Notes on Virginia: the Illinois and a portage

Jefferson describes the Illinois and the two-mile portage to the Chicago river. That route later carried the Illinois and Michigan canal, opened in 1848. He gives widths in yards and distances in miles for river after river. The city of Chicago grew at the point he calls the Chickago.

Where this text comes fromThe Notes were not written as a book. They began as answers to a written questionnaire, arranged by number, and this passage sits inside the query about rivers, which explains why it reads like an inventory rather than a description: Jefferson is working through a list, waterway by waterway, giving each one a width and a distance and moving on. The 1853 reprint linked below preserves that structure, including the abrupt transitions between rivers that a book written from scratch would have smoothed away.

What you might not noticeJefferson calls the Illinois navigable for batteaux to its source, using the French word for the flat river boats of the fur trade rather than any English equivalent. The 1853 reprint keeps the French spelling. Source

What it trainsThirteen digits and eight commas share 462 characters, so the passage alternates between measurement and description without warning. Two words will slow anyone down. Batteaux carries a French plural ending onto an unfamiliar stem, and Chickago is a place name spelled almost, but not quite, like one you already know, which is the worst case for accuracy. Twelve capitals appear, eight of them river and place names inside sentences. Four sentences average twenty words.

Read the full text at the publisher: Wikisource