Drawn by Geneva Kirschoff, Vincennes, Indiana
In 1800 the population of Indiana Territory (the western part of the Northwest Territory after its division) was 5641 people. Of these, 929 lived in the Clark grant and some 1500 others around Vincennes. Corydon in southern Indiana succeeded Vincennes as the territorial capital in 1813, and so remained when the state was admitted to the Union in 1816. At that time, some 15 counties had been established, all of them in the southern part of the state. The state capital was removed to Indianapolis, its present location, in 1825.
Illinois, located on the great Mississippi River highway of the French explorers and missionaries, had attained a considerable repute for so remote an area.
About 1700, Kaskaskia and Cahokia, near the present St. Louis, had been settled as trading posts and, along with those erected in present Michigan and Wisconsin, were links in a chain of proposed forts from the St. Lawrence River to the Gulf of Mexico. Such was the intensity of purpose of France with reference to the Northwest in the early 1700’s.
In 1712 the Illinois River had been made the northern border of the Louisiana Territory.
As a result of the French and Indian War, however, the territory east of the Mississippi and north of the Ohio River was ceded to England. Due to the Pontiac Conspiracy, an alliance of most of the Indian tribes of the Northwest, it was two years later before the French flag was lowered at Fort Chartres and English dominion effected. As in all the rest of the Northwest after that war, settlement was forbidden by royal decree until around 1770, when settlers poured in from the seaboard colonies. As a result, one of the great early colonial “land bubble” schemes centered in southern Illinois.
In 1771, the Illinois settlers petitioned for, and, in fact, demanded, a form of self-government; but this was refused by Great Britain and in 1774 the Quebec Act annexed the entire area to the Province of Quebec. This all resulted in a considerable sympathy of the Illinois people for the cause of the American colonists in the ensuing Revolutionary War.
FORT DEARBORN, CHICAGO
Drawn by Helen Jean Marshall, Grand Ledge, Michigan