overflowed land. Although the water was cold, into it they plunged, their
gallant leader in front; and until the evening of the 22d they saw no dry
land, except an occasional half-acre or so barely peeping above the flood
of waters and furnishing a meagre resting-place. It can hardly be said they
rested, for on several occasions they had to remain standing throughout the
night, or were compelled to walk about to keep from freezing. When they
came to a river that had overflowed its banks and was too deep to ford,
they made canoes and rafts and floated over.
Always they found the water covered with a thin coating of ice in the
morning, and through the ice and water they forced their way. When the
water was deep the sergeant carried the drummer boy on his shoulders, and
from that perch he beat his charge. Sometimes the water was only knee-deep;
sometimes it reached the middle and often to the shoulders; but not one of
the men thought of turning back. The boat with provisions that had been
sent around by water failed to connect and to their other discomforts
hunger was added.
On the morning of the 21st they came within sound of the morning gun at
Fort Sackville, but it required two more days of wandering without
provisions before they could cross the Wabash River. At last they
captured some Indians and with them the half of a buffalo rump, which they
made into a broth. On the 23d they arrived at the heights back of the town,
and for the first time since their departure had an opportunity to dry
their clothing. Clark sent a letter to the French inhabitants of the town,
telling them of his presence, but warning them not to give any information
to Hamilton. The news caused the greatest excitement; the French ran about
the streets telling it with joy, for Hamilton had won their hatred. They
sent out provisions to the hungry Americans, who that night marched into
the town and by opening fire on the fort gave the first intimation to
Hamilton and the garrison of the presence of an enemy. The firing was
continued until about nine o'clock the next morning, when a surrender was
demanded, accompanied by a threat that if the place had to be taken by
storm the officers would be treated as murderers. A parley ensued, followed
after a few hours by the surrender of the fort, and once more the American
flag floated over Fort Sackville, which was then renamed Fort Patrick
Henry.
Hamilton and the other officers were sent to Williamsburg, Va., where they
were held in custody for a year or two. From papers found in the fort,
Clark learned that reinforcements, bringing supplies and stores, were on
the way, and at once sent a part of his little force to intercept and
capture the reinforcements, which was promptly done.[9]
Vincennes was now the most important place in the Illinois country. When
Colonel John Todd was appointed Lieutenant for the County of Illinois, he
made Colonel Legrace his deputy for Vincennes, who established the first
court the place ever had. Virginia ceded the territory to the United
States, and by the Ordinance of 1787 a civil government was set up,
Governor St. Clair sending Winthrop Sargent to assume direct jurisdiction
at Vincennes. The French inhabitants were finally permitted to hold the
lands to which they could show title, while all the rest were taken by the
Government.
Clark added an empire to the domain of the colonies, made possible the
Louisiana Purchase and the future extension of the country to the Pacific,
and then in his extreme old age Virginia sent him only a sword when he
asked for repayment of what he had disbursed for the country.
In 1800 Indiana Territory was established with Vincennes as its capital.
The jurisdiction of the Territory then included what are now the States of
Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin, and a part of Minnesota, and to
this was afterward added for a short time the whole of the Louisiana
Purchase.
On the 4th of July, 1800, the government of Indiana Territory was formally
organized. The Governor, William Henry Harrison, was, however, not present.
General John Gibson, who represented him, was one of the Revolutionary
heroes. He had married a sister of Logan, the celebrated Mingo chief, and
it was to his brother that Logan made his famous speech. On his arrival,
Governor Harrison began the work of trading the Indians out of their lands.
He made one treaty after another, until more than one half of the present
Indiana, together with a good part of Illinois, was ceded. He erected the
first brick house in all that section, perhaps the first west of the
Alleghanies, in its day a structure so magnificent as to be called the
"Governor's Palace." It is still standing, and near it the tree under which
the Governor held his historic interview with Tecumseh, when the Indian
chief planned the Governor's death.
[Illustration WILLIAM HENRY HARRISON.]
[Illustration ST. XAVIER'S CHURCH, 1779.]
In 1813 the territorial capital was removed to Corydon, and the political
importance of Vincennes ceased. Already a university had been established,
Congress giving to it a township of land, and the beginning was made for
what is now one of the most valuable libraries in the West. The first
church in the Northwest Territory was built in Vincennes about 1742, under
the rectorship of Father Meurin, who had come from France to care for the
spiritual wants of the settlers. In 1793 M. Rivet, a French priest, driven
from his native country by the terrors of the Revolution, arrived at
Vincennes and opened the first school taught in Indiana.
The Vincennes of to-day is a thriving, bustling city of ten thousand
inhabitants. It has modern schools and modern churches, modern ideas and
modern progressiveness. As a city it has had its ups and downs since it
lost political prestige, but for some years it has steadily grown, until
now it is classed as one of the beautiful cities of the State. Surrounded
by a magnificent agricultural section, and with many manufacturing
interests, it threw off long ago the old French habits and customs and took
on a progressive spirit, which promises a bright future.
Vincennes has had a glorious past; it occupies a unique place among the
historic towns of the country. Boston may have been the cradle of American
independence; Philadelphia the place where that liberty was first
announced; but after all Boston gave to the Union only Massachusetts, and
Philadelphia only Pennsylvania. Vincennes gave us Indiana, Ohio, Illinois,
Michigan, and Wisconsin, the great Middle West. But for the genius and
perseverance of George Rogers Clark, when independence came the United
Colonies would have stopped at the Alleghanies. The capture of Vincennes
spread the jurisdiction of the colonies to the Mississippi, carrying with
it American liberty, American progress, American ideas. More than this, it
made possible the Louisiana Purchase, which in turn opened the way to the
annexation of Texas, the securing of California and the Pacific coast, and
the later acquisition of Hawaii and the Philippines. The capture of
Vincennes carried American liberty to a domain stretching from the
Alleghany Mountains to the Pacific Ocean, yea even to the Orient--a domain
which else would still be British or Spanish.
It was Indiana, of which Vincennes was the chief part, that stopped the
extension of slavery at the Ohio River, and made all the Northwest free
territory. It was at Vincennes that Aaron Burr received his first decided
check in his great scheme to dismember the Union. It was Benjamin Parke, a
citizen of Vincennes, who placed in the first constitution of the State the
clause making it obligatory on the Legislature to provide for the care and
treatment of the insane, the first provision of the kind made by any
civilized government, a provision which has revolutionized the treatment of
the insane throughout the world. Such is the story of Vincennes, no
frontier town like Albany or Pittsburg, for when its history began
Vincennes was hundreds of miles out in the wilderness beyond the frontier
line, and was still hundreds of miles beyond when the great event occurred
which changed it from a French settlement under the jurisdiction of Great
Britain into the chief seat of American power west of the Alleghanies.
[Illustration]
FOOTNOTES:
[8] La Salle, in drawing his maps, made the Ouabache to empty into the
Mississippi at Cairo, According to him the Oyo (Ohio) was a tributary of
the Ouabache. About 1702, one, M. Juchereau, sent to establish a post for
the protection of the traders in peltries, reported that he had established
a post about forty leagues above the mouth of the Ouabache. Some writers
have taken that to mean Vincennes, and it is so recorded in some of the
encyclopædias, but his post was on what is now called the Ohio, and not on
the Wabash.
[9] Clark began at once to organize an expedition against Detroit, but it
never started. Francis Vigo, who had let Clark have provisions and money
for his expedition against Vincennes, aided in like manner in fitting out
the new expedition, lending money to the amount of $8616, for which Clark
gave him an order on Virginia. The order was never honored, and an appeal
was made to Congress. Finally, in 1872, nearly a century after the debt was
contracted, and nearly thirty-seven years after Vigo had died in extreme
poverty, Congress referred the matter to the Court of Claims, which four
years later allowed the claim, together with more than $41,000 in
interest.
[Illustration]
CHICAGO
LARGE IN EVERY WAY
BY LYMAN J. GAGE
The plotting of the site of Chicago was characteristic of the practical
sentiment that has ever stimulated the city. No less a personage than
Washington established the streets and boundaries of the national capital;
religious romance presided at the founding of San Francisco; interesting
legends cluster about the origin of other American communities; and in the
old world demigods were supposed to have watched over the beginnings of
ancient cities. Chicago, though neither hero nor fabled deity was present
when its foundations were laid, had a start none the less imposing, for the
genius of industry and trade fixed its metes and bounds. And in the growth
of the city into perhaps the industrial capital of the continent there has
been presented a supreme expression of that resourceful and triumphant
ingenuity which has redeemed the American wilderness. The desolation upon
which the plodding engineer planted his theodolite three-score-and-ten
years ago is a colossal hive of human activity. A marsh has become a
metropolis.
The promoters of the Illinois and Michigan Canal were not the first to see
the possibility of water communication via the present site of Chicago
between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River.
In 1673, Joliet wrote to the authorities in Canada that by the cutting of
a canal through half a league of prairie it would be possible for boats to
"pass from the Lake of Illinois into the St. Louis River [the Illinois
including the Desplaines] which empties into the Mississippi." One hundred
years before our Republic was conceived, a mathematician, but no mere
_visionnaire_, the son of a wheelwright of Quebec, realized that the
"Portage of Checagau" was the meeting-place of the future traffic between
the chain of inland seas and the rivers flowing toward the Mexican Gulf.
It is plain that nature located Chicago. The meeting-point between
unparalleled watercourses could not but be a place for the distribution of
commodities. To the north, awaiting the woodman, were the lumber regions of
Michigan and Wisconsin; south and west and east stretched the prairie, to
be developed into farms; in Illinois alone, thirty thousand square miles of
coal fields were to be uncovered, while Pennsylvania's inexhaustible supply
was to find a vast market at this centre of lake shipping; and the iron,
red-stone, and copper regions of Lake Superior were to pile their output on
Chicago docks. The natural meeting-place of grain, lumber, fuel, and iron
would have become a city of commerce and manufactures, even if steam
railroads and navigation had not come to assist in the unique development
of this _entrepôt_, by making it the half-way house for transcontinental
traffic. But though nature, as the Rev. Robert Collyer has said, "called
the lakes, the forest, the prairies together in convention, and they
decided that on this spot a great city should be built," Chicago has been
singularly blessed in the alert and enterprising genius of her citizens.
Her business men have worked with catholic outlook, knowing that what
upbuilt the city in general would augment their individual projects.
The city has never been, even in its aboriginal beginnings, an
abiding-place for visionaries. The Minneways were a picturesque tribe.
Their chiefs assumed poetic names, and the young men cherished the
traditions of their people; but the tribe did not take advantage of its
strategic opportunities. Checagau to them was not a coign of vantage
between great waters. At the shore of a vast lake, or the brink of a broad
river, their dominion halted, for they were not navigators. In their
dialect, "Checagau" meant "wild onion." As if to typify the force that was
to dominate their region in later centuries, the Checagau country fell to
the conquering "canoe men," the adventurous Pottawatomies, the Chippewas,
the Sacs, and kindred tribes who, unafraid to venture on the water, turned
to trade, exchanging furs and pelts with the French pioneers for food,
blankets, and ornamental trinkets. They became the masters of the lake
country, and the broken remnant of the uncommercial tribe fled to the
Wabash, there to wail their plaintive songs.[10]
Meanwhile the conquering tribesmen, whose canoes paddled up the Mississippi
and the Illinois to the "Checagau Portage," to barter with Canadian
_voyageurs_, or glided thence across the Lakes, touching at the outposts of
colonizers and missionary friars, were prefiguring the gigantic activities
of civilized men who in a later age were to radiate from this same coveted
point of distribution. But as they had won their Checagau country by might,
and established their holdings by commercial enterprise, so they resisted
the coming of their European rivals and masters. Although as early as
1795, by the treaty of Greenville, they ceded much domain to our country,
including "one piece of land six miles square, at the mouth of the Checagau
River," the intrigue of the powerful Tecumseh and his brother, the Prophet,
led the tribes to disregard these and subsequent treaty stipulations. So
that when, on the same day that saw the capitulation of Detroit, Fort
Dearborn was burned and its garrison massacred,
"the last vestige," says Henry Adams, "of American authority on
the western lakes disappeared. Thenceforward the line of the
Wabash and the Maumee became the military boundary of the
United States in the northwest, and the country felt painful
doubt whether even that line could be defended."
For four years the unburied bones of the Fort Dearborn victims lay where
the bodies had fallen. Then came peace, Christian interment of these
pathetic human fragments, and a reorganization of the valuable fur trade of
the region. The spot again became the centre of this industry. Trading
posts were re-established on the Illinois River and the Kankakee with the
Pottawatomies of the prairies; at Rock River with the Winnebagoes; at
Milwaukee with the Menomonies, and at Le Large with the Kickapoos. Trains
of pack horses carried the furs and peltries to Chicago, and in the spring
vessels touching at that port bore these valuable cargoes to Mackinac,
where the American Fur Company, organized by John Jacob Astor, had
established its headquarters.
[Illustration THE DEARBORN MONUMENT.]
In 1821, Governor Lewis Cass of Michigan Territory and Solomon Sibley, with
Henry R. Schoolcraft as their secretary, representing the United States,
met three thousand Indian braves at Chicago. Topinebee and Meeta were
spokesmen for the tribes. In consideration of five thousand dollars, to be
paid annually for five years, the Pottawatomies and other tribes ceded to
this Government 5,000,000 acres of land lying in Michigan and Illinois. The
marvellous real estate transactions subsequently negotiated in Chicago,
whereby citizens have multiplied their millions, have not eclipsed this
profitable investment of the Federal Government in 1821.
Although some minds foresaw a possible future for Chicago in this centre of
a rich domain owned by the Republic, there was no rush to the spot. In
1823, the officials of Fulton County, of which the village was then a part,
levied a tax of five mills to the dollar upon property in the new port,
with the result that there was carried back to the county treasury the sum
of $11.42. Surely a small beginning to lead to taxes in 1900 amounting to
$19,086,408.36. In 1823, when the sum of $11.42 was the aggregate of taxes
collected from Chicago, the total assessed value of property was $2284. In
1900, the actual valuation of Chicago property was fairly $2,000,000,000.
No one, perhaps, of the few settlers who drifted to the place dreamed of
such mighty possibilities, yet as early as 1831 the future of the city was
a chosen topic of conversation among those enthusiastic pioneers. One of
these, Dr. Elijah D. Harmon, true to his baptismal name, was singularly
prophetic. He located in Chicago in 1831, acquired a section of land, built
a sod fence about it, and there planted fruit trees of all descriptions.
Mrs. Kinzie states that the south path to the settlement led by Dr.
Harmon's nursery, and that as people passed he sought to impress upon them
"the certain future importance of Chicago."
In 1830, lots were being sold at prices ranging from $10 to $50. In that
year Thomas Hartzell purchased eighty acres (being the west half of the
northeast quarter section) for $1.55 an acre. Low as these prices were,
they were an advance upon valuations a few years before. In the archives
of the Chicago Historical Society is a letter written to John Wentworth by
Father St. Cyr, recounting how one Bonhomme sold the north half of Chicago
to Pierre Ménard for $50, but that the latter, finding land cheaper near
Peoria, and more fertile, repented of his bargain, and hurrying back
unloaded what he believed to be a poor investment upon John Kinzie, who was
not unwilling to take the property at the same figure at which Ménard had
purchased it. By 1835, values had so increased that the investment had made
Mr. Kinzie rich.
The belief which soon began to take possession of the minds of white men,
that the little settlement was to be a city set in the midst of a new
empire of civilization, had also aroused the celebrated Indian, Black Hawk.
He was convinced that, unless the tribes could be federated into compact
opposition to their conquering enemies, the hunting-grounds of his people
would speedily be converted into the homes and cities of the paleface.
Emulating the career of Tecumseh, Black Hawk in 1832 addressed a grand
council, attended by representatives of fifty tribes. "Let all our tribes
unite," said he, "and we shall have an army of warriors equal in numbers to
the trees of the forest." The appeal was eloquent and moving, but
Shawbonee, who had been with Tecumseh when that leader fell at the battle
of the Thames, answered Black Hawk. "Your army," he cried, "would equal in
number the trees of the forest, and you would encounter an army of
palefaces as numerous as the leaves of those trees." The arguments of
Shawbonee prevailed, the native attempt at coalition was defeated, and
henceforward the activities of the white races in peopling the valley of
the Mississippi and building to the northward, on the shore of Lake
Michigan, its great metropolis, proceeded without any one to molest or make
afraid. Thus Shawbonee (whose name is variously spelled), in successfully
opposing the red men's far-reaching conspiracy, assisted materially in
advancing the interests of Chicago. In token of this service, the
Historical Society has given his portrait a place of honor, and has
preserved the record of his deeds.
[Illustration THE UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT BUILDING, CHICAGO.]
Late in July, 1833, three years after the canal surveyor, James Thompson,
had surveyed and mapped out the town which was to be, a public meeting was
held to decide whether incorporation should be effected. There were twelve
votes in favor of incorporation, and one against, and the place made its
start among historic towns. A few days later the following election notice
was posted:
"Publick notice is hereby given that an election will be holden
at the house of Mark Beaubien, on Saturday, the 10th day of
August, at 11 o'clock in the forenoon of that day, for the
purpose of choosing five trustees of the Town of Chicago."
"CHICAGO, August 5, 1833.
"E.S. KIMBERLY, Town Clerk.
"N.B. The poll will close at one o'clock."
On the appointed day, twenty-eight electors, the full number of citizens
entitled to suffrage in the new town, found their way to Mark Beaubien's
house and availed themselves of the privilege of freemen. Thirteen of them
announced their willingness to shoulder the responsibilities of office. The
first business transacted by the trustees was the establishment of a free
ferry across the river at Dearborn Street; the second, the reconstruction
of the "estray pen" into a solid and sufficiently commodious log jail.
These two programmes--the extension of commercial facilities and the stern
suppression of lawlessness--have ever since been conspicuous in the city's
history.
Then the town was born. Its development into a municipal Titan is one of
the marvels of history. In 1830, P.F.W. Peck arrived on a schooner,
bringing with him a small stock of goods. "He built," says Mr. Colbert, "a
small log store near the fort, which made an important addition to the
trade of Chicago." In the year 1900, just seventy years later, the amount
of wholesale goods distributed from this centre throughout the country
amounted to $741,000,000, the volume of drygoods alone being $143,000,000;
groceries, $99,000,000; clothing, $35,000,000; shoes, $58,500,000; books
and paper, $70,000,000, and other items in proportion; while the
manufactured products sent forth aggregated in value $786,000,000, and the
total business of the city reached the high figure of $1,963,000,000. The
year that concluded the nineteenth century recorded transfers of real
estate amounting in round numbers to $87,000,000, in striking contrast to
that early transaction wherein Chicago's first investor repented him of
paying $50 for the northern half of the city.
But the little town was not to achieve great things without a struggle.
Fire, flood, panic, and pestilence had first to be faced and fought. The
small band in the incorporated town started out determined to develop the
settlement into a city, notwithstanding the dismal prophecies of certain
learned men that a city would never rise on this unpropitious swamp.
Professor William H. Keating, geologist and historiographer, had furnished
the pioneer townsmen with the melancholy message:
[Illustration AUDITORIUM HOTEL, CHICAGO.]
"The dangers attending the navigation of the lake, and the
scarcity of harbors along the shore, must ever prove an
obstacle to the increase of the commercial importance of
Chicago. The extent of the sand banks which are formed on the
eastern and southern shore by the prevailing north and
northwesterly winds will likewise prevent any important works
from being undertaken to improve the port of Chicago."