Progressing westward, the timbered prairie gradually changes to the
grass-covered prairie, spreading everywhere a great ocean of
fertility. Across the Wabash is the "Prairie State" of Illinois, its
name coming from its principal river, which the Indians named after
themselves. The word is a French adaptation of the Indian name
"Illini," meaning "the superior men," the earliest explorers and
settlers having been French, the first comers on the Illinois River
being Father Marquette and La Salle. At the beginning of the
eighteenth century their little settlements were flourishing, and the
most glowing accounts were sent home, describing the region, which
they called "New France," on account of its beauty, attractiveness and
prodigious fertility, as a new Paradise. There were many years of
Indian conflicts and hostility, but after peace was restored and a
stable government established, population flowed in, and Illinois was
admitted as a State to the Union in 1818. The capital was established
at Springfield in 1837, an attractive city of about thirty thousand
inhabitants, built on a prairie a few miles south of Sangamon River, a
tributary of the Illinois, and from its floral development and the
adornment of its gardens and shade trees, Springfield is popularly
known as the "Flower City." There is a magnificent State Capitol with
high surmounting dome, patterned somewhat after the Federal Capitol
at Washington. Springfield has coal-mines which add to its prosperity,
but its great fame is connected with Abraham Lincoln. He lived in
Springfield, and the house he occupied when elected President has been
acquired by the State and is on public exhibition. After his
assassination in 1865, his remains were brought from Washington to
Springfield, and interred in the picturesque Oak Ridge Cemetery, in
the northern suburbs, where a magnificent monument was erected to his
memory and dedicated in 1874. About sixty miles north of Springfield,
the Illinois River expands into Peoria Lake, and here came La Salle
down the river in 1680, and at the foot of the lake established a
trading-post and fort, one of the earliest in that region. When more
than a century had elapsed, a little town grew there which is now the
busy industrial city of Peoria, famous for its whiskey and glucose,
and turning out products that annually approximate a hundred millions,
furnishing vast traffic for numerous railroads. It is the chief city
of the "corn belt," and is served by all the prominent trunk railway
lines.
Like the pioneers of a hundred years ago, we have left the Atlantic
seaboard, crossed the Allegheny Mountains and entered the expansive
"Northwest Territory," which in the first half of the nineteenth
century was the Mecca of the colonist and frontiersman. This was then
the region of the "Great West," though that has since moved far
beyond the Mississippi. Its agricultural wealth made the prosperity of
the country for many decades, and its prodigious development was
hardly realized until put to the test of the Civil War, when it poured
out the men and officers, and had the staying qualities so largely
contributing to the result of that great conflict. Gradually
overspread by a network of railways, the numerous "cross-roads" have
expanded everywhere into towns and cities, almost all patterned alike,
and all of them centres of rich farming districts. Coal, oil and gas
have come to minister to its manufacturing wants, and thus growing
into mature Commonwealths, this prolific region in the later decades
has been itself, in turn, contributing largely to the tide of
migration flowing to the present "Great Northwest," a thousand miles
or more beyond. It presents a rich agricultural picture, but little
scenic attractiveness. Everywhere an almost dead level, the numerous
railways cross and recross the surface in all directions at grade, and
are easily built, it being only necessary to dig a shallow ditch on
either side, throw the earth in the centre, and lay the ties and
rails. Nature has made the prairie as smooth as a lake, so that hardly
any grading is necessary, and the region of expansive green viewed out
of the car window has been aptly described as having "a face but no
features," when one looks afar over an ocean of waving verdure.