ded northward to
Chicago, and southward to a point about one hundred and fifty miles
southwest of Danville. Along this trail trading-posts were established at
intervals of forty or fifty miles. The southern extremity of the trail was
Blue Point, in Effingham county.(408) This became the regularly traveled
route between points connected by it.

Springfield was the northern terminus of the mail route early in 1823, and
the next year Sangamon county, in which the village lay, was almost
entirely without ferries, bridges, or roads.(409) In 1830 mail was carried
between Vincennes and St. Louis thrice a week; between Maysville and St.
Louis, and between Belleville and St. Charles twice a week. No point in
Illinois, not on one of these routes, received mail oftener than once a
week. There was at this time a mail route from Peoria to Galena.(410) The
legislatures of Indiana and Illinois petitioned Congress for an
appropriation to improve the mail route from Louisville, Kentucky, to St.
Louis, Missouri. The length of that part of the route which lay between
Vincennes and St. Louis was one hundred and sixty miles, but a more direct
route, recently surveyed by authority of the legislature of Illinois,
reduced the distance to one hundred and forty-five miles. The distance
between Vincennes and St. Louis was made up of about one-fourth of timber
land and three-fourths of prairies, from five to twenty miles across. "The
settlements are therefore scattered, and far between, and confined to the
vicinity of the timbered land. More than nineteen-twentieths of the land,
over which the road passes, is the property of the Federal Government. To
make the necessary causeways and bridges, and to keep the road in a proper
state of repair, is beyond the capacity of the people who reside upon it."
Another writer says of the route: "It must, for many years, be the channel
of communication, through which the Government shall transmit, and
receive, all its intelligence relative to the mines in the region of
Galena, and Prairie Du Chien, the Military Posts of the Upper Mississippi,
Missouri, and their tributary streams, and the whole northwestern Indian
frontier."(411)

Galena remained much isolated. A man who had horses and cattle, purchased
in southern Illinois and driven to Galena, by way of Springfield and
Peoria, in 1823, says that there was no settlement between Peoria and
Fever River. A year before, a traveler who went from St. Louis to Galena