In wealth, in population, in the high character and eager attendance in her great schools, in libraries, art, and architecture, as evidenced by institutes, buildings, and academies of design, in her letters, as displayed by the literary output, in her spiritual conquests, as shown in the teachings of her poets and preachers, and even in the periodical reforms that purify the political atmosphere, Chicago's future will undoubtedly be, like her past, phenomenal. [Illustration] FOOTNOTE: [10] Among the Sacs, "Checagau" was the name of one of their valiant warriors and colonizers, and meant "He that stands by the tree." Among the several tribes of the Algonquin group "Chekago," "Chicagong," etc., was pronounced in a variety of ways and had as many meanings. [Illustration] MADISON THE CITY OF THE FOUR LAKES BY REUBEN G. THWAITES In 1836, that portion of Michigan Territory which lay west of Lake Michigan, was erected into the Territory of Wisconsin. Within the borders of the nascent commonwealth there lived at that time about twelve thousand whites and nine thousand Indians. Many of the sites of future cities of Wisconsin were already occupied by agricultural settlers, isolated or in tiny groups. Green Bay, a straggling French-Canadian settlement, had come down from the seventeenth century, maintaining a sickly existence upon the fur trade and the coasting traffic of the upper Great Lakes; Forts Winnebago (at Portage) and Crawford (at Prairie du Chien) were surrounded by meagre hamlets, chiefly of French creoles; the lead-mining region in the southwest, although sparsely settled, contained the bulk of the white population, with Mineral Point as its centre--a village having at the time an apparently brighter prospect than the new settlement at the mouth of Milwaukee River; there were also a few notches carved, at wide intervals, from the gloomy forest bordering the western shore of Lake Michigan. Outside of the settlements just enumerated, Wisconsin was practically uninhabited by whites. Here and there was to be found an Indian trader, the Yankee successor of the _coureur de bois_ of the old French _régime_, or some exceptionally adventurous farmer; but their far-separated cabins only emphasized the density of the wilderness, through which roamed untrammelled the shiftless, gipsy-like aborigines,--the comparatively harmless Chippewas, Menomonies, Pottawatomies and Winnebagoes. [Illustration THE STATE HOUSE, MADISON.]