The Sieur Joliet, who tradition says, once resided on the top of this mount, which is flat and comprises several acres of rich meadow, was one of the adventurous heroes who first found their way from Canada to the Valley of the West. Little is known of him, except that he preceded or accompanied La Salle in some of his discoveries on the Mississippi, for which, says Charleroix, “he received a grant of the island of Anticosti, which extends about forty degrees north-west and south-east, and lies at the mouth of the River St. Lawrence. But they made him no great present; it is absolutely good for nothing. It is poorly wooded, its soil is barren, and it has not a single harbor where a ship can lie in safety.” I regret to differ with the good father, whose description shows it to be eminently calculated for the site of a great emporium, and am surprised that it has hitherto escaped the notice of our illustrious founders of cities in places where it is all rocks and no water. But be this as it may, the Sieur Joliet is particularly unfortunate in having been rewarded for his services by an island worth nothing, and defrauded by ignorance or vanity of the honor of giving his name to a beautiful and thriving town. Some fifteen years ago the place occupied by the town of Joliet was the seat of Black Hawk’s power. It now contains twelve or fifteen hundred white people, and is a busy, growing place, with reasonable anticipations of becoming considerably larger in good time. The frank, hospitable, spirited, and intelligent people of this noble region of the West, must not, however, calculate too confidently on all their towns becoming great cities because they grow with astonishing rapidity at the first starting. Great cities, like great men, do not spring up in all places and every where. A large portion of these towns, like children, will probably increase in size the first few years, more than in all their lives afterward. Many will stop short in their growth, and many will gradually be swallowed up by some neighboring rival, whose natural advantages, or some fortunate concurrence of circumstances, will enable it to secure the ascendancy, and render all the others tributary to its prosperity. When this ascendency is permanently acquired, nothing but inferior towns can flourish in its immediate vicinity, and like all great bodies, they will become the centre of attraction.