[Illustration: WAUBANSA STONE WITH GREAT FIRE RELICS.] An exception to this destruction and the fast gathering cloud of oblivion, is to be found in an old red granite boulder, with a rude human face carved on it, which stood in the center of the fort esplanade, and which is now (1891) one of our few antiquarian treasures. It is nearly eight feet high by three feet in greatest diameter, and weighs perhaps 4,000 pounds. In prehistoric times the Indians used the concave top for a corn-mill, and for many, many weary hours must the patient and long-suffering squaws have leaned over it, crushing the scanty, flinty corn of those days into material for the food of braves and pappooses. Many persons have looked on it as a relic of prehistoric art--the sacrificial stone of an Aztec teocalli perhaps--but Mr. Hurlbut gives the cold truth; more modern, though scarcely less romantic. He says it was set up in the fort, and soldiers, sick and well, used it as a lounging-place. Sometimes it served as a pillory for disorderly characters, and it was a common expression or threat, that for certain offenses the offender would be "sent to the rock." Waubansa was a Chicago chief, and a soldier-sculptor tried to depict his features on the stone; and (to quote Mr. Hurlbut): "The portrait pleased the Indians, the liege friends of the chief, greatly; for a party of them, admitted into the block-house to see it, whooped and leaped as if they had achieved a victory, and with uncouth gestures they danced in a triumphant circle around the rock." In 1837 ... Daniel Webster paid a visit to the West, and took Chicago in his route.... The conveyance was a barouche with four elegant creams attached. Mr. Webster was accompanied by his daughter and son. Every wheel-vehicle, every horse and mule in town, it is said, were in requisition that day, and the senator was met some miles out by a numerous delegation from this _new city_, who joined in the procession.... It was the fourth of July, the column came over Randolph Street bridge, and thence to the parade-ground within the fort. There were guns at the fort, which were eloquent, of course, though the soldiers had left some weeks before. The foundation of all this outcry about Mr. Webster is, that the base and platform on which that gentleman stood when he made the speech within the fort, was the rock, the same Waubansa stone.... Justin Butterfield (who stood directly in front of the senator) swung his hat and cheered the speaker.