of the Illinois village, but found it still deserted. They proceeded on down the river, past Fort Crevecoeur and on to the Mississippi, and then on and on, and still on, until on the ninth of April, 1682, their boats passed out of the river into the surging waters of the Gulf of Mexico. La Salle had attained his long- desired dream. He had followed the great river, of which all Europe had heard so many rumors, to its mouth. He divided his party into three sections, and each taking a different branch, all came together at the mouth of the river, proving that it emptied into the gulf by at least three channels. Here La Salle with great ceremony took possession of the country drained by the great river and all its tributaries in the name of King Louis of France, and named the valley Louisiana. Then began the journey back up the river, leaving behind them a post upon which had been nailed the 56 THE STORY OF LA SALLE arms of France pounded out of an old copper kettle. On the way, La Salle became sick from a fever and had to stay for months at an extemporized fort, Prud Homme, near the present site of Natchez. He sent Tonti on to go to Canada to report the result of his venture and to see that an account was sent to the king. In December of the same year, 1682, La Salle and Tonti were at the village of the Hlinois. Here they carried out the original purpose of fortifying the Rock. They brought all the supplies they had or could gather to the Rock, erected a fort on its top, and surrounded it with a palisade. The Indians, gathering confidence because of the fort, began to collect at the village again, until in the shadow of the Rock, now named Fort St. Louis, it was estimated that over twenty thousand Indians had their tents pitched. Here was the best fortified place established by La Salle in the present state of Illinois. Here we might leave him, for in the spring of 1683 he left Fort St. Louis, intending to go to Canada, and thence to France to interest the king in his projects. He never saw his Fort St. Louis again. La Salle made his way to France, persuaded the king to approve and aid him in his plans, and finally, in July, 1684, left France, with four ships and ample supplies, intending to enter the mouth of the Mississippi, estab- lish a colony, and then ascend to Fort St. Louis of the Illinois. His usual bad luck followed him. The leaders quarreled. The vessels missed the mouth of the river. They landed four hundred miles west of the river. Three of the ships were wrecked, the fourth finally returned to France, leaving La Salle with about a hundred of his colonists in an unknown country, which has since proved to have been the coast of the present 57 ILLINOIS HISTOKY STORIES state of Texas. Here they suffered and many of them died from fevers and other diseases, La Salle vainly trying to find the river. Finally, about the first of January, 1687, La Salle determined to make a desperate attempt to reach the river, then proceed to Canada and send word to France, that help might be sent to the lost colony. With a small party he set out and had proceeded as far as the Trinity river, when dissensions broke out among the members of the party, and La Salle was waylaid and treacherously shot to death. Ther'e died with him in as foul a manner, his faithful Indian hunter, Nika, his nephew, and another companion. A few of his party reached the Illinois, went on to Canada and returned to France. Of the remnant of the colony left in Texas, not one escaped to tell the tale of their sufferings and disasters. Months afterwards, Tonti, not knowing his leader was dead, set out to seek him in the wilds of Texas and came upon the ruins of the place that had sheltered them. All had been killed by Indians. Thus ends the story of La Salle so far as the country connected with Illinois has to do. He was a brave, pa- tient, much suffering man. He opened the way for the French settlers to enter the Mississippi valley both by way of the north and of the south. He deserved a title of nobility and great wealth from his country; instead, after his death at the hands of villainous assassins, he was denied even a grave beside the murky river in the dreary wilderness near the Gulf. CHAPTER V FRENCH OCCUPATION OF THE MISSISSIPPI VALLEY La Salle was assassinated in the southern wilderness early in 1687. Tonti held his post on the Rock, called Fort St. Louis, protecting the Indian tribes that had been induced to settle in the neighborhood, and waiting for reinforcements from the home country. The rein- forcements never came. France was not a successful colonizing country. The king and the French cabinet did not realize until it was forever too late the value of their interests in the New World. When Father Marquette visited the Kaskaskia In- dians prior to his death, he established among them the *' Mission of the Immaculate Conception." This mission was continued until the French power disappeared from the Mississippi valley. In 1698 the French king sent out a colony under one d 'Iberville, a Canadian, who had promised to take pos- session of the mouth of the Mississippi and colonize it. d 'Iberville arrived in the Gulf near the mouth of the Mississippi in the month of February or March, 1698. While exploring the inlets and trying to determine the best place for a settlement, one of his men found an Indian chief with a blue cloak and what he called a ''wonderful medicine," a piece of speaking-bark. The man traded a hatchet for it and found that it was a letter from Tonti to La Salle, written thirteen j^ears 59 ILLINOIS HISTORY STORIES before. When La Salle was struggling in the mazes of the Texas swamps, striving in vain to rediscover the great river, Tonti, hearing that he had left France with his colony, went down the river to meet him. He went to the mouth of the river and sought for days to locate him, then gave up the effort. But he gave an Indian chief a cloak and wrote a letter to La Salle, leaving it with the Indian to be delivered should he chance to meet the white man. After thirteen years the letter was placed in the hands of a Frenchman, but the one for whom it was intended and to whom it would have meant so much had been silenced forever. d 'Iberville finally decided to establish himself at the place now called Biloxi. In April, 1699, they built a fort at this place, d 'Iberville soon after returned to France, and the control of the colony fell into the hands of his younger brother, Bienville. On one of his exploring expeditions Bienville found some Indians, Chickasaws, who had been trading with the English, and with the help of Englishmen had fought a battle with some other Indians. This was startling news to the French. It is worth noting in our outline of the early occupation of the country. It tells us that at that early day the English settlers were finding their way through and around the southern Alleghanies. You remember that Joliet reported that in his explorations in 1673 he had met some Indians with either English or Spanish arms in their hands. The French soon had occasion to meet some of these pioneer English. In 1700 three things happened which we shall do well to make a note of. First, a member of the colony at Biloxi, a man by the name of La Sueur, with a two- masted vessel sailed up the Mississippi from the Gulf to 60 FRENCH OCCUPATION Lake Pepin. There he built a fort, killed four hundred buffalo, traded with the Indians and carried back to Biloxi a boat-load of blue mud, believing it to contain valuable ore. This was the first boat of any size to ascend the river. Second, Bienville moved his settle- ment from Biloxi to the present site of Mobile. Third, that year Tonti, discouraged with his work at the Rock and threatened by hostile tribes, persuaded the Kaskas- kia Indians to move down the Mississippi where the French might still protect them. The Indians moved, but upon reaching the land near the mouth of the Kaskaskia river and finding it a goodly land and unoc- cupied, they decided to pitch their tents there instead of following Tonti to the gulf. This explains the change in our Indian map, where we found the Illinois Indians crowded upon a small territory along the Kas- kaskia. Tonti went on down the river and joined the colony of Bienville at Mobile. It is said that he died there of yellow fever the next year. In 1792 one Juchereau, a trader from Montreal, estab- lished a trading-post just above the present site of Cairo. In the course of a few years he built a tannery there and dressed buffalo hides and shipped them down the Mississippi river, as well as up the Ohio toward Montreal. Finally with thirty thousand buffalo skins on hand he became frightened and ran away, leaving this vast stock of skins to spoil. Exploring parties went up the Missouri river and the Arkansas and wandered over the intervening territory in search for precious metals. This was not the order of people of which profitable colonies are made. In 1712 the king, disgusted with the efforts to colonize under the Royal patronage, turned 61 ILLINOIS HISTORY STORIES the whole matter over to Anthony Crozat, a wealthy French merchant, who undertook to make settlements on business principles and to manage the colony for fifteen years. It was his purpose to search for mines and to protect the French possessions from the Spanish and English. The story of the colony from 1712 to 1717 is a repetition of failures, of vicious and dishonest conduct, and of treacherous dealings with Indians and whites alike. In 1717 Crozat gave up the task. It was too much for him to manage according to business prin- ciples. We come now to one of those remarkable speculative phenomena that have visited from time to time every civilized community in the history of the world. The outlines of the story are well worth a little time and attention. John Law, a renegade from England, who had been tried, convicted and sentenced to be hung, escaped and made his way to France. He was versatile in expe- dients and a fascinating talker. He was a gambler, and it is said introduced the game of faro upon the continent of Europe. But in time he established, as the result of his gambling, a bank in the city of Paris. He at once became a leading financial adviser of the King Regent. (Louis XV was then a child about six years of age). Louis XIV had died, leaving the government in debt about sixteen million dollars. Law came for- ward with a scheme for raising this money. He recommended the issuing of paper money based upon the real estate of the nation. One million dollars of paper was to be issued for every two million dollars worth of real estate. Soon there was an abundance of money. Prices at once rose and a general prosperity 62 FRENCH OCCUPATION beamed upon the land. Law became famous as a financier. In September, 1717, he brought into the market his great scheme. This was known as the Mississippi Com- pany. Its object was to colonize the Mississippi valley and exploit it for its precious metals and diamonds. A great commerce was to be carried on between this country and Europe. Pamphlets were distributed tell- ing of all the wonders of this far-away land. No western town boomer of the nineteenth century ever dared to lie with the brazen effrontery shown by these circulars of John Law. It was even said the country grew flowers in whose cups the dewdrops of the night would crystallize into diamonds. Gold was to be found in abundance in every stream. The sediment in the waters of the Mississippi contained enough to make every man, woman and child rich. Bars of gold, said to have been thus collected, and diamonds said to have been formed in the flowers, were placed on exhibition in the shop windows. Then the stock of the company was placed on sale. Men and women fought with each other for places in the lines where they might buy the stock. Thousands of people flocked to the ships eager to be transported to the new field of wealth. When the tide of those who were anxious to cross over the ocean began to wane, the prisons were opened and the streets were swept of their riffraff to be sent out to colonize the valley of paradise and coin wealth for themselves and for the lucky holders of stock at home. Of such material were the French possessions in the lower Mississippi peopled. In 1718, Bienville estab- lished a colony at the present site of New Orleans and laid out the beginnings of the most important city in 5 63 ILLINOIS HISTORY STORIES the southern part of the valley. In the five years from 1717 to 1722 the Mississippi Company sent out seven thousand settlers and seven hundred slaves to Louisiana. Then the bubble burst. Ruin came upon thousands of homes in Europe. Millions upon millions of dollars were lost, and John Law fled for his life from Prance with nothing left of his great fortune. The thousands who had fought for places in the lines to buy stock and who deified Law were almost beggared in the over- whelming collapse, and of course they charged up all their grievances against Law. In the great valley of the Mississippi prosperity came out of the misfortunes of Europe. The people were here, and they had been convinced, after years of fruit- less searching and suffering, that there were no dia- monds in the petals of the flowers and there was no gold in the sediment of the Mississippi. They had learned, however, that there were riches to be earned by cultivating the soil, and that any one with reasonable industry could become an independent householder in this country. So the army of immigrants that had come from all the diverse elements of French life set themselves to work to organize a form of society that might be permanent and agreeable. In the early immi- gration there were many more men than women, and to supply the deficiency shiploads of young women were brought over to be bought for wives. In this way began many of the ''first families" of Louisiana. Many a proud dame of the South can trace her ancestry back to the time when a Mississippi colony immigrant met a young adventuress on the levee of the new city of New Orleans and there began family life. During all this time what was going on further up 64 FRENCH OCCUPATION the river? It is in this up-river country that we are chiefly interested. We have stated that in 1718 Bien- ville had established a permanent colony at New Orleans. Two years later one of his lieutenants, Major Pierre Boisbriant, led a colony of over a hundred people up the river to some sixteen miles above Kaskaskia and there built a fort, calling it Fort Chartres. Chartres Landing is still pointed out on the river where this fort was built. In 1721 Kaskaskia had risen to the dignity of a parish. In 1722 the first land warrant known to the real estate records of Illinois was issued by Boisbriant. In 1721 Francois Renault, who in 1720 brought the first negro slaves to Illinois, took two hundred miners and five hundred slaves to the point where Galena now stands and began operating the lead mines at that place. These mines are still furnishing profitable employment to hundreds of men. In the same year, 1721, a college and a monastery were estab- lished at Kaskaskia, and about the same time Fort Chartres became the head of the political and social life of the upper part of the valley. Cahokia, Prairie du Rocher and St. Phillippe were laid out in the near vicinity of Fort Chartres. If we look across the state we shall find that, after the Illinois Indians with Tonti had departed from Fort St. Louis, the portage by way of Chicago had become dangerous and was not much used by the traders between Canada and the valley settlements. Instead of that they came by way of Lake Erie, then up the Maumee river, and made a portage to the headwaters of the Wabash, thence down the Ohio. This meant the building of forts along this routQ. The portage from the Maumee began where Fort Wayne now stands. 65 ILLINOIS HISTORY STORIES The post on the upper Wabash was called Fort Ouata- non. LaFayette, Indiana, now stands on this spot. In 1715 a boat-load of fifteen thousand skins was collected on the Wabash and successfully taken down the river to New Orleans. A fort and trading-post was established at Vincennes in 1722, the very year in which John Law's bubble broke over France. Slowly but steadily the French had extended their settlements and trading-posts from the days of the early mission stations on the Great Lakes until the middle of the eighteenth century. A new era in the history of the valley was about to be ushered in. Before taking it up we shall briefly recall the position of the French and quote something of their manner of life. Between 1673, the days of Marquette, and 1750, when the barrier of the Alleghanies was about to give way, precipitating a flood of Anglo-Saxon home makers upon the valley, we have found forts or settlements or trad- ing places established at various places along the north- ern lakes, at Miami (the St. Joseph river), at Fort St. Louis, at Peoria, at Kaskaskia, Cahokia, Fort Chartres and other settlements near the mouth of the Kaskaskia ; at Galena, at Cairo, and at many places down the river extending to New Orleans, then out on the gulf to Biloxi and Mobile; at Niagara, at Fort Le Boeuf and a few other places leading into the Ohio valley. But notwith- standing all this array of settlements, it is necessary to repeat a caution, made some time ago, that these colonies did not mean anything like what the colonies on the Atlantic seaboard meant. After seventy-five years of colonization in the most fruitful valley in all the world, in a valley which is capable of furnishing food for twenty million of people, we find the total 66 FEENCH OCCUPATION French population never to have exceeded at any one time ten thousand souls from the lakes to the gulf. This is surely a meager showing, and when we further con- sider that this population in such a land was frequently dependent upon the home country for food to eat we are tempted to question whether after all they were of any more service to the world at large than the tribes of Indians they were attempting to displace. French writers of the period give us some glimpses of the manner of life among the people of these early settlements, which are entertaining and form a good background for the permanent setting of our story. We can quote but a few samples. From a letter written by an Ursuline nun at New Orleans to her father in 1727 : I can hardly realize that I am on the banks of the Mississippi because there is here, in certain things, as much magnificence as in France. Gold and velvet stuffs are commonly used, although they cost three times as much as in Rouen. Corn-bread costs ten cents a pound, eggs fifty cents a dozen, milk fifteen cents a measure. We have pineapples — most excellent fruit — peas and wild beans, watermelons and potatoes, an abundance of figs, and pecans, walnuts and hickory nuts. There are also pumpkins. As to meat, we live on wild venison, wild geese and turkey, hares, chickens, ducks, teal, partridges and other game. The rivers abound in monstrously large fish. We eat bread made of half wheat and half rice. The dish most in favor is rice boiled in milk and what is known as sagamite, which consists of Indian corn pounded in a mortar and boiled in water and butter. One might think from this letter that in such a country a colony must thrive and at least be able to care for itself. Yet in 1709 in that very region provisions became so scarce that the whole colony was obliged to live on acorns and Bienville was obliged to 67 ILLINOIS HISTORY STORIES disperse his soldiers and send them out among the Indians to get a living. This picture, when compared with that of the Pil- grims — forcing a living out of the rocky soil of New England mid winters' snow and summers' drought, illustrates most forcibly the difference between the two classes of settlers. The following is from Monette: "The French on the Illinois were remarkable for their easy amalgamation with the red race in manners and customs. Their villages sprang up in long narrow streets. The houses were so close that the people could carry on conversa- tions from their balconies." Each homestead was sur- rounded by its own rude picket fence. The houses were generally one story high, surrounded by sheds or galleries. The walls were constructed of a rude frame- work, having upright corner posts and studs connected by numerous cross-ties. The spaces between were filled by straw and clay and plastered by hand with clay. "The chimney was made in the same manner and of similar materials. There were four corner posts slant- ing toward the top and the cross pieces were filled in with clay." * ' A large field near by was fenced off for the common use." . . . "The season for plowing, harvesting, etc., was regulated by special enactments or by public ordinance, and took place at the same time in the several villages." . . . "Even the form and man- ner of dooryards was regulated by public enactment." "The winter dress of the man was generally a coarse blanket capote, drawn over shirt and long vest which served both as a cloak and a hat, for the hood attached to the collar could be drawn over the head when it was 68 FRENCH OCCUPATION cold. In summer the head was generally enveloped in a blue handkerchief in the form of a turban." "At the close of each year it was the custom of the young men to disguise themselves in old clothes, visit the several houses of the village, and engage in friendly dances with the inmates. This was understood as being an invitation for all the family to meet in a general K.. ., - _. :-3?i^^^Vv:'2i;;/5^^^;:35i:55sc^^^ A French House Amonsf the Illinois. ball, in which to watch the birth of the New Year. Large crowds assembled, carrying their own refresh- ments, and a merry time was the result. Another custom was general on January 6. By lot, four kings were chosen, each of whom selected for himself a queen. These together perfected arrangements for an enter- tainment known as a king ball. Towards the close of the first dance the old queens selected new kings, whom they kissed as the formality of introduction into the office. In a similar manner these kings chose new 69 ILLINOIS HISTORY STORIES queens, and thus the gay time continued during the entire carnival, up to the week preceding Lent." "Separated by an immense wilderness from all civil- ized society, these voluntary exiles yet retained all the suavity and politeness of their race. It is a remarkable fact that the roughest hunter or boatman among them could, at any time, appear in a ballroom, or at a council fire, with the carriage and behavior of a well- bred gentleman. At the same time the French women were remarkable for the sprightliness of their con- versation, and the grace and elegance of their manners. ' ' As late as 1750 a missionary at Kaskaskia wrote as follows: ''We have here whites, negroes and Indians, to say nothing of the cross-breeds. There are five French villages, and three of the natives, within a space of twenty-one leagues, situated between the Mississippi and another river called the Kaskaskia. In the five French villages there are, perhaps, eleven hundred whites, three hundred 'blacks, and some sixty red slaves, or savages. The three Indian towns do not contain more than eight hundred souls all told." CHAPTER VI THE TRANSFER OF THE VALLEY FROM THE FRENCH TO THE ENGLISH In 1673 Marquette and Joliet found Indians near the mouth of the Arkansas river with guns in their hands. In 1700 Bienville found Indians who had been engaged in a fight with English as allies. These were indications of a coming struggle. The French did what they could in their poor way to get ready for it. Among other things we learned that they located a great many emigrants in the Illinois country. Five villages sprang up around the Kaskaskia mission. In 1720 Boisbriant led a colony of six hundred to the site of Chartres and there erected a fort. This fort became the strongest post on the Mississippi; perhaps it was the best built and best fortified place in America south of Canada. The fort was built at first with stone foundations, then extended upward with palisades set in the stone-work. It enclosed about four acres of ground and became the stronghold of the French in all that region. It was in the days of the Mississippi Company and things were being done on a lavish scale. Later than this, in 1750^ when it seemed that a test of strength might soon come, Colonel Macarty was commissioned to rebuild this fort, making it still stronger. Over a million dollars was spent upon the works and their defenses. Wealthy people, as well as the vagabond classes, were 71 ILLINOIS HISTORY STORIES coming to the valley of the Mississippi, and fashionable and richly dressed mothers and daughters of French officers, soldiers and speculators were numerous, and set up a social life in harmony with their surroundings and inclinations. Gay companies of ladies and gentlemen rode to and fro among the villages stretched along the river bottoms, visiting, gossiping, arranging for parties and dances and outings, as if there were no work to be done any where in all their world. Dinners and balls and hunting parties were as common around old Fort Chartres as they were in Paris. French houses were built more and more imposing and commodious. The farms were chiefly tended by slaves and the Indians who were probably pressed into the service, as the Indian did not like farming any better than the Frenchman. No one pretended to live on the farm, but all lived in villages, giving opportunity for a social life. They had in the western colonies nothing of the sober and solemn traits found in the New England settlements, but every village had its frequent dances and outings. The French were a gay people. They went to church in the morning on the Sabbath as regularly as did the Puritan, but in the afternoon, when the church service was over and dinner was eaten, they went to their dancing or hunting or card playing. It was a gay life they lived, and nowhere were the characteristics of the French people better illustrated than in these settlements along the Mississippi around Kaskaskia in the Illinois country. Across the country on the Wabash was Fort Vin- cennes; and a little further to the north, at the portage from the Maumee, was the Fort Ouatanon. The people across the Alleghanies were noting all these things. 72 THE TEANSFER OF THE VALLEY They were beginning to cross over the mountains and the time was at hand to decide whether the discovery by Cabot and the treaty with the Iroquois were to stand for more than the discoveries by Marquette and Joliet and La Salle and the settlements made by their country- men. The English and the French could not both abide in this valley, large as it w^as, and be at peace. The French were the aggressors in the actual conflict, hiring Indians to invade the frontier settlenients in the New England colonies, paying for the scalps that were brought into the forts. They hoped to terrify the English and force them to abandon their outlying settle- ments and give up their fur trade with the Indians. The French cared little for settlements and farms, but they wanted the fur trade with the Indians to continue. The English, on the other hand, did not care so much for the trade, but they wanted to settle and open farms and clear the ground of useless timber. Of course where the English settled, the hunting and trading were at an end. In 1748 the English decided that, instead of with- drawing, they were ready to push out across the moun- tains in earnest. The Ohio land company was formed, the king having promised five hundred thousand acres of land in the Ohio country to the company upon certain conditions. The Washingtons were active directors and large stockholders in this enterprise. They sent agents into the country across the mountains to inspect the land and select places favorable for settlements. Of course they found the French there; then came the message from the Governor of Virginia to the commandant at Fort Venango, on the head waters of the Alleghany 73 ILLINOIS HISTORY STORIES river, asking him by what right he was there and warning him to leave. You know how the history intro- duces this subject with George Washington in the fore- ground. Then came Fort Duquesne, then Braddock, then the French and Indian War in all its bitterness. There were all the campaigns against Duquesne, Niagara (La Salle's old fort), Louisburg, Ticonderoga, Crown Point and Quebec, and all the side issues of Indian massacres. Your United States history tells you of Wolfe's victory on the plains of Abraham and how the French hero, Montcalm, died thanking God that he could not live to see the fort surrendered, while Wolfe was dying thanking God that the French were running and he had won the victory. That was a great victory indeed. It ended the war in America, for soon Montreal was surrendered, then the French quit fighting, and in 1763 a treaty of peace was signed in Paris. France had been most terribly worsted both in the New World and in the old, being forced to pay an enormous price for her defeat. All of her posses- sions east of the Mississippi river, including Canada, were given over to the British. By a secret treaty made with Spain, she gave all of her possessions west of the river and the Island of Orleans, including the city of New Orleans, to Spain. So when the war was ended, France did not have a foot of territory in all this great land. The lakes and rivers and forests which her heroic Frontenacs, Marquettes, La Salles, Bienvilles and thousands of other daring Frenchmen had dis- covered and fortified and settled, after a fashion, passed forever from her grasp. From the Atlantic to the great river, England was now supreme. Legally, her colonists could go any- 74 THE TRANSFER OP THE VALLEY where in all that region and make their homes. But when they tried to do this they found that there were still dangers and death in the way. The Indians must still be dealt with, and the English were not as skillful as the French in dealing with the Indian. It is a dark and bloody story, telling often of cruelty and treachery on the part of the English and of the awful penalty exacted by the merciless red man. It was during this period, between the French and Indian war and the beginning of the Revolution, that Pontiac, the great Indian chief, attempted to organize all the tribes from the lakes to the gulf into one great confederacy to wipe the English entirely out of the valley. The French en- couraged the enterprise, and, while it did not succeed, it cost thousands of lives and much suffering. It has been estimated that in all the wars that have been carried on with the Indians from the beginning until now, five white men have been slain to every Indian. So far as we can read now, looking back over the past, every outbreak, every war with the Indians, every massacre, was the outcome of some wrong committed by the whites against the red men. But all this your usual text-book in history will tell you; we are chiefly inter- ested in the things that happened in the Illinois country. The towns of Kaskaskia and Cahokia and the Fort Chartres now belonged by the treaty to the English. What happened there? The war did not reach them, except that it is worth telling that it was a Captain Villiers who took a company of men from Fort Chartres in the Illinois country and, making his way up the Ohio and across the Monongahela and across a part of the Alleghanies, reached Fort Necessity and there forced Major George Washington from Virginia to surrender. 75 ILLINOIS HISTORY STORIES When the news of this victory reached Fort Chartres they fired their guns and waved their flags and had dinners and dances without number. They did more than that. They loaded nine tons of flour on flatboats and started them up the Ohio to feed the soldiers gathering at Fort Duquesne. So during the years of this war the French people in the Illinois country sent breadstuff s and lead for bullets to the French soldiers in the field. You remember that Fort Chartres had been rebuilt before this time. It was now a solid stone fortification eighteen feet high, with forty-eight loop holes, through which guns or cannons might be fired. Soldiers' quarters, store-houses, powder magazines and other necessary buildings were erected within the enclosure. ''Now," said they, "let England and Virginia come and take it if they can. ' ' But never a gun was fired against this mighty fortress. It stood in the wind and weather until the Mississippi river, which it was built to defend, gradually ate the foundations out from under it, and this pride of the Illinois French people was swallowed up in the muddy waters of the great river during a flood in 1772, three years before the beginning of the Revolution. For two years after the close of the French and Indian War the English did not reach Fort Chartres to take possession. The war with Pontiac kept them busy. He stood across the path fighting over again the battle of his French friends. During these two years there was little government in the Illinois villages, for after the treaty of peace the French governor left the fort with quite a large body of followers and made his wsy across the river to the Spanish settlement at St. Louis. 76 THE TRANSFER OF THE VALLEY They preferred to be Spanish rather than English sub- jects. Pontiac, driven from the North after repeated defeats, took up his abode among the villages of Illinois. Finally, on October 10, 1765, a British company of about one hundred and twenty Highlanders reached Fort Chartres and there without opposition took possession of it. The lilies of France were lowered and for the first time on Illinois soil the flag of England was flung to the breeze. There was no disposition to molest the French settlers in the Illinois country. They were assured that they might continue on in their work and worship with full liberty of conscience and wdth a full recognition of all their civil rights. The English troops were withdrawn within a month, de- parting by the way of New Orleans for Philadelphia. No more British soldiers were sent into the Illinois country. The civil government was administered by governors appointed by the English. Several of these governors were Frenchmen who had given their oaths of allegiance to England, and, being familiar with the people and their institutions, carried on the government very much as it had been carried on under the French rule. In 1763, after the treaty of peace with France, but before the English had reached Fort Chartres, while Pontiac 's war was in progress, and probably as a bribe to the Indians for ending the war. King George issued a proclamation dividing the territory of the British crown in America into five parts. There was East Florida, covering about the same area as is covered by the state of Florida now; West Florida, taking a strip between the thirty-first parallel and the gulf, extending from East Florida to the Mississippi river. We are not 77 ILLINOIS HISTORY STORIES much interested in either of these divisions at the pres- ent time. To the north was the province of Quebec, which included both sides of the St. Lawrence river as far as the Ottawa river, and extending from the present boundary of the United States to about half way to Hudson Bay. Then there was the division occupied by the thirteen colonies, and the fifth division, to be known as the Indian Territory, from the Miss- issippi river to the boundary of the colonies. This is the division in which we are interested. The early charters of the colonies called for all the land from ''sea to sea," which came to be interpreted, when the country was better known, as meaning from the Atlantic to the Mississippi. This proclamation of 1763 there- fore was cutting off from the colonies a part of what they thought of right belonged to them. But to make the matter as bad as it could be, the proclamation stated that no one should be permitted to make treaties with the Indians or to buy lands from them except in the name of the king, nor should any of the colonists pre- sume to settle on any of the lands included within the Indian territory. The line between the Indian territory and the colonies was drawn down the divide of the Alleghany mountains. It began approximately with Lake Ontario, then ran southward along the ridge of the divide to the source of the Chattahooche river, thence along this river to the gulf. This would shut up the colonies to the limits they were trying to break through when the French and Indian war began. In fact it was to prevent just such limitations that the Ohio Company was formed and that George Washington had made his journey to Fort Venango, that Braddock had been sent upon his fatal expedition and that the col- 78 THE TEANSFER OF THE VALLEY onists had given of their means and blood to drive the French from the valley. Here was one of the very first grievances that led to the War of the Revolution. This was a much more serious matter than the payment of a few pounds on tea or stamped paper. The people of the colonies did not obey the proclamation, nor could they see how it could be obeyed if they were to continue to grow. Treaties continued to be made with the Indians. The chiefs of the Illinois made a grant of nearly all the lands now comprising the state of Illi- nois to a little group of people. After the Revolu- tion the United States refused to ratify these treaties, although eminent English judges held that they were valid. In 1768 a court of justice was organized at Fort Chartres for the Illinois country. It consisted of seven judges and held its first session December 9, 1768. This was the first experience the French people had ever had with the jury system. Heretofore they had been governed arbitrarily by the governor, or the notary and the priest. They could not understand how a dozen farmers or blacksmiths or traders could interpret the laws or, administer justice. They complained bit- terly of the change and many of them withdrew to the Spanish side of the river. Finally, to satisfy the demands of this Illinois settlement of French people, a change was made in the boundaries. This change occurred in 1774, in what is known as the Quebec act. The Illinois country, including approximately all the country north of the Ohio river, was made a part of the Quebec territory, and the French system of laws was applied to all that territory. To the thirteen colonies this was an added insult. It roused their passions and 6 79 ILLINOIS HISTORY STORIES called forth their denunciations as much as any single act ever passed by the British parliament. In the Declaration of Independence we read: "For abol- ishing the free system of English laws in a neighboring province, establishing therein an arbitrary government and enlarging its boundaries so as to render it at once an example and a fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these colonies." But this rule continued until the reorganization after the close of the Revolution. We can well understand how it happened with all the troubles about the Indian tribes, about the questions of jurisdiction and the system of laws to be applied, about the questions of law as to whether deeds and grants and treaties made contrary to the proclama- tion of 1763 would be sustained when they came to a judicial investigation, that the Illinois country from 1763 to 1780 made little or no progress. Indeed there were fewer people in the Illinois country at the close of the Revolution than there were fifteen years before. But while the Illinois country during these years was making little gains in population, the country south of the Ohio, in the present states of Tennessee and Kentucky, was being peopled by a hardy race of pioneers. In the advance guard of the white invasion of that region was Daniel Boone, who as a young man had served as a teamster in Braddock's campaign. His story is one of the most interesting in our border annals. Kentucky was Virginia country, while Ten- nessee belonged to North Carolina. When the Declara- tion of Independence was signed there were probably three or four thousand people living within the borders 80 THE TRANSFER OF THE VALLEY of the present Kentucky, and perhaps a few more than that within the present limits of Tennessee. These border settlements had much to do with the next step in the history of our Illinois country. CHAPTER VII THE NORTHWEST TERRITORY PASSES TO THE UNITED STATES Before taking up the subject directly we shall review briefly what we know of the early events connected with our Illinois history. We learned that in 1673 Joliet and Marquette, on their return trip from the Mississippi, turned into the Illinois river and followed it to the portage of the Des Plaines, and then crossed over to Lake Michigan on their way to Green Bay. We know that on this trip they found a village of Indians, whom they called Kaskaskia Indians, near the present site of Utica. Father Mar- quette promised to return to them to preach the gospel. He did return the following year, after spending a whole winter, sick, in a poor hovel on the ground where a part of Chicago now stands, perhaps about five miles from the lake on the south branch of the river. The Chicago and Alton railroad has erected a stone monu- ment of boulders to mark the vicinity of this winter camp. In 1907 the Chicago Association of Commerce erected a mahogany cross to mark the supposed spot on the bank of the river, just south of Blue Island avenue. The monument of mahogany, fourteen feet high and twelve inches thick, was donated by Mr. Cameron L. Wiley. Father Marquette reached the Kaskaskia village on the Illinois and preached to the Indians. He established what he called a mission (a 82 THE NORTHWEST TERRITORY church) among them, calling it the Mission of the Im- maculate Conception. This mission was continued by one priest or another so long as the French held possession of the Illinois country, although it was after a time moved further south. This was the last visit of Marquette to the Illinois (1675). In 1679 came La Salle and Tonti. La Salle in his different trips crossed the state at least six times by way of the Illinois river, sometimes going by way of the Chicago river portage, sometimes by the Calumet, and sometimes by way of the Kankakee portage from the St. Joseph river. La Salle built Fort Crevecoeur, near the present site of Peoria. It never was anything but a stockade and temporary stopping place, while the French occupied the country. He built and fortified Fort St. Louis on top of Starved Rock. Here Tonti held possession for some fifteen years, in close friend- ship with the Indians gathered around the rock. In 1700 Cahokia, a little below the present site of St. Louis, on the Illinois side of the river, was occupied by French priests and traders and at once became the nucleus of a French village. The same year Kaskaskia was settled by the French and Indians. We remember that it was at this time that Tonti wearied with waiting at the rock, persuaded the Indians to move southward toward the French settlements. He got them as far as the present site of Kaskaskia, named after them, and here they settled. In 1720 Fort Chartres was estab- lished by a colony of men led by one, Boisbriant, from the Biloxi or New Orleans colony. Two or three other villages were settled on this same peninsula, lying be- tween the Mississippi river and the Kaskaskia. They contained the larger part of the French population 83 ILLINOIS HISTORY STORIES south of Canada and north of New Orleans. We recall that as early as 1702 Juchereau established a trading station and built a tannery near the site of the present mmmaiim#im^ FRENCH EXPLORATIONS AND POSTS. Marquette & Joliet's Route, in 1673 La Salle's Route to Ft. Crevecoeur and return, 1679.... --^ — La Salle's Route from Ft. St. Louis to the Gulf, »68?. -..~ .- Hennepin's Route, 1680. — X— X- Cairo, and that in 1721 Renault took two hundred miners and five hundred slaves to the site of Galena and began operating the lead mines. The line of travel 84 THE NORTHWEST TERRITORY between Canada and the lower Mississippi changed after Tonti abandoned the fort on the rock, the trail leading by the way of Lake Erie and the Maumee river, where the portage was short, to the upper waters of the Wabash. So a fort, Ouatanon, on the present site of Lafayette on the Wabash, was built. As early as 1715 great cargoes of buffalo hides were shipped down the Wabash to New Orleans. In 1722, the year the Mississippi bubble broke, a fort and settlement were established on the present site of Vincennes. Then came the French and Indian War of 1754-1763. While this was in progress the French settlements in the Illinois country sent flour and lead to the French troops by way of the Ohio river. After the treaty of peace in 1763, came Pontiac 's war, which made it impossible for the British government to take pos- session of its Illinois territory, so the French flag waved over Fort Chartres and a French officer was in charge until one day in October, 1765, a Scotch Highland com- pany marched into the fort and the French flag was taken down and the British flag was hoisted in its place. Then we remember that following the treaty of peace the British king issued a proclamation making all the country bounded by the Alleghany mountains, the Ohio and Mississippi rivers and the lakes, an Indian territory, and forbade any of the Atlantic colonies to send settlers into the territory. Then in 1774 this territory was added to the province of Quebec and the system of French laws was put into operation within its boundaries. We know that the King's proclamation did not keep such men as Daniel Boone and Kenton and McAfee, and hundreds of their kind, from cross- ing the mountains and making settlements in the 85 ILLINOIS HISTORY STORIES western country. So by April 17, 1775, when the battle of Lexington was fought, there were two or three thousand settlers in the present territory of Tennessee and Kentucky. On the very day the news of the battle of Lexington reached the settlers in Kentucky a crowd of them were gathered together finishing a fort. The news of the battle so pleased them that they decided to call their new fort Fort Lexington. It stood on the site of the present city of Lexington, Kentucky. Among those who had gone back and forth along the mountain and river trails from Virginia to the Ohio and Kentucky country was a young man by the name of George Rogers Clark. He was a rover from boyhood. Like Washington, he learned enough of mathematics to become a surveyor, and he went into Kentucky, and perhaps into Tennessee, to follow his vocation. But he was warlike and loved the sound of fife and drum. There was frequent fighting along the border line, and George Rogers Clark was mixed up in several Indian skirmishes. Doubtless he would have added to his reputation more by staying out of some of these Indian, raids than by taking part in them. But 1777 came. Burgoyne had surrendered his army at Saratoga. The French king had given his consent to an open alliance with the colonists and sent ships and men to aid them. Things began to look very bright to the Americans. George Rogers Clark knew that all the great country from the Ohio to the lakes and to the Mississippi was held by a few British troops stationed at Detroit, and a very few more, chiefly French militia, stationed at Kaskaskia and Vincennes. Patrick Henry was governor of Virginia. He was a close personal friend of George Rogers Clark. To him 86 THE NOETHWEST TERRITORY the young man went and proposed a plan for capturing all the Illinois country from the British before they could know what was going on. He wanted a permit to gather men and some supplies for such an expedition. Governor Henry agreed with him as to the desirability of the enterprise, but the state was so poor it could give him no supplies, and men were so badly needed for the army of Washington that he could not give him a permit to recruit a company for this expedition on the frontier. After weeks of persuasion and argument, Clark finally secured from the governor an order for five hundred pounds of powder and permission to recruit a body of men west of the Blue Ridge mountains. It was a difficult task, but Clark was not easily discouraged. He finally found himself at Fort Washington, the present site of Cincinnati, Ohio, with a small body of recruits. He proceeded down the river as far as the present city of Louisville ; after hearing the complaints of some of his men, none of whom knew upon what errand they were bound, and letting all who wished return to their homes, he floated down the Ohio until he came' to an old deserted fort called Fort Massac, about three miles below the present town of Metropolis, Illinois. Here he landed his force of a little less than two hundred men. Clark did not dare follow the Ohio and the Mississippi around to Kaskaskia lest the Eng- lish should discover him. His success depended upon his ability to surprise the garrison. At this time there were about two thousand people living at Kaskaskia. There was no English garrison there, but a body of French militia under command of one, Rocheblave, a Frenchman who had given his allegiance to the British. On the thirtieth of June, 1778, almost a year from the 87 ILLINOIS HISTORY STORIES time Clark had begun to plan for this expedition, he left his flatboats on the Ohio and started for a trip across the country. The distance was ninety miles in a straight line. The way was partly through the woods and partly across the open prairie. A hunter whom they met agreed to guide them. After losing the way The Route Taken by George Eogers Clark. occasionally they reached the Kaskaskia river above the town about four o'clock on the afternoon of July 4. Here they hid in the bushes until dark. Then they picked up some canoes and ferried themselves across the stream. Clark divided his men into three parts. Two were to enter the town from different directions while the third, under Clark, was to attack the fort and capture it with its garrison. All were to keep out of sight as 88 THE NORTHWEST TERRITORY far as possible until Clark should give the word that the garrison was captured. They found the commandant, Phillipe Rocheblave, in bed asleep. When he waked, Clark was beside him and he was a prisoner in the hands of the Americans, Then the other companies marched through the streets of the town, firing their guns and yelling like Indians to frighten the inhabitants and make them believe that a large army had attacked them. Word was sent to the people that they must stay in their houses or they would be shot. They expected to be shot at any rate. The French people of Kaskaskia, and the Indians in that region as well, had long been familiar with the reputation of the Kentucky frontiers- men. They were called the Long Knives, and it was believed that they gave no quarter, but killed and scalped all alike — men, women and children — whenever they went upon the warpath. So the poor simple French people thought their hour had come, and the Kentuckians did not try to relieve their fears that night. The town was taken. The commandant was a prisoner. He was defiant and saucy and insulting. Clark put hand-cuffs on him and in a few days sent him to Vir- ginia as a prisoner. His slaves were confiscated and sold for two thousand five hundred dollars and the money was divided out among Clark's men. When the morning came. Father Gibault, the priest, with several of the old men of the village, called upon Clark to ask that before they were all separated one from another they might be permitted to gather in the little chapel and hold a service and bid each other good-bye. Then Clark looked astonished and asked what kind of men they supposed him and his soldiers to be. He told them that they were not butchers nor 89 ILLINOIS HISTOBY STORIES savages. It was not their business to kill innocent men, women and children. They might go to their church or to their places of business just as they had always done. All he wanted was that they should give in their oath of allegiance to the government of Vir- ginia. When the people learned this they were so overjoyed they wept on each other's shoulders, and they thought Clark was the best and most generous man they had ever heard of. The church bell was rung and the people flocked to the little church where the good news was published, and then they all took the oath of allegiance to Virginia, under whose authority Clark was acting. A detachment of Clark's men, with a number of recruits from the French at Kaskaskia were sent at once to Cahokia, and that town was surrendered without opposition, and the people took the oath of allegiance. So all the river towns which had cost the French so much money and sacrifice to establish, and which the British had won by treaty at the close of the French and Indian War, passed without a shot or the loss of a life into the hands of the Virginians, never to be held again by a foreign government. A few days later Clark sent the priest, Father Gibault, with a few Kaskaskia citizens, to Fort Vin- cennes to persuade the people of that place to sur- render the town to the Americans. The fort was de- fended at the time by French militia, no British soldiers being there. The errand was successful. The French, after hearing what had happened at Kaskaskia, very readily agreed to become American citizens. Clark afterward sent one of his officers, Captain Helm, with 90 THE NORTHWEST TERRITORY one other American, to take charge of the fort and administer its affairs in the name of Virginia. From the Ohio to the lakes the British did not have a settlement left. Word was soon carried to Detroit, to the great surprise and chagrin of General Hamilton, the commander there. He at once organized parties of Indians and sent them out to attack any of Clark's men wherever they could find them. In the meantime he began organizing a force to retake the country from the Americans. Early in the winter he started from Detroit with his force. It was cold and he made slow progress. It was seventy-five days before he reached Vincennes. When they heard of his approach all the French deserted Captain Helm, refusing to fight against the British. When Hamilton appeared before the fort he did not know how many men were within. He de- manded that the fort be surrendered. Helm had charged a cannon with shot and it commanded the gate- way to the fort. He threatened to defend the place to the last, but in view of scarcity of provisions he con- sented to surrender, provided he might be allowed the honors of war. To this Hamilton readily agreed. So the American colors were taken down. The British were drawn up -in two lines to receive the surrendered garrison when, to their surprise the captain and one man marched out with flying colors. It must have made even the chagrined British laugh. Clark, at Kaskaskia, did not learn of what had hap- pened at Vincennes until some time in January. He was in a perilous situation. He well knew that as soon as the weather permitted, Hamilton would attack him and he could not resist him with the few men he had. (About half of Clark's men had returned to their 91 ILLINOIS HISTORY STORIES Kentucky homes after things had been settled in the Illinois villages.) There was no time to lose if Clark would hold the territory he had captured. He decided at once what he should do. He sent spies to Vincennes to learn the real situation there. Then he recruited all the French young men he could to fill up his ranks. Clark had become very popular in the meantime on account of the way he had dealt with the Indians. The French had come to believe him invincible. They were sure he must succeed in anything he undertook. So he had little trouble in getting quite a number of French- men to enlist with him. On the twenty-ninth of January, Colonel Francis Vigo, a Spanish merchant of St. Louis, who had become a great friend to Clark, returning from a trading trip to Vincennes, told Clark that all the British except about eighty men had returned to Detroit and that Hamilton was busy getting ready for a campaign in the spring. The time to act had come. The state of Virginia had not sent Clark a dollar nor a man. But Colonel Vigo had loaned him twenty thousand dollars. With this sum he met the necessary expenses of his expedition, and on the seventh of February, with his little force of one hundred and forty men, most of them French volunteers, started upon his adventurous march to Vincennes. The distance was not great, only about two hundred and thirty miles. In warm weather, when the fields were full of game and the prairie trails were dry, it would have been a light matter for Clark 's little army to have made this march. But they had no tents. Every foot of the prairie trail was water-soaked and muddy. The streams were flooded by the early spring 92 THE NORTHWEST TERRITORY freshets. Much of the distance they had to wade in the chill, icy water, sometimes waist deep. In crossing the Embarrass river and the small streams they sometimes were obliged to wade for miles with the water up to their shoulders, carrying their guns and powder over their heads. Their food gave out. Game was scarce and hard to kill. As they approached Vincennes they were afraid to shoot lest they announce their com- ing to the British. They reached the fort about dark on the twenty- second of February, and at once began an attack. The French inhabitants were glad to see them and furnished them with food and ammunition. General Hamilton, surprised and chagrined, refused to sur- render. The attack upon the fort, with occasional parleys, was continued until the twenty-fifth, when the fort was turned over to Clark and his victorious follow- ers. The stores captured with the fort were valued at about fifty thousand dollars, and in addition to this a boat-load of supplies on the way from Detroit was cap- tured, adding about forty thousand dollars worth more of supplies for division among the little band, that was almost shoeless and coatless after its fearful march through the swamps of the Wabash river bottoms. It was an heroic thing to do and bravely did the dauntless leader perform his part. Few marches in our history are so well calculated to stir the blood of patriotism as the details of this final move in the conquest of the Mississippi valley. The importance of this campaign of George Rogers Clark, including the conquest of the Illinois country, cannot be over-estimated. Had the country between the Ohio and the Mississippi been in the possession 93 ILLINOIS HISTORY STORIES of the British when the treaty of 1783 was raade it would undoubtedly have remained theirs, as did Canada. Conquest and possession made it as much United States territory as that beyond the Alleghany mountains. It is greatly to be regretted that the record of such a man as George Rogers Clark cannot be glory covered to the end. But such was not to be the case. The state of Virginia did not realize how great things their heroic soldier of fortune had accomplished. His request for further commissions was refused; his debts contracted in the name of his state were neglected. Hurt to the quick, and heartsore, the hero of Kaskaskia and Vin- cennes, while yet in years but a young man retired to comparative privacy in the vicinity of Louisville, Ken- tucky, and there, in 1818, after severe sufferings from rheumatism and paralysis, the after effects of the exposures he had endured, he passed away and was buried at Locust Grove near that city. CHAPTER VIII FROM THE REVOLUTION TO STATEHOOD — 1783 TO 1818 George Rogers Clark had tal^en the fortified posts of the British within the Illinois territory. In all the region from the lakes to the Ohio river there was not a fort the British could claim. When the commissioners came to form the treaty of Paris in 1783, the fact that the Americans had conquered and taken possession of this region w^as sufficient to turn the scale in favor of permanent possession. So it came about that all the country below the lakes to the Spanish possessions on the south became the undisputed property of the United ^irfonies. lit was the Virginia colony that had claimed, under her ''from sea to sea" charter, all the Illinois country. It was the governor of Virginia, Patrick Henry, that had authorized George Rogers Clark to take possession of the country. It w^as in the name of Virginia that C.ark had acted, and to Virginia he made his report. Virginia was not slow in following up the advantage gained by her adventurous soldiers. Kaskaskia was caken in July, 1778. In October of that year The Assembly of Virginia made provisions for a form of temporary government for the Illinois country. On the fifteenth of the following June, John Todd, one of Clark's colonels, issued a proclamation at Kaskaskia, organizing the country into a county of Virginia to be 7 95 ILLINOIS HISTORY STORIES known as Illinois county. This county included all of the Northwest to which . Virginia had any semblance of a claim; Todd remained as governor until August 18, 1782, when he was killed at the battle of Blue Lick Springs in Kentucky. He was succeeded by Timothy Montbrun, a Frenchman. As the treaty of peace signed in 1783 set at rest all doubts as to the possession of the country, it ceased to be so important a subject as it had been. There was enough to occupy the attention of the young nation nearer the center of population. The French in the valley had about all taken the oath of allegiance to the American government and seemed happy and contented. In 1781 a party of American settlers crossed the Alle- ghanies, descended the Ohio in a flatboat called "The Ark," and with great labor forced it up the Mississ^"ppi to a point within the present limits of Monroe couity. Here they landed and established the first permar ent American settlement in the present limits of Illin s. They called their settlement New Design. It was O'uly a small colony, but it was the advance guard of a different class of settlers from that the Mississippi valley had heretofore known. They had come to make farms, to cultivate the soil, to establish permanent homes and to possess the land for industrial purposes. It was a long hard struggle, into the particulars cf which we cannot go at present. On March 1, 1784, the state of Virginia ceded all her possessions west of the Ohio to the general government. The other colonies soon did the same. In this way the new government came into possession of a vast tract of land which could be divided up and sold to settlers. In May, 1785, Congress passed an act providing for the 96 REVOLUTION TO STATEHOOD survey of all this vast region. Here began that elabor- ate system of surveys which has been in use ever since, and which has given to this country the best, the simplest and the most complete system known to the world. In 1787 the famous Ordinance for the government of the territory northwest of the Ohio was passed by Con- Ohio Flatboat. gress. The same year General Arthur St. Clair was made governor of all the territory. In 1788 he reached Marietta, the oldest American settlement in Ohio. In 1790 he, with the judges of the superior court, descend- ed the Ohio river in flatboats to the present site of Cincinnati. Here they laid out a county large enough to include all the settlements in that neighborhood and called it Hamilton county. They proceeded down the river and up the Mississippi to Kaskaskia, and there laid out two counties, to include all the settlements in 97 EEVOLUTION TO STATEHOOD that part of the territory. The boundary line of one began near the present town of Tazewell, on the Illinois river, ran straight to the site of Fort Massac, then followed the Ohio, Mississippi and Illinois to the place of beginning. This county was called St. Clair. All to the east of this and south of the Illinois was known as Knox county. A court was established at Cahokia and the forms of federal government begun. In 1795 the settlements in the Illinois country and the commencement of the courts justified the establishing of another county. A line was drawn a little south of the settlement of New Design, east and west from the Mississippi, to the Knox county line, and all south of that line was called Randolph county. These county lines were frequently changed. We may pause here to take note of an interesting incident in the early history of Cahokia that has but recently come to light. It is claimed that here in this little French village close by the Mississippi, began the public schools of Illinois. The old court house, used by the judges under St. Clair, stood for years, undisturbed. Recently it was bought by an association of citizens of Chicago and removed to Wooded Island in Jackson Park, where it stands, a relic of the past, to remind us of the primitive simplicity of those times. An old docu- ment was found bearing date May 6, 1794, addressed to the judges of the court. It is written in French, which when translated reads as follows : "The inhabitants of the parish of the Holy Family of Cahokia have the honor to express to you at their assembly that they have the desire to establish a school in the said parish (or town) for the instruction of their children. "As they are obliged to do many necessary public works in 99 100 REVOLUTION TO STATEHOOD the parish, they cannot at once undertake the construction of a building necessary to hold the said school, so these representatives ask you gentlemen that you allow them to hold the said school in your audience room of the courthouse until they construct a building which will oblige all the inhabitants whose children have their instruction in the school and in which case, should there arise any defacement of the said audience room, they will leave it in the best condition which you judge necessary and proper. "That is why they supplicate you to accord them this request . as being necessary for the public good. In this cause they submit themselves to your good will and have the honor to be, very respectfully, "Your very humble and very obedient servants, "Louis Sebrun, "Louis Grand. "Cahokia, 6 May, 1794." This, according to the historians, was the first request for a public school in Illinois after the revolutionary war when, under one of our first laws, one section in each township was set aside for school purposes. With the erection in Jackson Park of the old court/ house in which the first Illinois schools were held, Chicago now possesses the only original historic public building west of Boston and north of New Orleans. The structure was the seat of local government at Ca- hokia, in what is the oldest county in the state. The little building is constructed of square black walnut logs, about ten inches square on the ends and one story high. The logs are set up on end in the style of the construc- tion of the French period. The overhanging roof makes the top of the porch, which extends all around it. At the end is a chimney and fireplace, with the old hand- wrought andirons. The picture of the French house in 101 ILLINOIS HISTORY STORIES Chapter V is almost an exact duplicate of this old Court House as it now stands on Wooded Island. In May, 1800, the' Northwest territory was divided. The part containing the present states of Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin and Illinois was set off and called Indiana territory. William Henry Harrison was made governor of this territory. The capital of the new terri- tory was fixed at Vincennes. In 1805 this territory was again divided. The part known as Michigan was cut off and named Michigan territory. In 1809 another division was made. At this time Indiana was set off by itself much as it is at present, while all of Illinois, Wisconsin and the peninsular part of Michigan was organized into the Illinois territory, Ninian Edwards was appointed governor and the seat of government was fixed at Kaskaskia. In 1812 a territorial legislature was elected by the people. Three new counties were established — Madison, Gallatin and Johnson. This made five counties in Illinois. Then came the war of 1812 with the British. In this war Illinois had some slight part. The most tragic event, and the only one with which we shall attempt to deal, is the massacre at Fort Dearborn, which occurred on the fifteenth of August, 1812. Indian raids and massacres had determined the government to erect a line of forts all along the western frontier to protect the settlers. Detroit was to the north of this line. In 1795 General Wayne defeated the Indians at the Falls of the Maumee river, and a fort called Fort Wayne was established at this point. Friction had existed between the English and the Americans from the close of the Revolution. Bad faith 102 ^: — n- 103 ILLINOIS HISTORY STORIES was charged on both sides. The English in Canada had encouraged the organization of the Indians against the Americans to the south, and it is said had paid them for scalps taken by their raiding parties. All along the border line and reaching down to the Ohio river there were frequent massacres of white settlers. It is impossible for us to realize the horror of one of these Indian surprises and the devastation left behind one of their raids. It is one of the most astounding paradoxes of human nature that in spite of massacres and outrages, in field and in home, the population increased. As the impending struggle between the states and the English government drew near, the Indians became more aggressive and their confederacies became stronger and more compact. When the declaration of war was made, in June, 1812, the news was at once spread by fleet-footed messengers among all the western tribes, and they believed the time had come when, with British bayonets and Indian scalp- ing knives, the whites were to be driven from the hunt- ing grounds of their fathers. General Hull was sent to Fort Detroit to hold the place against the British. The Illinois country was included in his command. At Chicago, Fort Dearborn had been built in 1803 and was held by a small garrison under Captain Heald. Finding that the forest paths were beset and guarded by bands of Indians, General Hull sent word to Captain Heald that if he could not hold the fort until aid could reach him he should with- draw his garrison and proceed at once to Fort Wayne. The message reached' Fort Dearborn on the ninth of August. Large forces of Indians were already gather- 104 REVOLUTION TO STATEHOOD ing about the place and Captain Heald decided to abandon the place. His subordinate officers protested, but he insisted and fixed upon the fifteenth as the time for their departure. On the evening of the twelfth Captain Heald held a conference with the Indians outside the fort. He agreed to leave the fort with all his men and to turn over to them all the supplies, including the ammunition, provided they should give him a safe escort to Fort Wayne. The garrison objected to giving the powder and ball to the Indians who might use them in an attack. Finally the powder was thrown into a well and the liquor was emptied into the river. The Indians learned of this fact and, believing themselves deceived and cheated, considered that they were freed from all obligations to furnish a safe escort. On the night of the fourteenth John Kinzie brought his family into the fort for protection, and the few other settlers in the neighborhood did the same. Wagons were loaded with the things needed for the trip, and twenty-five rounds of ammunition were dealt out to each man. At nine o'clock on the morning of the fifteenth of August the little cavalcade filed out from the doomed fortress and began its march along the sandy shore of the river. The Chicago river at that time had its mouth much farther south than at the present. It emptied into the lake near the present end of Madison street. The whole company consisted of sixty-six soldiers of the garrison. Captain Wells, of Fort Wayne, with thirty friendly Miami Indians, and about thirty settlers, women and children. When the company reached the place which is now 105 ILLINOIS HISTORY STORIES the foot of Eighteenth street they were attacked by an overwhelming force of Indians that had been slowly gathering about them. The friendly Miamis fled at the first attack. The soldiers of the garrison and the set- tlers fought bravely, but in twenty minutes the struggle was over. About fifteen Indians were killed. Of the white dead there were twenty-six soldiers, twelve set- tlers, two women and twelve children left on the field. The others, consisting of Captain and Mrs. Heald, Mr^ Helm, twenty-five soldiers, and ele^ en women and chil- dren were prisoners. More than half of them were wounded. Most of the wounded were killed that night by the merciless savages. The story of the survivors of this massacre is thrill- ing. They were scattered from the banks of the Wabash to Mackinac. Most of them were eventually ransomed and returned to the white settlements. At the foot of Eighteenth street, near the spot where this awful massacre occurred, stands to-day a group of bronze figures upon a massive granite pedestal. It represents the saving of Mrs. Helm by Black Partridge, a friendly Indian chief, during the heat of the struggle. It stands there to remind us of the agonies, worse than death, through which our frontier forefathers passed as they laid deep and strong the foundations of civiliza- tion in this western country. From this time to the close of the war in 1814, parties of soldiers were going to and fro in the state, seeking out hostile Indians, burning their villages and destroying their crops, but there was nothing approach- ing a battle and little that deserved the name of warfare. As stated above, in 1812 the state entered upon its second stage of territorial government. A legislature, 106 MAP OP ILLINOIS SHOWING COUNTY BOUNDARIES 1818. (ILLINOIS TY.) 107 ILLINOIS HISTORY STORIES consisting of five members of the legislative council and seven members of the house, was elected by the inhabi- tants of the five counties. This general assembly held its first session at Kaskaskia in November and December of 1812. It reenacted many of the old territorial laws and elected Shadrach Bond to be the territorial delegate to Congress. During his term as delegate Bond secured the passage by Congress of the first preemption law. This law provided that when a settler had made im- provements upon a piece of land belonging to the government he could not be displaced by another pur- chaser until he had been given a chance to buy the land from the government. Population increased very rapidly from 1812 to 1818. Many soldiers from Virginia, Kentucky and Tennessee, who came into the state to protect the settlers during the war, were so well pleased with the country that they came back with their families and became permanent residents. Before 1818 ten new counties were formed, making fifteen in all, and the total population had increased to about forty thousand. Early in 1818 a petition was presented to Congress through Nathaniel Pope, then the Illinois delegate, ask- ing an act to enable the territory of Illinois to form a state government. Such an act was passed April 18, fixing the boundaries of the state and the provisions under which it might be admitted to the Union. After much tribulation and no little scheming the conditions were complied with to the satisfaction of Congress, and the bill which made Illinois a state received the signa- ture of President Monroe on the fourth of December, 1818. CHAPTER IX ACQUIRING TITLE TO THE SOIL It will be useful for us to review briefly the various claims to the soil of our state and the steps by which it was finally vested in the people of Illinois. Omitting all consideration of the original occupants, the Indians, we learn that in 1497 one, John Cabot, and his son Sebastian made certain ''voyages of discovery" under the patronage of the English king, Henry VII. In one of these voyages it is claimed that the shore of the continent was coasted from Labrador to the Caro- linas, and upon this claim was based the right of Eng- land to occupy and dispose of the lands within these latitudes and extending as far west as -the western sea — wheresoever that might be. Other nations did not seem to seriously question this claim, and upon it rests the original title of England to American soil. "In the year of our Lord 1497 John Cabot, a Venetian, and his Sonne Sebastian, — discovered that land which no man before that time had attempted, on the 24th of June (July) about five of the clock, early in the morning." — Voyages of the English Na- tion to America, Vol. 1, p. 24 — Hakluyt. The English king in time gave charters to various companies for the settlement of these lands. In 1606, a charter, known as the Virginia charter, was given, with very indefinite boundary lines between the thirty- fourth and thirty-fifth degrees north latitude. In ie9 ILLINOIS HISTORY STORIES 1609 this charter was modified, locating the lands of Virginia between lines two hundred miles north and two hundred miles south of Old Point Com- fort. If lines be drawn east and west as here indi- cated, they will follow very closely the thirty-fourth and fortieth parallels. By this arrangement, all the central and southern parts of the present Illinois fell within the Virginia limits. Following the original north by northwest line named in the 1606 charter, which Virginia continued to claim, all of the Illinois country fell within the Virginia grant. In 1621 a charter was given the Massachusetts colony which conveyed territory from *'sea to sea" between the fortieth and forty-eighth degrees of latitude. In 1662 a charter was given to Connecticut conveying ter- ritory as wide as the present state and reaching from ''sea to sea." These various charters were frequently modified, and, as can be easily seen, the grants of land overlapped each other. The truth is the king and his councilors who gave the charters, and the grantees who were bargaining for them, were all alike ignorant of the geography of the country which they were dividing up. It was all a terra incognita to them, and the most vague and indef- inite notions prevailed as to the location and extent of the New "World. As the result of these various charters, a strip of country across the extreme northern part of the present state of Illinois was claimed as belonging by the charter of 1621 to Massachusetts. Just to the south of this was a strip claimed by Connecticut under the charter of 1662, while the rest of the state was conceded to belong to Virginia. 110 ACQUIRING TITLE TO THE SOIL Long after these charters were granted, the French came up the valley of the St. Lawrence, across the Great Lakes and down the Mississippi valley, making theirs by possession the lands which the colonists held only by charter. This invasion and possession lasted from 1673, when Marquette and Joliet, as the representatives of the French king, crossed this country, until 1763, when, as the result of unsuccessful war, France ceded all of her possessions on the American continent to Great Britain. England does not seem in any way to have recog- nized the old charter rights of the colonies to these lands west of the Alleghanies after this war, but proceeded to treat them as she did the lands to the north of the Lakes. The revolution came, and in the midst of the strife and turmoil George Rogers Clark appeared and, in the name of Virginia, captured the Illinois country from the British in that famous Kaskaskia and Vincennes cam- paign of 1778-9. At once the title of Virginia to the Illinois country was revived, and it was at once organ- ized into a county of Virginia, and this was its legal status from 1778 to 1787. In March, 1784, Virginia made a conditional cession of all her lands west and northwest of the Ohio to the United States government. In April, 1785, Massa- chusetts joined her in this cession. In September, 1786, Connecticut gave up her claims. Thus the territory embraced in the present state of Illinois passed into the hands of the United States. Then followed the great ordinance of 1787 for the government of this territory northwest of the Ohio river. Under this ordinance a government was organized and carried on from 1790 to 1809. During this latter period the name Illinois was not used to designate the territory. (It was known 8 111 ILLINOIS HISTORY STORIES as Indiana territory.) But in 1809 the boundaries were changed, a territorial government was established, over the Illinois country, and the name Illinois was restored. In 1812 the first territorial legislature was elected, con- sisting of twelve members in all. In April, 1818, the enabling act was passed, and in December of the same year Illinois became a full-fledged state, one of the sovereign members of the Union. A brief outline of these various changes may help us to associate them more readily. 1. The English, — by Cabot's discovery, 1497/ 2. The Colonies by original charters — Virginia, 1609. Massachusetts, 1621. Connecticut, 1662. 3. The French, by exploration and occupation, 1673- 1763. 4. The English, by treaty of Paris, 1763. 5. Virginia, by conquest of George Rogers Clark, 1778-9. (Ceded to the United States by treaty of 1783.) 6. The United States, by cession — Virginia, 1784. Massachusetts, 1785. Connecticut, 1786. (Governed under the Ordinance, 1787-1809.) 7. Illinois Territory, 1809-1818. (Name Illinois suppressed from 1787 to 1809.) 8. State of Illinois from December 4, 1818. CHAPTER X THE STATE CONSTITUTIONS Illinois is now being governed under the provisions of its third constitution. The first dated from the admission as a state. 1818, the second from 1848, and the third from 1870. There is a general feeling that a fourth constitution is greatly needed owing to the rapid development and marvelous changes of the past forty years, but the political managers upon one side and the people upon the other, through fear of objec- tionable features that might find place in a new con- stitution, have prevented its enactment. Under the ordinance of 1787 it was provided that the Northwest Territory should be divided up into not less than three states, and that to secure admission by any one of these states a population of not less than sixty thousand should be shown. When the petition from Illinois was received by Congress, an amendment was made accepting forty thousand as the requisite number. Our territorial delegate in Congress, Mr. Nathaniel Pope, succeeded also in having the northern boundary moved from a line running directly west from the most southern point of Lake Michigan to the parallel forty- two degrees and thirty minutes north latitude, thus giv- ing the state sixty miles of lake shore and securing Chicago harbor for Illinois instead of for Wisconsin. We are under a great debt of gratitude to Mr. Pope 113 ILLINOIS HISTORY STORIES for his wise and statesman-like management in bring- ing the new state into the Union. Mr. Pope secured also another amendment to the Ordinance. It was provided that five per cent of the money received from the sale of public lands in the states should be devoted to public works, such as build- ing roads and digging canals. This was amended so that three-fifths of this money could be set aside for public school purposes, one-sixth of which should be given over for the benefit of a college or university. This was the foundation for our state fund for the pub- lic schools and for our great and growing university at Champaign. The convention for framing the first constitution met at Kaskaskia, August 3, 1818, and completed its work on the twenty-sixth of the same month. As stated else- where, there were then fifteen counties in the state. St. Clair, Madison and Gallatin sent three delegates each to this convention, the others two each, making a total of thirty-three delegates. One delegate died during the meeting, leaving but thirty-two in actual attendance. This constitution of 1818 was never submitted to the people for approval or rejection. It was comparatively a brief document, occupying but nine pages in the statute book, as against twenty-three pages of the pres- ent constitution. It shows very little confidence in the vox populi. As little as possible was left to popular vote for decision. The provisions were copied chiefly from the constitutions of Kentucky, New York, Ohio and Indiana. The only officers the people were per- mitted to elect were the governor, lieutenant governor, sheriff and coroner. All other officers were appointed 114 THE STATE CONSTITUTIONS by or with the advice of the legislature. Comparing this with the provisions of the present constitution, we see that great advance has been made in trusting the people to manage their own affairs. Local self-government has undergone a rapid and radical change in the last three- quarters of a century. One thing this constitution did which was an advance upon all previous organic enactments — it abolished im- prisonment for debt. Article VIII, section 15, reads: "No person shall be imprisoned for debt unless upon refusal to deliver up his estate for the benefit of his creditors." If such a provision had existed in the con- stitution of Pennsylvania, Robert Morris, the financial patriot of the Revolution, had not been forced to spend four years of his old age in prison. This constitution gave great latitude to the legislature in pledging the credit of the state; this was the most serious weakness of the document. It led to financial embarrassment, bringing the state to the verge of bank- ruptcy. The present constitution has erected effectual safeguards against this tendency to contract debts. Next after the latitude allowed the legislature to abuse the credit of the state, the provision that gave rise to the most serious complications was that of Article VI, in reference to slavery. It is ambiguous and capable of being so construed as to permit slavery as effectually as it existed in Kentucky. This brought on the bitter contest of 1823-4, in which the anti-slavery party won and slavery came to an end in the state so far as any countenance from the law was concerned. When the slavery question was settled in 1824 the attacks upon the constitution ceased and for eighteen years little was said about a new constitution. In 1840- 115 ILLINOIS HISTORY STOEIES 41 the legislature provided for the calling of a constitu- tional convention, but it failed of approval by the people, and nothing was done. In 1844-45 the matter was again taken up, and this time secured approval. The convention, consisting of as many delegates as there were members entitled to the general assembly, met at Springfield, June 7, 1847, and completed its work by the thirty-first of August; this constitution was ratified by the people March 6, 1848, and went into effect on the first day of April of that year. The marked change observed in comparing the constitutions of 1818 and 1848 is along the line of popular government, — the placing of greater power in the hands of the people. The powers of the legislature were curtailed both in the expending of moneys and in the appointment of officers. This constitution, in length, stands about midway between that of 1818 and 1870, occupying about fourteen pages on the statute book. It was only a few years until the people and the press began to discover weaknesses and limitations in the new constitution that were detrimental to the best interests and the growth of the state. A demand went up for a new constitution, and in 1862 a convention was called; but it was in the storm and stress of the civil war, and it is not to be wondered at that the people refused to approve a document wrought out at such a time. How- ever, the need of a better constitution was evident to all, and in 1869, under more favorable conditions, a second convention was assembled at Springfield. This resulted in the present constitution, which was approved by the people July 2, 1870, and went into effect on the eighth of August of the same year. 116 THE STATE CONSTITUTIONS As it stands to-day, this is perhaps one of the best state constitutions in the Union. The state, however, in its rapid development has outgrown many of the provisions, and frequent patching by way of amend- ment has been resorted to that it may continue to serve its original purpose. The space limitations of this book preclude the possibility of printing in this place a copy of the constitution of the state, but it should be in the hands of each teacher and pupil who reads this chapter, and the main provisions should be outlined and discussed at some length. Familiarity with the fundamental provi- sions of government, either state or national, is well worth the time and effort necessary to secure it. CHAPTER XI CONSTITUTIONAL BOUNDARY AND DIVISIONS On the eighteenth of April, 1818, Congress passed an *' enabling act" giving the people of Illinois permission to form a constitution and prepare for admission to the Union as a state. This enabling act defined the boundaries v^hich the proposed state must accept. This boundary line is repeated in the constitution of the state. It read as follows: ''Beginning at the mouth of the Wabash river, thence up the same and with the line of Indiana to the northwest corner of said state; thence east with the line of said state to the middle of Lake Michigan, thence north along the middle of said lake to north latitude forty-two degrees and thirty minutes, thence west to the middle of the Mississippi river, and thence down along the middle of said river to its confluence with the Ohio, and thence up the latter river along its northwestern shore to the place of be- ginning. ' ' This constitutes the official boundary of the state, found not on the maps nor in the geographies, but in the constitution of the state and the enactments of Congress. This territory, covering about fifty-six thousand four hundred square miles, has been divided up into counties. There have been many changes in county lines since General St. Clair came with his staff down the Ohio 118 119 ILLINOIS HISTORY STORIES river on a flatboat and organized the first county of the state. The records show twenty-seven readjustments in all, St. Clair, in 1790, being the first, and Ford county, in 1859, being the last. There will probably be few changes in county lines in the future. There are now one hundred and two counties in the state. The constitution of the United States says that the representatives in Congress shall be apportioned among the states in the ratio of their population. This made necessary a general census. The constitution also pro- vides for the time of taking the census. It is taken every ten years. The representation from any state may be changed every ten years either to fewer or more mem- bers. Illinois has steadily increased her numbers, until now she has twenty-five ; consequently the state is divided into twenty-five congressional districts, each of whicli elects a representative to Congress every two years. {Illmois Statutes, Chapter 46, Section 150). The state has a legislature copied after that of the national Congress consisting of a senate and a house of representatives. The state constitution provides for the number of members in each house. (Art. IV, Sec. 6.) There are one-half as many senators as there are coun- ties, and three times as many representatives as there are senators. This gives to the state legislature fifty-one senators and one hundred and fifty-three representa- tives. The districts from which these members of the state legislature are elected are also subject to change as the population changes. {Illinois Statutes, Chapter 46, Section 152.) The party in power at the time of redistricting always tries to so divide the state that as many as possible of the districts may be represented by its members. 120 CONSTITUTIONAL BOUNDARY At the present time, Cook and Lake counties have ten of the congressmen out of a possible twenty-five, and Cook has nineteen of the state senators out of a possible fifty-one, with fifty-seven members of the assembly out of a total of one hundred and fifty-three. In order to carry on the judicial work of the state it is necessary to have judicial districts and circuits. The judicial department is modeled after that of the national judicial system. The state constitution (Art. VI) pro- vides that ''the judicial powers, except as in this article is otherwise provided, shall be vested in one supreme court, circuit courts, county courts, justices of the peace, police magistrates, and such courts as may be created by law in and for cities and incorporated towns. ' ' Provision is then made for dividing the state into seven judicial districts, each of which may elect one judge of the supreme court to serve nine years. The districts can be changed by the state legislature, but only at the session next preceding the election of judges. Cook county is in the seventh district. There are circuit court divisions based upon popu- lation. The constitution forbids more than one for one hundred thousand of the population. There are at pres- ent seventeen such recruits not counting Cook county. In judicial matters Cook county has had special provi- sion made because of the great population massed in the city of Chicago. The county constitutes one judicial circuit, and there are also superior and criminal courts established by the constitution, and the legislature is for- bidden to include this county in the redistricting of the state into circuits. The constitution also provides for appellate court districts, the judges of which courts shall be the same as the judges of the circuit courts, and 121 MA IP ©r niLILHI^dDIiS CONGflCSSIONAL APPORTIONMENT of igoi 122 CONSTITUTIONAL BOUNDARY \ no extra compensation is allowed for this service. There are four such districts in the state, of which Cook county constitutes the first. In addition to the supreme, circuit and appellate courts as given, each county elects its own county judge, and if there are over fifty thousand inhabitants the legislature may provide for the election of a probate judge also. The following outline is intended to show the official organization of Cook county. In the main it represents the organization of other counties in the state, but be- cause of its great population more officers are allowed in this county and greater latitude is given for official ac- tion. Cook County. Organized, — March 4, 1831. Territory originally included, Iroquois, — separated Feb. 26, 1833. Will,— Separated Jan. 12, 1836. McHenry, — separated Jan. 16, 1836. DuPage, — separated Feb. 9, 1839. Lake, — separated March 9, 1839. Cook, — which remains, area 890 square miles. Officers and Employes. Elected by the People: County Board. President. Fourteen other members, ( 10 from Chicago, 5 outside. ) Sheriff. County Clerk. County Treasurer. States Attorney. Coroner. Recorder of Deeds. Surveyor. 123 ILLINOIS HISTORY STORIES Five Assessors. Board of Review (3 members). Probate Judge. County Judge. Fourteen Circuit Judges. Twelve Superior Court Judges. County Supt. of Schools. Appointed by the County Board: County Attorney. Supt. of Public Service. County Civil Service Commission (3 members). Heads of County Institutions, (Poor House, County Hospital, etc., etc.). In most counties of the state the County Board is known as the Board of Supervisors, the members of which are elected by the various towns in the county. The superior and circuit courts are not organized in other counties as in Cook, and only a few of the larger counties have a probate judge. The duties of each of these officers and the manner in which the business of the county is transacted must be learned from the various laws and reports issued from time to time. As a matter of convenient reference, the following table has been arranged, giving the counties of the state in alphabetical order and indicating the various divi- sions of the state to which each belongs : 124 CONSTITUTIONAL BOUNDARY Illinois Electoral Districts. County. Adams . . . . Alexander Bond .... Boone • • • • Brown . .". Bureau . . . Calhoun . . Carroll . . • Cass Champaign Christian . Clark Clay Clinton ... Coles .... Cook Crawford . Cumberland DeKalb . . DeWitt . . . Douglas .. DuPage . . Edgar .... Edwards . Etiftngham . Fayette . . Ford Franklin . . Fulton . . . Gallatin . . Greene . . . Grundy . . . Hamilton . Hancock. . Hardin . . . Henderson Henry .... Iroquois . . Jackson . . Jasper . . . Jefferson . Jersey .... Jo Daviess Johnson . . Kane Kankakee . Kendall . . Knox .... Lake County seat. Quincy Cairo Greenville . . . . Belvidere Mount Sterling Princeton . . . . Hardin Mount Carroll , Virginia Urbana Taylorville . . . Marshall Louisville . . . . Carlyle Charleston . . . . Chicago Robinson Toledo Sycamore . . . . Clinton Tuscola Wheaton Paris Albion Effingham . . . . Vandalia Paxton Benton Lewistown . . Shawneetown Carrollton . . . , Morris McLeansboro Carthage .... Elizabethtown Oquawka .... Cambridge ... Watseka .... Murphysboro Newton Mount Vernon Jerseyville . . Galena Vienna Geneva Kankakee . . . Yorkville .... Galesburg . . . Waukegan . . . 36 50 47 8 30 37 3fi 12 30 24 40 34 42 42 34 * 48 40 35 28 34 41 22 48 42 40 26 50 43 48 38 20 51 32 48 33 37 20 44 46 46 38 12 51 14 20 14 43 O 15 25 22 12 20 16 20 13 20 19 21 18 24 23 19 * 23 18 12 19 19 11 18 24 23 23 17 25 15 24 20 12 24 14 24 14 15 18 25 23 23 20 13 24 11 18 12 15 10 1 3 17 8 13 8 15 8 6 4 5 4 4 5 * 2 5 16 6 6 16 5 2 4 4 11 2 9 2 7 13 2 9 2 9 14 12 1 4 2 7 15 1 16 12 16 9 17 Judicial Dis. ft 02 ft ft < * Senatorial, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 9, 11, 13, 15, 17, 19, 21, 23, 25, 27, 29, 81. Congressional, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. Judicial cir- cuit, not numbered. Appellate, 1. Supreme, 7. 125 ILLINOIS HISTORY STORIES County. LaSalle .. . . Lawrence . . Lee Livingston . Logan 'Macon Macoupin .. Madison . . . Marion . . . . Marshall . . Mason Massac . . . . McDonough McHenry . . McLean . . . Menard . . . Mercer . . . . Monroe . . . Montgomery Morgan . . . Moultrie . . . Ogle Peoria Perry Piatt Pike Pope Pulaski . . . . Putnam . . . Randolph . . Richland . . Rock Island Saline . . . . Sangamon . Schuyler . . . Scott Shelby Stark St. Clair .. . Stephenson Tazewell . . Union Vermilion . . Wabash . . . Warren . . . Washington Wayne . . . . White Whiteside .. Will Williamson Winnebago . Woodford . . County seat. Ottawa .... Lawrenceville Dixon Pontiac .... Lincoln .... Decatur . . . . Carlinville . . Edwardsville Salem Lacon Havana . . . . Metropolis . Macomb . . . , Woodstock . Bloomington Petersburg . , Aledo Waterloo . . . . Hillsboro . . . Jacksonville , Sullivan ... Oregon .... Peoria Pinckneyville Monticello . . Pittsfield Golconda . . . , Mound City . Hennepin . . . Chester .... Olney Rock Island Harrisburg . . Springfield . , Rushville . . . Winchester . , Shelbyville . , Toulon Belleville . . . Freeport . . . , Pekin Jonesboro . . , Danville . . . , Mount Carmel Monmouth . . , Nashville . . . Fairfield . . . , Carmi Morrison . . . Joliet , Marion Rockford . . . Eureka Judicial 03 Dis. ,__( o 02 CO Ol S^ a3 a +^