We Were On The Prairie, But Still I Felt No
Satisfaction.
It was private property, divided among holders and
pastured over by private cattle.
Salisbury Plain is as wild, and
Dartmoor almost wilder. Deer, they told me, were to be had within
reach of Dixon, but for the buffalo one has to go much farther
afield than Illinois. The farmer may rejoice in Illinois, but the
hunter and the trapper must cross the big rivers and pass away into
the Western Territories before he can find lands wild enough for
his purposes. My visit to the corn-fields of Illinois was in its
way successful, but I felt, as I turned my face eastward toward
Chicago, that I had no right to boast that I had as yet made
acquaintance with a prairie.
All minds were turned to the war, at Dixon as elsewhere. In
Illinois the men boasted that, as regards the war, they were the
leading State of the union. But the same boast was made in
Indiana, and also in Massachusetts, and probably in half the States
of the North and West. They, the Illinoisians, call their country
the war-nest of the West. The population of the State is
1,700,000, and it had undertaken to furnish sixty volunteer
regiments of 1000 men each. And let it be borne in mind that these
regiments, when furnished, are really full - absolutely containing
the thousand men when they are sent away from the parent States.
The number of souls above named will give 420,000 working men, and
if, out of these, 60,000 are sent to the war, the State, which is
almost purely agricultural, will have given more than one man in
eight. When I was in Illinois, over forty regiments had already
been sent - forty-six, if I remember rightly - and there existed no
doubt whatever as to the remaining number. From the next State,
Indiana, with a population of 1,350,000, giving something less than
350,000 working men, thirty-six regiments had been sent. I fear
that I am mentioning these numbers usque ad nauseam; but I wish to
impress upon English readers the magnitude of the effort made by
the States in mustering and equipping an army within six or seven
months of the first acknowledgment that such an army would be
necessary. The Americans have complained bitterly of the want of
English sympathy, and I think they have been weak in making that
complaint. But I would not wish that they should hereafter have
the power of complaining of a want of English justice. There can
be no doubt that a genuine feeling of patriotism was aroused
throughout the North and West, and that men rushed into the ranks
actuated by that feeling, men for whom war and army life, a camp
and fifteen dollars a month; would not of themselves have had any
attraction. It came to that, that young men were ashamed not to go
into the army.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 142 of 277
Words from 73110 to 73610
of 143277
