The magnitude of this great plain, now teeming with thousands of homes and farms, is seldom realized. Draw a straight line west from old Fort Vincennes to the Mississippi, and practically all north of it, to the Wisconsin line, is the Grand Prairie. "Westward of the Wabash, except occasional tracts of timbered lands in northern Indiana and fringes of forest growth along the intervening water courses, the prairies stretch westward continuously across Indiana, and the whole of Illinois to the Mississippi. Taking the line of the Wabash railway, which crosses Illinois in its greatest breadth, and beginning in Indiana, where the railway leaves the timber, west of the Wabash near Marshfield (in Warren County), the prairie extends to Quincy, a distance of more than two hundred and fifty miles, and its continuity the entire way is only broken by four strips of timber along four streams running at right angles with the route of the railway, namely, the timber on the Vermilion river between Danville and the Indiana state line; the Sangamon, seventy miles west of Danville, near Decatur; the Sangamon again a few miles east of Springfield, and the Illinois river at Meredosia, and all the timber at the crossing of these several streams, if put together, would not aggregate fifteen miles, against the two hundred and fifty miles of prairie. Taking a north and south direction and parallel with the drainage of the rivers, one could start near Ashley, on the Illinois Central railway, in Washington county, and going northward, nearly on an air line, keeping on the divide between Kaskaskia and Little Wabash, the Sangamon and the Vermilion, the Iroquois and the Vermilion of the Illinois, crossing the latter stream between the mouths of the Fox and DuPage, and travel through to the state of Wisconsin, a distance of nearly three hundred miles, without encountering five miles of timber during the whole journey."