to
the first class.(438) The prairies remained unappreciated by the
Americans, although some foreign farmers preferred to settle in Illinois,
because there they could avoid having to clear land, and could raise a
crop the first year, while coal could serve as fuel,(439) and a ditch and
bank fence, requiring little wood, could be constructed, or a hedge could
be grown.(440) A traveler of 1819 speaks of one of the largest prairies as
not well adapted to cultivation, because of the scarcity of wood, and in
the fall of 1825 there was but one house on the way from Paris to
Springfield, leading across eighty miles of a prairie ninety miles in
length.(441)

It was easy to obtain land. After 1820 it could be bought from the
government of the United States at $1.25 per acre, it could be
rented--sometimes for one peck of corn per acre per year(442)--, or the
claim of a squatter could be purchased. When Peter Cartwright moved from
Kentucky to Illinois in 1824, he gave as reasons for moving the fact that
he had six children and but one hundred and fifty acres of land, and that
Kentucky land was high and rising in value; the increase of a disposition
in the South to justify slavery; the distinction in Kentucky between young
people reared without working and those who worked; the danger that his
four daughters might marry into slave families; and the need of preachers
in the new country.(443) The land being obtained, the first cultivation
was difficult. Writers often give the idea that after a year or two the
land which had been heavily timbered was left free from trees, stumps, or
roots, but many a pioneer plowed for twenty years among the stumps. Stump
fields are today no novelty in Illinois, and farming has not retrograded.
Usually the settler's first need was a crop, and in order to hasten its
production the trees were girdled, a process which might either precede or
follow the planting, according to the time of year in which the immigrant
arrived. If prairie land was plowed six horses, or their equivalent of
power in oxen, were required for the first breaking, and a summer's fallow
usually followed in order to allow the roots to decay. In 1819 five
dollars per acre was paid for the first plowing of the prairie, and three
or four dollars for the second.(444)

Agricultural products exhibited considerable variety, although corn was
the chief article raised, because it furnished food for man and beast, it
gave a large yield, and i