The day which dawned so bright has dragged through its bloody hours and come to its dark and hideous close. The dead, men, women and children, are at peace. The wounded are suffering the torments of the pit, the rest are shuddering in the uncertainties that lie before them. The Indians are riotously happy; for have they not done harm? Have they not killed, scalped, destroyed, wasted, life and property? Have they not annihilated the source whence they had been getting arms, ammunition and blankets, and driven off the men who tried to keep whisky from them? Have they not made a solitude and called it war? The goods are scattered. The fort is burned. The cattle are dead or dying. The soldiers are defeated, slain or held as prisoners, for ransom if unhurt, for torture if disabled. The babes are brained and their mothers dead or desolate. What more "happy hunting ground" is possible to them this side of hades itself? In "Wau-Bun," one seems to hear them telling of their individual good deeds and attributing all evil deeds to each other. For the Indian's hand was against every man, even all other Indians. Their bloodiest wars have been between themselves; wars of absolute extermination for the beaten party Every tribe held its lands by conquest and by force. Even if we had taken them by the sword, without compensation (which we never did), they would only have lost their holdings by the selfsame means by which they had gained them. Well is it for the kindlier folk that the cruel did not stick together. If they had done so, we should be a hundred years in time and a thousand miles in space further back in our territorial progress. But they could not combine. "You might as well try to boil flints into a pudding." * * * * * It still remains to me to trace, so far as it is not shrouded in oblivion, the fate of the survivors. But as this leads some distance into the future, I have thought best to treat the matter separately; prefacing the story of what followed the tragedy by a short sketch of what preceded and led up to it. Why did those brave and hapless beings come here? How came they here? What brought their few and scattered footprints to the ground since then trodden by millions? The following pages will try to answer these questions, beginning with the very earliest permanent settlement of what is now Chicago. [Illustration] PART SECOND. HISTORICAL AND BIOGRAPHICAL HOW CHICAGO BEGAN AND WHO WERE ITS BEGINNERS. PART SECOND. CHAPTER I. THE DARK BEFORE THE DAWN. [Illustration: EARLY JESUIT.]