[929] For the ceremony I have drawn upon the graphic description of Caton (Miscellanies, 141-45), who was an eye-witness of the proceedings.
THE TRANSFORMATION OF A CENTURY
Grant Park and Michigan Avenue, where the Fort Dearborn garrison marched to destruction one hundred years ago
Every effort was made to render the dance, which to the participants was "a funeral ceremony of old associations and memories," impressive and solemn. The procession moved slowly, the warriors advancing with a continual dance. In front of every house along their course a stop was made and extra feats were performed. The musicians produced a discordant din of hideous noises by beating on hollow vessels and striking sticks and clubs together.
The Sauganash Hotel at that time stood on the corner of Lake and Market Streets, where a quarter of a century later Abraham Lincoln received that nomination for the presidency which involved the nation in civil war. From its second-story parlor windows a group of spectators, chiefly ladies, gazed out upon the strange exhibition. From this vantage point John D. Caton, a future chief justice of the Supreme Court of Illinois, looked down upon the dance. It was mid-August, the morning was very warm, and the exertions of the warriors caused the perspiration to pour forth almost in streams. "Their eyes were wild and blood-shot," writes Caton, "their countenances had assumed an expression of all the worst passions which can find a place in the breast of a savage; fierce anger, terrible hate, dire revenge, remorseless cruelty, all were expressed in their terrible features. Their muscles stood out in great hard knots, as if wrought to a tension which must burst them. Their tomahawks and clubs were thrown and brandished about in every direction with the most terrible ferocity, and with a force and energy which could only result from the highest excitement, and with every step and every gesture they uttered the most frightful yells, in every imaginable key and note, though generally the highest and shrillest possible. The dance, which was ever continued, consisted of leaps and spasmodic steps, now forward and now back or sideways, with the whole body distorted into every imaginable unnatural position, most generally stooping forward, with the head and face thrown up, the back arched down, first one foot thrown forward and then withdrawn, and the other similarly thrust out, frequently squatting quite to the ground, and all with a movement almost as quick as lightning. Their weapons were brandished as if they would slay a thousand enemies at every blow, while the yells and screams they uttered were broken up and multiplied and rendered all the more hideous by a rapid clapping of the mouth with the hand."
The impression produced upon the spectators by such an exhibition can readily be imagined. Many of those who had gathered at the Sauganash were recent arrivals from the East and knew nothing of the Indians but what they had been told of their butcheries and tortures. Others, like Caton himself, had been for some time familiar with the red men. But the spectacle tried the nerves of even the stoutest, and all felt that one such sight was sufficient for a lifetime. From the Sauganash parlors, whose windows faced the west, the parade was visible some time before it reached the North Branch bridge, and from this place all the way to the bridge across the South Branch and down Lake Street to the hotel itself. As they came upon the bridge, the wild band of musicians in front redoubled their blows to increase the noise. When the head of the column had reached the front of the hotel, "leaping, dancing, gesticulating, and screaming, while they looked up with hell itself depicted on their faces, at the chemokoman squaws in the windows, and brandished their weapons as if they were about to make a real attack in deadly earnest, the rear was still on the other side of the river, two hundred yards off; and all the intervening space including the bridge and its approaches, was covered with this raging savagery glistening in the sun, reeking with streamy sweat, fairly frothing at their mouths as with unaffected rage, it seemed as if we had a picture of hell itself before us, and a carnival of the damned spirits there confined, whose pastimes we may suppose should present some such scene as this."
Thus did the red man play his savage role to the end. It was a brave show which he enacted that summer morning, but it was nothing more. For him the scepter of power had departed, and this was his final farewell. A few weeks later he took up his weary journey toward the sunset, and Chicago knew him no more. The red man had vanished, and Chicago and Chicago's future were committed to the care of another and mightier race.