Tuesday, August, 15th.
Proceeded on our march at 15 minutes past 5 o'clock a.m. 33 miles, and encamped on the Little Calamac river, at 16 minutes past 5 o'clock, p.m. Crossed the Grand Calamac river, at 8 o'clock a.m., 12 miles from encampment.
Wednesday, August, 17th.
Proceeded on our march at 6 o'clock a.m., 34 miles and encamped on the Chicago river, at 2 o'clock p.m. This river is about 30 yards wide where the garrison is intended, to be built, and from 18 feet and upwards, deep, dead water, owing to its being stopped up at the mouth, by the washing of sand, from the lakes. The water is not fit to use. The bank where the fort is to be built is about 8 feet high and a half mile above the mouth. The opposite bank is not so high, not being a difference, of more than two feet, by appearances. The banks above are quite low. The distance from Detroit, to the mouth of the St. Josephus, is 272 miles. From the mouth of the St. Josephus to Chicago, 90 miles, making in the whole 362 miles.
PORTAGE.
A portage from the Chicago river, so as to get into the Illinois river, which is 400 miles from the lakes, or the mouth of Chicago. This portage is 6 miles above the mouth and a short distance, across into a small creek, which discharges itself into the river, 16 miles from this place, at a village, from thence, into a small lakes and creeks, until intersected, by the Illinois river, from thence into the Mississippi. In the spring or time of high water, small crafts, may pass without any land carriage.
APPENDIX II
SOURCES OF INFORMATION FOR THE FORT DEARBORN MASSACRE
The history of lost manuscripts, even in so new a country as the United States, contains not only much of interest to the curious, but much of profit to the serious, who are genuinely interested in the work of preserving the records of the past. Various have the fortunes of these precious documents been. Some have been used by frugal housewives to cover jelly glasses or pack eggs, others have gone to feed the paper mill or the furnace; while all the time our libraries and historical societies are longing for the opportunity to secure such materials for preservation for the use of future generations. At times, however, the very measure of placing manuscripts within the protecting walls of an institution has been responsible for their oblivion. Either the document has been mislaid and its resting-place forgotten, or actual destruction has come upon it.
The history of manuscripts pertaining to the Fort Dearborn tragedy furnishes numerous illustrations of these various contingencies. One of the most important of them, a document of several hundred pages, disappeared, apparently for all time, from the home of the Heald family a half-century ago. Another, Lieutenant Helm's massacre narrative, after being lost to sight for three-quarters of a century, was discovered a few years since in the Detroit Public Library. A third, the fatal order of Hull to Captain Heald for the evacuation of the fort, long supposed to have been destroyed, has been for over forty years, unknown to historical workers, a part of the Draper Collection, now the property of the Wisconsin State Historical Society. Still other documents gathered with loving care within the walls of the local Historical Society by citizens of Chicago, by reason of this fact were doomed to perish in one or other of the fires which have twice consumed the Society's archives. Such was the fate of the papers of Lieutenant Swearingen, destroyed in the great fire of 1871, a few years after he had presented them to the Society. Such was the fate, also, of John Kinzie's account books with their unique picture of early Chicago in the years from 1804 to 1824.