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 to-and 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 rootsin 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 over 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.

The Frenchwomen were remarkable for the sprightliness of their conversation and the grace and elegance of their manners. And the whole population lived lives of alternate toil, pleasure, innocent amusement and gaiety.

Their horses and cattle, for want of proper food and care for many generations, had degenerated in size, but had acquired additional vigor and toughness, so that a French pony was a proverb for strength and endurance. These ponies were made to draw sometimes one alone, sometimes two together, one hitched before the other, to the plow or to carts made entirely of wood, the bodies of which held about double the contents of the body of a common large wheelbarrow. The oxen were yoked by the horns instead of the neck, and in this mode were made to draw the plow and cart. Nothing like reins were ever used in driving; the whip of the driver, with a handle about two feet and a lash two yards long, stopped or guided the horse as effectually as the strongest reins.

The French houses were mostly built of hewn timber set upright in the ground, or upon plates laid upon a wall, the intervals between the upright pieces being filled with stone and mortar. Scarcely any of them were more than one story high, with a porch on one or two sides and sometimes all around, with low roofs extending with slopes of different steepness from the comb in the center to the lowest part of the porch. These houses were generally placed in gardens, surrounded by fruit trees of apples, pears, cherries, and peaches; and in the villages each inclosure for a house and garden occupied a square or the greater part of one. Each village had its Catholic church and priest. The church was the great place of gay resort on Sundays and holidays, and the priest was the adviser and director and companion of all his flock. The people looked up to him with affection and reverence, and he upon them with compassion and tenderness. He was ever ready to sympathise with them in all their sorrows, enter into all their joys, and counsel them in all their per. plexities. Many good Protestant ministers, who stoutly believe the Catholic priests to be the emissaries of Satan, would have done well to imitate their simple-hearted goodness to the members of their flocks.

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Commerce, from 1818 to 1830, made but a small progress. Steamboats commenced running the western waters in 1816, and by the year 1830 there were one or two small ones running on the Illinois river as far up as Peoria, and sometimes further. The old keel boat navigation had been disused; but as yet there was so little trade as not to call for many steamboats to supply their place. The merchants of the villages, few in number at first, were mere retailers of dry goods and groceries; they purchased and shipped abroad none of the productions of the country, except a few skins, hides and furs, and a little tallow and beeswax.

They were sustained in this kind of business by the influx of immigrants, whose money, being paid out in the country for grain, stock and labor, furnished the means of trade.

The merchant himself rarely attempted to barter business, and never paid cash for anything but his goods. There was no class of men who devoted themselves to the business of buying and selling, and of making the exchanges of the productions at home for those of other states and countries. The great majority, in fact nearly all the merchants, were mere blood suckers; men who with a very little capital, a small stock of goods, and with ideas of business not broader than their ribbons nor deeper than their colors, sold for money down, or on a credit for cash, which, when received they sent out of the country. Since their time, a race of traders and merchants has sprung up who use the money they receive for goods in purchasing the

wheat, corn, beef and pork of the farmers; and ship these articles to the eastern cities. Mather, Lamb & Co., late of Chester, in Randolph county, but now of Springfield, were the first to engage in this business, and they were led to it by the refusal of the United States Bank, at St. Louis, to grant them the usual facilities of trade. As they could get no accommodation from the bank, they fell upon this course to avoid going to St. Louis to purchase eastern exchange.

Peck's Guide for Emigrants, published in 1831, contains a large amount of matter relating to the condition and progress of agriculture and the useful arts at that period, as well as some information concerning the climate and natural productions of the country, from which I extract the following:

The soil of the American bottom is as rich as land can be made, and that to the average depth of twenty-five feet. About the French towns it has been cultivated and produced corn in succession, without manuring, for more than a century without exhausting its fertilizing powers. It is evident, however, that such an injudicious method as has been pursued by farmers in this country renders the soil more adhesive or clammy and exposes it to bake in the sun.

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These bottoms, especially the American, are the best regions in the United States for raising stock, particularly horses, cattle and swine. Seventy-five bushels of corn to the acre is an ordinary crop. The roots and worms of the soil, the acorns and other fruits from the trees, and the fish of the lakes, accelerate the growth of swine. Horses and cattle find exhaustless supplies of grass in the prairies, and pea vines, buffalo grass, wild oats and other herbage in the timber for summer range, and often throughout most of the winter. In all the rush bottoms they fatten during the severe weather on rushes. The bottom soil is not so well adapted to the production of small grain as of maize or Indian corn, on account of its rank growth, and being more subject to blast or fall down before harvest, than on the uplands. The upper part of the American bottom is somewhat subject to a disease in cattle, called the milk sickness, described under the head of diseases.

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The following graphical description is copied from the Illinois Monthly Magazine, conducted by James Hall, Esq., a gentleman well known abroad as a fine writer. It is from the pen of the editor, under the head of "Notes on Illinois," Vol. I, pp. 60-64:

"The most of the country which lies south of a line drawnfrom the mouth of the Wabash to the mouth of the Kaskaskia is covered with timber. A very few prairies, and those inconsiderable in point and size, may be found immediately south of this line. Crossing that line, the timber is found to decrease in quantity and the prairies to expand, yet the latter are still comparatively small, wholly unconnected with each other, and their outlines distinctly marked by the thick forests which surround and separate them. Advancing to the north, the prairie surface begins to predominate; the prairies now become large and communicate with each other like a chain of lakes, by means of numerous avenues or vistas; still, however, the traveler is surrounded by timber, his eye never losing sight of the deep green outline throwing out its capes and headlands, though he sees no more than dense forests and large treees, whose deep shade almost appalled him in the south.

Traveling on from the center of the State to its northern limits we find ourselves surrounded by one vast prairie. In the country over which we have passed, the

forest is interspersed with these interesting plains; here, the prairie is studded with groves and copses, and the streams fringed with strips of woodland. The eye sometimes wanders over immense plains covered with grass, discovering no other object on which to rest, and finding no limit to its vision but the distant horizon; while, more frequently, it wanders from grove to grove, and from one point of woodland to another, charmed and refreshed by an endless variety of scenic beauty.

The prairies afford a subject of curious inquiry to every traveler who visits these States. That these vast and fertile plains should be totally destitute of trees seems to be an anomaly in the economy of nature. Upon the mind of an American, especially, accustomed to see new lands clothed with timber, and to associate the idea of damp and silent forests with that of a new country, the appearance of sunny plains and a diversified landscape, untenanted by man and unimproved by art, is singular and striking. Perhaps, if our imaginations were divested of those associations, the subjects would present less difficulty; and if we could reason abstractly, it might be as easy to account for the existence of a prairie as a forest."

The growth of the bottom lands consists of black walnut, ash of several species, hackberry, elm, (white, red and slippery,) sugar maple, honey-locust, buckeye, catalpa, sycamore, cotton-wood, pecan, hickory, mulberry, several oaks, as overcup, bur-oak, swamp or water-oak, white, red or Spanish oak; and of the shrubbery are, red-bud, papaw, grape-vine, dog-wood, spice-bush, hazel, green-brier, etc. Along the margin of the streams, the sycamore and cotton-wood often predominate, and attain to an amazing size. The cotton-wood is of rapid growth-a light, white wood, sometimes used for rails, shingles and scantlings; not lasting, but of no great value. Its dry, light wood is much used in steamboats. It forms the chief proportion of the drift-wood that floats down our rivers, and is frequently converted into planters, snags and sawyers. The sycamore is the button-wood of New England; is frequently hollow, and in that state procured by the farmers, cut at suitable lengths, cleaned out, and used as depositories for grain. They answer the purpose of large casks. The size of the cavity of some of these trees appears incredible in the ears of a stranger to the luxuriant growth of the West. To say that twenty or thirty men could be comfortably lodged in one would seem a monstrous fiction to a New Englander; but to those accustomed to this species of tree on our bottoms, it is nothing marvelous.

The uplands are covered with various species of oak, among which is the postoak, a valuable and lasting timber for posts; white oak, black oak of several varieties, and the black-jack, a dwarfish, gnarled looking tree, good for nothing but fuel, for which it is equal to any tree we have. Of hickory, we have both the shag-bark and smooth-bark; black walnut, in some parts, white walnut or butternut, lynn, (the bass-wood of New England,) cherry, and many of the species produced in the bottoms. The black walnut is much used for building materials and cabinet work, and sustains a fine polish. The different species of oaks, walnuts, hackberry, and occasionally hickory, are used for fencing.

In some parts of the State, the white and yellow poplar prevails. Beginning at the Mississippi, a few miles above the mouth of the Muddy River, * * and extending a line across the State to the Little Wabash, leaves the poplar range south, interspersed with occasional clumps of beech.

Near the Ohio, on the low creek bottoms, the cypress is found. No poplar exists on the eastern borders of the State, till you arrive at or near Palestine; while on the opposite shore of the Wabash, in Indiana, the poplar and beech predominate.

Near Palestine, in Crawford county, the poplar again commences, intermixed with beech, and all the varieties of timber, and extends northward further than I have explored. A spur of it puts into the interior of the State on the Little Wabash, above Maysville. It is reported that in some of the northern portions of the State, some chestnut timber is found. I have never seen a tree in its natural growth, west of the middle of Indiana.

Occasional clumps of stunted cedar are to be seen on the cliffs that overhang the bottoms, but no pine, unless it exists in the wild regions of Lake Michigan.

Timber not only grows much more rapidly in this country than in the Northern States, but it decays sooner when put in buildings, fences, or in any way exposed to the weather. It is more porous, and will shrink or expand as the weather is wet or dry, to a m.ch greater extent than the timber of New England. This may be owing partly to the atmosphere, but it is unquestionably owing in part to the quality of the timber, I have brought two wagons, or carriages, to this country, which were made in Litchfield, Conn., and they have lasted much longer than those made from the timber of Illinois. Our fences require to be new laid, and one-third of the rails provided anew, in a period of from seven to ten years. A shingled roof requires replacing in about twelve years. This, however, may not be a fair estimate, because most of our timber is prepared hastily, and in a green state. Doubtless with proper care in the seasoning and in the preservation it would last much longer.

Timber is ordinarily required for four purposes: fencing, building, fuel, and mechanical operations. I have already shown that rails are almost the only article used for fencing. In making a plantation in this mode requires a great waste of timber. Nor will a man, with a moderate capital, and with the burden of a constantly increasing family, stop to make experiments. He must have fields inclosed, and takes the quickest and cheapest method, by cutting down the most convenient timber and making rails. Ditching has been attempted in but a few instances, and without success. In the dry season, the turf withers on the embankment, the dry earth crumbles down, and the ditch offers no obstacle to the inroads of cattle, horses and swine, and these must run in droves over the prairies.

Some feeble attempts have been made to substitute a live hedge of crab-apple, and of honey locust, without success. So long as such extensive portions of the country lie uncultivated and waste, as a great common field for cattle, horses, swine and all other stock, it is not an easy matter to produce a hedge that will be impervious to these animals. The white thorn has not yet been tried, within my knowledge. It may succeed, especially if set within an inclosure for a few years, till its growth is matured.

A farm is to be inclosed, within a few miles from my residence, with plank, or, as a New Englander would say, boards, sawed at the mill, the cost of which will not exceed seventy-five cents per rod. But a great saving in fencing is made by making large fields, from forty to one hundred and fifty acres. I have no doubt but time will bring forth substitutes for fencing, and which will be a great saving of timber. The first buildings put up are of logs, slightly hewn on two sides, and the corners notched together. The roof is made of clapboards, split like staves, four feet in length, and six or eight inches in width. Two layers of these are so adjusted as to cover the cracks, and on the whole are laid heavy poles to bind down and hold the roof. This description of building is called a "cabin." These are made single, or double with a space between, according to the enterprise, force, or taste of the

owner.