Horses, cattle, and household goods were carried on boats. Travel by either land or water was beset with difficulties. The river, without pilot or dredge, had dangers [pg 095] peculiar to itself. Sometimes, when traveling overland, a broken wheel or axle, or a horse lost or stolen by Indians, caused protracted and vexatious delays. It is well to notice, also, that to travel a given distance into the wilderness was more than twice as difficult as to travel one-half that distance, because of the constantly increasing separation between the traveler and what had previously been his base of supplies.[215]
Sometimes immigrants debarked at Fort Massac and completed their journey by land. Two roads led from Fort Massac, one called the lower road and the other the upper road, the former, practicable only in the dry season and then only for travel on foot or on horseback, was some eighty miles long, while the latter was one hundred and fifty miles long. Roads of a like character connected Kaskaskia and Cahokia.[216]
A party of more than one hundred and fifty, which came from Virginia to the New Design settlement in 1797, set out from the south branch of the Potomac. They came from Redstone (now Brownsville), on the Monongahela, to Fort Massac, on flat-boats, and then by land, in twenty-one days, to New Design. The summer was wet and hot, a malignant fever broke out among the newcomers, and one-half of them died before winter. The old settlers were not affected by the fever, but they were too few to properly care for so many immigrants.[217]
Commerce in Illinois was in its infancy. Some cattle, [pg 096] corn, pork, and various other commodities were sent at irregular intervals to New Orleans.[218] The fur trade was carried on much as under the French régime. Salt was made at the salt springs on Saline Creek, the labor being performed chiefly by Kentucky and Tennessee slaves under the supervision of contractors who leased the works from the United States. The contractors agreed to sell no salt at the works for more than fifty cents per bushel, but by means of silent partners to whom the entire supply was sold, the price was sometimes raised as high as two dollars per bushel.[219] The commerce of the West suffered from a lack of vessels going from New Orleans to Atlantic ports, and as a result corn sold in New Orleans at fifty cents per bushel in 1805, while in some of the Atlantic ports it sold for more than two dollars. At the same time the West had a good crop, and Kentucky alone could have spared five hundred thousand bushels of corn, if it could have been shipped.[220]
To secure laborers was difficult. A petition of 1796 said that farm laborers could not be secured for less than one dollar per day, exclusive of washing, lodging, and boarding; that every kind of tradesman was paid from one dollar and a half to two dollars per day, and that at these prices laborers were scarce. Labor was cheaper on the Spanish side of the Mississippi, because of the larger proportion of slaves.[221] These wages were doubtless high in comparison with those paid in the East, just as the one dollar per day and board paid at the Galena lead mines in [pg 097] 1788 was more than double the wages then paid in New England,[222] but an Illinois price list of 1795 shows that the wages of 1796 were by no means comparable to those of today in purchasing power. Making shoes was two dollars per pair; potatoes were one dollar per bushel; brandy, one dollar per quart; corn, one dollar per bushel.[223]
Among the early difficulties in the way of settlement, one of the most persistent was the presence of prairies. This is by no means far-fetched, although it sounds so to modern ears. In 1786, Monroe wrote to Jefferson concerning the Northwest Territory: “A great part of the territory is miserably poor, especially that near Lakes Michigan and Erie, and that upon the Mississippi and the Illinois consists of extensive plains which have not had, from appearances, and will not have, a single bush on them for ages. The districts, therefore, within which these fall will never contain a sufficient number of inhabitants to entitle them to membership in the confederacy.”[224] Some of the most fertile of the Illinois prairies were not settled until far into the nineteenth century. The false prophets of the early days will be judged less harshly if we recall that wood was then a necessity, that no railroads and few roads existed, that wells now in use in prairie regions are much deeper than the early settlers could dig, and that the vast quantities of coal under the surface of Illinois were undiscovered.
As causes for the fact that more than a quarter of a century after the Revolution, Illinois had a population estimated at only eleven thousand, may be suggested the [pg 098] presence of hostile Indians; the inability of settlers to secure a title to their land; the unsettled condition of the slavery question; the great distance from the older portions of the United States and from any market; the fact that Kentucky, Ohio, and Indiana had vast quantities of unoccupied land more accessible to emigrants than was Illinois; the danger and the cost of moving; privation incident to a scanty population, such as lack of roads, schools, churches and mills; the existence of large prairies in Illinois. To remove or mitigate these difficulties was still the problem of Illinois settlers. On some of them a beginning had been made before 1809, but none were yet removed.