While a slight discrepancy may be found to exist between items and their totals, they are but natural to all statements, and do not overestimate the awful mortality and the conditions, which can readily be realized. The following letter, published in the same issue of Niles and dated Fort Dearborn, July 12th, will probably convey a better idea of those conditions than any deductions I may make: “We have got at last to our place of rendezvous, but in what a condition! We have traveled 600 miles in a steamboat crowded almost to suffocation and the Asiatic cholera raging amongst us. The scenes on board the boat are not to be described. Men died in six hours after being in perfect health. The steerage was crowded with the dying and new cases were appearing on the deck, when the demon entered the cabin. The first case occurred at Fort Gratiot; the man attacked belonged to the company I commanded. I found that the soldiers hesitated about attending him at first, so that I went to the sick man, felt his pulse and stood by his bed, and in a short time the soldiers became reconciled. This was only at first, for when the disease came upon us with fury and the boat became a moving pestilence, every soldier who was well became a nurse for the sick. The disease was met with resolution, and never did a body of men stand more firmly by each other than the soldiers in our boat. “To give you an idea of the disease: You remember Sergeant Heyl? He was well at nine o’clock in the morning–he was at the bottom of Lake Michigan at seven o’clock in the afternoon! I was officer of the day when we arrived and had to move all the sick men to the shore; I had scarcely got through my task when I was thrown down on the deck almost as suddenly as if shot. “As I was walking on the lower deck, I felt my legs growing stiff from my knees down. I went on the upper deck and walked violently to keep up a circulation of the blood. I felt suddenly a rush of blood from my feet upwards, and as it rose my veins grew cold and my blood curdled. I was seized with a nausea at the stomach and a desire to vomit. My legs and hands were cramped with violent pain. The doctor gave me eight grains of opium and made me rub my legs as fast as I could; he also made me drink a tumbler and a half of raw brandy, and told me if I did not throw up the opium I would certainly be relieved; but not until I had had a violent spasm. The pain is excruciating.” Another letter, written by Capt. A. Walker to Capt. R.C. Bristol, which first appeared in the Chicago Democrat, March 23d, 1861, was afterward copied in “Fort Dearborn,” page 72, in an address delivered by John Wentworth, May 21st, 1881, and published the same year by the Chicago Historical Society, and is as follows: