Among the world's great cities, Chicago should be the one most thoroughly recorded. No other that counts her denizens by the million has among them those born before her annals fairly began. No other has had such startling vicissitudes. Laid low by slaughter in her infancy and by fire in her youth, she has climbed with bounding steps, upward and onward. Toiling, enduring, laughing, prospering, exulting; she has taken each scourge as a fillip to her energy, each spur as a stimulus to her courage. Hers is the enthusiasm of youth with the strength of maturity.
The early days of Paris and London are lost in half-mythical shadow. Even if told, their incidents might fail to match in interest those which have befallen their young sister. So much the more zealously should we who love this youthful aspirant for fame, take care that the romance of her childhood shall be preserved and handed down to posterity.
The spirited figure of La Salle (given by Lambert Tree) and Martin Ryerson's Indian group, are both fine memorials of the dawn of things in the North-West. Eli Bates's matchless statue of Lincoln is devoted to a page in the history of the whole Union. Now comes Chicago's latest treasure, the magnificent group commemorating the massacre of 1812; a purely civic work, to keep in the minds of Chicago's citizens, for untold generations, the romance and reality of her struggling infancy.
Honor to the men who, in the intense pressure of the present, still have thoughts for the past and the future.
At the unveiling, (1881) of the Block-House Tablet (designed by the Chicago Historical Society) set by William M. Hoyt in the north wall of his warehouse, facing Rush Street Bridge from the south, Mr. Eugene Hall read some stanzas of original verse so musical, so poetic and so apt for the occasion, that I venture (with his permission) to repeat them here, as a finish to our story.
BEAUBIEN FIDDLE AND CALUMET,
IN POSSESSION OF THE CALUMET CLUB.