On the morning of the twelfth, I settled with George and Babcock. The former went forward to Ottawa, and the latter to Joliet. It was my intention at the time to push on to Omaha and Cheyenne as rapidly as possible in the hope of passing Sherman, at the summit of the mountains, before the snow was too deep to interrupt my journey. Eight general halts had been decided upon between Boston and San Francisco, and these were Albany, Buffalo, Toledo, Chicago, Omaha, Cheyenne, Ogden, and Sacramento. I had now reached my fourth objective and felt the importance of more haste and less leisure and sightseeing. My time, therefore, in this great city was necessarily cut short. The Exposition had just opened at the time I reached Chicago, and this enabled me to see more in a few hours than I could have possibly seen in any other way, and gave me quite an idea of the industries carried on in Cook County. I had never seen a finer local affair of the kind and was confident that its object--the encouragement of agriculture and industry--would be successfully accomplished. Anyone who sees the way in which Chicagoans throw themselves into an undertaking of this sort, and in fact into everything that has to do with the enterprise or prosperity of their city, cannot but be struck with admiration. Their irrepressible hopefulness, which effected such marvelous results after the great conflagration of 1871, is a case in point, and those who have been fortunate enough to see the transformation, are forced to admit that the calamity was, after all, not so much to be deplored. Out of the great waste in which the business portion was laid, handsome buildings have sprung up with almost magic rapidity and auguring well for the future of the "Windy City." Especially is this feature striking in the vicinity of the City Hall, where finer edifices rose upon the old ruins. The very name of Chicago carries us back to the barbaric scenes of more than two hundred years ago. Where the beautiful city now stands, those days of long since past knew only a morass, an oozy, desolate stretch of water-soaked swamp. There was a stream in this desolate region, the banks of which, tradition tells us, were parched and cracked and blackened by the frequent ravages of lightning. The early explorers found on its banks an old stone mound, supposed to have been erected for the sacrifice of human victims to propitiate the wrath of the Indian deity Chekagua, the Thunder God. On the oldest map of this region now extant, one published in 1684, the little river itself bears the name Chekagua, and it may be, that our fair Western metropolis of to-day was also a namesake of that same weird divinity. Others, claiming a more propitious christening, assert that Chicago was a derivative from Chacaqua, the Indian term for the Divine River. Or perhaps the city was named from the successive titles of the proud, old Tamawas Chiefs.