Chapter III

I. The Land and Indian Questions. 1790 to 1809.

A proclamation issued by Estevan Miro, Governor and Intendant of the Provinces of Louisiana and Florida in 1789, offered to immigrants a liberal donation of land, graduated according to the number of laborers in the family; freedom of religion and from payment of tithes, although no public worship except Catholic would be allowed; freedom from taxation; and a free market at New Orleans for produce or manufactures. All settlers must swear allegiance to Spain.(146) This proclamation came at a time when the West was divided in opinion as to whether to make war upon Spain for her closure of the Mississippi or to secede from the United States and become a part of Spain.(147) It tended to continue the emigration from the Illinois country to Spanish territory, for public land was not yet for sale in Illinois.

To the professional rover, the inability to secure a title to land was the cause of small concern, but the more substantial and desirable the settler, the more concerned was he about the matter. Settlement and improvements were retarded. Before the affairs of the Ohio Company had progressed far enough to permit sales of land to settlers, the little company at Marietta saw, with deep chagrin, thousands of settlers float by on their way to Kentucky, where land could be bought.(148) Squatters in Illinois were constantly expecting that the public lands would soon be offered for sale. The natural result was petitions for the right of preëmption, because without such a right, the settler was in danger of losing whatever improvements he had made. In 1790, James Piggott and forty-five others petitioned for such a right. The petitioners stated that they had settled since 1783 and had suffered much from Indians. They could not cultivate their land except under guard. Seventeen families had no more tillable land than four could tend. The land on which they lived was the property of two individuals.(149)

Petitions from various classes of settlers, not provided for by the acts of June 20, August 28, and August 29, 1788, led Congress to pass the act of March 3, 1791. By this act, four hundred acres was to be given to each head of a family who, in 1783, was resident in the Illinois country or at Vincennes, and who had since moved from the one to the other. The same donation was to be made to all persons who had moved away, if they should return within five years. Such persons should also have confirmed to them the land they originally held. This was intended to bring back persons who had gone to the Spanish side of the Mississippi. Grants previously made by courts having no authority should be confirmed to persons who had made improvements, to an extent not exceeding four hundred acres to any one person. As these lands had in some cases been repeatedly sold, the parties making the improvements were frequently guiltless of any knowledge of fraud. The Cahokia commons were confirmed to that village. One hundred acres was to be granted to each militiaman enrolled on August 1, 1790, and who had received no other grant.(150) This act throws considerable light on the causes of discontent then prevailing among the settlers and on the conditions to which immigrants came.

This same spring, about two hundred and fifty of the inhabitants of Vincennes had gone to settle at New Madrid.(151) It is not strange that the act of March 3, 1791, made provisions intended to induce the Americans who had emigrated to the Spanish possessions to return. The history of the threatened Spanish aggression upon the western part of the United States is known in essence to anyone who has made the slightest special study of the period at which it was at its height. Morgan’s scheme for a purchase of land in Illinois was not carried out, and he turned his attention to peopling his settlement at New Madrid. Down the Mississippi to New Orleans seemed the natural route for Illinois commerce. Slavery flourished unmolested west of the Mississippi. In 1794, Baron de Carondolet gave orders to the governor of Natchez to incite the Chickasaw Indians to expel the Americans from Fort Massac. The governor refused to obey the order, because Fort Massac had been occupied by the Americans in pursuance of a request by the Spanish representative at the capital of the United States that the president would put a stop to the proposed expedition of the French against the Spanish. The claim was advanced by Carondolet that the Americans had no right to the land on which the fort stood, but that the land belonged to the Chickasaws, who were independent allies of Spain. Two other reasons given for not obeying the order were that it would preclude the successful issue of the Spanish intrigue for the separation of Kentucky from the United States, and would hinder negotiations, then pending, for a commercial treaty between Spain and the United States.(152) Carondolet regarded the Indians as Spain’s best defence against the Americans,(153) yet the whites prepared for defence, and in anticipation of the proposed French expedition of George Rogers Clark, a garrison of thirty men and an officer was placed at Ste. Genevieve, opposite Kaskaskia. Carondolet said: “This will suffice to prevent the smuggling carried on by the Americans of the settlement of Kaskaskias situated opposite, which increases daily.”(154)

Early in 1796, a petition was sent from Kaskaskia to Congress. The petitioners desired that they might be permitted to locate their donation of four hundred acres per family on Long Prairie, a few miles above Kaskaskia, on the Kaskaskia River, and that the expense of surveying the land might be paid by the United States. The act granting the donation-land had provided for its location between the Kaskaskia and the Mississippi. This land the petitioners declared to be private land and some of it was of poor quality.(155) Confirmation of land claims directed to be made upon the Governor’s visit in 1790 were delayed by the lack of a surveyor and the poverty of the inhabitants.(156) The petition was signed by John Edgar, William Morrison, William St. Clair, and John Demoulin(157) “for the inhabitants of the counties of St. Clair and Randolph”(158)—the Illinois counties. The petitioners ranked high in the mercantile and legal life of the Illinois settlements, but they must have been novices in the art of petitioning if they thought that a petition signed by four men from the Illinois country, with no sign of their being legally representative, would be regarded by Congress as an expression of the opinion of the Northwest Territory. The part of the petition relating to lands was granted, but the major part, which related to other subjects, was denied on the ground that the petitioners probably did not represent public sentiment.(159) During this same year Congress denied a number of petitions for the right of preëmption in the Northwest Territory, because such a right would encourage illegal settling. It was also during this year that the first sales of public land in the Northwest Territory were authorized. The land to be sold was in what is now Ohio. No tract of less than four thousand acres could be purchased.(160)

In 1800, two hundred and sixty-eight inhabitants of Illinois, chiefly French, petitioned Congress that Indian titles to land in the southern part of Illinois might be extinguished and the land offered for sale; that tracts of land at the distance of a day’s journey from each other, lying between Vincennes and the Illinois settlements, might be ceded to such persons as would keep taverns, and that one or two garrisons might be stationed in Illinois. The petitioners state that the Kaskaskia tribe of Indians numbered not more than fifteen members and that their title to land could be easily extinguished; that not enough land is open to settlement to admit a population sufficient to support ordinary county establishments; that roads are much needed, and that many of the inhabitants are crossing the Mississippi with their slaves. The petition was not considered.(161)

A new factor now appears in the forces affecting Illinois settlement. The Northwest Territory having advanced to the second grade of territorial government, in December, 1799, its delegate took his seat in Congress. The step was an important one for the struggling colony. Before this time such petitions as were prepared by inhabitants of the territory for the consideration of Congress had been subjected to all the vicissitudes of being addressed to some public officer or of being confided to some member of Congress who represented a different portion of the country. Up to this time the public lands could only be bought in tracts of four thousand acres. Largely through the influence of the delegate from the Northwest Territory, a bill was passed which authorized the sale of sections and half-sections. In consequence, emigration soon began to flow rapidly into Ohio. Land in Illinois was not yet offered for sale, but this bill is important because the policy of offering land in smaller tracts was to continue.(162)

The territorial delegate was also active in procuring the passage of a bill for the division of the Northwest Territory. While the bill was pending, a petition from Illinois, praying for the division and for the establishment of such a government in the western part as was provided for by the Ordinance of 1787, was presented. The act for division was signed by the President on May 7, 1800; it formed Indiana Territory, with Vincennes as its capital.(163)

The propositions made by a convention of representatives elected by the citizens of Indiana to prepare petitions to Congress, near the close of 1802, illustrate the needs of the time. It was desired that the Indian title to land lying in Southern Illinois and Southwestern Indiana might be extinguished and the land sold in smaller tracts and at a lower price;(164) that a preëmption act might be passed; that a grant of seminary and school lands might be made; that land for taverns, twenty miles or less apart, might be granted along certain specified routes; that donation-lands might be chosen in separate tracts, instead of in three specified areas, in order to avoid “absolutely useless” prairies, and also lands claimed by ancient grants; and that the qualification of a freehold of fifty acres of land, prescribed for the electors of representatives to the territorial legislature, might be changed to manhood suffrage, because the freehold qualification was said to tend “to throw too great a weight in the scale of wealth.” The petition was considered in committees, but it led to no legislation.(165)

None of the above complaints was better founded than that concerning the restriction of the suffrage, and it is well to note subsequent proceedings in regard to it. No qualification less suitable to the time and place could well have been devised, and this is especially true of the Illinois portion of the territory, because there unsettled French claims were to delay the sales of public lands until 1814, and thus early settlers could neither buy land nor vote unless they owned it, unless indeed they purchased land claims from the needy and unbusiness-like French. An interesting petition of 1807 from the settlement on Richland Creek,(166) for the right of preëmption, throws light upon conditions then obtaining. The petitioner inclosed a map of the settlement, with the following explanation: “Those persons whose names are enclosed in said plot, within surveyed lines, have confirmed and located rights, amounting to 3,775 acres; ... the residue of the said settlers, occupying about 6,000 acres of land, have, without any right, settled upon the public land.” The map shows that there were eleven owners and twenty-two squatters.(167) As the law then stood, the twenty-two squatters, occupying more than three-fifths of the land, could not vote. The eleven land-owners must have secured their land either under the acts of 1788 or that of 1791, or by the purchase of French claims, a trade vigorously carried on. In 1808,(168) Congress so far extended the suffrage in Indiana as to make the ownership of a town lot worth one hundred dollars an alternative qualification to the possession of a freehold of fifty acres. This was in advance of the law in some of the Eastern states.

After 1802, the land question can not be traced without reference to the Indian question in Illinois. That question became important as soon as American occupation was assured, and it remained important for fifty years after the Revolution. The desire of the American settlers for land was directly counter to the desire of the Indians to preserve their hunting-grounds. Before the close of the eighteenth century, the list of bloody deeds in Illinois had grown long.(169) The United States Government appreciated the gravity of the situation and early made efforts to purchase the land from the Indians. That part of the treaty of Greenville, of 1795, which affected Illinois, extinguished the Indian title to a tract six miles square, at the mouth of Chicago River; one six miles square, at Peoria; one twelve miles square, near the mouth of the Illinois River; the post of Fort Massac, and the land in the possession of the whites.(170) The treaty of Fort Wayne, in 1803, ceded four square miles or less, at the salt springs on Saline Creek, and some land west and southwest from Vincennes. This treaty, with another made in the following August, ceded three tracts of land, each one mile square, between Vincennes and Kaskaskia, to be sites for taverns.(171) The treaty of Vincennes, of August, 1803, ceded land in Illinois bounded by the Ohio, the Mississippi, the Illinois, and the western watershed of the Wabash, except three hundred and fifty acres near Kaskaskia, and twelve hundred and eighty acres to be located. This last treaty was made with the depleted Kaskaskia tribe.(172) As the claims of various tribes overlapped, an Indian treaty rarely signifies that all controversy in regard to the land ceded is at an end. Frequently one or more treaties must yet be made with other tribes, and frequently a tribe refuses to abide by its agreement.

Previous to 1804, no land was sold in the Northwest Territory west of the mouth of the Kentucky River. An act of March 26 of that year provided for the opening of a land-office at Detroit to sell lands north of Ohio; one at Vincennes to sell lands in its vicinity ceded by the treaty of Fort Wayne; and one at Kaskaskia to sell so much of the land ceded by the treaty of Vincennes (August, 1803) as was not claimed by any other tribe than those represented in the cession. The register and the receiver of public moneys of these respective districts were to be commissioners to settle private land claims. Evidences of claims should be filed before January 1, 1805, and after the adjustment of claims the public lands should be sold at auction to the highest bidder. Two dollars per acre was to be the minimum price; no land should be sold in less than quarter-sections, except fractional portions caused by irregularities in topography or survey, and lands unsold after the auction might be sold at private sale. Although this act provided for the sale of public lands in Illinois after private claims should have been satisfied, and directed that such claims should be filed not later than January 1, 1805, Congress repeatedly extended the time for the filing of claims, and ten years after the passage of this act there were still unsatisfied claims.(173) Not until 1814 did sales of public land begin in Illinois. The delay retarded immigration of that class which would have made the most desirable citizens.

By the treaty of St. Louis, November 3, 1804, the Sauk and Foxes ceded that part of Illinois west of the Illinois and Fox rivers. Black Hawk, the principal chief of the Sauk, did not sign the treaty.(174) By the treaty of Vincennes, 1805, the Piankashaws ceded a tract lying between the lower Wabash and its western watershed.(175) No more Indian titles to land in Illinois were extinguished, and no public land was sold in Illinois until after that part of the country became a separate territory.

Early in 1806, there came to Congress from Illinois a petition which betrayed the anxiety of the French settlers, and of the Americans who had bought French claims, lest the peculiar shape of their holdings should be disturbed by the orderly system of government surveys. The petitioners asked that a line might be run from a point north of Cahokia to an unspecified river south of Kaskaskia, in such a manner as to include all settlements between the two points, and that the land so included be exempt from the mode of survey and terms of sale of other public lands of the United States. The petition was apparently not reported upon, but a detailed map of the region referred to shows that the holdings were left in their bewildering complexity.(176)

By the time Indiana Territory was divided some progress had been made in extinguishing Indian titles, and some also in investigating land claims of the French and their assignees; but the American immigrant had still the hard choice of buying a French claim with uncertain title or squatting on government land with the risk of losing whatever improvement he might make, and often the added risk of being killed by the suspicious, hostile, untrustworthy Indians. This was one class of hindrances to settlement. Another hindrance, next to be noticed, was the unstable governmental conditions following the anarchy already recited.

II. Government Succeeding the Period of Anarchy, 1790 to 1809.

When St. Clair County was formed, in 1790, it was made to include all the settlements of the Northwest Territory to the westward of Vincennes. On account of its geographical extent it was divided into three judicial districts, but it could not be made into three separate counties, because there were not enough men capable of holding office to furnish the necessary officials. The American settlers were few and a large proportion of them were unskilled in matters of government, while the French were totally unfit to govern. In 1795, St. Clair, when referring to conditions in 1790, wrote that since then the population of Illinois had decreased considerably.(177) Combining this decrease with the fact that there were in the settlements in what is now Missouri 1491 inhabitants in 1785, 2093 in 1788, and 6028, including 883 slaves, in 1799,(178) the conclusion is inevitable that emigration across the Mississippi was the immediate cause of the decrease in Illinois.

In 1795, notwithstanding the decreased population, and perhaps in the hope of checking the decrease, St. Clair County was divided by proclamation of Governor St. Clair. The division was by an east and west line running a little south of the settlement of New Design.(179) St. Clair County lay to the north, Randolph County to the south of the line.(180)

The early laws of the Northwest Territory throw light upon the conditions existing upon the frontier. Minute provisions for establishing and maintaining ferries, with no mention of bridges, indicate the primitive methods of travel.(181) Millers were required to use a prescribed set of measures and to grind for a prescribed toll, the toll for the use of a horse-mill being higher than that for a water-mill, unless the owner of the grain furnished the horses.(182) Guide-posts were to be put up at the forks of every public road.(183) No stray stock should be taken up between the first of April and the first of November, unless the stray should have broken into the inclosure of the taker-up.(184) In those days stock was turned out and crops were fenced in. Prairies or cleared land were not to be fired except between December 1 and March 10, unless upon one’s own land.(185) The following rates of county taxation were prescribed:

Horses, per head, not more than $.50 Neat cattle, not more than .12-½ Bond servant, not more than 1.00 Single man, 21 yrs. or older, with less than $200 worth of property, not more than 2.00 nor less than .50 Retail merchants, not more than 10.00(186)

A bounty, varying at different times between 1799 and 1810 from 50 cents to $2 per head, was given for killing wolves.(187) Imprisonment for debt, a law antedating by many years similar laws in several of the other parts of the United States, was practically abolished.(188) A frontier region does not have that social stratification which makes oppression of the debtor class easy. A county too poor to build a log jail without difficulty is not likely to be so senseless as to make a practice of confining and boarding its debtor class.

For the purpose of taxation land was to be listed in three classes according to value. No specification as to the value of the respective classes was prescribed. The tax was eighty-five, sixty, or twenty-five cents per one hundred acres, according as land was first, second, or third class. No unimproved land in Illinois was to be listed higher than second class.(189)

The laws above cited were enacted by the legislature of the Northwest Territory. In May, 1800, that territory was divided, the western part, including Illinois, becoming Indiana Territory. This made the Illinois country more distinctly frontier by again reducing it to the first grade of territorial government, Indiana Territory, as such, not being represented in Congress until December, 1805.(190) Among the reasons advanced for dividing the Northwest Territory was the fact that in five years there had been but one court for criminal cases in the three western counties.(191)

Illinois soon sought admission to the second grade of territorial government. In April, 1801, John Edgar wrote from Kaskaskia to St. Clair: “During a few weeks past, we have put into circulation petitions addressed to Governor Harrison, for a General Assembly, and we have had the satisfaction to find that about nine-tenths of the inhabitants of the counties of St. Clair and Randolph approve of the measure, a great proportion of whom have already put their signatures to the petition.... I have no doubt but that the undertaking will meet with early success, so as to admit of the House of Representatives meeting in the fall.”(192) The movement for advancement to the second grade was not, however, destined to such early success, and when it did take place such a change had occurred that Illinois was much enraged.

The Illinois country early became restive under the government of Indiana Territory. Much the same causes for discontent existed as had caused Kentucky to wish to separate from Virginia, Tennessee from North Carolina, and the country west of the Alleghanies from the United States. In each case a frontier minority saw its wishes, if not its rights, infringed by a more eastern majority. In each case the eastern people were themselves too weak to furnish sufficient succor to the struggling West. The conflict was natural and inevitable. The grave charge against Governor Harrison, who had large powers of patronage, was local favoritism. So discontented was Illinois, that in 1803 it had petitioned for annexation to the territory of Louisiana when such territory should be formed.(193) Antagonism to the Indiana government became still more bitter when, in December, 1804, after an election which was so hurried that an outlying county did not get to vote, the territory entered the second grade of territorial government.(194)

In the summer of 1805, discontent in Illinois was again expressed in a memorial to Congress. About three hundred and fifty inhabitants of the region petitioned for a division of Indiana Territory, From the Illinois settlements to the capital, Vincennes, was said to be one hundred and eighty miles, “through a dreary and inhospitable wilderness, uninhabited, and which during one part of the year, can scarcely afford water sufficient to sustain nature, and that of the most indifferent quality, besides presenting other hardships equally severe, while in another it is part under water, and in places to the extent of some miles, by which the road is rendered almost impassable, and the traveler is not only subjected to the greatest difficulties, but his life placed in the most imminent danger.” It resulted that the attendance of Illinois inhabitants upon either the legislature or the supreme court was fraught with many inconveniences. Because of the extensive prairies between Illinois and Vincennes, “a communication between them and the settlements east of that river [the Wabash] can not in the common course of things, for centuries yet to come, be supported with the least benefit, or be of the least moment to either of them.” Illinois objected to having been precipitated into the second grade of government. In the election for that purpose, said the memorialists, only Knox county voted in the affirmative, and Wayne county did not vote, because the writs of election arrived too late. Since entering the second grade the County of Wayne (Michigan) had been struck off. It was believed that if the prayer for separation should be granted, the rage for emigration to Louisiana would, in great measure, cease, the value of public lands in Illinois would be increased, and their sale would also be more rapid, while an increased population would render Illinois flourishing and self-supporting rather than a claimant for governmental support.(195)

At the same time that Congress received the above memorial, it received a petition from a majority of the members of the respective houses of the Indiana legislature. This petition asked that the freehold qualification for electors be abolished; that Indiana Territory be not divided, and that the undivided territory be soon made a state. It was said that the people were too poor to support a divided government, and that as the general court met annually in each county it was slight hardship to the frontier to have the supreme court meet at Vincennes.(196) It was probably true at this time, as it certainly was in 1807, that the general court met as above stated. Appeal by bill of exceptions was, however, allowed. The supreme court had no original, exclusive jurisdiction.(197) Nothing daunted by this memorial from the legislature, Illinois, in a short time, prepared another memorial—this time with twenty signatures. This adds to the grievances recited in the previous memorial that the wealthy appeal cases against the Illinois poor to the supreme court at Vincennes; that landholders on the Wabash are interested in preventing the population of lands on the Mississippi; that preëmption is needed, and that it is hoped that the general government will not pass unnoticed the act of the last legislature authorizing the importation of slaves into the territory. It violates the Ordinance of 1787. The memorialists desired such importation, but it must be authorized by Congress to be legal. The population of Illinois was given as follows:

By the census of April 1, 1801: 2,361

Inhabitants of Prairie du Chien and on the Illinois River, not
included in above: 550

“Emigration” since 1801, at least one-third increase: 750

Settlements on the Ohio River: 650

4,311(198)

The truth of some of the complaints from Illinois is apparent. That a land company on the Wabash wished to hinder settlement on the Mississippi is probably true, for Matthew Lyon, of Kentucky, said in Congress, in the winter of 1805-6: “The price of lands is various. I know of two hundred thousand acres of land on the Wabash, which is offered for sale at twenty cents per acre.”(199) It is to be presumed that the company making the offer could not give a secure title to the land.

In 1806, a congressional committee reported on the various memorials and petitions from Illinois, but the report led to no legislation and thus settled nothing, and in 1807 petitioning continued.(200) Illinois again petitioned for separation from the remainder of Indiana Territory, this petition bearing seventeen signatures. An inclosed census is lost, but a population of five thousand is spoken of. A new and significant paragraph occurs: “When your Memorialists contemplate the probable movements which may arise out of an European peace, now apparently about to take place, they cannot but feel the importance of union, of energy, of population on this shore of the Mississippi—they cannot but shudder at the horrors which may arise from a _disaffection in the West_....” A government was needed, and that of Indiana Territory was not acceptable to the people of Illinois. One hundred and two inhabitants of Illinois sent a counter-petition, in which they said that Illinois had paid no taxes and needed no separate government, also that the committee that prepared the above petition was not legally chosen. Most of the signers of the petition were Americans, while most of the signers of the counter-petition were French, forty-two of the latter being illiterate.(201) The report of a congressional committee on the petition was adverse,(202) as was also a report on three petitions for division that came from Illinois in the spring of 1808.(203) In the following December, the representative of Indiana Territory in Congress was appointed chairman of a committee to consider the expediency of dividing the territory, and to this committee petitions both for and against division were referred. This territorial delegate was in favor of division, and his committee presented a favorable report, in which the number of inhabitants of Indiana east of the Wabash was estimated to be seventeen thousand, and the number west of the Wabash to be eleven thousand—numbers thought to be sufficiently large to justify division, and an estimate which the census of 1810 proves to have been almost correct. In February, 1809, the bill providing for the division so ardently desired by Illinois was approved, the division to take place on the first of the next March. The western division was to be known as Illinois Territory and was to have for its eastern boundary a line due north from Vincennes to the Canadian line.(204) In the debate in the House of Representatives, preceding the passage of the bill for division, the arguments in its favor were that the Wabash was a natural dividing line; that a wide extent of wilderness intervened between Vincennes and the western settlements; that the power of the executive was enervated by the dispersed condition of the settlements; that to render justice was almost impossible; that the United States would be more than compensated for the increased expense by the rise in value of the public lands. Opponents of the bill declared that the complaints made by Illinois were common to many parts of the country; that the number of officers would be needlessly increased by the proposed division; and that “a compliance with this petition would but serve to foster their factions, and produce more petitions.” No significant geographical division of the vote on the bill is apparent.(205)

III. Obstacles to Immigration. 1790 to 1809.

In addition to the inability to secure land titles on account of unsettled French claims, to the presence of Indians and to the discontent with the government of Indiana Territory, almost every cause which made settlement on the frontier difficult was found in the Illinois country in its most pronounced form, because Illinois was the far corner of the frontier. The census reports of the United Status give the following statistics of population:

1790. 1800. 1810. Kentucky 73,677 220,955 406,511 Ohio 45,365 230,760 Indiana 2,517 24,520 Illinois 2,458 12,282

These figures show how conspicuously small was the immigration to Illinois. Enough has already been said to show some of the reasons for this sluggish settlement. When, in 1793, Governor St. Clair wrote to Alexander Hamilton, “In compassion to a poor devil banished to another planet, tell me what is doing in yours, if you can snatch a moment from the weighty cares of your office,”(206) he doubtless felt that the language was not too strong, and voiced a feeling of loneliness that was common to the settlers. Nor was there a lack of land in the East to make westward movement imperative. Massachusetts was much opposed to her people emigrating to Ohio, because she wished them to settle on her own eastern frontier (Maine), and Vermont and New York had vacant lands.(207)

One who settled in Illinois at this period came through danger to danger, for Indians lurked in the woods and malaria waited in the lowlands. The journey made by the immigrants was tedious and difficult, and was often rendered dangerous by precipitous and rough hills and swollen streams, if the journey was overland, or by snags, shoals and rapids, if by water. A large proportion of the settlers came from Maryland, Virginia, or the Carolinas. Those from Virginia and Maryland were induced to emigrate by the glowing descriptions of the Illinois country given by the soldiers of George Rogers Clark, and these soldiers sometimes led the first contingent. A typical Virginia settlement in Illinois was that called New Design, located in what is now Monroe county, between Kaskaskia and Cahokia. Founded about 1786 by a native of Berkeley county, the settlement received important additions in 1793, and four years later a party of more than one hundred and fifty arrived from near the headwaters of the south branch of the Potomac, this last contingent led by a Baptist minister, who had organized a church on a previous visit.(208) In general, persons Scotch-Irish by birth were opposed to slavery, as were also the members of the Quaker church. This caused a considerable emigration from the Carolinas. Another motive for people from all sections was that expressed by settlers of Illinois, in 1806, when they said that they came west in order to secure “such an establishment in land as they despaired of ever being able to procure in the old settlements.”(209) We have seen how long deferred was the fulfillment of their hope of getting a title to the coveted land. Although the East was not crowded, it is true that land there was more expensive than that of the same quality in the West. In 1806, three dollars per acre was the maximum price in even the settled parts of Indiana Territory, while fifty dollars per acre had been paid for choice Kentucky land.(210)

The greater number of immigrants came by water, but a family too poor to travel thus, or whose starting-point was not near a navigable stream, could come overland. Illinois was favored by having a number of large rivers leading toward it; the Ohio, Kentucky, Cumberland, Tennessee, and their tributaries were much used by emigrants. The chief route by land was the Wilderness Road, over which thousands of the inhabitants of Kentucky had come. Its existence helps to explain the wonderful growth of Kentucky—in 1774 the first cabin, in 1790 a population of 73,000. It crossed the mountains at Cumberland Gap, wound its way by the most convenient course to Crab Orchard, and was early extended to the Falls of the Ohio and later to Vincennes and St. Louis. The legislature of Kentucky provided, in 1795, that the road from Cumberland Gap to Crab Orchard should be made perfectly commodious and passable for wagons carrying a weight of one ton, and appropriated two thousand pounds for the work. Two years later five hundred dollars were appropriated for the repair of the road, and the highway was made a turnpike with prescribed toll, although it did not become such a road as the word turnpike suggests.(211)

A traveler of 1807 described the river craft of the period. The smallest kind in use was a simple log canoe. This was followed by the pirogue, which was a larger kind of canoe and sufficiently strong and capacious to carry from twelve to fifteen barrels of salt. Skiffs were built of all sizes, from five hundred to twenty thousand pounds burden, and batteaux were the same as the larger skiffs, being indifferently known by either name. Kentucky boats were strong frames of an oblong form, varying in size from twenty to fifty feet in length and from ten to fourteen in breadth, were sided and roofed, and guided by huge oars. New Orleans boats resembled Kentucky boats, but were larger and stronger and had arched roofs. The largest could carry four hundred and fifty barrels of flour. Keel boats were generally built from forty to eighty feet in length and from seven to nine feet in width. The largest required one man to steer and two to row in descending the Ohio, and would carry about one hundred barrels of salt; but to ascend the stream, at least six or eight men were required to make any considerable progress. A barge would carry from four thousand to sixty thousand pounds, and required four men, besides the helmsman, to descend the river, while to return with a load from eight to twelve men were required.(212)

Shipments of produce from Illinois were usually made in flat-bottomed boats of fifteen tons burden. Such a boat cost about one hundred dollars, the crew of five men was paid one hundred dollars each, the support of the crew was reckoned at one hundred dollars, and insurance at one hundred dollars, thus making a freightage cost of eight hundred dollars for fifteen tons. The boat was either set adrift or sold for the price of firewood at New Orleans. It was estimated that the use of boats of four hundred and fifty tons burden would save four dollars per barrel on shipping flour to New Orleans, where flour had often sold at less than three dollars per barrel, but such boats were not yet used in the West.(213) Canoes cost an emigrant from one to three dollars; pirogues, five to twenty dollars; small skiffs, five to ten dollars; large skiffs or batteaux, twenty to fifty dollars; Kentucky and New Orleans boats, one dollar to one and one-half dollars per foot; keel boats, two dollars and a half to three dollars per foot; and barges, four to five dollars per foot.(214)

Horses, cattle, and household goods were carried on boats. Travel by either land or water was beset with difficulties. The river, without pilot or dredge, had dangers peculiar to itself. Sometimes, when traveling overland, a broken wheel or axle, or a horse lost or stolen by Indians, caused protracted and vexatious delays. It is well to notice, also, that to travel a given distance into the wilderness was more than twice as difficult as to travel one-half that distance, because of the constantly increasing separation between the traveler and what had previously been his base of supplies.(215)

Sometimes immigrants debarked at Fort Massac and completed their journey by land. Two roads led from Fort Massac, one called the lower road and the other the upper road, the former, practicable only in the dry season and then only for travel on foot or on horseback, was some eighty miles long, while the latter was one hundred and fifty miles long. Roads of a like character connected Kaskaskia and Cahokia.(216)

A party of more than one hundred and fifty, which came from Virginia to the New Design settlement in 1797, set out from the south branch of the Potomac. They came from Redstone (now Brownsville), on the Monongahela, to Fort Massac, on flat-boats, and then by land, in twenty-one days, to New Design. The summer was wet and hot, a malignant fever broke out among the newcomers, and one-half of them died before winter. The old settlers were not affected by the fever, but they were too few to properly care for so many immigrants.(217)

Commerce in Illinois was in its infancy. Some cattle, corn, pork, and various other commodities were sent at irregular intervals to New Orleans.(218) The fur trade was carried on much as under the French régime. Salt was made at the salt springs on Saline Creek, the labor being performed chiefly by Kentucky and Tennessee slaves under the supervision of contractors who leased the works from the United States. The contractors agreed to sell no salt at the works for more than fifty cents per bushel, but by means of silent partners to whom the entire supply was sold, the price was sometimes raised as high as two dollars per bushel.(219) The commerce of the West suffered from a lack of vessels going from New Orleans to Atlantic ports, and as a result corn sold in New Orleans at fifty cents per bushel in 1805, while in some of the Atlantic ports it sold for more than two dollars. At the same time the West had a good crop, and Kentucky alone could have spared five hundred thousand bushels of corn, if it could have been shipped.(220)

To secure laborers was difficult. A petition of 1796 said that farm laborers could not be secured for less than one dollar per day, exclusive of washing, lodging, and boarding; that every kind of tradesman was paid from one dollar and a half to two dollars per day, and that at these prices laborers were scarce. Labor was cheaper on the Spanish side of the Mississippi, because of the larger proportion of slaves.(221) These wages were doubtless high in comparison with those paid in the East, just as the one dollar per day and board paid at the Galena lead mines in 1788 was more than double the wages then paid in New England,(222) but an Illinois price list of 1795 shows that the wages of 1796 were by no means comparable to those of today in purchasing power. Making shoes was two dollars per pair; potatoes were one dollar per bushel; brandy, one dollar per quart; corn, one dollar per bushel.(223)

Among the early difficulties in the way of settlement, one of the most persistent was the presence of prairies. This is by no means far-fetched, although it sounds so to modern ears. In 1786, Monroe wrote to Jefferson concerning the Northwest Territory: “A great part of the territory is miserably poor, especially that near Lakes Michigan and Erie, and that upon the Mississippi and the Illinois consists of extensive plains which have not had, from appearances, and will not have, a single bush on them for ages. The districts, therefore, within which these fall will never contain a sufficient number of inhabitants to entitle them to membership in the confederacy.”(224) Some of the most fertile of the Illinois prairies were not settled until far into the nineteenth century. The false prophets of the early days will be judged less harshly if we recall that wood was then a necessity, that no railroads and few roads existed, that wells now in use in prairie regions are much deeper than the early settlers could dig, and that the vast quantities of coal under the surface of Illinois were undiscovered.

As causes for the fact that more than a quarter of a century after the Revolution, Illinois had a population estimated at only eleven thousand, may be suggested the presence of hostile Indians; the inability of settlers to secure a title to their land; the unsettled condition of the slavery question; the great distance from the older portions of the United States and from any market; the fact that Kentucky, Ohio, and Indiana had vast quantities of unoccupied land more accessible to emigrants than was Illinois; the danger and the cost of moving; privation incident to a scanty population, such as lack of roads, schools, churches and mills; the existence of large prairies in Illinois. To remove or mitigate these difficulties was still the problem of Illinois settlers. On some of them a beginning had been made before 1809, but none were yet removed.