he plunged into the deep water, but held her head above the waves. This was the friendly Black Partridge, who thus preserved her life by feigning to destroy it. One of the wagons in the rear contained twelve children, and these were all slaughtered by a single savage.

When but twenty-six soldiers were left to confront five hundred warriors, the commander surrendered, stipulating that the women and children should be spared. Fifty-six whites had been killed; and the Indians destroyed the fort and barracks by fire. In 1816 white men once once more sought the site of Chicago, and Fort Dearborn was. rebuilt and garrisoned. In 1823 the civilian population was augmented by the arrival of Clybourne, who rode thither on horseback, a thousand miles, from Virginia. In 1827 there were two other families living outside the fort-the indomitable John Kinzie and his competitor, the French trader Oulimette. The fortifications were inconsiderable, and consisted mainly of a block-house near the mouth of the river. As late as the year 1857 this venerable defence was still standing, weather-beaten and ruinous, but worthy to have been preserved as an eloquent historical relic. On several occasions it had served as a city of refuge during the terrors of the border-wars; and the Government agency continued in its walls for many years. From 1832 until 1836 it was garrisoned by two companies of infantry under Winfield Scott, afterwards the conqueror of Mexico and commander-in-chief of the American armies. The Agency building proper-a grotesque group of log-buildings, with many angles and wings-was entitled Cobweb Castle by the imaginative pioneers. At that time the North Side was covered with a vigorous forest, while the South Side lay partly under water and morasses.

An active and prominent citizen, Mr. Gurdon S. Hubbard, found but two families. living here when his first visit was made (he then being a lad of sixteen) in the year 1818. He was an employé of the American Fur Company, sent out from Montreal, and detailed to service in the Illinois brigade of traders, over whom the Canadian voyageur, Antoine Dechamps, held command. Cautiously and slowly the little flotilla of Mackinaw boats coasted the shores of the Great Lakes, as the early merchants were wont to do, passing hundreds of leagues of desolate and uninhabited lands. They found a few whites at Mackinaw and Chicago, but nowhere any others, from Lake Ontario to the Mississippi River.

By the year 1830 Chicago had made no advance, and was still composed of a military post and a fur-station-the former a log-fort, garrisoned by two companies of regulars, the latter composed of two shops, filled with trinkets for barbarian traders ;-three taverns, where the Indians who brought furs spent their earnings in drunkenness; a blacksmith's shop, where rude work was done; a house for the interpreter; and a shanty for the chiefs. of the visiting tribes. John Jacob Astor's little schooner made a yearly voyage to the post to carry away the accumulated furs.

The fort was menaced by the Winnebago Indians in 1828, and reinforcements were hurried in from the eastward. But four years later the garrison evacuated the works, and their barracks were occupied by immigrant families. At one time, more than four thousand Indians gathered here to receive their annuities; and soon afterwards, during the disastrous war waged by the chief Black Hawk against the frontier settlements, Fort Dearborn was crowded with many hundreds of refugees from the devastated country beyond. The powerful

tribe of Indians who had always lived near the fort assumed a menacing attitude, and it was only by the most skilful diplomacy that the Government agent held them under control. A year or two later, when there were still but twenty-eight men living in the hamlet, seven thousand Pottawatomie Indians, of the tribe which from time immemorial had owned and dwelt on these plains, were convened here, and executed a treaty with

the agent of the United States, ceding to the National Government all their domains in Illinois and Wisconsin, amounting to twenty million acres. But the red men did not yield up their birthright quite willingly, and several chiefs, notably the brilliant young Metenay, made eloquent speeches against the proposed cession, evidently foreseeing that this advancing tide of traders and farmers, unless checked, would drive them for ever from the prairies. Great quantities of merchandise were distributed among the tribes, in such rude fashion that the strongest braves got all the presents, and the others were left without anything; and at night the usual scene ensued -a wild and bloody debauch, which left the unfortunate Indians poorer than before. It was in the autumn

of 1835 that the great exodus began, and the wretched remnant of the Pottawatomies left their ancient hunting-grounds for ever. Forty wagons, each drawn by four oxen, carried the children and the scanty effects of the tribe, and the men and women marched on foot beside them. Thus the sad and solemn march went on-for twenty days across the prairies to the Mississippi River, and then for twenty days more into the wild and unknown regions beyond, until the weary clan settled on the reservation which the Great Father at Washington had appointed as their home.

When the garrison was withdrawn, in 1831, the twelve resident families deserted their rude shebeens on the prairie and spent the winter in the fort, making a right merry time, with their debating society and dancing parties. The next year the first public building was erected-a pound for stray cattle, which cost £2 8s., one-twelfth of the entire annual tax-levy. The woods and swamps about the little hamlet abounded in game, deer, wolves, bears, foxes, lynxes, and wild-cats; and in a single day in 1834 a party of hunters killed a bear and forty prairie wolves on the present site of the city. Several years later, the long howl of the wolf was often heard by night within the municipal limits.

The United States Government, which is so economical as regards its army and navy, has always been ready to spend vast sums on internal improvements, and far in advance of its

probable needs. In 1834, therefore, a corps of engineers was sent to Chicago, the muddy little lake-village in the far West, and dredged out the river, which had hitherto been blockaded by a sand-bar, so that vessels of above fifty tons could enter. A curiously timely freshet came the next season, and scoured out the bed of the stream to a much greater depth, changing the boggy fissure into a snug and commodious harbour.

Soon afterwards, the great Western exodus from the Atlantic States began, a march of civilisation which bids. fair to continue far into the twentieth century. The proximity of Fort Dearborn, and the fine harbour now afforded by the mouth of the Chicago River, attracted many settlers to this locality; and in the year 1837 Chicago was declared a city. So meagre was the local productiveness at this time, and so carefully did the agricultural classes shun this marshy flat, which during the rainy season was sometimes stirrup-deep in water, that the provisions necessary to supply the incoming population had to be brought from distant points in Michigan.

The metropolitan position of Chicago, already foreshadowed by its command of the navigation of the great lakes, was assured by the year 1852, when the Lake-Shore and Michigan Central Railways were finished, connecting it with the teeming States on the Atlantic slope. Henceforward, the primacy of the West became an affair of railway construction; and the locomotives, crossing the broad prairies in every direction, with their tracks converging here, rapidly made the commerce of the rising empire of the new States tributary to Chicago. This interest has always been held paramount, until now twelve thousand miles of railways, penetrating the remotest valleys of the north-west and south-west, bring their vast freights hither, where they may be carried to the seaboard by the great trunk-lines to the eastward, or shipped on the white-winged fleets which patrol the lakes.

The Great Lakes are to America what the Mediterranean is to Europe, and their united area is almost as large as that of the classic sea. At the head of this long system of navigation, like Smyrna or Alexandria in the Levant, is the harbour of Chicago, a system of water-lanes, among which miles of masts are grouped, and scores of steamships. Venice and Genoa united, with all their poetry of history and antique splendour, have not the population of this encampment of the nomads of yesterday; have not its energy and commercial activity; have not its comfort and happiness for the people at large.

In 1840, Chicago was a village of a few hundred inhabitants, and ten years later her population was 30,000. Another decade passed, and the census showed 112,172 inhabitants, a gain of 373 per cent. In 1870, although the devastating civil war had been weakening the Republic for years, the population numbered 298,977. The last decade was disastrous in many ways; it was a period of great commercial depression, and the city sank down at one time under a conflagration which destroyed all its best and richest precincts. Yet the tide of immigration and increase continued to rise without interruption. In the year 1866 alone the number of houses erected in the city was nine thousand, for which, besides the timber

The am vra of the population of Chirag may lest le Canned by the fl wing

Some la may be ruled of the vast increase and volume of business bere from a statement of the sales made by the whilesse dealers and mandates The amants of SUŽ SÚA TÆre with m

The grid fire tĉ Out ber, 1972, was roe of the mos semble risteti as which any Christian (nt ene ended Late on Sandy ending. Other S, as the entizens were going home from their themes, a fire broke out in a ew-stable, in a symb quarter of the city, pethally woulting from some revealed at in a drunken frile which was going on in an algaert Irish bit. For many weks a draght had afficed all this region, and for tilever bocs a strey soth-west wind had ben 10 wing, which drive the flames direct freward and through the very heart of the city. This lane of death, not more than arming but món, deft its way with startling rajality, and the ellies eased by the intense beat spread new Eisasters on every side. Showers of burning beads were borne onward by the my wind, and fell among the buillings beyond the river; and the contest was transferred from a region of wooden houses and lumber yards to the splendid hotels, shops, and fires of the central section. It was no leger an affair of a single fire-a score of bjorks, wildly serrated, were in fames at once. The destruction was aided by the wooden sidewalks, then in common use, along which the fire ran from street to street, levelling ervemaking in its earse. The mastery gained by the baleful element was absolute; its maLdestations were unspeakably terrible. The raring red elamas shot high into the Light air, and then bent forward to strike baillings far in advance, while showers of sparks fel, everywhere

The firemen were provided with powerful steam-engines, and faced their work without bien-hing, but s rapid was the advance of the every that they were driven back from point to point, and s veral of the engines were destroyed before they could be withdrawn. The great alarm-be in the Court-Honse dome tolled heavily, untì that bullling sank under the red waves. The prisoners who had been confined in the cells below were released, and trooped through the streets in dangerous freedom. Feeling that the city was doomel, thousands of men were work.ng to save furniture and goods, but these also were melted down on the streets and squares where they had been pled. At last it became a question of saving their own lives, of preserving their wives and children. The streets were massed with flying myriads

women and children bewailed their lost estate, while swept along they knew not whither,the ponderous engines rushed through the crowds to take up new positions, and the roar and crackle of the advancing flames were overborne, from time to time, by the booming of gunpowder, where houses were being blown up in the hope of staying the fire by offering it a worse desolation. At three in the morning the destroyer leaped across the main stream of the Chicago River, and took possession of that extensive district known as the North Division, which had been considered secure from its advance. Then the terror of midnight deepened into a wild panic, a pitiless débandade. The bridges were choked with wagons and passengers entangled in hopeless masses, and scores of people were precipitated into the dark stream below. Others were beaten down by the flying brands, or were smothered under clouds of dense hot smoke. There was a belief in the minds of many that the Day of Wrath itself had come. The better classes were stupefied with terror and grief-the dregs of society, the depraved and criminal classes, maudlin with liquor, and wild with excitement, attacked what the fiery sea had spared. Robbery and ribaldry were in full carnival. Fireproof buildings, entirely of stone and iron, crumbled and fell in chaotic heaps under a surrounding heat like that of a blast-furnace; the great gas-works exploded; 98,000 homeless people were scattered on the prairie; and finally the water-works themselves, the only means by which the fire might be stayed, were swept away, and left Chicago entirely defenceless.

Thousands of people on the North Side fled far out on the prairie, but other thousands, less fortunate, were hemmed in before they could reach the country, and were driven to the Sands, a group of beach-hillocks fronting on Lake Michigan. These had been covered with rescued merchandise and furniture. The flames fell fiercely upon the heaps of goods, and the miserable refugees were driven into the black waves, where they stood neck-deep in chilling water, scourged by sheets of sparks and blowing sand. A great number of horses had been collected here, and they too dashed into the sea, where scores of them were drowned. Toward evening the Mayor sent a fleet of tow-boats, which took off the fugitives at the Sands.

When the next day dawned, the prairie was covered with the calcined ruins of more than 17,000 buildings, including seventy-five churches and ecclesiastical buildings, valued at £600,000; nearly all the newspaper offices; nine theatres; the Academy of Design, with 300 paintings; the priceless collections of the Academy of Sciences; much of the shipping in the river; seventeen breweries, valued at £400,000; seventeen hotels; six great railway termini; 1,631,000 bushels of grain; 80,000 tons of coal; 50,000,000 feet of lumber; and vast quantities of other stores; and nearly all the public buildings pertaining to the city and the nation. On the ruins of Booksellers' Row, where more than a million books were held in stock, but one fragment of literature was found-a charred leaf of a Bible, on which were the words (Lamentations i. 1, 2):

"How doth the city sit solitary, that was full of people! how is she become as a widow!" "She weepeth sore in the night, and her tears are on her cheeks."

This was the greatest and most disastrous conflagration on record. The burning of Moscow, in 1812, caused a loss amounting to £30,000,000; but the loss at Chicago was in excess of this amount. The Great Fire of London, in 1666, devastated a tract of 436 acres, and destroyed 13,000 buildings; but that of Chicago swept over 1,900 acres, and burned more