Sugar Creek: Life On The Illinois Prairie

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Sugar Creek: Life on the Illinois Prairie John Mack Faragher’s book, Sugar Creek: Life on the Illinois Prairie, was written in 1986. The book brings a great picture about the lives of people who lived in Illinois in 1800s. In it, Faragher examined the development of the Sugar Creek area of Sangamon County, Illinois from 1817 through the 1880s. Faragher began his project on Sugar Creek in order to understand more about early nineteenth-century Americans who lived in the Midwest and the change of life of people in the particular area of the Illinois Prairie. As Professor Don H.Doyle says on the book that: “This is the story of birth and development of a rural American community, from its origins at the turn of the nineteenth century to the years that followed the Civil War. It vividly portrays the sights and sounds of the prairie, the lives of the Indians and pioneers, the relations between farming men and women, and the ways the settlers adjusted to the advent of railroads and commercial agriculture.” Faragher divided Sugar Creek: Life on the Illinois Prairie into five sections. The “Howling Wilderness” examines the dispossession of the Algonquian speaking Indians and settlement of Anglo-Americans on the frontier. “The Country of Plenty to Eat” focuses on the creation of a distinctive rural landscape in Illinois. Social relationships between men and women were discussed in “Lords of the Soil, Tenants of the Hearth” and the community life in the west and the transition to commercial agriculture were described in “All is Changed.” Faragher used the narrative of Robert Pulliam, who was born in Virginia and migrated to Illinois with his parents before settling on Sugar Creek. From talking about the John Pulliam, Robert Pulliam’s father, the book also tells a fact at that time in Illinois that no one could own their own land even they spent all their life to work on
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