only festivities were those that accompanied weddings, and these were,
of course, of a primitive kind. The perils and adventures through
which the young pioneers went to obtain their brides furnish forth
thousands of tales by Western firesides. Instead of taking the rosy
daughter of a neighbor, the enterprising bachelor would often go back
to Kentucky, and pass through as many adventures in bringing his wife
home as a returning crusader would meet between Beirut and Vienna. If
she was a young woman who respected herself, the household gear she
would insist on bringing would entail an Iliad of embarrassments. An
old farmer of Sangamon County still talks of a featherbed weighing
fifty-four pounds with which his wife made him swim six rivers under
penalty of desertion.

It was not always easy to find a competent authority to perform the
ceremony. A justice in McLean County lived by the bank of a river, and
his services were sometimes required by impatient lovers on the other
bank when the waters were too torrential to cross. In such cases,
being a conscientious man, he always insisted that they should ride
into the stream far enough for him to discern their features, holding
torches to their faces by night and by storm. The wooing of those days
was prompt and practical. There was no time for the gradual approaches
of an idler and more conventional age. It is related of one Stout, one
of the legendary Nimrods of Illinois, who was well and frequently
married, that he had one unfailing formula of courtship. He always
promised the ladies whose hearts he was besieging that "they should
live in the timber where they could pick up their own firewood."

Theft was almost unknown; property, being so hard to get, was
jealously guarded, as we have already noticed in speaking of the
settlement of Kentucky. The pioneers of Illinois brought with them the