977.3 11623 Illinois, the Prairie State (1134) ILLINOIS HISTORICAL SURVEY ILLINOIS THE PRAIRIE STATE THE MANHATTAN LIBRARY Y OF iluNH| ATURB \K3N JLLHISISUnVf ILLINOIS THE PRAIRIE STATE Copyright, 1936, by BANK OF THE MANHATTAN COMPANY MEMBER OF THE FEDERAL DEPOSIT INSURANCE CORPORATION ILLINOIS THE PRAIRIE STATE Published by BANK OF THE MANHATTAN COMPANY NEW YORK, N. Y. Chartered 1799 CHRONOLOGY 1673 — Joliet and Marquette discovered the Mississippi. 1679 — La Salle first reached Illinois. 1696 — Mission of the Guardian Angel founded at Chicago. 1720 — Fort de Chartres built. 1731 — Vincennes founded. 1763 — Pontiac's conspiracy. 177-1 — Quebec Act. 1778 — George Rogers Clark's conquest of Illinois. 1787 — Ordinance governing Old Northwest passed by Congress of the Confeder- acy. 1793 — First Methodist preacher, Rev. Joseph Lillard. 1794 — Battle of Fallen Timbers. 1796 — First Baptist church founded at New Design. 1803 — Fort Dearborn erected. ^77. 3 $M< Mr X***y, •JZJL (d M CHRONOLOGY 1814 — First newspaper printed at Kaskaskia by Matthew Duncan, the Illinois Herald. 1818 — Illinois became a State. 1819 — First agricultural society. 1826 — Peoria founded. 1832— Black Hawk war. 1833 — Incorporation of Chicago. First Congregational church, near Naperville. 1834 — First Episcopal churches organized. 1837 — Rush Medical College incorporated. 1871 — Chicago fire. 1889 — Hull House founded by Jane Addams. 1893 — World's Columbian Exposition. 1933 — Century of Progress Exposition. CONTENTS Chapter Page I Conflict Stakes Out an Empire - 1 II The Gage Is Thrown, and Caught --------- 11 III A Chafing Flood Is Loosed - - 18 IV "They Made Their Own Conquest" 25 V The Flood Waters Are Not Stayed 32 VI Out Of Fermenting Growth, Men Of Vigorous Mind. .. - - - - 40 VII A Center Of Commerce Is Decided 49 VIII An Alliance Among States - - - 56 IX A Speller, and a Slate Besides - 63 X America Was Built By These - - 71 FOREWORD A young, well muscled State, Illi- nois still pioneers. The flotsam of European imperialism has been flung on its river shores . . . the flags of three nations — France, Spain and England — flew over it before it was won for a fourth nation by the bright courage of George Rogers Clark and held for it by the far-seeing Benja- min Franklin. Illinois became a State and a member of the Union in 1818 — soon thereafter Bank of the Manhattan Company began serving its people just as for nineteen previous years it had been serving the people of the nation. CHAPTER ONE CONFLICT STAKES OUT AN EMPIRE N the high rock of Quebec the Intendant o f New France heard fancied music in his ears, the praise of the Grand Monarque for an empire nobly expanded . . . pictured his tri- umphant return to France and Versailles, the glittering court of Louis XIV, and his fit ennoblement . . . Through the wilderness, a thousand miles, Jean Talon's couriers brought to a young voyageur who waited impa- tiently at St. Ignace, at Michilimackinac, for permission to seek out the "great water" beyond the Lakes whose rumor hung on every passing forest wind. Just 28 . . . but for years Louis Joliet had led flotillas of canoes, fur-laden to the gunwales, down the perilous rivers to Montreal, one of that wilderness- [11 loving tribe that adventure and the enor- mous profits in furs lured from one river valley to another, threading the Lakes and the northern forests to the very depths of the continent . . . It was the gentle, indomitable Father Jacques Marquette that Joliet chose to go with him; and for Marquette it an- swered a lifelong hope to carry Chris- tianity to the Indians south of the Lakes. May 17, 1673, they left the mission St. Ignace, which Marquette had found- ed only two years before. It was almost the last outpost in the wilderness. With two canoes and five men they skirted the northern shore of Lake Michigan to Green Bay. Along the Fox River friend- ly Indians begged them to go no farther, warned them of hostile peoples, a dan- gerous river filled with monsters, a demon still more terrible, and scorching heat . . . Two Indians were persuaded to guide them across the portage to the Wiscon- sin, and on June 17th they entered the unknown river. Awed, delighted, they [2] floated down the flood-stream, by the shores of the Illinois, past the Missouri, the famous Piasa Rock with its painted demon, and the mouth of the Ohio. Cer- tain now that the great river flowed into the Gulf of Mexico and not to Virginia or California, and fearing both southern Indians and Spaniards, they turned back at the Arkansas River. They returned by the Illinois and the voyageurs keen eyes lighted at the broad prairies. "A settler would not there spend ten years in cutting down and burning trees," Joliet exultingly reported in Quebec; "on the very day of his ar- rival, he could put his plow into the ground." Jubilant he was, too, over the new water route he had discovered. A bark could be sailed, he showed, from Lake Erie through the de troit (these too were his discovery) and the lower Lakes to the place the Indians called Checagou, for the wild onions that grew in the woods ; from thence a canal through "but half a [3] league of prairie" would open the great valley and the port on the southern gulf. All this meant furs and merchandise and commerce. Close by the portage to the Chicago River was a village of the Kaskaskia In- dians, a tribe of the Illinois, who asked Father Marquette to return ; and he joy- fully promised. But before he reached Green Bay he had fallen ill, nor a whole year later was yet recovered. Neverthe- less, in the fall of 1674 he set out, travel- ing wearily. At the Chicago River where winter winds had driven away even the gulls that wheeled high over the desolate shore and flattened the dune grasses, he could go no farther. In a tiny cabin of voyageurs an outlaw "surgeon" tended him through the win- ter — and Father Marquette was grate- ful, for in a journal otherwise meticulous he carefully forgot his name. It was with death already upon him that he reached Kaskaskia in the spring. Five hundred chiefs and elders, fifteen [4] hundred men and boys, and numbers of women and children gathered to hear him. It was Good Friday. On Easter he preached again and named his mis- sion, "the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin." His life's work was filled; all he wished now was to die at his own St. Ignace. He had delayed too long. Canoes car- ried him swiftly along the eastern shore of the Lake, but on May 18, 1675, his companions carried him ashore to die in the wilderness, at the mouth of a little river since called Marquette. Strangely, that last journey of the saintly, boyish-faced father was the pre- lude to bitter contest . . . Jean Talon's dreaming had been rudely interrupted, his plans scarcely laid when the fame of them fell to a successor. Comte Louis de Buade Frontenac had plans of his own for the expansion of New France, and of a different nature. In alarm two divergent factions joined against him ; the fur merchants of Mon- [5] treal, fearful to lose their monopoly of trade, and the Jesuits whose missions were the only established posts among the Lakes, and who yet hoped to achieve a sort of Christian Arcady in the heart of the continent that should exclude all traders and soldiers — a land of Indians peaceful under Jesuit tutelage alone, of which Marquette's mission was to be the beginning. At the court of France the Jesuits sought to undermine Frontenac's power, made the most of Joliet's discovery; in all New France the people numbered but 6,705, and with these Frontenac thought to extend trade and settlement westward — the Jesuits scoffed at the folly of spreading so thin a colony over so vast a territory. Yet Frontenac prevailed. He obtained a monopoly of the fur trade south of the Lakes, and consent to exploration. To check the spread of Jesuit influence he kept Joliet at Quebec in angry idle- ness; it was Robert Cavelier de la Salle [6] that he sent to build posts and organize their company. They should both have been rich, but that a dreamer and adven- turer went to do the work of a man of business. Uncontent with trade, La Salle conceived an empire . . . Fort Frontenac was built on Lake On- tario to be the center of the proposed western trade, a fort at Niagara, and another on the St. Joseph River in the tenuous chain . . . while creditors seized his property mortgaged to achieve them, and the little Griffin he had built with great toil was lost on the Lakes. In December of 1679 he struggled with his men through the marshy port- age to the Kankakee . . . quelled hostile Illinois with show of battle, and built finally a fort at the lower end of Lake Peoria, which he called Crevecoeur — heartbreak. La Salle had returned to Fort Fron- tenac for supplies when the perennial Iroquois flame broke out in fury at the French attempt to rob them of their trade [7] in western furs. With dread at heart la Salle returned to find the fields laid waste, the village burned, forts destroyed, no trace of his men or his lieutenant, Henri de Tonti. Tonti escaped from the Iroquois and rejoined him a year later; meanwhile all their ground work was to do again . . . All his few remaining resources were mortgaged when in the dead of winter his canoes floated once more down the Illinois, and on February 2, 1682, came out into the Mississippi. When he came back, he had reached the Gulf and staked out an empire for France. The dream was all but accomplished. Together, he and Tonti worked fever- ishly. The Indians were united in a great western confederacy against the Iroquois. Fort St. Louis began to rise at the place later called Starved Rock, to be the center of his seigniory. Nearby he made the first grants of land to young voyageurs, and around the fort gathered his Indian allies [S] to the number of twenty thousand. The fur trade was his, and he had a port free of ice. Now, if ever, he hoped to free himself from the entanglements of Canada, gov- ernor of a far vaster and more fertile territory. All depended, for the moment, on getting merchandise from Canada for trade . . . and at this critical moment Frontenac was recalled and Canada was filled only with his enemies. Hopeless his efforts to win over the successor, La Barre. Montreal merchants surrounded him, waiting to fall heir to Illinois. The Iroquois threatened war, and lacking Frontenac's strong hand, La Barre offered France's explorer for a pro- pitiatory sacrifice. As la Salle himself journeyed to Quebec for justice, he met his successor in command. The Iroquois, naturally, made no dis- tinction. While la Salle won belated justice at the court of France and sailed for Loui- siana to found the colony that ended in [9] his murder, in Canada one governor after another tried to stem the Iroquois tor- rent that joined with it hard-won west- ern tribes and swept to the gates of Montreal. In the end it was seventy- year old Comte de Frontenac who re- turned in 1689 to save the colony. Five years later the Iroquois were ready to make peace, but Frontenac was not. It was only in 1701 that the great treaty was concluded with all the tribes of east and west. Once more Frontenac saw the empire laid ready to building. He knew as well that Illinois was its key. [10] CHAPTER TWO THE GAGE IS THROWN, AND CAUGHT T Sault Ste. Marie, and in the West Virginia mountains . . . in the year of 1671 and almost at one time two kings laid claim to the valley of the Mississippi. Not many years later, both reached for the mouth of the river, and by a few months the English lost . . . Had the French not been so niggardly through the rest of that century of oppor- tunity, Illinois might have kept them Louisiana. It is a story of few who saw, and many who were blind. While the distant war continued against British and Iroquois, Henri de Tonti — he of the iron hand — quietly secured la Salle's lost holdings in Illinois, watching the Mississippi for his leader's return, until at length there was no need. [11] A new Fort St. Louis was built at the village Pimitoui, below Lake Peoria, and around it settled for love of him both Indians and voyageurs. It was not long before the fort was the center of wide and flourishing trade, with Frontenac a silent sharer in the profits. Events, meanwhile, steadily weighted the scale against him. Through Madame de Maintenon the Jesuits were winning deciding strength at court, and complained bitterly of the fur trader's brandy and cheating prac- tices. With much truth they blamed on their irresponsibilities Indian discontents and Iroquois attacks. And in 1696 when a depression in the beaver trade was added, the king issued an edict. All traders were recalled, all journey- ing into the wilderness forbidden. Fron- tenac rejoined sarcastically that the court knew better the good of Canada than he. As for Tonti and his partner La Forest, they were exempted, but the exemption was a mockery — two canoes [12] of merchandise a year. Had they been men of another temper they would have abandoned the whole thing. Perversely, though the pious court of France gave lip-service to Jesuit wishes, it had not lost its imperial ambitions. It was the Comte de Pontchartrain, too weak himself for the exploits he keenly admired, who saw the imperative neces- sity for carrying out la Salle's plans for Louisiana ; he who sent Pierre le Moyne, sieur d'Iberville, to the mouth of the Mississippi in 1698, where he founded Biloxi. Gladly Tonti joined hands in trade, only to die in Biloxi in 1704 of yellow fever. Iberville, as well, had far-reaching plans for Illinois — the name meant, then, all the wide valley lands from the Alleghenies to the Rockies. French traders traveled far west of the Mississippi, knew the Missouri to the forks of the Platte, even the Tennessee to the Carolinas . . . though twenty and thirty years later some persisted in look- US ] ing with longing eyes up the yellow Mis- souri as the highway to China . . . Curiously enough, the French knew little of the upper Ohio, and it was no small part of their undoing. Even when Tonti was first among the Illinois Virginia packtrains had crossed the mountains and adventurers long since reached the lower Ohio by the Cumber- land and the Tennessee. Yet even as pioneers clambered over the Allegheny slopes the French government toyed with the idea of trading the whole of Loui- siana for the island of Santo Domingo. That enormity did not occur, and the colony was turned over to a private mer- chant, Antoine Crozat, to save expense to the government. But Crozat made no easy money, and in Illinois the hostile Fox Indians had thrown the tribes into turmoil that for four years defeated all efforts of the French. Then a speculating Scotsman thought he could do better, and under the Com- pany of the Indies Louisiana became the [14] backing for John Law's paper schemes. Before long the bubble burst, but mean- while Illinois had a good deal of pub- licity. New garrisons were added against the English threats, Fort de Chartres built fifteen miles north of Kaskaskia and a settlement grew around it, civil govern- ment was added to ecclesiastical and military jurisdiction; coal, copper and silver mines were opened. But, as always, shareholders grumbled. Expenses were cut down, merchandise limited for trade, and garrisons reduced. Astonishing shortsightedness, for the Foxes still traveled in full war paint, were uniting the discontented tribes once more to rid them of the white men . . . and English trading goods, English gen- erosity were winning them over. And against them? The parsimony of the Company, the jealous indifference of the Canadian officials — empty store- houses and a handful of troops. No more than a miracle saved the French colony. A general conspiracy [15 1 planned annihilation at one concerted blow . . . but the Natchez broke out too soon, and the murder of 238 Frenchmen about Fort Rosalie November 29, 1729 awakened the startled directors. Fright- ened, they begged the king to take back his granted gift. No easy task the French commandants had in Illinois . . . Canadian jealousy, unruly colonists, intruding and dangerous English, smoldering Indian revolt. It was after more than one failure that young Pierre Dartaguiette came in 1733 to quell the turbulence — never, it was said, were Indians more submissive. Then, in an expedition against the Chick- asaws three years later, he fell wounded and was taken . . . diea 1 at the stake, singing proudly above the flames. At home neither French nor English, it seemed, realized the true course events were taking along the inland valleys. In 1746 Governor Bertet showed in a long letter to France how the fertile Illinois country could supply meat, tobacco, [16] wheat and rice in competition with the English colonies, and begged, as had others before him, for a fort on the Ohio to protect it from the British — and was also refused, because of the expense. The following year war broke out be- tween England and France — called in America King George's war — and for weeks Bertet was without news. Fort de Chartres was falling to pieces, he had neither goods nor ammunition, and only sheer personal force kept the uneasy tribes quiet and saved the colony. Had the English but realized . . . The war ended in a truce, and then several English politicians did begin to realize the magnificence of the stake for which they had been playing. But even while they talked, along the Ohio the gage of battle had been thrown, and caught ... It was the blind spot of the French possessions. [17] CHAPTER THREE A CHAFING FLOOD IS LOOSED OVERNOR DE LA GALISSONIERE snorted in exasperation. Were there no words to rouse such stupidity? For all his answers from La Pompadour's ministers to his urgent messages were: "Defend the rights of the king — but keep down the expenses." Celoron de Blainville, planting leaden plates along the Ohio Valley to "re-estab- lish" French possession, well realized how the whole fabric of alliances had fallen in pieces. Lacking the English numbers, the French had depended on those alli- ances to hold the land. Desperately, the governor tried to bolster his position. The Miami town Pickawillany, center of British influence, was destroyed. A string of forts built from Lake Erie to the Ohio. Expeditions of voyageurs and Indians from Illinois, from Mackinac, [18 1 and from the Sault Ste. Marie carried war into the enemy's country. Grimly, the English retrenched. On fields west of the mountains the tide turned. Fort after fort was lost, Indian allies fell away, and the English flag drew westward toward Illinois. Yet in England it was a victory poorly appreciated. "Large tracts of America were added by the last war to the British dominions," wrote Dr. Samuel Johnson, but "only the barren parts of the con- tinent, the refuse of the earlier adven- turers, which the French, who came last, had taken only as better than nothing." Almost alone, William Pitt's young minister, Lord Shelburne, realized the inevitable, and laid plans for methodical settlement of the western country — plans that were fulfilled, ironically, a quarter of a century later, but not by England . . . Then came far-flung In- dian massacre, as Pontiac's fanatic war- riors fell upon the western forts, and the crisis dashed the work from his hands. [19 1 No small prize of the war had been the enormous fur trade, and Indian war would destroy the profit at a stroke. It was imperative to keep lawless white traders and squatters from raising the fire until definite regulations could be made. Thus, hastily, was issued the Proclamation of 1763 which set a bound to the enterprising frontiersmen, the crest of the mountains. It had been meant, in the beginning, for a framework, to be filled in with def- inite reservations for the Indians farther west, regulated settlements between that should some day be equal colonies, and protection for both. But too many great landowners feared losses in sales or rent- rolls in the exodus, the fur-trading inter- ests were too jealous of their wilderness resources, too many voices warned of unruliness in expanding colonies . . . Each succeeding ministry shrank from raising the issue which involved so many influential politicians . . . while settlers fretted angrily for the new lands. [20] Strict regulation of the fur trade pro- tected the Indians, and the new Indian Department presented astounding bills for presents, which the ministry accepted with resignation. Nevertheless, the trade still went to the French. The wealthier of them had moved across to the Spanish side of the Mississippi, but they still dom- inated southern Illinois. French traders roamed at large where no British trader dared set his foot outside the protection of the forts, and the fur-laden canoes floated steadily down the river to Span- ish New Orleans. It was to pay, in part, for this "devel- opment" of the west, that the Stamp Act was passed. When the vociferous protest of the colonies swept away both the Act and the ministry which proposed it, Eng- land was a little inclined to exasperation. It was nearly three years after the peace had been signed, three years of Indian fighting and Indian diplomacy, that the English came into possession of Illinois. Docile, the. French accepted a [21] new order far from pleasant. No provi- sion had been made for their Govern- ment, merely English law thrust upon them, of which they understood noth- ing, and they lived under the arbitrary whims of the English commanders sta- tioned there. Moreover, the priests had been ban- ished, a population of devout Catholics left without guidance. It was one of the banished Jesuits, the old and feeble Father Meurin, who gained permission to re- turn to care for his flock . . . and was driven from the western side of the river by the Spanish for trafficking with the English heretics. Yet despite the threat of being sent in chains to New Orleans, he returned secretly to his people when he was needed, however difficult the crossing of the turbulent river, toiling uncomplainingly. Gradually, even these docile villagers were restive, stirred by the spirit in the east to make a sharp stand for their own rights. In 1771 they sent Daniel Blouin [22] to General Gage in Boston to ask for civil government, one modeled, they sug- gested, on that of Connecticut. Gage would as soon have let them set up a king as see another colony invested with that irksome democracy. He listened in amazement, and scornfully refused. Meanwhile, what the ministry would not do for the empire, private men and colony officials were doing for themselves. The English government was occupied with the contumacious coast towns, and lawless frontiersmen swarmed over the mountains. Surveyors and land agents were choosing the choicest tracts far down the Ohio. Even the great merchant firms of the east caught the fever, and began com- peting for a trade that did not exist. One of them, Baynton Wharton, and Morgan of Philadelphia, sent $150,000 worth of goods* down the Ohio from Pittsburgh, one of the largest commercial undertak- ings of the eighteenth century. It was the junior partner, George Morgan, who [23] went to Illinois in its charge, prototype of hundreds to come after — founders of towns, of mines, of railroads, pushing the frontier westward. It was a time of wild speculation, and — it was speculation, perforce, that opened the west. When, shortly, the movement of set- tlers and attendant lawless disorders aroused new Indian war, England made one last effort to deal with the problem, to throw imperial protection over the Ohio valley, in the Quebec Act of 1774. Too late. The squatters and specula- tors gleefully defied the prohibition. When, at last, rebellion loosed the chaf- ing flood of pioneers, they threw into alliance with the British all the bitter fury of implacable Indian resistance. But now they should fight their own battles, make their own conquest of the land. England had made only a brand for the burning. [24] CHAPTER FOUR "THEY MADE THEIR OWN CONQUEST" T was a canny speculator's land agent, Dr. John Connolly, who saw that the backwoodsmen and mountaineers were the back- bone of the Revolution, and that an expedition launched from the west would break it. Luckily for the colonies, the British commanders were not convinced. Instead, Colonel Hamilton sent war parties from Detroit to harry and burn and slaughter from end to end of the long, scattering frontier . . . unaware that he raised a hornets' nest. In Kaskaskia, meanwhile, Comman- dante Phillippe de Rocheblave was be- coming more and more disgruntled at being left to hold a precarious post with a mere handful of militia . . . uncom- fortably aware that the villagers were [25] dividing against him, despite his efforts at holding them together, that not a few were quietly trading with the frontier settlements in Kentucky, that some were even helping the American rebels bring munitions up the river from New Or- leans . . . Aware, as well, that across the river complacent Spanish officials winked at the traffic, even actively helped . . . that if American forces came to take these Illinois towns, he could not stop them, and from there they could take Detroit. Runner after runner went to Canada, and unhearing British commanders. Fi- nally, news came of boats descending the Ohio, packed with the dreaded "Long Knives." Grimly he called out his sol- diers and without much surprise heard their sullen refusal to fight. American sympathizers had done their work well — the French had a healthy respect for the frontier rifles. That night he wrote his last letter, dated July 4, 1778 ... the ink was [26] scarcely dry when George Rogers Clark broke in upon him. Clark brought news of the alliance with France, and these Frenchmen cheered. Prairie du Rocher, Cahokia, and the others willingly surrendered. Dr. Jean Baptiste Laffont and Father Pierre Gibault themselves went to Vin- cennes, and brought back the famous oath of allegiance to Virginia written in bar- barous French and signed by all the townsfolk — most by making their marks. As a matter of course Clark at once instituted self-government, set up courts and the delighted villagers for the first time elected their own magistrates. Illinois was taken, but it was to be a far different thing to hold it. A good share of Clark's men insisted on return- ing to their families. Those that were left had to be fed and housed — it was only a matter of time until the French should distrust the paper money he of- fered in payment. The treaties he made with neighboring tribes would hold off [27] their murderous raids only until the next instalment of British trading goods . . . and Hamilton was at Detroit. Early in the fall the news came. Ham- ilton had retaken Vincennes . . . but the first snow had fallen, and he settled down comfortably until spring. Grimly, Clark saw but one chance, and at his appeal Frenchmen patched up his dwindling forces . . . day after day they waded wearily through the swollen rivers and flooded bottom lands of an Illinois February — through icy water that stretched for miles waist-- even neck-deep, and rested on muddy knolls at night, often without food . . . scarcely another could have led them, but on Clark's sheer certainty of victory they reached Vincennes ... on the 25th Ham- ilton surrendered, without terms. Illinois had become a county of Vir- ginia, divided in three districts, the French inhabitants given their old French law — the coutume de Paris — and courts for each district. But already [28] there were clashes between the French and the frontiersmen that were fast grow- ing bitter. Clark was worn with worry when his friend John Todd came from Virginia to take over the civil authority. Despite the prohibition of Virginia law, no man living could keep Kentucky back- woodsmen from making tomahawk claims to the fertile lands above the bluffs. It was in 1779 that the first English-speak- ing settlement was planted, at Bellefon- taine in Kaskaskia district, and, soon after, Grand Ruisseau in Cahokia dis- trict. Not a few of them had been bred by wilderness life to recognize no law but their own, and to their disorders was soon added the realization of the worth- lessness of the drafts and Continental notes that filled their strong boxes, and the French began refusing supplies . . . but "Long Knives" were not well re- fused. And, finally, Todd resigned. Far away to the eastward, the war ended ... in private conferences Benja- [29] min Franklin went over the peace terms with his old friend Lord Shelburne, once more in power and anxious to conciliate a nation that might be a desirable ally . . . the boundary was set at the Lakes, and the desperate grip Clark had held upon Illinois could relax. But of this the harried villagers knew almost nothing. The legal existence of Illinois County ended in January, 1782, and until 1790 its only visible authority lay in the courts, while the eastern states disputed whether the government of the Northwest belonged to states or nation. Indian attacks came with new fury, sparing not even the French. More and more of the people moved to the com- parative security of the Spanish side of the river. Most of their leaders went, and many of the villages were left in utter misery and despair, each dependent upon itself, an abandoned people. In Kaskaskia errant scoundrels came from the east, and overthrew the court. Led by John Dodge in his hilltop citadel [30] they ruled the luckless village with a heavy and corrupt hand. The French were unfit to govern themselves, Dodge and his men contended when embarrass- ing questions came from home . . . but in Cahokia the French court maintained its authority to the end. Petition after petition failed to reach Congress. Then in January, 1787 word came that Congress was at work at last, and the people were wild with joy. On August 17 an expedition came under Colonel Harmar and for the first time they saw the flag they lived under. Three more years they waited for ac- tual government, and law-abiding men, American and French alike, began to de- spair. In the fall of 1789 they promised each other to wait until March before they abandoned Illinois, and in that month Governor St. Clair finally came. [31] CHAPTER FIVE THE FLOOD WATERS ARE NOT STAYED NCE more speculation had driv- en an opening wedge. New York, Virginia and the other states had ceded their western claims. The plan of settlement had been fought out and laid down in Thomas Jefferson's land ordi- nance of 1785, and still all the discus- sion came to no action. It was not until 1787, when a new Ohio company of New Englanders backed by New York promoters de- manded to buy wide territory north of the Ohio, that the apathy of the northern states disappeared . . . under the urging of New York financiers the Continental Congress passed in days the ordinance that had been delayed for years. Land companies could buy the land, the United States could sell it, but not [32] much more than the mere title was chang- ing hands. Convinced that Lord Shel- burne had made a grave mistake, English garrisons still held the western forts, and the fur trade. The Indian tribes were their catspaws, and cried back the settle- ments with the bitter voice of scalping knives and burning cabins. President Washington urged St. Clair to strike the decisive blow that would quell it ... he tried in the fall of 1791, and met crushing defeat. It was Anthony Wayne, no longer Mad Anthony, but a wily and cunning general, who patiently drilled a new army . . . the Indians dis- covered in dismay the Americans had a new war chief who never slept ... on the field of Fallen Timbers, August 20, 1794, under the very guns of the British fort on the Maumee, they discovered his was a greater voice than theirs. At Greenville, just a year later, the tribes flocked to his summons. Wayne drew a line across northwestern Ohio to be the boundary of the Indian country, [33] and not one of the sullen tribes dared raise a voice against him. Fifteen years of peace followed, before frontiersmen had to fight once more. But it was only a matter of time before the suspended battle was taken up again. Always hostile to an eastern neighbor, the Spanish officials of Louisiana were stirring up the Indians to attack, hamper- ing at every turn the small fur trade the Americans had gained, intriguing to win the Illinois villages from their allegiance. It was an international accident that frightened them into behaving — the ir- repressible minister of the new French republic, Citizen Genet, got to the west- ern settlements before the American gov- ernment realized what he was doing and started a movement to attack the Spanish villages . . . Ten years later the Loui- siana purchase settled the problem. Months of travel distant from the ter- ritorial government in Ohio, the Illinois villages had scant attention at any time during those years. The upper valleys [34] were filled and Ohio was a state before ever the covered wagons reached half way to the Mississippi . . . Tall trees were the rule of thumb for fertile land, and the rich prairies beyond went for sheer wasteland. Besides, it was national policy to buy Indian titles before the land was settled, and St. Clair could find no single tribe with a clear title. Shortly, however, William Henry Harrison came as Indian Superintendent, and bought land from any wandering band that would do busi- ness with him, and seldom troubled about the justice of any claim. The Kentuckians came first, Clark's old campaigners who remembered the fertile soil . . . 4,311 people west of In- diana in 1806 had grown to 12,282 four years later, and in 1809 long petitioning won Illinois territorial government of its own. The working value of the Ordinance of 1787 was tested severely in those first few years of the new territory. At the [35] outset the situation could scarcely have been worse . . . All the settled area, some forty miles along the Mississippi, was a veritable nest of petty intrigues and quarrels. North of Kaskaskia American posts could be count- ed on one hand and were reached only by weeks of laborious poling upstream. Canadians dominated them all and In- dians ran unchecked. On two small mili- tary garrisons rested all the responsibil- ity of protection. Even worse, for the establishment of order, land titles were in entire confu- sion. Incoming settlers had to buy up old, uncertain claims or take public lands without shadow of title. Speculation was rampant and frauds innumerable. Yet in three years the young Ken- tuckian who came as territorial governor wrought law and order out of the chaos. ■ Governor Ninian Edwards used the doctrine he had learned from Jefferson. He insisted on the rule of the majority in every dispute, and to the astonishment [36] of the old rulers he was incorruptible. He reformed the judiciary and chose his new men carefully, and drastic measures struck hard at the prevailing lawlessness. Time worked with him, for every suc- ceeding month brought new wagon trains, and men who cared nothing for old quar- rels and everything for present peace. The Shadrach Bonds came to help him, uncle and nephew, and John Rice Jones — men that were sound material for building a new state. Even within the year a movement appeared for represen- tative government, and for once all fac- tions united. So far had order progressed that even the declaration of war did not deter the people's will, and it was in 1812 that the second step in territorial govern- ment was taken. And just in time, for the old battle was this time to be finished. As the Foxes had dimly seen a hun- dred years before, and Pontiac clearly, now every Indian in the northwest knew . . . though they might have tried to [37] stay the flood waters of their own western rivers, yet they stiffened for a final effort. It was Tecumseh and his prophet brother who whipped them to religious frenzy, preached return to their ancient customs, their ancient hatreds . . . and new Indian forays came like a shower of arrows in the forest. In retaliation Harrison destroyed Te- cumseh's village, Tippecanoe — fruitless victory, for Tecumseh fled to the British. Through the whole northwest the old fury was raised, and in the clamor for war all Madison's diplomacy was futile. Once more Illinois was the prize of international conflict — and this time the English meant no mistakes. Unluckily, the American command did make mis- takes, and costly ones. In the first cam- paign Detroit and Mackinac fell, and Fort Dearborn's garrison was massacred. The English believed the noxious boundary was retrieved . . . but against the enfilade of Indian attacks the Illinois settlers stayed and defiantly clamored for [38] revenge. Without government money or authority Governor Edwards raised mili- tia from his own pocket and patrolled the frontier from Vincennes to the Mis- sissippi, building blockhouses to cover the outlying settlements. It was a year later when troops finally came . . . Perry drove the English from Lake Erie, and they abandoned Detroit . . . but though they had lost in the east the English peace commissioners went to Ghent still in firm hold of the Mississippi, and determined to keep it. But the United States had sent three of its ablest men, John Quincy Adams, Albert Gallatin and Henry Clay. They held stubbornly to their terms. With the withdrawal of the English traders passed the wilderness years . . . settlement came in full tide, towns laid out in all the boom-time optimism of a western frontier . . . and, as was also to be the history of the west, when state- hood came in 1818 the majority of its founders were practically strangers. [39] CHAPTER SIX OUT OF FERMENTING GROWTH, MEN OF VIGOROUS MIND . . . ALF - SAVAGE frontiersmen and college-bred lawyers, small farmers and speculators' agents, fine ladies and gaunt women from backwoods settlements . . . houses of frame, and of brick, replacing swiftly the old log cabins . . . great dinners given, while men still gathered for corn-huskings and barn- raisings, court days and camp meet- ings . . . Rifles and powder, blankets and cali- cos in the village stores, beside fine wines, brandies, lemons, spices, silver tea ser- vices, broadcloths and silks ... so widely diverse the elbowing life of frontier towns. They clustered in the rich river bot- toms, climbing in two wide columns from [40] the Ohio at either side of the State . . . following the water courses for timber, water, and easy communication. Grist mills, steam distilleries, sawmills sprang up in their busy life; coopers, tanners, weavers, clock and watchmakers, hatters and milliners set up thriving trades, and Connecticut pedlars were a household byword. Down every Illinois river and creek the farmers sent their produce to the markets in the towns, and from there down the Ohio and Mississippi, where steamboats were just pushing aside the flatboats and keelboats, to pile up on the wharves at New Orleans . . . But the manufactured goods farmers wanted in return necessarily came from the east, and the resulting problem in exchange was beyond that day. Little by little currency was drained from Illi- nois until men began to fear for the union . . . not yet did they look northward for the solution. Though by 1830 the people had grown [41] to number 157,000 men almost super- stitiously avoided the prairies. Between the columns and to the north, the Kicka- poos, the Sauks and the Foxes, the Win- nebagos and the Potawatomis still mo- rosely hunted a trackless wilderness. It was a colony of English, drawn by the resemblance of the lands to the manor parks at home, who first settled on the prairie in 1818. Their leaders were the Flowers, and Morris Birkbeck who not only led in the fight on slavery in the State, but accomplished much in the ad- vancement of scientific agriculture. Then, about 1823, lead was discov- ered at Galena, and miners saw the rich corn fields and the great villages near Rock Island where the Sauks and the Foxes had lived for a hundred years. Without ceremony, in violation of both federal law and Indian treaty, they took possession of this corner of the wide prai- rie .. . encroaching year by year, until they plowed the village and the ancient graves. Only then, and under the goad [42] of mistreatment, the sixty-year old war chief Black Hawk turned suddenly and ordered them to leave. The settlers fled in panic to Governor Reynolds who pro- claimed Illinois in a state of "actual in- vasion" and called for volunteers . . . The war was a frolic better than a wolfhunt to frontier farmers who for twenty years had hated Indians without seeing any . . . Black Hawk, already disillusioned, fled with his starving band across Wisconsin before an army of four thousand soldiers . . . again and again tried to surrender, only to meet annihila- tion. No other Indian in Illinois ever ques- tioned the ownership of the land. The war was not ended before settlers were crowding northward, and specula- tion doubling and tripling land values in a year. The favorite get-rich-quick scheme was the projection of a new town ; Chicago was the speculators' hunting ground, and they made fortunes. In 1832 it was a market with two stores, and fur [43] traders still floated their Mackinaw boats over the swampy portage to the Des Plaines. A year later there were 2,000 people living there, and the lake front was crowded with ships bringing more. Gradually farms spread over the prai- rie, though it was far from easy to break up the tough prairie sod, and expensive to fence it. The pioneer settlers were usually squatters, who often sold their claims to newcomers and kept on moving westward. And despite all the rulings of indignant eastern statesmen who looked upon the west as a source of public funds, instead of the future home of American people, westerners justly respected their usefulness and protected their rights. In these years an enormous change was taking place. A canal had been built that linked the Lakes to the sea, and as commerce shifted heavily from Philadel- phia and Baltimore to New York, so Chicago gained in importance over the Mississippi towns . . . In 1834 weekly steamers plied from [44] Buffalo, and the fast settling northern country began hauling its grain to the city from hundreds of miles. Prices in the Chicago market surged above those in any other city, and the wheat came from the neighboring states as well. By 1841 a hundred and fifty ships docked a month, and they were not enough to carry it away. Long since men had pointed to the canal Joliet had seen between the Chicago and Illinois Rivers as solving the trans- portation problem. Plans had been made in 1819, and battered around in politics for several years. Finally, toward 1830 a government grant was made and actual shoveling was within sight. But then men heard of railroads and suddenly all Illinois was flooded with schemes to give fabulous values to lands away from the water routes. A mass of fantastic charters were granted in 1836, but so widespread was the fever that the next year the State undertook its own system of railroads [45] and canals, all over the State, and all to be built on the State's credit. Bonds were sold, and they were all begun at once ... it was two years later when the financial house of cards began to fall, when it was no longer a question of com- pletion but of paying interest on the loans already made, and scarcely six months later when even that hope collapsed . . . The State was called ruined when Governor Thomas Ford, elected in 1842, showed the legislators the way out, per- suaded the creditors of Illinois' good faith. Under his direction, not only were the debts paid, but the important Michi- gan-Illinois canal was finished. More than that, in those sobering years Illinois came of age. It was in these years of fermenting growth that immigrants began coming to Illinois from many lands . . . German fugitives from revolution, men of books many of them, whom the westerners called Latin farmers for knowing more of Latin than of the land, who started [46] a school in Belleville the first winter they settled there, 1836, brought one of the first important libraries in the State, and founded the first music school . . . Irish laborers who came to work on the canal and settled in Chicago, or farmed the canal lands they bought with their wages . . . English and Scotch, be- sides, and many Norwegians and Swedes. Most ambitious and tragic of all at- tempts was the colony of Mormons that followed Joseph Smith in persecution from state to state and came from Mis- souri in 1839 to settle at Nauvoo. Almost in a night a city of perhaps twenty thou- sand grew up to overtop any other in the State, where today is a village of scarcely a thousand. Granted almost unheard of lawmak- ing powers by the State, it was not long before Smith, here as elsewhere, was interfering in politics and trying to draw commerce from neighboring towns to feed his thousands. Gradually a storm of hostility was stirred up, and men gath- [47] ered under arms in the neighboring dis- tricts. Smith was murdered in jail, and only open warfare finally drove Brigham Young and his followers to another west- ward migration. From the beginning Illinois towns had fairly buzzed with political life . . . but the factions of an isolated frontier state were giving way to greater struggles, in terms of the nation, and of the future . . . Out of the cauldron of a hundred vio- lent beliefs grew men of vigorous mind, leaders . . . one who, in 1837, declared in protest against the rest of the legisla- ture that abolitionism made the slavery evil worse, who denounced the Mexican war as "robbery and dishonor" and was called a second Benedict Arnold . . . Who fought the cause of liberty and union in a contest for an Illinois senator- ship that the nation watched . . . and won on Illinois stumps, that year, the presidency for 1860. [48] CHAPTER SEVEN A CENTER OF COMMERCE IS DECIDED HE promised transformation, when it came, answered even the speculators' wild dreams. By the late forties eastern capitalists were beginning to bid for charters that would carry the railroads across the states to St. Louis or to Chicago at the terminus of the new canal which was already pour- ing into the lake port the grain of the Illinois river country and even of the Mississippi from St. Louis. In 1850 a land grant was secured to build the Illinois Central Railroad and it was promptly undertaken. In 1849 the Galena and Chicago Union, later part of the Northwestern, had 14 miles in operation; the road reached Freeport in 1853. By another year the Chicago and Rock Island, the Chicago and Alton were [49] each organized, and a number of other roads were put together as a nucleus of the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy. Rapidly connections with the east were developed, and year by year new roads and connections showed the outline of the vast railroad network that was to be. And the reaching lines wrought enor- mous changes . . . Even through the rest- less years of '49 and '50, when every western wagon train seemed to come from Illinois, people poured into the State faster than others poured out. The prairies of eastern Illinois were filling up at last. Along the railroads the villages of log cabins sprang up once more, to change over night to good-sized towns. Farmers suddenly realized the wealth of new markets, and a fever of plank roads almost kept pace with the railroads. Back in the thirties farmers had begun to grope uncertainly for the bounty that lay in the rich prairie soil. Agricultural societies appeared and farmers experi- mented with flax and mustard seed ; cot- [50] ton, tobacco, hemp, castor beans and mulberry trees were all tried in brief crazes. But they still used the primitive bar-share plows, and it was not new crops they needed. In a little forest forge where now is the Illinois Central station at 12th Street in Chicago, John Lane fabricated the first steel plow in the world in 1833. John Deere took up the idea and began making plows at Grand Detour in 1837, and William Parlin in 1842. It was John Lane, true son of his father, who revolutionized the making of plows by the invention of soft center steel in 1868. In these years, too, inventors were tinkering with planters, threshers and harvesters. The first McCormick factory was set up in Chicago in 1847, and not long afterwards two young Illinois farm- ers, the Marsh brothers, Charles and William, patented the harvesters which superseded the combined reapers and mowers. In turn these gave way to the binding machines which George H. [51] Spaulding of Rockford, Illinois, and John F. Appleby of Wisconsin first con- structed. Grain drills and disk harrows, hay rakes and hay loaders . . . and as important as all these, the invention of barbed wire, which made possible the great stock and dairying industries which are the agriculture of Illinois today. For as the railroads pushed on, wheat production shifted westward, and closer utilization of the soil brought specialized crops — corn and oats above the other grains, hay and pasturage, and horticul- tural crops as well. Livestock had been handled somewhat haphazardly. But it was easy and profit- able to raise cattle, and most farmers began to find it cheaper to "make their corn walk to market." They bought western "feeders" to fatten on Illinois corn, and it was when prices of cattle rose that farmers started raising their own and discovered the huge profits in producing "baby beef." When the Civil War raised the price [52] of wool to new heights, many farmers had immense flocks of sheep, but the prices fell, and interest returned, for a time, only with the demand for mutton through the nineties. In the production of swine, however, most important in Illinois agriculture today, the State al- ways ranked high. From 1830 importa- tions of improved breeds were made steadily, until the State was a center of pure-blooded swine. The other important section of agri- culture today, dairying, developed with the growth of industrial cities, with the seventies, to become an industry in itself in the development of cream separators, butter-making machinery and large scale organization. And while with the expanding rail- roads Illinois farmers looked into a new era, the city by the lake reaped mightily of their harvest. At first Chicago grain dealers feared losing the trade the canal and the Lakes had brought them . . . the railroads decided the city's dominance. [53] By 1859 dealers were almost as busy as ever in the "pit" of today, attending four "boards" a day ... the first at eight in the morning on a street corner called "Gamblers' Corner," the second at elev- en in the rooms of the Board of Trade, another in the afternoon back at the Corner, and the last at seven that evening on the sidewalk opposite the Tremont House. And when the railroads, having brought the enormous shipments of grain, shifted them also westward to Duluth; when, also, the mid-western forests were stripped after a decade when Chicago was the nation's lumber market ... at length, as the trail herds began rolling northward to meet the railroads, stockyards grew on the city's westward fringe . . . the beginning of an unexam- pled industry. In the twenty years from 1850 to 1870, the city's population grew from 30,000 to 300,000. Eighteen trunk lines had made it already the country's railroad [54] center, had built its receiving yards and freight houses, its warehouses and eleva- tors, and its factories . . . And one windy October night in 1871 Mrs. O'Leary's cow upset a kerosene lamp in a flimsy barn, and the gale swept flames in vast billows across a city that melted before it . . . Yet the ashes were not aold before rebuilding had begun . . . merchants or- dering new stocks from the east the moment the wires were repaired . . . banks open for business within the week . . . and in three years a new city showed of what temper was Illinois' growth. [55] CHAPTER EIGHT AN ALLIANCE UNIQUE AMONG STATES ARADOXICALLY, the trans- formation of Illinois into an industrial state grew largely out of its agriculture. While out of the demands created by the Civil War a diversity of manufactures grew rapidly, it was on the State's unrivaled sources of raw materials that its most important industries were based — flour and whisky on its wheat and corn, meat packing on livestock and fodder corn, and on the lumber of neighboring states the agricul- tural implements, carriages and wagons, and planed lumber that agriculture de- manded. Out of the interchange a wide com- merce grew within the State. With the telegraph and the railroads, competition widened, and spread to distant markets. [56] By 1876 Chicago merchants not only competed at home on equal terms with the east, but sent their "drummers" sell- ing through the whole country. Trade with China and Japan was just begin- ning, moreover, and by means of the transcontinental railroads just completed, their goods were sold from Chicago. At the same time, an industrial popu- lation was growing rapidly. The inven- tion of new processes and the supplanting of old methods by the factory system were beginning modern industrialism . . . and the far-reaching changes in the growth of corporations and the differen- tiation of capital and labor were not far distant. Already in the seventies, of so-called "pure" manufactures, clothing ranked with meat-packing and flour milling. And there were numbers of others just beginning to grow — iron castings, forged and rolled iron, tobacco, furniture, machinery, leather goods, boots and shoes . . . [57 1 The iron and steel industry in Illinois dated from the sixties when the mines in northern Michigan were opened. In Chicago it started in 1857 when Captain E. B. Ward of Detroit built the Chicago Rolling Mill on the right bank of the Chicago River, "just outside the city," to reroll iron rails. It was the nucleus of the North Chicago Rolling Mill which in 1864 rolled the first Bessemer steel made in this country. Later, also, this company joined with the Union works, the South Chicago works, and the Joliet Iron and Steel Company to form the Illinois Steel Com- pany in 1889. The first furnaces were built by the Chicago Iron Company in 1868, and by 1876 there were eleven furnaces and nine rolling mills in the State. It was in the eighties that the steel industry started its modern growth, with the opening of the Superior ranges and the freighting of ore cheaply down the Lakes . . . and with the opening of the Illinois coal mines. [58] Coal mining is not a frontier industry. Perhaps nothing so clearly as its begin- ning in Illinois marked the advance of the State to high industrial rank. The rich deposits went unrealized under the deep prairies until the railroads brought men to open them. No longer were the steel industries dependent on coal from other states, and they began to expand on Illinois sources. And not only in Chicago . . . other cities suddenly began to grow: Peoria, Deca- tur, Joliet, Quincy, Rockford, Spring- field. And in 1883 was designed the first steel cage construction known to the world — the first of skyscrapers. It was the ten-story Home Insurance Building in Chicago that revolutionized building methods, and the industry. Today the chief industry in Illinois is still wholesale meatpacking — joined with the chief product of agriculture which is hogs, and the third and fourth on that list, corn and cattle. [59] It was in 1865 that the Chicago stock- yards were consolidated, at the time when railroads promised to prevent the pre- vious great risks to the packers. Until then meat was packed in the winter to prevent spoiling, but could be shipped only when summer freed the lake and canal of ice. Then the refrigeration process was dis- covered, and in 1867 fresh meat was first successfully shipped in refrigerator cars. Eight years later Chicago meat reached Europe, and its foreign trade kept grow- ing. More and more large packers discovered the utilization of the by-prod- ucts, and by the nature of the industry combinations grew up that not only con- centrated it in fewer hands, but deter- mined its permanence in Chicago. A 1933 census gives to meat-packing the value of three hundred and ten mil- lions of dollars. The second in rank, printing and publishing, is valued at $175,000,000. Other industries, large as they are, reach not quite a hundred millions : [60 1 Steel works and rolling mills, clothing, foundry, and machine shops, bread and other bakery goods, confectionery, petro- leum refining, electrical machinery, boots and shoes, tin cans and tinware, paints and varnishes, railroad repair shops. Second of states in commerce and in- dustry; third in mineral production. In like spirit has agriculture grown. For a quarter of a century there was a steady decrease in farm population as boys and girls were drawn by the cities and farm labor sought steady pay in industry. Yet a steady increase in farm production, in farms, in acreage, corre- sponded. And dairying grew with the cities to rank in its own right. Farming machinery and farming meth- ods made enormous advances . . . crop planning, use of fertilizer, soil utiliza- tion, the gasoline tractors that displace horses and small engines that do the muscular work of a farm household. In the corn belt tile drains and ditches increased the value of the marshy prairies [61] to the highest priced agricultural land in the United States. In 1890 the high point in cultivation was reached: 32,794,- 728 acres. But after a long decline thereafter, farms and acreage have again increased, and in 1935 acres under cul- tivation were little more than a million short of the mark. Long ago the wasteful pioneer disap- peared, displaced by the modern business farmer, who is acquainted with markets and prices, able to apply a cost account- ing system to his operations, posted on rapidly developing improvements, and anxious to give his children who will work after him technical education. In interdependent commerce, interde- pendent strength, agriculture and indus- try have grown . . . fqrged an alliance unique among states, of high rank secure in the nation. [62] CHAPTER NINE A SPELLER, AND A SLATE BESIDES LMOST proverbial among to- day's school children is the Life of Washington that the boy Lincoln borrowed from a neigh- boring farmer, tucked between the ill-fitting logs of the cabin one night before it snowed — and then had to split rails to pay for it. Many a frontier child learned to read from that same gossipy book of Parson Weems. A speller and a slate besides were generally all his equipment for education in the log cabin schoolhouses of the first Amer- ican settlers. The first of them known was built in Monroe County in 1783. Itinerant schoolmasters kept them, and farmers bought tuition for one or two children and divided the term among the family. Despite the provision made for education [63] in the Ordinance of 1787, these were the only schools for a good many years. In the early years of statehood, more ambitious private schools appeared, some about the grade of grammar schools, and some girls' schools that taught needle- work, painting and similar subjects for tuition of $3.50 to $7.00 a quarter. At Kaskaskia a Reverend Mr. Desmoulin taught Latin and French, and Aratus Kent taught Latin and Greek at Galena about 1829. There was one public school at Alton, which was free to children of the incorporation. It was in 1824 that the first bill passed the Illinois legislature to establish free schools, but a storm of disapproval greeted it. A year later it was repealed, and twenty years passed before the public was convinced that the State owed every child an education. Meanwhile every denomination worked to provide instruction for its own children, from the three Rs to nat- ural and moral philosophy, Latin and [64] Greek. The pioneering Presbyterian and Congregational missionaries, who worked together in the west, were usually men of thorough collegiate and theological training, and founded a number of schools — Illinois, Knox and Beloit col- leges ; Whipple, Dover, Princeton and other academies; Monticello, Jackson- burg, Rockford and Galesburg female seminaries. The foundations of collegiate educa- tion in the west were laid in 1827 when John Mason Peck opened a theological seminary at Rock Spring, which taught literature and science besides. A farm for student labor reduced expenses as well as promoted good health — a favorite type of school corporation at the time. Out of this seminary some years later grew Shurtleff College, by then moved to upper Alton. A quarter century in advance of their time, its trustees pro- jected in 1840 a school of scientific agri- culture and a year or so later opened a medical school. [65] By 1840 the State had twelve colleges, though Illinois College, opened in 1830 at Jacksonville, alone granted degrees. Others were McKendree, a Methodist seminary opened at Lebanon in 1835 on the labor principle and with a depart- ment for women, and Knox College at Galesburg, founded in 1837. Among the numbers of denomination colleges founded since, Wheaton College, Illinois Wesleyan University at Bloom- ington, and Illinois Women's College at Jacksonville were founded by Method- ists; Shurtleff and the old Chicago Uni- versity that Stephen A. Douglas founded in 1857 by Baptists; Lombard College at Galesburg by Universalists ; Jubilee College by Episcopalians in 1847; Au- gustana College, founded by the Luth- erans at Chicago in 1860 and moved to Rock Island in 1875; and St. Ignatius Jesuit College, built in 1869 and now Loyola University. State Normal University at Blooming- ton, founded in 1857, and the University [66] of Illinois, chartered ten years later as Illinois Industrial University, were the first altogether non-denominational high- er schools. In 1892 came the opening of the University of Chicago, just a few weeks before the dedication of the Colum- bian Exposition. In the forties the state schools that had sprung up in various townships were gradually brought under control of a unified system. In 1845 a state super- intendent of schools was appointed — though for economy's sake he was the secretary of state for nine years — and teachers' conventions were called that went into problems thoroughly. In the next ten years the foundation of the modern school system was laid. In 1846 and 1847 schools were opened for the deaf and dumb, and for the blind. Later on the State widened its instruc- tion for these special groups. Despite the numbers of private schools, it was still difficult to get teachers of adequate training. In 1857 State Nor- [67] mal was opened, the first normal school in the middle west. Others followed, and in the burst of activities in the nine- ties the standards were raised, instruc- tion put on a basis of psychology, and a number of new subjects added. Several technological schools followed. Armour Institute of Technology in 1893, Lewis Institute in 1896, Bradley Poly- technic Institute of Peoria in 1897. And in the same decade came Chicago's four great libraries: Newberry Library opened in 1887, the scientific and tech- nical John Crerar Library incorporated in 1894, the beginning of the collection of the University of Chicago library, while the Chicago Public Library found- ed twenty years earlier was established in its own new building in 1892. Significant of the quickening life of the sixties and seventies, Chicago early had an Academy of Sciences, an opera house and an art gallery. These burned, but the interests they represented have grown stronger ever since. An active [68] musical life gave foretaste of today's great Chicago Symphony, particularly among the Germans, who had an orches- tra and two rival male choruses which grew out of the music for President Lin- coln's funeral. Schools of music, later on, were established at Illinois College, at Northwestern, and at Knox, and music festivals fostered the people's liking. From the beginning newspapers sprang up in Illinois, not one at a time, but in rivalries of threes and fours. Not pre- cisely newspapers in the modern sense, the strictures and observations of the edi- tor were interlarded with clippings of romances and occasionally better pieces. But even in expression often crude and violent was the vigor of a growing fron- tier people. By 1870 more than 500 periodicals were published in Illinois. In the next decade the number doubled, and it was chiefly in those years that newspapers changed from ideas to news, and that the Chicago press became metropolitan. Out- [69] side of Chicago, as well, not a few papers attained an influence equal to any in Chicago. By 1890 there were more than 1300 papers — these were years of a stirring of thought, years that saw a Robert In- gersoll, and in which Jane Addams strug- gled in a pioneer work. The first per- manent periodicals appeared, as expand- ing, richer life brought more closely knit expression. Thus also the culminating World's Columbian Exposition, as an- other and greater exposition at the end of a longer period. [70] CHAPTER TEN AMERICA WAS BUILT BY THESE LLINOIS is a story of few who saw, many who were blind ... a story of empire that many laid high stakes to win and, often in the winning, lost. Of nameless voyageurs who searched out the far paths before any that history names . . . whom Allouez and Marquette and Joliet found before them at the landing places and the portages. Of la Salle, magnificent in his failures ... of the loyalty of Tonti, the gleaming courage of Dartaguiette ... of saintly, fearless fathers, who dared — rather, wel- comed — the most terrible of hardships, and death, for the saving of Indian souls. Tiny French villages, flotsam of French imperialism flung on the Mis- sissippi shore . . . small farmers and [71] hard-bitten traders, their sprinkling of nobles, and fringe of Indian and negro slaves . . . bits of an old world forsaken in the new, like the Indians to fall sacri- fice to conquest . . . Two centuries nations wasted in fruit- less conflict . . . and the valleys waited men who sought for themselves. Specu- lators and squatters pushed a frontier westward, built the lusty frontier towns, and the tide of settlement rolled after. Speculators and squatters. America was built by these. The founders of towns, exploiters of mines, builders of railroads . . . who laid high stakes to win. They were adventurers like these who built Illinois . . . who pioneered her far- flung business frontiers. It is a young, well muscled state; it still pioneers. [72 1 UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS-URBANA 977.3IL623 com ILLINOIS THE PRAIRIE STATE NEW YORK, N 3 0112 025380590