Papers in Illinois History and Transactions for the Year Volume 23 (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1917 edition. Excerpt: ...map. For a decade or more after this, the first settler had not yet come, either to the State's gigantic metropolis, Chicago, or its present progressive capital city, in which we are now assembled. Beardstown came into being before any of the above named centers of municipal life and activity. She was among the first of the State's town-children to be born, and was a flourishing trading post, known far and wide, as a meatpacking center and emporium, while Chicago still lay in its infantile swaddling clothes, and while Omaha and Kansas City and Denver and Portland and Seattle were still undreamed of nonentities. Even New York, Boston, Philadelphia and Baltimore were then comparatively small cities, while the Whole nation had less than nine millions of population. We had just fought our second warwith Great Britain, and Europe had newly come to rest from that nineteenth century dreamer of world-empire, Napoleon Bonaparte. The first steamship had not yet crossed the Atlantic, nor had ever yet the streets of any American city been lit by gas nor a telegraphic message been sent in all the world. As for telephones, cables, or wireless messages, bicycles or automobiles, aeroplanes or submarines, they were not dreamed of for another half century. Negro slavery still flourished i11 the southern half of our country and continued for forty years longer. The great emancipator, who gave to this State her greatest fame as one of. her adopted sons, was just ten years old, and had not yet set foot upon her prairie soil. The Indians still occupied two-thirds of our immense domain.-Lo what a century of exploration, invention, settlement, conquest, development and making of political history lies immediately behind us Illinois' one...