Fordham's Personal Narrative, 1817-1818

Explosive growth in settlement took place in the Northwest Territory following the end of the War of 1812. Settlers came from the American seaboard and from Europe, especially England, which lost many of its middle-class farmers and artisans. One such settlement was the agricultural colony called the English Prairie, in southeastern Illinois in what is now Edwards County. Among its first settlers was a young engineer, Elias Pym Fordham, who kept journals which he sent back to England with his letters to his family. Those writings are here collected into a fascinating description of frontier life in the new republic. As the editor states in the introduction, Fordham describes "the land and people of Virginia, a voyage up the Chesapeake, a trip on the Pennsylvania Road from Baltimore to Pittsburg, the people of western Pennsylvania, the city of Pittsburg, the descent of the Ohio to Cincinnati by flat-boat, the land and people of southern Indiana, establishing the settlement at English Prairie, hardships of the first winter, the surveying and entering of public land, prices, wages, and labor in the West, the classes of people on the frontiers, a trip through Kentucky to Cincinnati, the Rappite settlement at New Harmony, and prospects for English emigrants in the American interior." An index to full-names, places and subjects augments the narrative.