these obscure founders of a great empire. Any subject of conversation,
any cause of sensation, was a godsend. When Vannoy murdered his wife
in Springfield, whole families put on their best clothes and drove
fifty miles through bottomless mud and swollen rivers to see him
hanged.

[Sidenote: Power, "Early Settlers of Sangamon County," p. 88.]

It is curious to see how naturally in such a state of things the
fabric of political society developed itself from its germ. The county
of Sangamon was called by an act of the Legislature in 1821 out of a
verdant solitude of more than a million acres, inhabited by a few
families. An election for county commissioners was ordered; three men
were chosen; they came together at the cabin of John Kelly, at Spring
Creek. He was a roving bachelor from North Carolina, devoted to the
chase, who had built this hut three years before on the margin of a
green-bordered rivulet, where the deer passed by in hundreds, going in
the morning from the shady banks of the Sangamon to feed on the rich
green grass of the prairie, and returning in the twilight. He was so
delighted with this hunters' paradise that he sent for his brothers to
join him. They came and brought their friends, so it happened that in
this immense county, several thousand square miles in extent, the
settlement of John Kelly at Spring Creek was the only place where
there was shelter for the commissioners; thus it became the temporary
county-seat, duly described in the official report of the
commissioners as "a certain point in the prairie near John Kelly's
field, on the waters of Spring Creek, at a stake marked Z and D (the
initials of the commissioners), to be the temporary seat of justice
for said county; and we do further agree that the said county-seat be
called and known by the name of Springfield." In this manner the