In the meantime, Indian
treaties had released additional land in southern Illinois, and pioneers
were widening the bounds of the old French settlements. Avoiding the
rich savannas of the prairie regions, as devoid of wood, remote from
transportation facilities, and suited only to grazing, they entered the
hard woods--and in the early twenties they were advancing in a
wedge-shaped column up the Illinois Valley.

The Southern element constituted the main portion of this phalanx of
ax-bearers. Abraham Lincoln's father joined the throng of Kentuckians
that entered the Indiana woods in 1816, and the boy, when he had learned
to hew out a forest home, betook himself, in 1830, to Sangamon county,
Illinois. He represents the pioneer of the period; but his ax sank
deeper than other men's, and the plaster cast of his great sinewy hand,
at Washington, embodies the training of these frontier railsplitters, in
the days when Fort Dearborn, on the site of Chicago, was but a military
outpost in a desolate country. While the hard woods of Illinois were
being entered, the pioneer movement passed also into the Missouri
Valley. The French lead miners had already opened the southeastern
section, and Southern mountaineers had pushed up the Missouri; but now
the planters from the Ohio Valley and the upper Tennessee followed,
seeking the alluvial soils for slave labor. Moving across the southern
border of free Illinois, they had awakened regrets in that State at the
loss of so large a body of settlers.

Looking at the Middle West, as a whole, in the decade from 1810 to 1820,
we perceive that settlement extended from the shores of Lake Erie in an
arc, following the banks of the Ohio till it joined the Mississippi, and
thence along that river and up the Missouri well into the center of the
State. The next decade was marked by the increased use of the steamboat;
pioneers pressed farther up the streams, etching out the hard wood
forests well up to the prairie lands, and forming additional tracts of
settlement in the region tributary to Detroit and in the southeastern
part of Michigan. In the area of the Galena lead mines of northwestern
Illinois, southwestern Wisconsin, and northeastern Iowa, Southerners had
already begun operations; and if we except Ohio and Michigan, the
dominant element in all this overflow of settlement into the Middle West
was Southern, particularly from Kentucky, Virginia, and North Carolina.
The settlements were still depen