Blanchard, Rufus. History of Illinois, to Accompany an Historical Map of the State . Chicago: National School Furnishing Company, 1883. [format: book], [genre: history]. Permission: Schingoethe Center for Native American Cultures, Aurora University
Persistent link to this document: http://lincoln.lib.niu.edu/file.php?file=blanchard.html

Two large valleys extend into the innermost centre of a continent, and a broad plateau of fertile soil intervenes between them. This is Illinois — a connecting link and portage ground from one of them to the other. Had it been an arid waste or an impregnable mountain uplift, it would have been a barrier — a separatrix between them; but, in the economy of Nature, the national interests of Illinois are inseparably connected with those of both.

From its first discovery, the physical geography of this country attracted the attention of the French, and their early occupation of it shows the importance they attached to it. Three nations have contended for possession of it — Spain, France and England, but a new nation possesses it by right of "manifest destiny."

To leave her history out of American records would leave an unbridged chasm — it would be like cutting off the tap root of a tree and leaving its trunk without support.

When the Jamestown and Plymouth colonies were contending with a stubborn soil, their ambitions limited to their daily wants, France was laying the dimension stone in the Illinois country for the central base of her American empire, and to this end she built Ft. Chartres here, the most impregnable fortress then known in the Western World. These high hopes

that she then cherished have been realized — not by her, but by a new nation, and it is not too much to say that the history of Illinois records a past and presages a future that finds a parallel only in the history of the United States, of which it forms so important a part, and anything that affects her affects the whole. If the centre is jarred, the circumference is shaken.

Youth of Illinois: You who are to inherit such responsibilities may laudably feel a State pride which will heighten your ambition to do honor to her name.

THE AUTHOR

WHEATON, JUNE, 1883.

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