It is plain that nature located Chicago. The meeting-point between unparalleled watercourses could not but be a place for the distribution of commodities. To the north, awaiting the woodman, were the lumber regions of Michigan and Wisconsin; south and west and east stretched the prairie, to be developed into farms; in Illinois alone, thirty thousand square miles of coal fields were to be uncovered, while Pennsylvania's inexhaustible supply was to find a vast market at this centre of lake shipping; and the iron, red-stone, and copper regions of Lake Superior were to pile their output on Chicago docks. The natural meeting-place of grain, lumber, fuel, and iron would have become a city of commerce and manufactures, even if steam railroads and navigation had not come to assist in the unique development of this _entrepôt_, by making it the half-way house for transcontinental traffic. But though nature, as the Rev. Robert Collyer has said, "called the lakes, the forest, the prairies together in convention, and they decided that on this spot a great city should be built," Chicago has been singularly blessed in the alert and enterprising genius of her citizens. Her business men have worked with catholic outlook, knowing that what upbuilt the city in general would augment their individual projects. The city has never been, even in its aboriginal beginnings, an abiding-place for visionaries. The Minneways were a picturesque tribe. Their chiefs assumed poetic names, and the young men cherished the traditions of their people; but the tribe did not take advantage of its strategic opportunities. Checagau to them was not a coign of vantage between great waters. At the shore of a vast lake, or the brink of a broad river, their dominion halted, for they were not navigators. In their dialect, "Checagau" meant "wild onion." As if to typify the force that was to dominate their region in later centuries, the Checagau country fell to the conquering "canoe men," the adventurous Pottawatomies, the Chippewas, the Sacs, and kindred tribes who, unafraid to venture on the water, turned to trade, exchanging furs and pelts with the French pioneers for food, blankets, and ornamental trinkets. They became the masters of the lake country, and the broken remnant of the uncommercial tribe fled to the Wabash, there to wail their plaintive songs.[10]