Frontier Illinois

by Davis, James Edward

"In this major new history of the making of the state, Davis tells a sweeping story of Illinois, from the Ice Age to the eve of the Civil War.". "The story begins with three eyewitness accounts of the settlement process during its highest tide in the 1830s. But there were much earlier settlers to Illinois. Archaic Indians entered the region around 8000 B.C. By A.D. 1100, some 20,000 Indians of the Mississippian culture lived in the villages around Cahokia, a population rivaling that of any city in Europe at the time. By the time of the arrival of LaSalle and Jolliet and the founding of the French colony, these civilizations had virtually disappeared; other tribes had entered the area and lived in uneasy proximity to the European newcomers. British Illinois, whose fate was sealed by defeat in the Revolutionary War, makes for a relatively brief chapter in the history of the territory, but as the nineteenth century begins, a complex tale unfolds of settlement from the South and the East,