Americans began to settle in southern Illinois as early as 1778, and land companies quickly formed to promote the benefits of homesteading there. The Kickapoo, allied with the Shawnees and the Miamis, proposed a militant Algonquian resistance to the American settler, "that great land animal," comparing a white settlement to a drop of raccoon's grease fallen on a new blanket: at first scarcely visible, in time the stain grows to cover every inch. (27)
Sugar Creek: Life on the Illinois Prairie (1986)
John Mack Faragher
