same rigid notions of honesty which their environment maintained. A
man in Macoupin County left his wagon, loaded with corn, stuck in the
prairie mud for two weeks near a frequented road. When he returned he
found some of his corn gone, but there was money enough tied in the
sacks to pay for what was taken. Men carrying bags of silver from the
towns of Illinois to St. Louis rather made a display of it, as it
enhanced their own importance, and there was no fear of robbery. There
were of course no locks on the cabin doors, and the early merchants
sometimes left their stores unprotected for days together when they
went to the nearest city to replenish their stock. Of course there
were rare exceptions to this rule, but a single theft alarmed and
excited a whole neighborhood. When a crime was traced home, the family
of the criminal were generally obliged to remove.

[Sidenote: N.W. Edwards, "Life and Times of Ninian Edwards," p. 163.]

There were still, even so late as the time to which we are referring,
two alien elements in the population of the State--the French and the
Indians. The French settlements about Kaskaskia retained much of their
national character, and the pioneers from the South who visited them
or settled among them never ceased to wonder at their gayety, their
peaceable industry and enterprise, and their domestic affection, which
they did not care to dissemble and conceal like their shy and reticent
neighbors. It was a daily spectacle, which never lost its strangeness
for the Tennesseeans and Kentuckians, to see the Frenchman returning
from his work greeted by his wife and children with embraces of
welcome "at the gate of his door-yard, and in view of all the
villagers." The natural and kindly fraternization of the Frenchmen
with the Indians was also a cause of wonder to the Americans. The
friendly intercourse between them, and their occasional