The Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No. V, May, 1863 | Page 2

more. If we say the State that sends the best
men is the greatest State (for the time, especially the present time), 'all
the people shall answer Amen!' for one loyal heart, just now, is more
precious than millions of fat acres. Whether Illinois could prudently
submit to this appraisal, just at the present moment, remains to be
proved; but that her heart is loyal as well as brave, there can be no
question.
Without going back, in philosophical style, to the creation of the world,
we may say that the State had a good beginning. Father Marquette and
his pious comrade Allouez, both soldiers of the Cross, explored her
northern wilds for God, and not for greed. They saw her solid and
serene beauty, and presaged her greatness, and they did all that wise
and devoted Catholic missionaries could do toward sanctifying her soil
to good ends forever. They found 'a peaceful and manly tribe' in her
interior, the name Illinois signifying 'men of men,' and the superiority
of the tribe to all the other Indians of the region justifying the
appellation. Allouez said, 'Their country is the best field for the gospel,'
and he planted it as well as he could with what he believed to be the
Tree of Life, long nourished with the prayers and tears of himself and
his successors. The Indians took kindly to the teaching of the good and
wise Frenchman, and it is said that even after troubles had begun to
arise, owing, as usual, to the misconduct of rapacious and unprincipled
white settlers, many of the Indians held fast by their newly adopted
faith, and even showed some good fruits of it in forbearance and
honesty of dealing. All this was not far from contemporary with the
period when Cotton Mather, in New England, while teaching the
principles of civil government, was persecuting Quakers and burning
witches; and in yet another part of the new country, William Penn,
neither Catholic nor Puritan, was making fair and honest treaties with
savages, and winning them, by the negative virtue of truthfulness, to
believe that white men could be friends.
The Great Colbert, minister to Louis XIV, under whose auspices the
French missionaries had been sent out, very soon came to the
conclusion that it was important to enlarge and strengthen French

influence in this great new country, particularly after he had ascertained
the existence of the 'Great River,' which Father Marquette had
undertaken to explore, and by means of which he expected to open
trade with China! But the minister of finance required rather more
worldly agents than the single-hearted and devoted ministers of religion,
and he found a fitting instrument in the young and ardent Robert de la
Salle, a Frenchman of enterprise and sagacity, worldly enough in his
motives, but of indomitable energy and perseverance. He was very
successful in establishing commerce in furs and other productions of
the country, but lost his life somewhere near the mouth of the
Mississippi, which he first explored, after escaping a thousand dangers.
His name is famous in the land, and a large town was called after it; but
what would he say if he heard his patronymic transformed into
'Lay-séll,' as it is, universally, among the 'natives'?
It is in La Salle's first procès verbal for his government that we find the
first mention of the river 'Chekagou,' a lonely stream then, but which
now reflects a number of houses and stores, tall steeples, colossal grain
depots, and--the splendid edifice which fitly enshrines the northern
terminus of the Illinois Central Railroad, the greatest railway in the
world, and certainly one of the wonders which even the ambitious and
sanguine La Salle never dreamed of; a daily messenger of light and life
through seven hundred miles of country, which, without it, would have
remained a wilderness to this day.
The first settler on the banks of this now so famous river was a black
man from St. Domingo, Jean Baptiste Point-au-Sable by name, who
brought some wealth with him, and built a residence which must have
seemed grand for that time and place. He did not stay long, however,
and the Indians, who had probably suffered some things from the
arrogance of their white neighbors, thought it a good joke to say that
'the first 'white man' that settled there was a negro.' Like some other
jokes, this one seems to have rankled deep and long, for to this day
Illinois tolerates neither negro nor Indian. The Indian, as an Indian, has
no foothold in the State; and the negro, even in the guise of born and
skilled laborer in the production of the crops which form the wealth of
the country, and of the new ones which are to be transplanted hither in

consequence of