Chicago and the Old Northwest, 1673-1835 / A study of the evolution of the northwestern frontier, together with a history of Fort Dearborn

by Milo Milton Quaife

[858] Niles' Register, November 17, 1832.

[859] Drennan Papers, Fort Dearborn post returns for 1832.

[860] Ibid.

Thus the Black Hawk War passed into history. It remains to speak of the momentous results for Chicago and the country west of Lake Michigan which accrued from it. By the war the beautiful region of northern Illinois and southern Wisconsin was first fairly made known to the whites. "The troops acted as explorers of a large tract of which nothing had hitherto been definitely known among white men."[861] It has even been said that portions of the country which the armies traversed had previously been as little known to the Indians themselves "as the interior of Africa was to Stanley when he first groped his way across the Dark Continent." One of the Illinois militiamen wrote of the Four-Lakes country that if these lakes were anywhere else they would be regarded as among the wonders of the world.[862] On the shores of one of them stands today the capital of Wisconsin, and on the very spot over which the troops of Dodge and Henry pressed in hot pursuit of the fleeing red men has grown up one of America's greatest universities. With the close of the war the East was flooded with books, pamphlets, and newspaper articles describing the newly discovered paradise. The result of this thorough advertising was a rush of immigrants to take possession of it. No other point in all the West profited by this as did Chicago. Her position at the foot of Lake Michigan, on the great highway of trade and travel between the lakes and the Mississippi, which it was expected the construction of the canal from the Chicago River to the Illinois, long under agitation, would shortly open up, secured to her commercial advantages which no other point in the Northwest could rival. Chicago became, therefore, the great entrepôt for the onrushing tide of immigrants. In turn the development of her hinterland provided the substantial basis for a trade, growing ever vaster, of which Chicago constituted the natural outlet and center. The fulfilment of the prophecy made by Schoolcraft a dozen years before that Chicago would become the dèpôt for the inland commerce between the northern and southern sections of the Union, and "a great thoroughfare for strangers, merchants, and travellers," was at hand. The lethargy of a century and a half was about to be thrown off, in the birth of a new Chicago whose name was to become the synonym for energy, enthusiasm, and progress.

[861] Thwaites, "Story of the Black Hawk War," in Wisconsin Historical Collections, XII, 264.

[862] Wakefield, quoted in ibid., XII, 252.

CHAPTER XV
THE VANISHING OF THE RED MAN

The Treaty of Paris of 1783 which closed the Revolutionary War gave the new nation whose birth it marked the Mississippi River for its western boundary, and a line through the middle of the Great Lakes and extended thence to the Mississippi, as its boundary on the north. Until Wayne's victory over the northwestern tribes in the battle of Fallen Timbers, in August, 1794, however, the grip of the red man upon the territory north of the Ohio River was practically unbroken. Certain treaties had been made, it is true, carrying cessions of land to the whites in this region,[863] but their validity was contested by powerful tribes and factions among the Indians, and the tide of white settlement was still confined to the country closely bordering upon the Ohio River. By the Treaty of Greenville, a year after his victory over the Indians, Wayne secured the cession by them to the United States of about twenty-five thousand square miles of land, comprising roughly the southern half of the present state of Ohio together with a long and narrow strip of land in southwestern Indiana.[864] At the same time, however, the Indian ownership of the remainder of the Northwest, aside from certain reservations which were specially excepted, was conceded. The extinguishment of the Indian title, thus formally recognized, to the soil of the Northwest required two score years of time and the negotiation of dozens of treaties. Its consummation marked the passing of the red man from the imperial domain of the old Northwest.

[863] See supra, pp. 109-10.

[864] For a further account of the terms of the treaty see pp. 124-25.