The pioneer period of Illinois was ending as Thomas Lincoln and his tall boy drove their ox-team over the Indiana line. The population of the State had grown to 157,447. It still clung to the wooded borders of the water-courses; scattered settlements were to be found all along the Mississippi and its affluents, from where Cairo struggled for life in the swamps of the Ohio to the bustling and busy mining camps which the recent discovery of lead had brought to Galena. A line of villages from Alton to Peoria dotted the woodland which the Illinois River had stretched, like a green baldric, diagonally across the bosom of the State. Then there were long reaches of wilderness before you came to Fort Dearborn, where there was nothing as yet to give promise of that miraculous growth which was soon to make Chicago a proverb to the world. There were a few settlements in the fertile region called the Military Tract; the southern part of the State was getting itself settled here and there. People were coming in freely to the Sangamon country. But a grassy solitude stretched from Galena to Chicago, and the upper half of the State was generally a wilderness. The earlier emigrants, principally of the poorer class of Southern farmers, shunned the prairies with something of a superstitious dread. They preferred to pass the first years of their occupation in the wasteful and laborious work of clearing a patch of timber for corn, rather than enter upon those rich savannas which were ready to break into fertility at the slightest provocation of culture. Even so late as 1835, writes J. F. Speed, "no one dreamed the prairies would ever be occupied." It was thought they would be used perpetually as grazing- fields for stock. For years the long processions of "movers" wound, over those fertile and neglected plains, taking no hint of the wealth suggested by the rank luxuriance of vegetable growth around them, the carpet of brilliant flowers spread over the verdant knolls, the strong, succulent grass that waved in the breeze, full of warm and vital odor, as high as the waist of a man. In after years, when the emigration from the Northern and Eastern States began to pour in, the prairies were rapidly taken up, and the relative growth and importance of the two sections of the State were immediately reversed. Governor Ford, writing about 1847, attributes this result to the fact that the best class of Southern people were slow to emigrate to a State where they could not take their slaves; while the settlers from the North, not being debarred by the State Constitution from bringing their property with them, were of a different class. "The northern part of the State was settled in the first instance by wealthy farmers, enterprising merchants, millers, and manufacturers. They made farms, built mills, churches, school-houses, towns, and cities, and constructed roads and bridges as if by magic; so that although the