248 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts , and Letters. 
and of a coal road in western Illinois, 1 bnt if such existed at all 
they were no part of any continuous organic life. How rapidly 
these roads might have developed under the enthusiastic guid¬ 
ance of youthful promoters and complaisant legislatures cannot 
he said with certainty, since the financial storm, which had been 
brewing ever since General Jackson began to utter executive 
inenaces against the Bank, broke upon the United States in the 
spring of 1837, to depress the whole country and check the de¬ 
velopment of the West. As active agencies in transportation, 
railways did not exist in the Oid Horthwest until the Mexican 
war was over. The lines undertaken between 1835 and 1847 
are to be regarded as pioneer enterprises conceived in poverty 
1 Gov. Reynolds claimed to have helped to build six miles of wooden 
railway from his coal mine to the Mississippi opposite St. Louis, in 
1837. Reynolds, J., My own Times, (Illinois, 1855), 503; Tanner, H. S., 
Descr. of the Canals and Railroads of the U. S., (New York, 1840), 
197; Hist, of St. Clair Co., Illinois, (Phila., Brink, McDonough and 
Co., 1881), 32. 
