Geography and Industry

Illinois gets its name from the large rolling prairies that cover the state. As with most of the Midwest, there are no mountains to speak of in Illinois. The state is both bordered and affected by a number of large rivers: the Mississippi in the west, the Ohio and Wabash in the southeast, and the Illinois River, the largest river in the state, which runs across Illinois to drain into the Mississippi itself.

Although noted for its large prairies, the state has a number of hardwood forests in various portions of it, including the vast tracts to be found in the Shawnee National Forest. Places like the Cahokia Mounds have remnants of large burial mounds left behind by the ancient Mississippian civilization, too.

Illinois is located close to the geographic center of the country, and as a result, its largest city, Chicago, is the central transportation hub in the United States. Transcontinental flights routinely stop over in Chicago's O'Hare Airport, one of the world's largest. Also, the city has been the eastern endpoint of a number of national railroads for over a century. Freight that gets shipped through Chicago frequently gets shifted from the railroad to a container ship, which in turn can take it out of the Great Lakes, through the St. Lawrence Seaway to parts of the East Coast or overseas markets.

History

Well before the arrival of European explorers in the region, a mound-building Native American civilization known today as the Mississippian culture had a huge presence in what is now Illinois. The ruins of this culture can still be viewed at places such as Cahokia, in the southern part of the state. At one point Cahokia was home to nearly 40,000 people and the site of a large earthen mound that stood 100 feet high and nearly 1,000 feet long. The Mississippian culture declined because of food shortages and warfare sometime between 1250 and 1400 A.D.

After the Mississippian culture fell apart, Algonquian-speaking tribes such as the Winnebago, the Illini, and the Sauk and Fox moved in to the area, living and farming in the state's large river valleys. When the Europeans came, they were initially French and mostly fur traders. In time, they lost the land to the English, who gave up the area to the United States as part of the treaty ending the American Revolution.

As a result of the Black Hawk War of 1832, the U.S. government “removed” the Native Americans living in this area to lands across the Mississippi River. The Illinois country began to rapidly fill up with people interested in farming the region's rich black soil. To this day, Illinois produces huge quantities of crops such as wheat, soybeans, corn, and sorghum, in addition to livestock such as cattle and hogs. Because of its location and the availability of railroads to bring cattle and hogs from rural Illinois and such plains states as Kansas and Nebraska, Chicago also quickly became the center of the meat-packing industry.

After the Civil War, manufacturing in Illinois boomed. Because ironmongers had figured out how to make high-grade steel in large quantities, Chicago quickly got something it hadn't had before: a view! Chicago was the site of a massive explosion of skyscraper building during the decades right before the turn of the nineteenth century.

Because of both its booming manufacturing base and its central location in the United States, Chicago also became the catalog sales capital of the world in the late nineteenth century. Sears, Roebuck & Company (among many other catalog sales businesses) started out as a catalog store based in Chicago. In other words, you could order goods from it to be delivered anywhere that had postal service, but you couldn't go to the store, because there was no store to go to, only a supply center in Chicago.