S M Tolley

The Comet and the Steamboat S M Tolley

On November 6, 1812, the Shawneetown militia was responsible for the looting and burning of French Peoria - a fact that (like the War of 1812 itself) receives no mention in the earliest surviving "official" history of Gallatin County. Rather, Goodspeed's History of Gallatin, Saline, Hamilton, Franklin and Williamson Counties, Illinois (1887) chooses to depict the entire citizenry of Shawneetown of the same era as Godless, superstitious fools, too stupid to recognize the difference between a comet and a steamboat. Why? Better yet, how did this depiction of early Shawneetown become at all preferable to the truth, and what does it tell us about the evolution of social dynamics in the oldest American community in Illinois?