Theft was almost unknown; property, being so hard to get, was jealously guarded, as we have already noticed in speaking of the settlement of Kentucky. The pioneers of Illinois brought with them the same rigid notions of honesty which their environment maintained. A man in Macoupin County left his wagon, loaded with corn, stuck in the prairie mud for two weeks near a frequented road. When he returned he found some of his corn gone, but there was money enough tied in the sacks to pay for what was taken. Men carrying bags of silver from the towns of Illinois to St. Louis rather made a display of it, as it enhanced their own importance, and there was no fear of robbery. There were of course no locks on the cabin doors, and the early merchants sometimes left their stores unprotected for days together when they went to the nearest city to replenish their stock. Of course there were rare exceptions to this rule, but a single theft alarmed and excited a whole neighborhood. When a crime was traced home, the family of the criminal were generally obliged to remove. [Sidenote: N.W. Edwards, "Life and Times of Ninian Edwards," p. 163.] There were still, even so late as the time to which we are referring, two alien elements in the population of the State--the French and the Indians. The French settlements about Kaskaskia retained much of their national character, and the pioneers from the South who visited them or settled among them never ceased to wonder at their gayety, their peaceable industry and enterprise, and their domestic affection, which they did not care to dissemble and conceal like their shy and reticent neighbors. It was a daily spectacle, which never lost its strangeness for the Tennesseeans and Kentuckians, to see the Frenchman returning from his work greeted by his wife and children with embraces of welcome "at the gate of his door-yard, and in view of all the villagers." The natural and kindly fraternization of the Frenchmen with the Indians was also a cause of wonder to the Americans. The friendly intercourse between them, and their occasional intermarriages, seemed little short of monstrous to the ferocious exclusiveness of the Anglo-Saxon. [Footnote: Michelet notices this exclusiveness of the English, and inveighs against it in his most lyric style. "Crime contre la nature! Crime contre l'humanite! Il sera expie par la sterilite de l'esprit."] The Indians in the central part of Illinois cut very little figure in the reminiscences of the pioneers; they occupied much the same relation to them as the tramp to the housewife of to-day. The Winnebago war in 1827 and the Black Hawk war in 1831 disturbed only the northern portion of the State. A few scattered and vagrant lodges of Pottawatomies and Kickapoos were all the pioneers of Sangamon and the neighboring counties ever met. They were spared the heroic struggle of the advance-guard of civilization in other States. A woman was sometimes alarmed by a visit from a