rd to the Ohio. Beck's Gazetteer
published in 1823--five years after the admission of the State into
the Union--contains the following: "Chicago, a village of Pike
County, situated on Lake Michigan at the mouth of the Chicago Creek.
It contains twelve or fifteen houses, and about sixty or seventy
inhabitants."

The acquaintance of John Reynolds with what was then known as "the
Illinois Country" began in 1800, and his thorough knowledge of the
people and their ways gave him rare opportunities for acquiring
great personal popularity. Fairly well educated for the times,
gifted with an abundance of shrewdness, and withal an excellent
judge of human nature, he soon became a man of mark in the new
country. He was at all times and under all circumstances the
self-constituted "friend of the people." He affected to be one of
the humblest of the sons of men; and his dress, language, and
deportment were always in strict keeping with that assumption. For
the pride of ancestry he had a supreme contempt. In his "My Own
Times," published a few years before his death, he said: "I regard
the whole subject of ancestry and descent as utterly frivolous and
unworthy of a moment's serious attention."

This recalls what Judge Baldwin said of Cave Burton:

"He was not clearly satisfied that Esau made as foolish a bargain with
his brother Jacob as some think. If the birth-right was _a mere
matter of family pride,_ and the pottage of agreeable taste, Cave was
not quite sure that Esau had not gotten the advantage in his famed
bargain with the Father of Israel."

Humility was Reynolds's highest card, and when out among the people
he was always figuratively clothed in sackcloth and ashes. A
few extracts from his book may be of interest:

"I was a singular spectacle when in 1809 I started to Tennessee to
college. I looked like a trapper going to the Rocky Mountains.
I wore a cream-colored hat made of the fur of the prairie wolf,
which gave me a grotesque appearance. I was well acquainted with the
mysteries of horse and foot races, shooting matches, and other wild
sports of the backwoods, but had not studied the polish of the
ball-room and was sorely beset with diffidence, awkwardness, and
poverty."

Later, and when out in pursuit of the Indians, he said: "But
diffidence never permitted me to approach an officer's tent, or
solicit any one for office."

None the less, the office of Orderly Sergeant being thrust upon
him, he man