"The winning of Louisiana," says Roosevelt, in his _Winning of the West_, "followed inevitably upon the great westward thrust of the settlerfolk, a thrust which was delivered blindly, but which no rival race could parry, until it was stopped by the ocean itself." The entire area of what is now the State of Illinois was, in 1803, a part of Indiana Territory, which had been organized three years before, with William Henry Harrison, then a young man of twenty-seven, as first Governor. It was not until February, 1809, that Illinois Territory was organized, with Ninian Edwards as the first Governor. No civil government was in existence at Chicago; the first authority, as at all frontier posts, was military. The only people here during the period of which we are writing, besides the few traders we have mentioned and their helpers, were the officers and soldiers of Fort Dearborn, and they were of course under military authority and discipline. All orders came to the captain commanding at the fort through the commandant at Detroit, Colonel Jacob Kingsbury, until the breaking out of the war with England, when General William Hull, previously the Governor of Michigan Territory, was placed in command of the Northwestern army then assembling at Detroit. Orders thenceforth issued from the commanding general. The southern portion of the territory now within the bounds of the State of Illinois had been settled in some few localities during the French period of domination, and the population of the towns of Kaskaskia, Prairie du Rocher and Cahokia were predominantly French, being composed of a few native born French, but mostly of French Canadians and Creoles. Even under British domination (1763 to 1783) there were practically no English-speaking people among the inhabitants of the places mentioned except the garrisons in the forts at those points; and after the conquering march of Colonel George Rogers Clark and his Virginians in 1778 and 1779 the English authority ceased altogether, the forces forming the garrisons having become prisoners in the hands of the Americans. The result of the stream of emigration that set in from Kentucky and the States farther east, after the creation of the Northwest Territory in 1787, was that in a few years the Americans outnumbered the earlier inhabitants. At the time Fort Dearborn was built almost the entire State of Illinois, as at present constituted, was included in a county called St. Clair County. It was not until long after Illinois had become a State in the Union that county government began to be effective in any way in the affairs of the little community at Chicago; and indeed, it did not matter in the least to the inhabitants what the name of the county might be in which the place was situated. It is quite likely that no one there even knew that he was living within the limits of St. Clair County, which in any case was merely a geographical expression carrying no exercise of jurisdiction whatever.