IN traveling over the great fertile prairie State of Illinois, and viewing its many railroads, its many beautiful cities and towns, its school houses, its churches, its broad fields of waving grain, its orchards bending under their load of golden fruit, its vast population of industrious and intelligent citizens, its mills, and its factories, one can hardly realize that nearly all of this great improvement has been made in the last sixty years, but such is the case. Sixty years ago these prairies were an unbroken howling wilderness, where the wolf and deer roamed at will and raised their young unmolested, and where the rattlesnake was in his glory. The pioneer had unknowingly blazed the way for what was to come; he did not seem to know that these wild prairies was soon to become the garden spot of the world.