Page:The Atlantic Monthly Volume 2.djvu/492

 n a hundred and fifty years,--indeed, ever since the French occupation of Illinois. What of under-draining? Some forty or fifty rivers threading the State, besides smaller streams innumerable, always will do that, as soon as the Nilic floods of spring have accomplished their work by floating to the surface the finest part of the soil. Irrigation? You may now grow rice on one farm and grapes on another, without travelling far between. It is true, there must be an end to this universality of power and advantage, some day; but nobody can see far enough ahead to feel afraid, and it is not in the spirit of our time to think much about the good of our grandchildren. "What has posterity done for me?" is the instinctive question of the busy Westerner, as he sits down under vine and fig-tree which his own hands have planted, to enjoy peace and plenty, after suffering the inevitable hardships of pioneer life. You may tell him he is not wise to scorn good rules; but he will reply, that he did not come so far West, and begin life anew, for the sake of being wise, but of making money, and that as rapidly as possible. He has forgotten the care and economy learned among the cold and stony hills of New England, and wants to do everything on a large scale. He likes to hear of patent reapers, Briarean threshing-machines, and anything that will save him most of the time and trouble of gathering in his heavy crops,--but that is all. The growth of those crops he has nothing to do with. That is provided for by Nature in Illinois; if it were not, he would move "out West."

Stories of this boundless fertility are rife here. One pioneer told us, that, when a fence is to be made and post-holes are wanted, it is only necessary to drop beet-seed ten feet apart all around the field, and, when the beet is ripe, you pull it up and your post-hole is ready! To be sure, there was a twinkle in the corner of his eye as he stated this novel and interesting fact; but, after all, the fertility in question was not so extravagantly "poefied" by this _canard_ as some may suppose. Our friend went on to state, that, in his district, they had a kind of corn which produced from a single grain a dozen stalks of twelve ears each; and not content with this, on _most_ of the stalks you would find, somewhere near the top, a small calabash full of shelled corn! To put the matter beyond doubt, he pulled a handful of the corn from his pocket, which he invited us to plant, and satisfy ourselves.

The reader has probably concluded, by this time, that beets and corn are not the only enormous things grown in Illinois.

A friend told us, in perfectly good faith, that a tract of his, some fourteen thousand acres, in the southern part of the State, contained coal enough to warm the world, and more iron than that coal would smelt,--salt enough for all time, and marble and rich metallic ores of various kinds besides. In one region are found inexhaustible beds of limestone, the smoke of whose burning fills the whole spring air, and the crevices of whose formation make very pokerish-looking caves, which young and adventurous ladies are fond of exploring; in another we come to quantities of that snow-white porcelain clay of which some people suppose themselves to have been originally formed, but which has been, in a commercial point of view, hitherto a _desideratum_ in these United States of ours. The people at Mound City (an aspiring rival of Cairo, on the banks of the Ohio) are about building a factory for the exploitation of this clay, not into ladies and gentlemen, (unpopular articles here,) but into china-ware, the quality of which will be indisputable.

One soon ceases wondering at the tropicality of the Illinoisian imagination. Ali Baba's eye-straining experiences were poor, compared to these every-day realities.

The "Open Sesame" in this case has been spoken through the railroad-whistle. Railroads cannot make mines and quarries, and fat soil and bounteous rivers; yet railroads have been the making of Illinois. Nobody who has ever seen her