intermarriages, seemed little short of monstrous to the ferocious
exclusiveness of the Anglo-Saxon. [Footnote: Michelet notices this
exclusiveness of the English, and inveighs against it in his most
lyric style. "Crime contre la nature! Crime contre l'humanite! Il sera
expie par la sterilite de l'esprit."] The Indians in the central part
of Illinois cut very little figure in the reminiscences of the
pioneers; they occupied much the same relation to them as the tramp to
the housewife of to-day. The Winnebago war in 1827 and the Black Hawk
war in 1831 disturbed only the northern portion of the State. A few
scattered and vagrant lodges of Pottawatomies and Kickapoos were all
the pioneers of Sangamon and the neighboring counties ever met. They
were spared the heroic struggle of the advance-guard of civilization
in other States. A woman was sometimes alarmed by a visit from a
drunken savage; poultry and pigs occasionally disappeared when they
were in the neighborhood; but life was not darkened by the constant
menace of massacre. A few years earlier, indeed, the relations of the
two races had been more strained, as may be inferred from an act
passed by the territorial Legislature in 1814, offering a reward of
fifty dollars to any citizen or ranger who should kill or take any
depredating Indian. As only two dollars was paid for killing a wolf,
it is easy to see how the pioneers regarded the forest folk in point
of relative noxiousness. But ten years later a handful only of the
Kickapoos remained in Sangamon County, the specter of the vanished
people. A chief named Machina came one day to a family who were
clearing a piece of timber, and issued an order of eviction in these
words: "Too much come white man. T'other side Sangamon." He threw a
handful of dried leaves in the air to show how he would scatter the
pale faces, but he never fulfilled his threats further than to come in
occasionally and ask for a drink of whisky. That such trivial details
are still related, only shows how barren of incident was the life of