John Montgomery Roberts

John Montgomery Roberts was born in 1807 in upstate New York. After marrying Mary W. Burhans in 1831, Roberts left his lithography apprenticeship and moved to what is currently southern Illinois to become a farmer. Roberts and his wife kept detailed descriptions of their travels from New York to the Midwest, including encounters with Indigenous people who lived in the region, resisting forced migration. Mary passed away seven years after they settled outside of Bloomington, Illinois. Roberts later married Ann Waters, and the two continued to run the farm for over fifty years. Ann Waters Roberts died in 1883, followed shortly by her husband in 1886.

Stephen A. Frost

Originally manufactured in Italy, Poland, and Czechoslovakia, the blue seed beads (left) were peddled by Stephen A. Frost and his son Daniel to Plains Indian tribes—many of whom were Midwestern tribes until their forcible removal in the early half of the nineteenth century. The more ornate beads (right) were purchased by wealthy non-Native customers. The cards themselves date to about 1870, when company operations were moved to New York. These sample cards are part of a 71-card collection, representing 55 years of trade between Euro-American and Native American peoples.—Illinois State Museum

Mary Sackett

Mary Sackett was born in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1825, the eldest of the living children of Isaac Sackett and his wife Mary Johnson. The family was living in Brooklyn, New York, when Isaac decided to move them to the Midwest, where his sister Abigail and her husband Charles Cleveland were already settled. In 1841 and 1842, a teenage Mary Sackett kept a journal documenting the journey from New York City to Laona, a small town in Winnebago County, Illinois. The United States government had forcibly removed the Meskwaki from the land that the Sacketts settled less than a decade earlier. In 1847, when Mary Sackett was twenty-one, she married Hanson C. Pierson, who died a year later. In 1852, she married Samuel Chapman, with whom she had six children. Little else is known about Sackett’s adult life, and she died at age forty-three in 1869.

Mary Sackett edited this local newspaper that published original stories, poems, editorials, and reports relating to the Pleasant Valley Reading Circle. The group was formed to provide amusement “during the coming winter months.”

Mary Sackett kept a lively, detailed journal when she and her family emigrated from New York to Laona, Winnebago County, Illinois in 1841-1842. Help transcribe Mary's journal!