[9] Clark began at once to organize an expedition against Detroit, but it never started. Francis Vigo, who had let Clark have provisions and money for his expedition against Vincennes, aided in like manner in fitting out the new expedition, lending money to the amount of $8616, for which Clark gave him an order on Virginia. The order was never honored, and an appeal was made to Congress. Finally, in 1872, nearly a century after the debt was contracted, and nearly thirty-seven years after Vigo had died in extreme poverty, Congress referred the matter to the Court of Claims, which four years later allowed the claim, together with more than $41,000 in interest. [Illustration] CHICAGO LARGE IN EVERY WAY BY LYMAN J. GAGE The plotting of the site of Chicago was characteristic of the practical sentiment that has ever stimulated the city. No less a personage than Washington established the streets and boundaries of the national capital; religious romance presided at the founding of San Francisco; interesting legends cluster about the origin of other American communities; and in the old world demigods were supposed to have watched over the beginnings of ancient cities. Chicago, though neither hero nor fabled deity was present when its foundations were laid, had a start none the less imposing, for the genius of industry and trade fixed its metes and bounds. And in the growth of the city into perhaps the industrial capital of the continent there has been presented a supreme expression of that resourceful and triumphant ingenuity which has redeemed the American wilderness. The desolation upon which the plodding engineer planted his theodolite three-score-and-ten years ago is a colossal hive of human activity. A marsh has become a metropolis. The promoters of the Illinois and Michigan Canal were not the first to see the possibility of water communication via the present site of Chicago between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River. In 1673, Joliet wrote to the authorities in Canada that by the cutting of a canal through half a league of prairie it would be possible for boats to "pass from the Lake of Illinois into the St. Louis River [the Illinois including the Desplaines] which empties into the Mississippi." One hundred years before our Republic was conceived, a mathematician, but no mere _visionnaire_, the son of a wheelwright of Quebec, realized that the "Portage of Checagau" was the meeting-place of the future traffic between the chain of inland seas and the rivers flowing toward the Mexican Gulf.