Documentary History Of The Illinois And Michigan Canal

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

Excerpt from Documentary History of the Illinois and Michigan Canal: Legislation, Litigation and Titles In 1954, a provision that the canal should never be sold or leased was removed from the Constitution of Illinois, With a View to the sale or disposal of the canal and canal lands. In 1955, the General Assembly directed the Department of Public Works and Buildings to report on problems which affect the proposed sale of Illinois and Michigan Canal lands. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

Merging narration with exhibit-quality photographs—weaving history, nostalgia, and even a touch of romance around good graphic evidence of what the canal has become today—Jim Redd takes us on a highly personal journey down the Illinois and Michigan Canal as it follows the Des Plaines and Illinois rivers from Chicago to La Salle. In order to understand the whole of what the canal means now and what it has meant, Redd looks at and photographs the present, an old ruin of a canal out of use for half of a century. But he also sees the beginning, the time before the glaciers inched south—contemplating the two hundred years when the "ice flowing from the north just balanced the melting loss" when "the moving ice was like a continental conveyer belt, dumping tons of entrained rubble and granite from as far away as the Canadian Shield." He envisions the trappers, travelers, and traders who crossed the terrain—this vast mud lake. He brings back the days when Père Jacques Marquette brought the Jesuit message to the frontier. Redd also tells what the canal did for the region, how it bolstered Chicago from a town of twelve hundred at the time of the 1836 groundbreaking ceremony to a city of seventy-four thousand after six years of operation in 1854. During the peak traffic—from the 1860s through the 1880s—more than five million tons of freight passed through the canal, generating a million dollars in tolls and opening a trade route from the East Coast to the Gulf of Mexico.