The Iron Road in the Prairie State: The Story of Illinois Railroading

By Simon Cordery

In 1836, Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas agreed on one thing: Illinois needed railroads. Over the next fifty years, the state became the nation's railroad hub, with Chicago at its center. Speculators, greed, growth, and regulation followed as the railroad industry consumed unprecedented amounts of capital and labor. A nationwide market resulted, and the Windy City became the site of opportunities and challenges that remain to this day. In this first-of-its-kind history, full of entertaining anecdotes and colorful characters, Simon Cordery describes the explosive growth of Illinois railroads and its impact on America. Cordery shows how railroading in Illinois influenced railroad financing, the creation of a national economy, and government regulation of business. Cordery's masterful chronicle of rail development in Illinois from 1837 to 2010 reveals how the state's expanding railroads became the foundation of the nation's rail network.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jan 20, 2016
• ISBN: 9780253019127

Simon Cordery

Simon Cordery is chair of the History Department at Western Illinois University in Macomb, Illinois.

Book preview

THE

IRON ROAD

in the

PRAIRIE STATE

RAILROADS PAST AND PRESENT

GEORGE M. SMERK AND

H. ROGER GRANT,

EDITORS

A list of books in the series appears at the end of this volume.

THE

IRON ROAD

in the

PRAIRIE STATE

THE STORY OF ILLINOIS RAILROADING

SIMON CORDERY

This book is a publication of

Indiana University Press

Office of Scholarly Publishing

Herman B Wells Library 350

1320 East 10th Street

Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA

iupress.indiana.edu

© 2016 by Simon Cordery

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses’ Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI

Z39.48–1992.

Manufactured in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Cordery, Simon, 1960- author.

The iron road in the Prairie State : the story of illinois railroading / Simon Cordery.

pages cm. — (Railroads past and present)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-253-01906-6 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-253-01912-7 (ebook) 1. Railroads—Illinois— History. 2.   Railroads—United States—History. I. Title.

HE2771.I4C67 2016

385.09773—dc23

2015022336

1  2  3  4  5    21  20  19  18  17  16

For my fellow enthusiasts,

Stacy and Gareth

CONTENTS

Preface

Acknowledgments

List of Abbreviations

1 Preliminaries

2 Development Delayed

3 Optimism Revived

4 Cultivating the Prairie

5 Financing Railroads

6 Conflagrations and Expansion

7 Illinois Railroad Labor

8 A Kaleidoscope of Regulations

9 Panic and Innovation

10 Bridge Building and Overbuilding

11 Excursions and Interurbans

12 Coal and Competition

13 Progressive Regulation

14 World War I and the 1920s

15 Depression, Dieselization, and Another War

16 Postwar Challenges

17 National Solutions?

18 Salvation

Epilogue

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Figure 0.1. The drama of steam: a TP&W double-headed freight between Chatsworth and Piper City (1924). Author’s collection.

PREFACE

The history of railroading in Illinois looks from a distance like an orderly sequence of events. The story, seemingly preordained, tells of rise, fall, and tentative renaissance. After a slow, parochial start—so the narrative goes—railroad technology improved and private capital flowed into the industry, which grew into a mighty transportation network, created a national market, and shrank time and space. But storms blew in when the omnipresent and omnipotent railroads alienated employees, customers, and politicians. Reined in by labor unions and government regulators, the railroads suffered a near-mortal blow as people shifted to cars, trucks, and airplanes after 1900. Political and economic pressure squeezed the industry until much of the track became redundant and had to be abandoned. Having redefined how people understood and interacted with the world, railroads almost disappeared. Revived by the elimination of harmful government regulations and saved from the burden of carrying passengers, a smaller but stronger industry entered the twenty-first century by providing vital arteries of commerce and environmentally sound alternatives to trucks and airplanes.

Though this sketch contains a grain of truth, it obscures the lived experience of railroading and the complex development of the industry. For those caught up in the actual events, the narrative arc was far from obvious and mostly imposed after the fact. Disruption, corruption, disaster, scheming, friction, and despair shared the landscape with optimism, dreaming, recovery, expansion, and excitement. Alternative avenues were frequently present, as was the unknown. Sudden and unanticipated developments caused changes of direction and emphasis across state and nation with local ramifications. The story is clear in retrospect, but the unpredictable, the random, and the tension of the time can only be appreciated by taking ourselves back into the railroad age.

The railroads did not appear out of nothing. True, they brought large numbers of people to the state, but they were not the only force for expansion. The population of Illinois expanded over 200 percent during the decade before the railroad spread across the state as the prairies opened to settlement. In the 1850s Illinois grew by 78.8 percent, and in the 1860s the population more than doubled, but the industry tapped into preexisting trends instead of creating them. The railroads did contribute to the urbanization of the state, with towns and cities growing in double digits every decade from the 1860s on, but even here widespread paving programs in the early twentieth century accelerated the process.

The iron road conditioned Illinois economically and socially, but not in a vacuum. The first tentative steps were taken directly into the abyss of a transatlantic depression, destroying early ambitions and wrecking the state’s fiscal health and reputation. Prairie State railroads originated as local interests, and not until after the Civil War did they connect with a growing national system of railroads. Then Illinois became inextricably part of a global economy, sharing in its wealth but subject to its moments of calamity and recession. To speak of Illinois as an independent economic entity became impossible, and the railroads did more than any other business to tie the state into national and international marketplaces during the nineteenth century. Local control became a fiction as Illinois merchants and bankers partnered with and grew dependent upon their counterparts in other states and nations. Any possibility for autarky—the complete economic self-reliance dreamed of by many pioneers—vanished.¹

The topography of Illinois presents few challenges to railroad building and operation. Mostly flat, with many rivers and streams and almost no truly hilly terrain, the state occupies the territory in which the American railroad network reached its maturity. During the 1850s a dramatic upsurge in railroad building brought trains to every part of the state. Lines radiated out from Chicago; railroads through southern and central Illinois connected Indiana with Iowa and Missouri; and north-south routes linked Wisconsin with Kentucky. By 1880 most settlements of any size were within five miles of an operating railroad, a situation that held until about 1960. Only one of the state’s 102 counties—Calhoun, a hilly peninsula trapped between the Illinois and Mississippi Rivers—has never hosted a railroad. Railroads brought in settlers from southern and eastern states and from Europe to carve farms and towns into the frontier. Only the railroad could have carried the lumber, grain, and minerals those settlers and their successors exploited. The young state’s remote villages and growing towns would not have existed without the railroads. During the Great Migration of African Americans to the North, railroads provided passage to a new life with new complications in Chicago, Peoria, Decatur, East St. Louis, and elsewhere.

Railroads were ubiquitous across Illinois and the Windy City remains the hub of the North American transportation system, though the separation of operations and financing means Chicago is no longer the home of major railroad headquarters. It is impossible to travel any distance in the state today without encountering railroads or their remnants. From massive yards full of freight cars and lively depots teeming with excited passengers to crumbling bridge abutments or the telltale hump of a disused trackbed, railroads are woven into the cultural and physical fabric of the state. Long-abandoned rights-of-way are still visible from airplane and satellite. The railroad industry shaped the political development, economic growth, and settlement patterns of the state. In return, its topography, politicians, and population have influenced the expansion of railroads across the United States.

Illinois railroading offers a study of railroad development in a microcosm. The costly and futile internal improvements projects imagined by exuberant legislators in Vandalia during the late 1830s found echoes across the young nation. After a decade of despondency, renewed enthusiasm and expansion in the 1850s were duplicated throughout the trans-Appalachian West. The first merger of the railroad age occurred in Illinois, and land grants pioneered by the Illinois Central would spur transcontinental railroad building. Government regulation growing out of lawsuits originating in Illinois in the 1870s and 1880s dramatically altered the relationship between industry and government. Periodic recessions—panics, as they were called in the nineteenth century—threw Illinois-based railroads into bankruptcy and receivership, allowing many to reorganize but forcing some to disappear.

Illinois railroads encapsulated national trends in the nineteenth century and experienced the growth and decline of the twentieth. When Little Grangers built across state lines into Illinois they illustrated one aspect of a new problem: too many railroads and not enough business in an era of competition from interurbans and, more dangerously, the internal combustion engine. The Good Roads movement tilted public policy toward automobiles, buses, and trucks in the 1920s. Good Roads trains spread the gospel of paving while county and state governments subsidized, with federal assistance, the railroads’ most powerful competitors by funding road-building programs.

Illinois had one advantage no other state had: Chicago. The Windy City was a barrier and a wealth generator. Because of their origins as unidirectional local projects with territorial limits, railroads ran to but not through the city. This created headaches for passengers and freight handlers, but as a center of the grain, meat, and lumber trades Chicago had no parallel. Several attempts to bypass Chicago enjoyed limited success because of the size of its market, its location adjacent to Lake Michigan, and the corporate structures of the railroads themselves.

Figure 0.2. Extreme specialization: a 1915 car used by the Illinois Game and Fish Commission to transport fish from hatcheries to rivers. Lake Forest College Library Special Collections.

Politics permeates the story of Prairie State railroading. Two of the state’s best-known national figures, Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas, cut their teeth on the industry. Municipal and county politicians made their names denouncing corporate power and demanding control over rates and routes. Railroad development in Illinois determined how the federal government could stimulate economic growth and regulate commerce. Trucks, automobiles, and buses subsidized by taxpayers and buoyed by public policy cut deeply into the railroads’ customer base. National transportation priorities in the 1950s and 1960s, particularly an emphasis on building federally subsidized interstate highways and airports, posed a nearly fatal threat to the railroads. Finally, in the late twentieth century, railroad corporations and governments struck an unstable bargain, with huge implications for Illinois.

Most of the railroads named in this book have vanished, their lines absorbed by other corporations or torn up. At their peak in 1920, Illinois railroads had 12,128 route miles; by 2012 that had shrunk to 6,989 miles.² How and why that happened is a crucial element in the story told here. Many railroads went bankrupt at least once, with lost investments and shattered dreams, and almost all merged into or were bought by other companies. Rural branch lines laid to serve farming areas and stymie competitors were abandoned in the twentieth century, the track lifted and reused, the land sometimes entering a twilight zone of ambiguous ownership.

Railroads proved expensive to build and maintain. They consumed oceans of capital because they required land, steel, buildings, rolling stock, and lots of people. Railroad corporations needed money to lay track and operate trains, though a fair amount—the exact sums will never be known—went into the pockets of the powerful and occasionally shady people involved. Railroads needed to attract investment from diverse sources, often (in the early days of the industry) foreign banks and financiers. Chasing capital changed the nature of business in the United States and elsewhere. Railroad corporations were the first organizations to systematically utilize funds from investors who were not family members and often did not see the lines in which they invested. Shareholders cared primarily about dividends and bondholders wanted timely interest payments, the local impact of their investments taking a back seat to the search for profits.

This book is also about an industry with some very specific technological and operational jargon. One of the most important terms is gauge, which denotes the distance or width between the inside heads of the two rails forming a track and is usually 4 feet 8.5 inches. Part of the story of Illinois railroading is how this particular gauge conquered alternatives, though the victory was neither predetermined nor simple. The rails, made of iron and later steel, are attached to wooden or (increasingly) concrete ties sitting on layers of ballast (small rocks) with a graded roadbed beneath. Railroad lines can be classified as either trunk (main) or branch (minor). Trains are pulled by locomotives, originally steam engines but later diesel and, in a few cases, electric. Runs vary from short hauls of fewer than one hundred miles to interstate trips of two thousand miles or more. People ride in passenger cars while freight travels in ever-increasingly specialized vehicles. The boxcar served many purposes but proved inflexible compared with the intermodal container, its twenty-first-century equivalent. Railroad companies and suppliers developed gondolas, flatcars, tank cars, stock cars, hoppers, auto racks, and others to meet particular needs. At the rear of freight trains were cabooses for crews monitoring rolling stock en route; those cabooses and crews were replaced in the late twentieth century by computers transmitting information from the back of the last car to the locomotive cab.

As the demise of the beloved caboose reminds us, change was and remains a constant feature of railroading, but the history and operation of the industry in Illinois maintains an enduring fascination.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book has been many years in the making, and the debts incurred are staggering. It is a pleasure to acknowledge them, beginning with two historians who have been incredibly supportive throughout. To Roger Grant I owe massive thanks for his faith in this project, and Don Hofsommer has been unstinting in his support and his conviction that this was a book worth writing. Conversations with Keith Bryant, Al Churella, Jim Ward, Greg Schneider, Brent Glass, Dale Jenkins, Bill Greenwood, and Steve Patterson have helped deepen my understanding of Illinois railroads past and present. John Gruber and Scott Lothes of the Center for Railroad Photography and Art have been very generous with their time and expertise, as have Don Hitchcock and John White.

Traveling around Illinois lecturing about railroads as an Illinois Humanities Council Road Scholar has been wonderfully enriching, and it is a pleasure to thank Ryan Lewis and many librarians and archivists for facilitating forty such talks across the years. I learned a lot from listening to audiences on jaunts from Olney to Rockford and many points in between, and I thank them for their thoughtful contributions on this wonderful subject. Many amazing opportunities have come my way thanks to the National Railroad Hall of Fame, and I am grateful to executive director Julie King and board members Bob Bondi and Jay Matson for these experiences.

Numerous dedicated archivists and librarians have contributed to this volume, notably Nick Fry of the John H. Barriger III National Railroad Library, MaryJo McAndrew and Jeff Douglas of Knox College, Anne Thomason of Lake Forest College, Ann Marie Hayes-Hawkinson and Jeff Hancks of Western Illinois University, George Perkins of McLean County Historical Society, and Barb Musk of the Fulton Museum. At Indiana University Press, Sarah Jacobi has been a joy to work with; I am also grateful for the advice of two anonymous readers to whom the press sent the manuscript, which has been greatly improved by their suggestions.

At Western Illinois University I have benefited tremendously from the deep knowledge of railroading of Bart Jennings and from the amazing cartographic skills of Chris Sutton, who designed the maps for this book while introducing me to the magic of GIS. Sarah Ritter helped with the illustrations at a busy time. Students in my Honors Railroading course encouraged me to see the industry in a new light as we traveled through Colorado together, a trip immeasurably improved by Ed Ellis’s thoughtful assistance. Many colleagues have assisted with this project. At Western Illinois University these include Bill Thompson, Keith Holz, Bob Welch, Jim Patterson, John Stierman, and William Polley. Former colleagues at Monmouth College have also been generous with their time and expertise, including Pierre Pete Loomis, Mark Ogorzalek, Bill Urban, Tom Best, and Fred Witzig. Students in my railroading courses there contributed to my knowledge of the industry, as did the many guest speakers who gave their time so freely to meet with us.

Friends and family have been incredibly helpful. Clive Hanley, photographer extraordinaire, is a wonderful traveling companion with a brilliant grasp of railroading. Lewis L. Gould has offered much good advice and many useful documents. My parents, Ned and Mary Cordery, have long nurtured my interest in the study of railroads and have listened to many a tale with interest and joy. Most of all, Stacy and Gareth have fed my soul and kept me sane on this journey, for which I cannot thank them enough. Without their grounding and encouragement this book would never have seen the light of day.

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

THE

IRON ROAD

in the

PRAIRIE STATE

1

PRELIMINARIES

The topography of Illinois is particularly conducive to railroading. Trains move best over flat land, and the state has few hills of any size and nothing that could be mistaken for a mountain. Its 56,400 square miles vary from a low of 279 feet above sea level to the 1,235 feet of Charles Mound on the Wisconsin border near Galena. The glaciated north boasted extensive prairies dotted with stands of timber, while in the heavily wooded south, coal deposits lay concealed beneath the surface. The hilliest section of the state is in the northwest. Here the lead-mining region of Galena escaped the graze of the glaciers, as did Calhoun County in the south. The south offered numerous engineering trials, especially around Cairo, strategically placed at the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers but swampy and subject to frequent flooding, while much of far-southern Illinois was viewed as a hilly extension of the Ozark highland.¹ The state’s rivers provided obstacles to emigrants and challenges to bridge builders, while bluffs at Peoria and Alton restricted railroad development at those two important towns. Generally, however, the gentle prairies presented few insurmountable or even challenging hindrances except distance: Illinois is larger than England, birthplace of the railroad industry.

PRAIRIES AND INDIANS

Prior to European settlement successive Indian peoples made the Illinois country their home. When French fur traders and missionaries arrived in the seventeenth century the Illini (or Illiniwek), who had dominated the area for a century, were already being pressured by the Iroquois confederation and left the land bearing their name. Others shared their fate, culminating in 1833 with the federal government’s forcible relocation of the remaining Indians. In 1717 the French colony in Louisiana annexed Illinois, where settlers had established outposts on the banks of the Mississippi River, including the town of Kaskaskia. The demography of Illinois changed after Britain defeated France in the French and Indian War (1754–1763). The region became more heterogeneous as British immigrants arrived on the Ohio and Wabash Rivers. Indians clustered around Lake Michigan, and white settlers established trading posts on its banks. Water remained the preeminent means of transportation, and the rivers running around and across Illinois served as highways.

But natural flows were unreliable. Waterways froze, fell, and flooded. Sandbars along the shore of Lake Michigan blocked easy access to the stale stream that would later be named the Chicago River, and the shoreline offered no natural harbors to protect shipping from devastating storms on the giant lake. Just a few miles inland lay a low continental shelf; most of the rivers to its west ran from there down to the Mississippi, while the few to its east flowed into Lake Michigan. The marshy territory on the site of what would—after extensive draining and filling—become Chicago offered an unpromising prospect to hopeful settlers, though small numbers kept arriving nevertheless.

Figure 1.1. Charles Turzak’s River and Canal Boats illustrates the brute force needed to move along canals. Collection of Western Illinois University Art Gallery; courtesy of the Fine Arts Program, Public Buildings Service, US General Services Administration.

Dangerous and uncomfortable boats contributed to the risks of river passage. Traveling to Pekin aboard the steamship Banner on the Illinois River in the 1830s, Eliza Farnham complained, The doors were broken, the stairs dilapidated; there was no linen for the berths, the hurricane deck leaked. Tar covering the rough wooden roof melted in the hot sun and dripped onto unsuspecting passengers. Farnham recorded how the waste of steam was so great that the wheels effected only about four revolutions a minute, and the boat had a strange habit . . . of occasionally running twice or thrice her length with considerable rapidity, and then suddenly lurching so as to throw everything to the starboard. A decade later Scottish immigrant John Regan spent his first night in Illinois on the banks of the Mississippi after a steamer ran aground.² These and a thousand other such tales told of the perils of traveling on the relatively calm rivers forming the state’s boundaries. Railroads would seize the competitive advantages their speed and safety offered as an alternative to river travel.

CANALS SHOW THE WAY

Rivers imperfectly met a growing demand for long-distance transportation and were sometimes replaced by canals. These artificial channels enabled humans to harness water for carrying heavy loads over long distances in relative safety. Secure inland haulage on a large scale could boost economic development, as British canal builders demonstrated in the 1760s, but theirs was hardly a recent innovation. While diverting water for irrigation and transportation is as old as civilization, British entrepreneurs pioneered the private, for-profit canal, learning from the public-works engineers who had developed locks for moving barges uphill.³

Canal building reached across the Atlantic soon after the American Revolution. Canals in the young republic, often constructed with government funding, carried bulk commodities such as coal and cotton over long distances. As white Americans moved west from the Atlantic seaboard, the states of Virginia and Pennsylvania proposed funding canals to the Ohio River valley. Though not built, these projects whetted an appetite that reached its pinnacle in 1825 with the triumphal opening of the Erie Canal, a state-funded, 340-mile-long ditch linking New York City with Lake Erie via the Hudson River and the Great Lakes, making the country beyond the Appalachians accessible to new immigrants. It was then possible to travel by water from New York City to the young state of Illinois.

STEAM PROVIDES A PUSH

Canals afforded a slow, pastoral means of movement but they could not solve all the problems presented by rivers. Horse-drawn boats did nothing to increase speed and ice could block canals completely, but they did represent a crucial breakthrough. In the realm of technological innovation one improvement frequently leads to others. In this case, proof of the demand for bulk haulage helped convince investors of the need for a faster mode of transportation. Cart horses pulled barges at perhaps five miles per hour while steam locomotives reached twenty-five miles an hour, as rapid as a race-horse. Railroads brought the drama of new technology and the exhilaration of hitherto-unmatched velocity. In one of history’s delightful ironies, the world’s first public railroad—England’s Stockton & Darlington Railway—opened in the same year as the Erie Canal.

The steam locomotive was a strange beast—a mad dragon some called it—and it grabbed the American imagination in the 1830s. The pace, noise, and danger of train travel were made culturally safe by applying metaphors such as the iron horse to help domesticate the noisy, smelly machines.⁴ One Illinois newspaper editor, campaigning in favor of building railroads, wrote in 1851: A railroad, what an invention! what a blessing! See yon ‘iron horse’ with his nostrils breathing fire, his long and shaggy mane, in the shape of smoke, streaming far behind, while in his might and strength, with his ‘train’ in the rear, he comes careering through yon ‘neck of timber,’ now over that creek, now across the prairie, now again in timber.⁵ Excitement and convenience would soon overcome fear of the unknown.

Early locomotives looked like barrels on wheels. Firemen shoveled coal into small fireboxes to boil water, which was released under pressure to power pistons and turn the wheels. The tiny point of contact between wheel and track—less than one-tenth of a square inch—created virtually frictionless motion and demanded ever-improved brakes. The means of slowing and stopping a train was just one innovation railroading inspired. The industry quickly became a leading area for inventions, and Illinois would be the location for many of the workshops, factories, and routes of this technological progress.

Railroads promised a bright future for a young nation. In 1832 one journalist marveled at how the prosperity and intelligence of the country will be comparatively great when railroads operated the length and breadth of the land. Modest first steps were being taken at the time of this proclamation. In 1830 the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad (B&O) opened thirteen miles of track from the port of Baltimore to Ellicott’s Mills. The company used an American-built steam locomotive constructed by New York businessman, politician, and inventor Peter Cooper. He called his engine Tom Thumb because it was so insignificant, by which he meant it was for demonstration purposes only. Unfortunately, the first run was delayed a week after someone purloined the copper in the pipes and boiler.⁶

Figure 1.2. An American-type 4-4-0 locomotive at Disco on the TP&W (April 1894). Author’s collection.

Tom Thumb foreshadowed the end of canals, but they did not go quietly. In 1830 several newspapers published A Canal Stockholder’s Outburst, a fictional diatribe complaining that railroads threatened to set the whole world a-gadding, destroy local attachments, and upset all the gravity of the nation. The steam train, the anonymous author declared, was a pestilential, topsy-turvy, harum-scarum whirligig. But an early traveler on the B&O reported that, far from causing social upheaval, the railroad was reviving Frederick, Maryland, by bringing people and commerce into town and dramatically lowering the cost of sending and receiving commodities.⁷ This pattern would be repeated across the nation, but for settlements without railroads the consequences could be dire.

Peter Cooper’s diminutive machine boasted one horsepower and was quickly superseded. The first American-built locomotive had been constructed and operated in 1826 by Colonel John Stevens on the grounds of his estate in Hoboken, New Jersey. Stevens became the chief engineer on the Camden & Amboy, refining the designs of British locomotives unable to negotiate the New World’s lightweight and poorly laid track. A dozen small workshops sprang up to meet the growing demand for engines, ranging from the short-lived, such as the Taunton Works in Massachusetts, to the durable, including the famous Baldwin Locomotive Works. Established in Philadelphia in 1832, Baldwin turned out some of the iconic locomotives of the steam age and lasted into the diesel era of the mid-twentieth century. After much experimentation, the sturdy and reliable American-type locomotive, with its characteristic cow catcher and giant headlight, dominated railroading until after the Civil War.

Working with an emerging technology confronting a virtually limitless range of unknown and unfamiliar factors, railroad pioneers woefully underestimated the costs of construction. The first surveys for the B&O, opened in 1830, projected that $5 million would be needed to lay its 290 miles of track, but $16 million, 379 miles, and 22 years later it reached the Ohio River. Investors were cautious: the South Carolina legislature was forced to market and guarantee bonds for the South-Carolina Canal & Rail-Road Company when few individuals or institutions were willing to take the plunge. Building a line from Charleston to Hamburg, it began operations in November 1832 and soon reached its terminus across the Savannah River from Augusta, Georgia. Offering regular passenger services and carrying cotton for shipment to mills in the North and to Europe, it helped make the case for building railroads.⁸ Other states took note.

THE PRAIRIE STATE

One of those states was Illinois. Gaining admission to the Union in 1818, the Prairie State covered more territory than New York, Connecticut, Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island combined. Settlers attracted by relatively easy passage from Missouri and Kentucky entered from the south, while Native Americans harrying and frightening immigrants in the north delayed colonization there. Chicago did not exist until the owners of a few rough houses clustered around Fort Dearborn boldly declared themselves a city in 1833, the last of the local indigenous peoples having been forced at gunpoint to sell their land to federal Indian agents. An early boost to settlement in the north came with rumors that a proposed canal would be dug to connect Lake Michigan with the Illinois River. This immensely popular project was authorized by the legislature in 1822, but delays in financing and construction meant it did not open until 1848. When finally completed, the Illinois and Michigan