The word, Illinois, is a French corruption of Leno. The Indians told the early French settlers that they were Leno-Lenapes--we are men--meaning, we are brave or masculine men, in contradistinction to cowardly or effeminate men. To an imperfect pronunciation of the first word, the French added the termination peculiar to their own language--hence Lenois, and ultimately, by a further corruption, Illinois.
It has been often remarked that the topography and climate of Illinois bear a strong analogy to those of some portions of France. In its primeval condition, there was, in its landscape and atmosphere, the spirit of gay and joyous life, and of soft and luxurious repose which distinguish the Gallic Empire. The broad plains were free from the enervating influence of the Tropics, on the one hand, or the stern and rugged landscape features which nurse the restless Norseman, on the other. These may have been among the reasons which tempted the Frenchman, after their existence had been made known by the explorations of his countrymen, to take up his abode along the streams and groves which diversify them. At any rate, French settlements were made immediately in the footsteps of Marquette, La Salle, La Hontag and other explorers, who carried the Holy Cross of the Church and the Fleurs de Lis of France into these wilds, as early as the reign of the Grande Monarque, Louis XIV. in the latter part of the seventeenth century.--Settlements were made at Peoria, Kaskaskia and Cohokia, to which were transferred the arts, customs, manners, faith and costumes of France, at the period, and where they flourished and were conserved, with very little innovation, until the approach of the American Goth--the rude and semi barbaric pioneer. Little jealousy and few feuds appear to have existed between these intruders and the tawny children of the forest and prairie, by whom they were surrounded, and upon whose hunting grounds they were trespassing. The imposing ceremonies of the Catholic faith, and the simple, frank and conciliatory manners of the strangers charmed the senses and soothed the passions of these children of nature. The French rule in America was, in the main, marked by the absence of those terrible and prolonged conflicts which almost always accompanied Anglo Saxon settlement, in which the amenities of civilized, or even barbaric warfare, were entirely ignored, and each party strove to out do the other in acts of revolting atrocity. The stern, cold hauteur, the rude, coarse insolence, and the grasping, insatiable cupidity of the latter inevitably aroused every demon in the Indian breast. The English colonists knew no arts of Indian conciliation. Their tactics were limited to fire water in advance, and the sword in reserve to avenge the acts of madness excited thereby. The race has not degenerated at all, in these respects, since the marauding Saxon scourged the Baltic shores of Britain. In support of this, witness the efforts of England to force an interdicted and demoralizing commerce upon the passive Chinese; witness her success in saddling the spawn of her aristocracy upon the necks of the subjugated Hindoo and Sepoy, compelling the worshippers of both Vishnu, and Mahomet to bow before crosier and mitre; witness the long and cruel oppression of her Celtic neighbors; witness how we, shoots from the same scion, have carried the bible in our hand and the whisky bottle in the other, while in the rear came the rifle of the backwoodsman to enforce all arguments with the untutored savages; witness how volunteers have rallied around the stars and stripes, and pushed the original possessors of the soil backwards, ever backwards, until a new wave comes rolling from the Pacific coast upon his rear; witness the cruel and inglorious wars--if by that name they may be dignified--in Florida and Oregon, excited by mercenary and unscrupulous jobbers for the sake of a chance of plunder from the National treasury; witness the bullying of and final conflict with the mongrel races of poor, decrepit, imbecile Mexico, whereby the auriferous valleys of California and the sterile wastes of New Mexico were wrested from her nerveless grasp; witness the filibustering forays in Central America; and witness the undisguised lusting after the Gem of the Antilles, and the unblushing announcement made at Ostend, by dignified statesmen, claiming, in the nineteenth century, to be Christians, and representing, not cannibal savages or outlawed pirates, but a people who profess to acknowledge the divine injunction, "do unto others as you would that they should do unto you," and to believe that the command, "thou shalt not steal," is as imperative now as it was in the days of the great Jewish law giver.