of the water-courses; scattered settlements were to be found all along
the Mississippi and its affluents, from where Cairo struggled for life
in the swamps of the Ohio to the bustling and busy mining camps which
the recent discovery of lead had brought to Galena. A line of villages
from Alton to Peoria dotted the woodland which the Illinois River had
stretched, like a green baldric, diagonally across the bosom of the
State. Then there were long reaches of wilderness before you came to
Fort Dearborn, where there was nothing as yet to give promise of that
miraculous growth which was soon to make Chicago a proverb to the
world. There were a few settlements in the fertile region called the
Military Tract; the southern part of the State was getting itself
settled here and there. People were coming in freely to the Sangamon
country. But a grassy solitude stretched from Galena to Chicago, and
the upper half of the State was generally a wilderness. The earlier
emigrants, principally of the poorer class of Southern farmers,
shunned the prairies with something of a superstitious dread. They
preferred to pass the first years of their occupation in the wasteful
and laborious work of clearing a patch of timber for corn, rather than
enter upon those rich savannas which were ready to break into
fertility at the slightest provocation of culture. Even so late as
1835, writes J. F. Speed, "no one dreamed the prairies would ever be
occupied." It was thought they would be used perpetually as grazing-
fields for stock. For years the long processions of "movers" wound,
over those fertile and neglected plains, taking no hint of the wealth
suggested by the rank luxuriance of vegetable growth around them, the
carpet of brilliant flowers spread over the verdant knolls, the
strong, succulent grass that waved in the breeze, full of warm and
vital odor, as high as the waist of a man. In after years, when the
emigration from the Northern and Eastern States began to pour in, the
prairies were rapidly taken up, and the relative growth and importance