CHAPTER VI. 



BOOXE COUNTY. 



This is, perhaps, the smallest county in the State, comprising only eight 

 townships of land. It is twenty-four miles long from north to south, 

 and twelve miles wide from east to west, and consequently contains 

 only two hundred and eighty-eight square miles. It is situated in the 

 north tier of counties of the State, a little east of the center of the same. 

 Its boundaries are as follows: on the east, McHenry county ; on the 

 south, DeKalb county ; on the west, Winuebago county ; and on the 

 north, the State of Wisconsin. 



Its physical geography is not remarkable, and the general face of its 

 surface not dissimilar to that of neighboring counties. 



The townships of Spring and Flora, and in fact all that part of the 

 county south of the Kishwaukee, may be called a treeless prairie, char- 

 acterized by long, low, undulating rolls, and low ranges of hills and 

 ridges. In some places it is flat, with swales and sloughs of limited 

 extent, between moist marshes and black, fat meadow lands. A few 

 trees skirt along Coon creek in the south-west, and scattered patches of 

 timber in one or two other places relieve the level landscape. A broad, 

 rich, comparatively level Illinois, prairie, these hundred noble sections 

 preserve yet some of that primitive beauty, which gave two townships 

 their names. Before the busy teeming millions of the sons of toil 

 swarmed over the fertile West, prairie flowers, in spring-like beauty 

 and autumnal glory, bloomed, where now the glancing plow-share turns 

 the spring furrow, and the golden-ripened wheat fields dally with the 

 fugitive winds. The purple and golden clouds of flowers, that used to 

 lay on these prairies, are now no more ; but in their place the tasselled 

 Indian corn waves its head, and men are growing rich from the cultiva- 

 tion in useful crops of these old flower-beds of nature. 



But leaving these prairies, the county changes its appearance north 

 of the Kishwaukee. It becomes rougher and more rolling. Although 

 still good for agricultural purposes, the soil becomes thinner and lighter 

 colored. More streams are met with. These are margined with hills to 

 some extent, and hilly ban-ens. Wide stretches of rather light timber 



