illinois

"From the air Illinois was a vast emptiness studded by lost-looking little towns."

"In the month of January, 1818, a petition was received from the territorial Legislature of Illinois by Nathaniel Pope, the delegate in Congress, (now district judge,) praying for the admission of the territory into the Union as an independent State. Judge Pope immediately brought the subject before Congress; and at an early day thereafter was instructed, by the proper committee, to report a bill in pursuance of the petition. Owing to the great amount of business which had matured, this bill was not acted on until the month of April, when it became a law, with certain amendments proposed by Judge Pope."

"There was an old woman in Illinois who missed some of her chickens, and couldn't imagine what had become of them. Someone suggested that they had been carried off by a skunk; so she told her husband he must sit up that night and shoot the 'critter.' The old man sat up all night, and next morning came in with two pet rabbits. 'Thar,' said he, 'your chickens are all safe; thar's two of them skunks I killed!' 'Them ain't skunks,' said the old woman; them's my pet rabbits; you allers was a fool!' 'Well, then,' returned the old man, 'if them ain't skunks I don't know a skunk when I sees it.'"

"I grew up in central Illinois midway between Chicago and St. Louis and I made an historic blunder. All my friends became Cardinals fans and grew up happy and liberal and I became a Cubs fan and grew up embittered and conservative."