occasion, having a vivid recollection of it, and having given me a very interesting account of the wedding and the appearance and deportment of the bride and groom and of the French plays new to the guests, introduced by the bride for the amusement of the younger persons present, which created much merriment. She and I are the only persons now living who were present on the occasion.

The young bride very naturally presuming that Mr. Paschall would not wish to adorn the walls of his home with the portraits of General and Mrs. Rachel Edgar, presented them to our family, and they now hang on the walls of the Chicago Historical Society,

I should not omit to mention an event which occurred during the life time of General Edgar that marked an era in the history of the ancient village, no less than a visit from the Marquis de LaFayette in the month of April, 1825. On this occasion he was the guest of General Edgar, and it is said they met as old friends, and it is quite probable that they saw each other frequently at the table of General Washington. Lavasseur says that General Edgar ordered all the doors of his mansion thrown open, that the eager people might feast their eyes on the nation's guest. A great dinner was served in his honor at Sweet's hotel. My aunt, Mrs. Mather, informed me that this hastily improvised entertainment was provided by the patriotic ladies of the town, as well as the floral decorations, which were not unworthy of the occasion. LaFayette came unexpectedly and was unheralded. Our then Governor, Coles, who was with him at St. Louis, there arranged that the boat on which he was going to Nashville, Tennessee, should stop at the Kaskaskia Landing on the Mississippi river. A ball was given at night at the large stone house of Colonel William Morrison, at which Mrs. Mather was present. She drank wine with LaFayette, and in my family are preserved the satin slippers worn by her on this occasion and the white kid gloves stained with wine.

Lavasseur mentions the incident of the visit of the Indian girl whose father fought under LaFayette during the Revolutionary War, and to whom he gave a certificate of his fidelity to the American cause that had been sacredly preserved, and there exhibited and recognized by him. Mrs. Mather remembered the event, and that the girl was known to the people as Mary, the daughter of Chief Louis Du Quoin, for whom DuQuoin, the county town of Perry county, is named. It is worthy of commendation and now the fashion to preserve in our towns and counties the names not only of the great Indian warriors, but as well the French explorers and Jesuit missionaries whose zeal led them. into the wilderness of the Northwest and opened the way to its civilization.

I close this paper with the confession that in its hurried preparation, while collecting the materials for it, down to the last moment, I have. done scant justice to the memory of this eminent man, but submit it asking for it your charitable criticism.

THE ILLINOIS EARTHQUAKE OF 1811 AND 1812.*

By Daniel Berry.

When I came to Southern Illinois in the winter of 1857 and 1858, I found that the old people, with whom I became acquainted, had three very interesting topics to talk about, when I asked them about the early times. To mention these topics according to the order in which the narrators were impressed by them, would be, first:

"When the stars fell," as they expressed it. This occurred in November, 1833. The most impressive incident I heard of, with respect to the falling stars, was told me by Mrs. Wilson, wife of Supreme Judge Wm. Wilson. Tumbling down moons might have frightened that woman, falling stars certainly did not scare her. I have heard her say that she washed her hands and face with the stars, as though they had been snow flakes. She carried her baby out to see the sight and saw the stars fall on the baby's face and wiped them off.

The event of next importance was the "Harraken" as they called it. This was a terrific cyclone that swept over Southern Illinois and Indiana clear into Ohio. It happened on the evening of the 18th day of June, 1815, the day of Waterloo. It left a track of broken, twisted, tangled, fallen timber nearly a mile wide through White county.

The talk about the prime event-the old time earthquake-was mostly traditional. Very few of the narrators were living in Illinois then; in fact, few of them were born before the time of its occurrence. At the time of the "great shakes," as the event was called, the Territory of Illinois did not have five thousand people, not counting the Indians. I have met but two people who had had any personal experience with the earthquake. These were Mr. Yearby Land and his mother. Mr. Land, when I first knew him, was about fifty-seven years old, and his mother was nearly ninety. His father Robert Land came to the Territory from South Carolina, and found a home place in what was then, the northern half of Gallatin county, and his family was one of the only six families in that part of Gallatin, at that time, 1809. The 3d Principal Meridian had just been run. The government survey of the country-where Carmi and Hawthorne Townships now are-had just been done by Arthur Henrie under contract with Jared Mansfield, Surveyor General of the United States. The land office at Shawneetown was not established until 1812.

The latter part of this paper, which dealt with the possibility of a future recurrence of earthquakes, has been omitted, since the subject matter was not strictly historical.

At the time of the earthquake, in November, 1811, Mr. Land was a boy past nine years old; but the happening of that four or five months shaking made an impression on his mind that was clear and bright when he was ninety years old. He said the ground would shake and then rock and roll in long waves. After a short quiet spell, there

would be another shock and roll.

His father had a clearing in the woods and just on the south edge of what is known as Big Prairie. In this woodland, extending southward to the hills on the Little Wabash, were white oak trees of wondrous size. There was rarely any undergrowth. This primeval forest was like a well kept park. I remember those trees.

When I came to White county, nearly all the produce of the country went by flatboat to New Orleans. These flatboats were as long as a tree could be found to make them. The sides, or gunwales, "gunnels, they were called-single pieces of timber two feet or more, deep and six inches thick. Many a tree could be found that would yield a log ninety-five feet long, which would first be hewed into a stick two feet wide and a foot thick, throughout its entire length. This would be split with the old fashioned whip saw, making two "gunnels" ninetyfive feet long, two feet wide and six inches thick.

I mention this timber to give point to Mr. Land's narrative. He said in these long continued rollings, the tall timber would weave their tops together, interlock their branches, then part and fly back the other way, and when they did this "the blossom ends of the limbs would pop like whip lashes; and the ground was covered with broken stuff."

In the prairie, about two miles east of his father's house, a big crack was made in the ground, and you could not see to the bottom of it. The ground on the south of the creek sunk down about two feet. "This crack" was on the land afterward owned by Mr. Jacob Parker on the N. W .Qr. of Sec. 35, T. 5, S. R. 10 E. 3d p. m.

It was well defined when I first saw the place in 1858. Across a field that sloped slightly upward to the north, was a well marked line of uplift of downfall. The lower side to the south. This line extended east and west. It started on some high ground, west of the field, extended eastward through the woodland and was lost in some swamp land further on. It could be traced about two miles. The field was in cultivation for wheat when I first saw it, and the slope of the uplift, or northern side, was about six feet long, as it had been worked down in cultivation.

South and eastward from this farm was a wide extent of low, flat, untimbered land, extending to the Marshall Hills, on the Big Wabash, eastward, and nearly to the Little Wabash southward. In those days this land was not overflowed by the Big Wabash. It was covered by a verdurous growth of grasses and was a splendid summer and winter range, or pasture for horses, cattle and swine.

There were many square miles of this level plain, and over it, in the earthquake time, piles and piles of pure, snow white sand were heaved up. In the words of Uncle Yearby Land, as we called him, these piles "were from the size of a bee-gum to three or four wagon loads."

To understand this, you will have to know what a "bee-gum" was. It was a section about twenty inches long, cut from a hollow gum log about fourteen or eighteen inches in diameter. It was placed, with many others of its kind, open end down on a raised platform of split logs. The top end was closed in with riven clapboards weighted down with stones; or pinned down with wooden pegs. In these, vast swarms of bees, unvexed by moth or other enemy of civilization, stored their honey, which was a splendid substitute for the sugar and molasses of later times.

This sand was so white and clean that, in the words of Mr. Land, "it would not stain or soil the whitest linen." These piles of sand showed us evidence of water. The sand remained in piles until washed down by succeeding rains.

In this shaking and rolling of the earth, from November until the following March, no buildings were damaged and only one person hurt. In reply to my inquiry of old Mrs. Land, the widow of Mr. Robert Land, as to personal injury of the people, she "minded" of only one. "That was a Williams girl, who had her feet badly burned by a skillet lid, loaded with hot embers, tumbling off the skillet and pouring the live coals on her bare feet. She was burnt scan'al-us." I asked about the houses; if they did not fall down. "I never heard of any that was hurt," replied Mr. Land. It took me a long time to make these contradictory stories of the instability of the ground and the stability of the houses fit each other.

It appears simple enough when we understand the sort of houses they were mere pens about fifteen feet square and seven feet high, built of small logs, that one or two men could handle. The pen was built up in such fashion that the logs were fitted in dove-tailed joints at the corners. The gable ends were raised in the same fashion, except that each log was held in place by a "long log" that was to support the roof. These "long logs" were long enough to project over the end of the cabin, so as to have the stick and mud chimney under the roof. To cover the cabin, riven clapboards, long enough to "reach and lap" from one log to another, were laid double, so as to "break jints," and held in place by weight poles placed directly over and parallel with the "long logs." The weight poles were also long enough to reach beyond the clapboards, so as to be tied down to the "long logs" with hickory withes.

When the cabin was so raised and kivered, an opening was made on one side for a door and in one end for a "chimbley," as a chimney was called then. This opening was about six feet wide; and in it was built, on the ground, a six feet square pen, about a foot deep, one-half in the cabin for the hearth, the other half outside for the base of the chimney. This pen was filled with wet clay, pounded down hard. The chimney was built up with a network of split white oak sticks and clay. The sticks lapped at the corners, and as it was built up the sticks were forced down into the soft mortar-like clay and another layer of clay placed upon them, the layers not being more than two inches apart. The walls of the chimney were more than a foot thick. The over-hang of the cabin roof protected the chimney from the weather. The floor of the cabin was of split logs, called puncheons.