The Story of Old Fort Dearborn

by J. Seymour Currey

There is evidence, however, that a fort, perhaps several of them at different periods, had been erected in this vicinity and occupied by the French; but having been built in a temporary fashion they utterly disappeared after the French had ceased to occupy the country.

The tract "six miles square" mentioned in the Treaty of Greenville was never surveyed, and as the treaties of later years included the locality within other descriptions of ceded lands, it did not become necessary to make a survey. For that reason the exact boundaries of the six-mile-square tract were never determined and are not shown on official maps now recognized in title abstracts, though on some maps an outline of the tract is shown as an illustration, but without any authority as to the precise position occupied.

It has been stated that commissioners from Washington had selected as the site of a proposed fort on Lake Michigan a location at the mouth of the St. Joseph River where the city of St. Joseph now stands, but as the Indian tribes would not give their consent for its construction at that point, the commissioners had been obliged to decide on a site at the mouth of the Chicago River. In commenting on this statement a writer in the Michigan Pioneer Collection of Historical Publications says:

"We conclude that had the fort been built at St. Joseph there would have been no Chicago." Mr. Edward G. Mason, a writer of acknowledged authority on subjects pertaining to western history, refers to this statement, and rather humorously observes: "This matter of a fort seems to have been peculiarly disastrous to the St. Joseph country. When it had one it constantly invited capture, and caused the inhabitants to spend more or less of their lives as prisoners of war, and when it did not have one it thereby lost the opportunity of becoming the commercial metropolis of the Northwest. I know of no such tract of land in all this section which has been so singularly unfortunate as the St. Joseph region."

Mr. Mason alludes in this passage to the vicissitudes suffered by the small military post or "tomahawk fortress," as such posts on the frontier were sometimes called, at the mouth of the St. Joseph River, which during the troublous period of the eighteenth century had frequently changed masters. At the time of which we are writing, the fort, or the remains of a fort, at that point was in such a condition that a new structure would have been necessary if that site had been determined upon by the authorities.

Building operations for Fort Dearborn began on the Fourth of July, under the direction of Captain Whistler. The soldiers cut the timber required from the neighboring forests and, as there were no horses or oxen available in the vicinity, the men dragged the logs with ropes from the woods to the banks of the river, and floated them to the site chosen. At that period a forest of considerable density covered the land on the north side of the river, and there was also a fringe of trees along the South Branch throughout its entire length; but the extensive area in the South Division, excepting the woodland on the margin of the river, was open prairie. In fact, the Grand Prairie of Illinois, extending for hundreds of miles into the interior of the state, here reached the shore of the lake for a space of three or four miles along the water, and it is a singular fact that at no other place does the Grand Prairie border on Lake Michigan. It was on the line of this famous tract that the massacre occurred, which will be described in the following pages.

The portion of the Grand Prairie between the mouth of the river and a point some three or four miles south along the lake shore was mostly devoid of trees, a scanty growth of cottonwoods and pines, however, maintaining a precarious existence among the sand-dunes. A mile or two south of the river's mouth these low sand-hills became the predominant feature of the landscape, just as may be found at the present time along the low shores of the lake beyond the city limits toward the south and east. Behind the sand-hills the level prairie stretched away as far as the eye could reach. Schoolcraft, in one of his early voyages, related that as one approached the shores from the southern end of Lake Michigan, the appearance of these sand-dunes—between which was occasionally seen a scanty growth of stunted pines—gave a desolate aspect to the scene, in wonderful contrast with the rich and abundant verdure of the far-reaching prairie land lying just beyond them.

When the schooner "Tracy" arrived at Chicago she anchored half a mile from shore and discharged her cargo by boats; for a long sand-bar, with its surface slightly higher than the lake level, forced the current of the river to follow the shore toward the south before finding an outlet into the lake, and even then over a broad stretch of shallow water, thus preventing the entrance of the vessel into the river channel. "Some two thousand Indians," said an eye-witness in an interview reported many years later, "visited the locality while the vessel was here, being attracted by so unusual an occurrence as the appearance in these waters of 'a big canoe with wings.'"

But notwithstanding the astonishment of the Indians, it was probably not the first time that sailing vessels had visited the shores of the future site of Chicago. William Burnett, the trader at St. Joseph before referred to, in writing to a merchant in Mackinac in 1786, makes a request that a vessel be sent to St. Joseph to take on board a quantity of grain, and further says regarding the expected vessel, "If she is to come to Chicago you can very likely get her to stop at the mouth of the river"—that is, the St. Joseph River. It is probable enough, however, that the great majority of the Indians around Chicago, who gazed with so much interest at the sight of the wonderful "canoe with wings," had never before seen a craft with sails spread to the breeze.