Book Description

Excerpt from The County of Illinois On the banks of the Mississippi in southwestern Illinois, lies the American Bottom, the land most hallowed by romance and history of all the lands of the old Northwest. Taking no account of the prehistoric epoch whose monuments survive in the numerous Indian mounds of the region, we find its history running back over two centuries to the time when the first white settlers placed their villages by the Side of the great river of the West in an attempt to realize the idea of a colonial empire as conceived by the Grand Monarch in his palace at Versailles. Here for almost a hundred years, while the dominion over the Northwest was passing from France to England and from England to the United States, these villages endured unchanged amidst the creeks and ponds of the bottom, which mirrored in their quiet waters the old world civilization transported into the heart of the wilderness from feudalized France. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.