A German in Illinois

Spring 1819. Ferdinand Ernst, an agriculturalist from Hanover, sails from Bremen aboard the Plato with one fixed idea: to find, in the heart of the United States, land on which to found a colony of his countrymen. Eighty days at sea, icebergs, then Baltimore and its Germans.

So begins a crossing of the continent by stagecoach, on horseback and by boat. Ernst crosses the Alleghenies, stops before a spring that burns, rides through the forests of Ohio, and meets Quakers, Swiss winegrowers and George Rapp's mysterious community of Harmonists. In Washington, John Quincy Adams receives him; at Kaskaskia, the first governor of Illinois. Everywhere he looks with a shrewd farmer's eye: the quality of the soil, the price of land, the health of the settlers, what an emigrant without means can hope for.

Horseflies, mosquitoes, fevers, a broken axle, prairie fires, snakes: the West gives nothing away. But at Vandalia, a capital still made of stumps and stakes, Ernst builds a log cabin and sets out to explore the Sangamon, the "wonderful country" of his dreams. Then the Mississippi carries him south, among sunken tree trunks, to Natchez and New Orleans.

Published in Hildesheim in 1820, and known in English only through a partial translation of its Illinois chapters, this account captures Illinois at the very moment of its birth. Did Ernst find the promised land he was looking for?