Repository: UIHistories Project: Board of Trustees Minutes - 1868 [PAGE 321]

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309

The soil is a light vegetable mold, of no great depth in general. The under-soil is a fat loam or clay, of considerable depth, that retains moisture, and prevents the land from burning. The land is easy of culture-much more so than any I was ever accustomed t o - a n d dry enough to plow in a day after heavy rain; this is the case with most of the land round the prairies. Prairie land is hard to break up the first time and requires four horses to do it effectually, it being so full of strong roots— in particular, one called red-root, that runs a great deal; and in moist places there is a small shrub named white-root, which must be grubbed up before it can be plowed; and sometimes there is a little brush-wood of different sorts to clear off.

Ford, in his history of Illinois, throws some light on the social and industrial condition of the people of our State from the years 1818 to 1830:

In the year 1818 the whole people numbered about forty-five thousand souls. Some two thousand of these were the descendants of the old French settlers in the villages of Kaskaskia, Prairie du Rocher, Prairie du Pont, Cahokia, Peoria and Chicago. These people had fields in common for farming, and farmed, built houses, and lived in the style of the peasantry in old France a hundred and fifty years ago. They had made no improvements in anything, nor had they adopted any of the improvements made by others. They were the descendants of those French people who had first settled the country, more than a hundred and fifty years before, under Lasalle, Ibberville, and the priests Alvarez, Rasles, Gravier, Pinet, Marest and others, and such as subsequently joined them from New Orleans and Canada; and they now formed all that remained of the once proud empire which Louis XIV, King of France, and the Regent Duke of Orleans, had intended to plant in the Illinois country. The original settlers had, many of them, intermarried with the native Indians, and some of the descendants of these partook of the wild, roving disposition of the savage united to the politeness and courtesy of the Frenchman. In the year 1818, and for many years before, the crews of keel boats on the Ohio and Mississippi rivers were furnished from the Frenchmen of this stock. Many of them spent a great part of their time, in the spring and fall seasons, in paddling their canoes up and down the rivers and lakes in the river bottoms, on hunting excursions in pursuit of deer, fur and wild fowl, and generally returned home well loaded with skins, fur and feathers, which were, with them, the great staples of trade. Those who stayed at home contented themselves with cultivating a few acres of Indian corn in their common fields for bread, and providing a supply of prairie hay for their cattle and horses. No genuine Frenchman, in those days, ever wore a hat, cap or coat The heads of both men and women were covered with Madras cotton handkerchiefs, which were tied around in the fashion of night caps. For an upper covering of the body, the men wore a blanket, called a "capot," (pronounced cappo) with a cap to it at the back of the neck, to be drawn ov£r the head for a protection in cold weather, or in warm weather to be thrown back upon the shoulders in the fashion of a cape. Notwithstanding this people had been so long separated by an immense wilderness from civilized society, they still retained all the suavity and politeness of their race. And it is a remarkable fact that the roughest hunter and boatman amongst them could at any time, appear in a ball room or other polite and gay assembly with the carriage and behavior of a well bred gentleman.