The period from 1818 to 1830 saw the Indian title to a great fertile tract of land in Illinois extinguished, the price of all public lands lowered and the land offered for sale in smaller tracts, the right of preemption granted to squatters who had settled before 1830, considerable grants of land made to the state for internal improvements, the great salt spring reservations reduced. These changes did much to make Illinois a more attractive place for settlement. When a committee of workingmen in Wheeling, Virginia, made a report, in October, 1830, on a method of escaping from the ills of workingmen, they presented an elaborate plan for buying land and forming a colony in Illinois.(368) The experience of the squatter who settled with four or five sows for breeders and in four years or less drove forty-two fat hogs to market and sold them for $135, with which he bought eighty acres of land and paid his debts, was not a rare one.(369) As 1830 closed there were still problems connected with the land to solve. The Indian question persisted, non-resident landholders were troublesome, and the state would still seek grants for internal improvements, but none of these was to be long a serious impediment to settlement. The Government and Its Representatives, 1818 to 1830. In some respects the character of the state government of Illinois shows the character of the settlers. The nativity of the governors and the congressmen of the state indicates that the South was the origin of a majority of the population. Before the end of 1830 there had been no northern-born representative of the state in the national House of Representatives; the first northern-born senator was chosen in the last month of 1825, and the first northern governor in 1830.(370) Pierre Menard, a French Canadian, the first lieutenant-governor, came to Illinois in 1790, and can not fairly be cited as a type of the French descendants of the first white settlers of Illinois.(371) As a matter of fact, the French element was not a political factor of importance. Nor is it true that all southerners were pro-slavery, for the most noted anti-slavery governor of Illinois, and her governor during the Civil War, were from the South, while her first northern senator was pro-slavery. The great influx of immigrants from New England and the rest of the North did not come until after 1830. It was retarded, after the opening of the Erie Canal (1825), by the Winnebago and Black Hawk wars, and did not reach its height until the latter war had closed and the Indian claims to land in northern Illinois had been extinguished. Immigration from the northern states increased proportionally, however, after 1820.