But to return to the Acadian settlements of the French in Illinois. The manners and customs of the seventeenth century, as before mentioned, were cherished and conserved by these communities, isolated as they were in the heart of a wilderness continent, until the beginning of the nineteenth century. Passing from French to English rule by the treaty of 1763, they finally came under the jurisdiction of the American Confederation by the treaty of 1783. After the treaty of Ghent in 1814 the restless American pioneer began to make encroachments. The contrast between these two representatives of their respective races, thus meeting face to face in the wilderness, was even more marked and decided than between the same races, separated by the English Channel. The Frenchman represented a by-gone age, softened and subdued by the influences of more than a century's sojourn, in aggregated communities, among the quiet, sylvan glades of le belle terre. The American, originally imbued with the heartless and licentious voluptuousness of the Cavaliers of the times of Charles II. or the morose, ascetic manners of the Commonwealth, was in either case, transformed and remoulded, but with many of his original characteristics yet clinging to him, by more than a century's residence upon a wilderness frontier, where "no pent up Utica confined his powers," where the most unbounded freedom of thought and action were enjoyed, where the wants of nature and the requirements of taste were gratified in the rudest, simplest and most primeval manner, and where, surrounded by the stern and gloomy grandeur of forest life, continual conflict with savages and wild beasts had produced characteristics which, transmitted from one generation to another, had culminated in a character original, unique and interesting. The salient points which distinguished him were unhesitating self reliance; reckless and chivalrous daring; imperious and resistless will; cool and imperturbable self possession; spasmodic and startling energy, contrasted with intermittent, if not habitual indolence; strong, masculine sense, undiluted with any poetry, sentiment or superstition; scorning wilds and strategy, but always prepared to circumvent and baffle them; hospitable to friend or stranger, and ever ready to share his wolf or bear skin, his hog and hominy, his tobacco and whisky, with all comers; to his enemies bold and defiant, but generous and forgiving; to his friends faithful and true, deeming desertion of their fortunes, in trouble or danger, the most aggravated of delinquencies; possessed of physical powers of endurance which mocked privation and fatigue; eye, nerve and brain steady and true in all emergencies; migratory in his habits as a Bedouin Arab; ready, at all times, to drink or fight, run or wrestle; unlettered and untutored as the savage who had been his companion or his foe; and uncouth and repulsive in action, manners and habits as the bear with which he had coped in a hand to paw and knife to fangs conflict.