Woodland and Prairie Settlement in Illinois: 1830–70

Astock figure in the drama of America's past is the pioneer set down amidst an unceasing forest, swinging his axe freely, and blithely unconcerned with woodland conservation. Such pioneers, for better or worse, were certainly plentiful in the wooded eastern half of the country. However, once settlement reached the ecological zone where woodland gave way to prairie, there was a significant change in the pioneers' mind-set. In the 1830s the wave of North American settlement began washing up against the shores of the tall-grass prairies of northern and central Illinois. Here, where timber was scarce, forestland was a prized commodity. Yetgrassland was also an asset. Indeed, many American pioneers came from cultures where grassland had long been vital. In England it was a poor Domesday village indeed that did not have its share of marsh and meadow. By the thirteenth century grassland was in sufficiently short supply that farmers were pushing their tofts, crofts, and pastures out into the fenland margins. In America the story was the same. As Howard Russell has argued, natural grasslands were the key to determining many initial New England settlement locations,' William Penn's followers, for example, valued the small prairies near their new woodland homes. Farther west, pioneers reveled in the grasslands of the central Kentucky and the Scioto Basin of Ohio. Bernard Peters has pointed out the attraction of oak openings for settlers. 2 But exploiting the odd patch of prairie grass located in a sea of woodland was one thing. In Illinois it was as if some inept photographer's apprentice had somehow reversed the ecological negative. Here for the first time prairie dominated, and woodland was reduced to a few scattered islands. The problem of settlement was not so much how to deal with grassland: this, the settler understood. The problem was how to deal with the absence of woodland. This article paints a picture of woodland use in the prairie-dominated areas of Illinois from about 1830 to 1870. It makes the case that settlers paid careful attention to woodland conservation, that woodland expanded significantly during this period, and that this expansion of woodland was in part a planned adjunct to agricultural settlement. Parts of this article are based on documents recently discovered in the archives of Illinois State University. These are the papers of a transplanted Virginian, John Edward McClun. McClun was a typical pioneer entrepreneur, and his records, particularly the contracts, give a detailed picture of the way in which woodland was managed. They underscore the importance of woodland for prairie settlement and stress the careful concern with which woodland was managed.'