as the benefits of the Illinois and Michigan Canal linking northern to central and southern Illinois outweighed secession. In 1861, the southern region of Illinois, known as Little Egypt, proposed secession due to cultural and political differences from Chicago and much of Central and Northern Illinois. In 1925, Cook County considered secession to create the state of Chicago. In the early 1970s, residents in western Illinois were upset over the allocation of state funds for transportation, prompting a student at Western Illinois University to declare 16 counties the Republic of Forgottonia. Although the declaration was meant to be a joke, the secession idea was picked up by the Western Illinois Regional Council, until State Representative Doug Kane showed that the counties had received funding that was more than what they paid in state taxes. In November 2011, State Representatives Bill Mitchell and Adam Brown introduced a proposal to make Cook County a state of its own. They felt that all of Illinois outside of Cook County should become a separate state, due to Chicago's "dictating its views" to the rest of the state. On February 7, 2019, State Representative Brad Halbrook, with co-sponsors Representatives Chris Miller and Darren Bailey, filed a resolution that urges the United States Congress to declare the City of Chicago the 51st state of the United States of America and separate it from the rest of Illinois. Kansas In 1992, a group in southwestern Kansas advocated the secession of a number of counties in that region from the state. Nominally headed by Don O. Concannon, former Chairman of the Kansas Republican Party and gubernatorial candidate from Hugoton, the group gave the new state the name "West Kansas", a state bird (pheasant), and a state flower (yucca). The proposal was in reaction to laws raising real estate taxes, and shifting state education funding away from rural school districts and into more urban areas. Though organizers arranged for a series of straw polls that demonstrated widespread support for secession in nine counties, the movement died out by the mid-1990s. Maine Maine was initially part of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts before being admitted to the Union as a state in 1820. However, its boundary with British North America (now Canada) had been in dispute for several decades. In 1827, John Baker unilaterally declared the disputed territory (now part of Aroostook County) to be the "Republic of Madawaska". The declaration