To the white settlers, the first look at the Illinois prairies was full of wonder. To the Indians on the other side of the moving frontier, of course, the new land was an old land to them, it was not a frontier gradually opening the boundaries of freedom but a steadily encroaching line of defeat and displacement. Thousands of settlers either turned their wagons straight west from Pennsylvania or poled their flatboats down the Ohio to swarm into the new land. THE LINE of the frontier moved steadily westward across America throughout the 18th and 19th centuries as inexorably, it seemed, as the path of the sun itself, and in the first quarter of the 19th century it marched slowly across the prairies of Illinois. Line print reproduction from the Chicago Historical Society. This drawing of Morris Birkbeck, who wrote about Illinois in his Notes on a Journey in America published in 1817, is from the frontispiece of George Flower's History of the English Settlement in Edwards County, Illinois (1882). The authors are bound by no restrictions regarding form, style or perspective, and they are encouraged to use any of a number of approaches, including exposition, analysis, satire and parody. This is the first in Illinois Issues' current series of essays designed to explore literary, historical and cultural issues of interest to people in the state. This fourth series of humanities essays is made possible in part by a grant from the Illinois Humanities Council, in cooperation with the Illinois General Assembly and the Illinois Department of Conservation.
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