Early Pioneer Life

What was it like to be a pioneer? In the 1830s and 1840s Illinois was considered the West described as an “unbroken wilderness.” Settlers moved to this part of the state slowly and then rapidly as transportation improved, arriving by keelboats which were then replaced by steamboats on the Ohio, Illinois, and Mississippi rivers.  By the 1830s, 50 steamboats arrived in the new town of Quincy, which increased to 3,000 landings by 1859.

John Wood arrived in 1822, traveling north from Alton on trails. He built a cabin near the river, in a place called Bluffs. But by 1840, 2,300 people lived in his newly formed community of Quincy.

People decided to settle in Illinois, which became a state in 1818, to find cheap land. Pioneers were young families. Orville Browning said, “They came from the older settled states to seek their fortune. They came full of hope and the bloom of youth.”

Other than seeking their fortune, pioneer men were adventurous, liked to hunt, and perhaps wanted to get away from civilization. Hunting became a necessity to feed their families. Women wore simple dresses made from flax which they could grow and spin the fiber into garments. Some had money but most did not.

In his History of Quincy John Tillson writes,  “The pioneer goes into the wilderness, often prompted by restlessness of temperament, and unconsciously with his axe and rifle, help[s] lay the foundations of city and state.  He builds more wisely and broader than he knows.” For some, the restlessness continued. It was not unusual for a settler to move on especially when the lands west of the Mississippi were open for settlement and became the states of Iowa and Nebraska.

Pioneers built simple cabins using an axe as their only tool. At first, the earliest settlers avoided the prairie. They built in locations with access to timber and water. Drinking water was supplied by rivers, streams and cisterns.

Some pioneers bypassed river travel and arrived by land in wagons or carts. They traveled at night, when possible, due to the flies and crossed the Illinois River on what was described as a backwoods ferry; boards laid across two canoes.

Storms were fierce and pioneers suffered through the occasional prairie fire. The winters of 1829-1830 and 1830-1831 were remembered as the worst with snows of seven feet deep lasting all winter. The last buffaloes sighted east of the Mississippi River, froze in the winter of 1830-1831.

A great source of information about pioneer life in Adams County came from the stories told at the “Old Settlers Reunions,” which were first held in Adams County in 1869. Each speaker would tell their story with speeches limited to 10 minutes.  Several stories were about snakes which proliferated in this area. Snakes would stick their heads through cracks in cabin walls. Some recalled snakes as their nearest neighbors and told of always carrying a knife as they would crawl up their legs. Pioneers at these events would also tell stories of bear, fox, and wolf hunts. According to the Quincy Whig, one old settler used his ten minutes to say, “He approved of good highways and asked no better evidence of civilization of a country than its highways.”

But what about pioneer women? We know little about their lives but rely on letters sent to relatives and personal journals. With a life of constant work, they had little time to write. What we do know was that death was a constant, particularly of babies and children. Money was tight, resources were scarce, and what they needed they made. Women did not travel west alone as men could. They arrived as daughters, maiden aunts, or sometimes as widows due to the long journey resulting in the death of a spouse from an accident or disease. Common diseases were diphtheria and cholera, both of which killed indiscriminately. Life was dangerous and short. Leaving home was permanent. Loneliness was common.

An example of that was a story told at the second Old Settlers meeting in Clayton. Mr. Peden of Columbus was 75 years old when he told the story of crossing the prairie and finding a lone woman in a cabin. She told him the mice had eaten all of her food. Before he moved on, he read a letter from her husband as the woman could not read.

Where was he? It was common for men to seek their fortune somewhere else. The early Illinois settlers tried that when the lead mines near Galena were opened in the 1820s and again when gold was discovered in California in 1848.

Labor was scarce so a pioneer family had to do it all. Some women helped with planting in addition to all the house chores, which were endless with a dirt floor, hides over windows, and cracks in the walls letting in insects, mice, and snakes. One letter home said, “In frontier Illinois, everything is do different—the people, their manners, their mode of living.”

The earliest settlers were the French traders who married the native Americans, then folks moving from Kentucky and Tennessee. Next came the Yankees from New York and New England. Followed by the Germans who traveled up the Mississippi from New Orleans.

Illinois settlers were diverse and cantankerous. One letter home said Yankee women were better educated, probably written by a Yankee woman. She said, “The society is not first rate, but a new place must grow.” An 1836 letter written from Rushville said, “The people here are primarily from the South. They are a very ignorant people. There is [sic] many among them that cannot read or write but they are very kind and friendly.”

Lest we think that all letters home were written by women, one young man wrote his friends saying, “Should you wish to avoid the expense of moving a help mate, I think you may find a better half among us as our place is settled almost exclusively by eastern people.  You would have your choice of selecting one among the Buckeyes and Hoosiers.” Not much romance in the west.

Arlis Dittmer is a retired health science librarian and former president of the Historical Society of Quincy and Adams County. During her years with Blessing Health System, she became interested in medical and nursing history—both topics frequently overlooked in history.

Sources:

“City News: Old Settler’s Meeting.” Quincy Whig, September 11, 1869, 5.

Dittmer, Arlis. “The Old Settlers of 1870,” Quincy Herald Whig, June 25, 2022.

Dulany, Dave. “Tom Jasper Steamboat: Quincy On The Move In The Mid-1880s,” Quincy Herald Whig, July 8, 2012.

“From Clayton.” Quincy Whig, September 10, 1870, 1.

Gregg, Thomas. The History of Hancock County, Illinois. Chicago, C. C. Chapman, 1880.

The History of Adams County, Illinois. Chicago: Murray, Williamson & Phelps, 1879.

“Pioneer Association.” The Carthage Republican, June 17, 1869.

Synder, Lynn. “Pioneer History Must Be Maily Biographical,” Quincy Herald Whig, February 15, 2015.

Tillson, William H.  (1879) “History of Quincy, Part I.”  In Past and Present of the City of Quincy and Adams County, Illinois, William H. Collins & Cicero F. Perry, 5-175.  Chicago, S.J. Clarke Publishing Co., 1905.