The placid waters of the beautiful Ohio have long since been disturbed by steam navigation; and the music of the steam engine echoing from the river hills have alarmed the bat and the owl, and broke the solitude around the graves of many of the first settlers. Many old associations have lived and died. The infant images of the early settlers are men and women. In the order of time Roxie Fairfield, the heroine of the snow storm, and Aunt Fillis Foster, claim our attention.
With a few back glances at girlhood, we hasten on to her womanhood. Aunt Fillis permitted Roxie to attend a country school a few months in each year. The school house was built of round logs, was twenty feet square, with one log left out on the south side for a window. The seats were made of slabs from the drift wood on the Ohio River, (the first cut from the log, one side flat, the other having the shape of the log, rounding); holes were bored in the slabs and pins eighteen inches long inserted for legs. These benches were set against the wall of the room, and the pupils arranged sitting in rows around the room. In the center sat the teacher by a little square table, with a switch long enough to reach any pupil in the house without rising from his seat. And thus the heroine of the snow storm received the rudiments of an education, as she grew to womanhood.
Roxie was obedient, tidy—and twenty, and like all girls of her class, had a lover. Aunt Fillis said Roxie kept everything about the house in the right place, and was always in the right place herself; she said more, she could not keep house without her. By what spirit Aunt Fillis was animated we shall not undertake to say, but she forbade Roxie's lover the prerogative of her premises.
Roxie's family blood could never submit to slavery, and she ran away with her lover, was married according to the common law, which recognizes man and wife as one, and the man is that one.
They went to Louisville, and the reader has already been introduced to the womanhood of Roxie Fairfield in the person of Daymon's wife.
The reader is referred to the closing sentence of Scene First. Daymon was granted a new trial, which never came off, and the young couple left Louisville and went to Chicago, Illinois. Roxie had been concealed by a female friend, and only learned the fate of Daymon a few minutes before she entered the court room. Daymon resolved to reform, for when future hope departed, and all but life had fled, the faithful Roxie rose like a spirit from the dead to come and stand by him.
Daymon and Roxie left Louisville without any intimation of their-destination to any one, without anything to pay expenses, and nothing but their wearing apparel, both resolved to work, for the sun shone as brightly upon them as it did upon any man and woman in the world.
As a day laborer Daymon worked in and around the infant city, as ignorant of the bright future as the wild ducks that hovered 'round the shores of the lake.
It is said that P. J. Marquette, a French missionary from Canada was the first white man that settled on the spot where Chicago now stands. This was before the war of the Revolution, and his residence was temporary.
Many years afterward a negro from San Domingo made some improvements at the same place; but John Kinzie is generally regarded as the first settler at Chicago, for he made a permanent home there in 1804. For a quarter of a century the village had less than one hundred inhabitants. A wild onion that grew there, called by the Indians Chikago, gave the name to the city.