Great resource for research.

[Robert Braun]

Milo Milton Quaife opined in a book he edited that approximately four out of six emigrants to the Mineral District and northern/western Illinois were southerners, principally of upland-southern descent and coming into the region from places like Kentucky, Tennessee, and Missouri.

That makes the majority of persons in the region southerners... with upland-southern dialects, customs, habits, and traditions borrowed in part from their upbringing. That other emigrants--French, Metis, blacks, and Yankees-- were in a minority is evidenced by accounts like that of Ruggles, written after his post-BHW journey into the mineral district.

Researching ways and customs of upland southerners may be facilitated by consulting this website: "Albion's Seed Grows in the Cumberland Gap"

xroads.virginia.edu/~UG97/albion/albion3.html

[Chris Gordy]

Great site Bob. They are pretty thorough in examining the various Upland-Southern lifeways. I thought I would also share a couple of good references that give a good view into the Illinois experience in the nineteenth century.

*Faragher, John Mack. Sugar Creek: Life on the Illinois Prairie. Yale University: 1986.

This work looks at the Upland-Southern people in the Springfield, Illinois area. Great look at everyday life. The other works I'll post here are good for seeing how the Illinois Upland-Southerners lived from people moving into the prairie. The experience of seeing these people for the first time and living among them.

*Burlend, Rebecca and Edward, Ed. Milo Milton Quaife. A True Picture of Emigration. Secausuc, N.J.: 1968.

*Boewe, Charles. Prairie Albion: An English Settlement in Pioneer Illinois. Carbondale, Illinois, Southern Illinois University Press: 1999.

*Tillson, Christiana Holmes, Ed. Milo Milton Quaife. A Woman's Story of Pioneer Illinois. Carbondale, Illinois, Southern Illinois University Press: 1999.

And lastly the most complete study would be Albion Seed. I would give it a proper citation here but unfortunately I don't have it sitting in front of me. Susan has our copy at Apple River Fort. I'll have to tell her to post it here.

[Marge Smith]

The County Histories also say that most people came from the South. I wondered at the time if they meant from that direction, because there would have been great difficulty in getting here from the North.

The movers and the shakers in the early days of the mineral district had Yankee, Irish, and French roots. It really was a mixture of people from the first days. People like Rountree, Dodge and Jones represented the Southern contingent. But there was Meeker, Bates, Gratiot, Lorimer, Comstock, Newhall, Tholozan, Detandeberatz, Hempstead, Lockwood, Morrison, Soulard. The Irish were the merchants like Dowling, Bryne, Gray, Drum. Can you imagine the different accents.

The other thing that has always intrigued me was the connection to the fur trade industry. Someone from Newberry Library in Chicago wrote that it was too bad that Chicago had to go East to get financing. They overlook St. Louis with the huge profits from the fur trade. St. Louis already had a trade center so did not want to invest in a rival. But they did invest heavily in the lead mines. Then they sent representatives and sons to run the smelting furnaces. I marvel that they would put all that money into building houses, furnaces and outbuildings based on a short-term lease with the government.

[Marge Smith]

I didn't tell you about a resource I just recently found in the Missouri Historical Review, April 2000. It is an article on James Johnson, our James Johnson who opened the lead mines in 1822. He had a contract to take supplies up the Missouri River in 1819 which failed miserably. The government who financed the deal is after him to pay back money advanced to him. His brother Richard M. Johnson, later to be Vice President, is trying to protect him.

He protected him by dealing with James C. Calhoun in getting a lease on these lead mines. (This is from the Calhoun Papers, not this article). Johnson ending up not paying a dime in rent or tax on the lead he smelted claiming there was a loophole in the lease (this from the letters to the Ordnance Dept from the Galena lead mine superintendent.) Shame on him!

[Susan Gordy]

On the Upland Southern Dialect, some really great sources are:

"Life in Prairie Land" by Eliza Farnham

(I think it is University of Illinois Press, should be easy to find at Half.com. Last I knew, Lincoln Log Cabin carried the book in their Gift Shop too.)


And not to be ignored are the works of James Whitcomb Riley. Born and raised in south central Indiana, Mr. Whitcomb writes his poetry as peope spoke. I found his poems were perfect practice to read out loud while practicing dialect.

;D

[Robert Braun]

It seems that James Johnson-- described in several sources as being "from Kentucky", interestingly enough--
was well-connected in U. S. Government, as you have indicated. John C. Calhoun served as Secretary of War, and lead was considered a war munition... accounting for the government set-aside in the region as early as the Jefferson Administration.

Hmmmm... James Johnson looking to avoid paying taxes. Since it could be argued that the lead region had no "official" representation in Congress...only a reporting responsibility to the U. S. Army Bureau of Ordnance, perhaps Mr. Johnson was looking to avoid paying taxes in a manner similar to that of patriot ancestors two generations previous!

There were numerous fortune seekers looking to cut their own deals with the Winnebago and thereby technically avoid lease or tax payments... the Gratiots, Thomas Parrish, Henry Dodge and possibly Billy Hamilton among them.

[Marge Smith]

I think the Gratiots paid their tax because a bill was introduced in Congress to refund them since they had purchased their mining lands from the Winnebago. The reasoning was that the U.S. could not collect on lead mines not owned by the U.S. The bill was probably introduced by Elihu Washburne (I don't remember exactly) but he did marry Adele Gratiot.

All the correspondence around the Winnebago War era talks about the miners can't go across the ridge to mine in Wisconsin. Do you know where that ridge is. When I drive it everything looks like a ridge.

[Robert Braun]

I suspect the ridge to which you refer is the so-called "Militiary Ridge" which today is largely crested by Highway 18 from Madison west.

As for Southerners in the District, I offer, along with Dodge, John Hawkins Rountree, and George Wallace Jones--

Hon. Charles Dunn, born in Bullitt Co., Kentucky; Charles Bracken while born in Pittsburgh, certainly spent enough time surveying in Kentocy to qualify as a southerner by avocation; John B. Terry, born in Coxsackie NY, but spent time in St. Charles, Missouri before relocating to Samgamon, Il and on to the Michigan Territory; John F. O'Neill, born County Tyrone, Ireland, but spent significant time in St. Louis; Daniel Morgan Parkinson, born in Carter Co., East Tennessee; Thomas Jenkins, veteran of Pecatonica, born in South Carolina; Levi Sterling, born in Woodford Co. Kentucky...

There is an example of a verified, "Yankee." A self-described Massachusetts Yankee, William P. Ruggles, came to the United States Mineral District in the spring of 1836. He eventually met up with George Wallace Jones at Galena. Together, they ventured to the Mississippi River and Dubuque, described by Ruggles as "only a small village, with a mining and trading population."

Ruggles recalled:

At this time, the strangeness of my situation struck me very forcibly. The people and their ways of doing and speaking were very different from what I had been accustomed to. The idea of calling a shilling a ‘long bit,’ a ten-cent piece a ‘short bit,’ and a five-cent piece a ‘picayune,’ was to me odd enough. I remained in the vicinity of Dubuque and Galena for the next two years, working for Mr. Jones, and, during that time, did not see more than two or three Yankees. Nearly every body and thing was Southern. Although I got along with the Southerners, yet we couldn’t mix...as I was mightily in the minority.

r.

[Marge Smith]

And by 1829 Burton (from Derbyshire, England) and Robert Waller (from Yorkshire, England) were here building their big furnaces. They say that northern England accents were almost like a foreign language. And then the Cornish came followed by the Germans.

My list was from the early licenses issued by the U.S. for smelting.

And then there were all those suckers who returned home each winter. My grandfather went to Kansas to work harvesting wheat just like the young men from southern Illinois came to drive the big ore wagons.

Isn't this a wonderful area. We are so lucky to live here.

[Chris Gordy]

This posting is response to the discussion The "whiskey" claim at "Old Man Creek." I agree with what was said, but since this thread is for resources I thought I'd give a bib on probably the best work on alcohol consumption in the 19th century. It is:

Rorabaugh, W.J. The Alcoholic Republic: An American Tradition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979.


Chris Gordy