April 5, 1823, a party of forty-three started from Cincinnati in a keel-boat, arriving at Galena, June 1, 1823. Twenty-two days were required to stem the flooded Mississippi from the mouth of the Ohio to St. Louis, and twenty of these were rainy days.(392) In 1822 the English settlement in Edwards county sent several flat-boats loaded with corn, flour, beef, pork, sausage, etc., to New Orleans.(393) Improvement of the Wabash was entrusted to an incorporated company in 1825, and several years earlier a canal across the peninsula at the junction of the Ohio and the Mississippi was contemplated.(394)
Many immigrants came overland. The following is typical: "In the year 1819 a party of six men, and families of three of them, started from Casey County, Kentucky, for Illinois.... The first three were young unmarried men, the last three had their wives and children with them. They came in an old-fashioned Tennessee wagon, that resembled a flat-boat on wheels. The younger readers of this sketch can form but a faint idea of the curious and awkward appearance of one of these old fashioned wagons, covered over with white sheeting, the front and rear bows set at an angle of forty-five degrees to correspond with the ends of the body, and then the enormous quantity of freight that could be stowed away in the hole would astonish even a modern omnibus driver! Women, children, beds, buckets, tubs, old fashioned chairs, including all the household furniture usually used by our log-cabin ancestors; a chicken coop, with 'two or three hens and a jolly rooster for a start,' tied on behind, while, under the wagon, trotted a full-blood, long-eared hound, fastened by a short rope to the hind axle. Without much effort on your part, you can, in imagination, see this party on the road, one of the men in the saddle on the near horse, driving; the other two, perhaps on horseback, slowly plodding along in the rear of the wagon, while the boys 'walked ahead,' with rifles on their shoulders 'at half-mast,' on the lookout for squirrels, turkey, deer, or '_Injin_.' "(395) Muddy roads sometimes caused emigrants to make long detours in the hope of finding better ones, and if the roads became impassable water transportation might be resorted to when the locality permitted.(396) The fear of breaking down was omnipresent and danger from professional bandits(397) was not lacking. There was also danger of being lost on the enormous prairies in Illinois.(398)