Jefferson County, Illinois - Chapter 1: Formative Period, 1909

Many pages even of a county history might be taken up in giving the "history of the Wild," so to speak, but as our mission is to give a true and succinct History of Jefferson county, we shall but briefly refer to what took place in this "realm of Greatness," back of the coming of the white man, which may justly be called the Formative Period. The Mound Builders, no doubt, preceded the Indians in the occupation of this western country, but we have no knowledge of them, except that we have some mounds and the relics found in them still remain. Then the Indians - how long they were here before the country was discovered, we will not attempt to say. The first settlers aside from the Mound Builders and the Indians were the French, afterward the British and then the pioneer Americans. As the territory composing Jefferson county was not the abiding place of the Mound Builders nor the Indians, except as they roamed through the woods, we will not undertake to tell all about them, but will hasten on to the more important work in hand.

West was under British control. Patrick Henry, who was Governor of Virginia, gave General George Rogers Clark authority to recruit several companies of Americans to capture the northwest country, a big undertaking, but a big man in command of other big men to accomplish the task. He recruited his men in Kentucky and set out on his mission. He arrived at Kaskaskia, July 4, 1 778, and captured the fort and the town without the loss of a man. Assuring the French, who had a large church there, that they were at liberty to worship God as they pleased, they gladly took the oath of allegiance, and many of them joined Clark's band and went with him to capture Cahokia, which was speedily done. Clark then with his band threaded his way through the dense woods of Southern Illinois, to Vincennes on the Wabash, which was also captured. Clark's expedition is believed to have passed through what is now the southern part of Jefferson county, although there was no trail of any kind at that time. With the capture of these three British posts, Illinois territory passed into the possession of Virginia.

In 1874 Virginia ceded to the United States the Northwestern Territory, which embraced all the lands lying between the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, including Illinois. It embraced what is now the great states of Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Michigan. Wisconsin and the part of Minnesota lying east of the Mississippi river, and the Mississippi river was then the western border of the United States. This territory was called the "New Northwest," and included an area of one million eight hundred eighty-seven thousand and eight hundred and fifty square miles - greater in extent than the united areas of all the Middle and Southern states, including Texas. Out of this magnificent territory has been erected fifteen sovereign states and two territories, with an aggregate population at the present time of about twenty-five million inhabitants or nearly a third of the entire population of the United States, and wealth untold. See what wonderful possibilities confronted the early settlers as they came to this wild and wooly West! Of course volumes might be written about this great body of country, but we must hasten on. But, not without referring to the act of Congress organizmg the territory, excluding slavery and dedicating it to freedom and free schools proclaiming that religion, morality and knowledge being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of knowledge shall ever be encouraged. Even in the face of this a desperate effort was made to make Illinois a slave state, and for a while Illinois was the battlefield of the irrepressible conflict. The southern part of the state was largely made up of southerners and they considered the easterners or Yankees as a skinning, tricky, penurious race of peddlers, filling the country with tinware, brass-clocks and wooden nutmegs. And the easterners, who crowded in the north part of the state, seemed to think the southerners as lean, lanky, lazy creatures, wanting slaves to do all their work - and here is where the "irrepressible conflict" came in, but under the guiding hand of Providence the "New Northwest," was forever dedicated to freedom. It is impossible to forecast the destiny of this grand and glorious section of the Union. Predictions made even now might seem twenty years hence so ludicrously small as to only excite derision, hence we leave it to the future historians to tell of its wonderful development.

The name of this beautiful Prairie state is derived from Illini, a Delaware Indian word signifying "Superior Men," and we are not disposed to object to the imputation. The Indians occupying Southern Illinois when the white men came were the Delawares, the Kickapoos, the Shawnees and the Piankeshaws. None of these were especially savage or troublesome to our first settlers.

Occasionally roving bands came in to hunt and trade. They carried their pelts to Shawneetown, Kaskaskia or St. Louis, bringing back articles which they traded to the whites. A great many Indians passed through the county, sometimes camping and hunting, but never remamed long at a time.

The first European discoveries in what is now Illinois date back over two hundred years. Old Kaskaskia was settled as early as 1690 by the French, and Cahokia was inhabited even before that. Away back of this, in 1 682, Illinois was a possession of the French, and it was then that the French obtained such a foothold in the territory that the French and Indians were finally brought to war. In 1 765 the same territory was counted as a treasure of Great Britain, but a few years later. Gen. George Rogers Clark captured it from the British, and here we have the connecting link, or formative period, that brings Illinois and Jefferson county down from the Mound Builders to the Indians, from the Indians to the French, from the French to the British and from the British to Virginia, from Virginia to the United States and from the United States to itself - grand old Illinois, fifty-five thousand four hundred and ten square miles of territory - one hundred and ninety miles wide, four hundred miles long, stretching in latitude from Maine to North Carolina, embracing a climate that varies from the lakes on the north almost to the orange groves of the South - being a tableland from six hundred to one thousand two hundred feet above the sea - a free state without a peer. It is in the heart of the greatest valley in the world, the vast regions between the mountains - a valley that could feed mankind for a thousand years. It has sixty-five miles of frontage on the lakes - the fresh water seas of the north - the Father of Waters forming the entire western boundary, with the Ohio river on its southern boundary, and the Wabash river on the east, and the Illinois river and canal dividing the state diagonally from the lakes to the lower Mississippi, and embracing the Rock, Sangamon, Okaw, Skillet Fork, Big Muddy and other streams, furnishing altogether two thousand miles of water front connecting and running through, in all about twelve thousand miles of navigable water, with miles of railroad more than any other state, with a soil full of bread and the earth rich with minerals - an upper surface of food and an under layer of fuel, and controlling the greatest grain, cattle, pork and lumber markets in the world, no wonder the people become infatuated with this glorious state of Illinois. We only regret that we cannot devote more time to its history, but it is so grand, so glorious that we feel impelled to carry it into the next chapter, and finish there. We have thus given a brief space to Illinois, because it is in name a little older than Jefferson county, and as a territory several years older, but in the beginning was Jefferson county all the same, the land, the prairie, the woodlands and the streams, just as when the pioneer came to live in it and make it bloom and blossom as the rose and it is the same Jefferson county today, notwithstanding a slight change in the personnel of her population.

Colonel George Rogers Clark and his brave army of less than two hundred men left Kaskaskia February 7, 1779. They probably passed near Breemen, Steeleville and Percy, entering Perry county and passing where Cutler, Bernard, Conant and Pinckneyville now are, crossed into Jefferson county a few miles north of the southwest corner, passing near the Mound, where Waltonville is situated, carrying axes and felling trees to cross the streams as they went. They evidently passed the entire length of the territory.

now composing the county, camped south of Mt. Vemon, perhaps near the Rogers ford; passed out of this county into Wayne county, near Kelns Skillet Fork; passed through Arrington Prairie near Jeffersonville and coming to what they called the "two Wabashesse," but evidently the junction of the Elm river with the Little Wabash, where they manufactured a big canoe and crossed the army, half dozen at a time. On the sixteenth they crossed the Bon Pass and entered Lawrence county at the southeast corner and finally crossed the Big Wabash near St. Francisville, and on the 23d captured Vincennes without firing a gun.

Just think of it, this patriotic intrepid American, with his one hundred and seventy-five braves in the dead of winter, traversing this wilderness, wading swamps, swimming streams, camping in the wildwoods, with no possibility of seeing or hearing of a human being, unless it be bands of savages, or perhaps wild beasts, making the trip without map or compass from Kaskaskia on the Mississippi river, to Vincennes on the Wabash, a distance of a little more than two hundred miles, and in doing so freed Illinois, from the domination of not only the hated British, but from the savage red men, and the wild beast as well! The bloodless battles and results of the same - of Col. George Rogers Clark and his braves stand unparalleled in the history of warfare.

And more wonderful still, that this brave man and his equally brave soldiers, should have trod the soil of old Jefferson county one hundred and thirty years ago, before any white man had ever passed this way - long before the Caseys, the Maxeys, the Johnsons, and other pioneers had ever thought of coming into these virgin wilds. Truly, when men put themselves in the hands of Providence for the accomplishment of great purposes, wonderful results are sure to follow.