first real estate boom in Chicago was launched with vigor and resulted in the sale of many town lots. One of the local histories of Chicago makes the following statement concerning the influence which the building of the canal had upon the origin and growth of the city:

"It is a curious fact that the early growth of Chicago was greatly in accord with the progress of the canal. The canal may be said to have made Chicago. When the survey of the site was commenced and platted, by order of the canal commissioners, in 1829, there resided upon its site only about a half dozen families, outside the palisades of Fort Dearborn: but with the prospect of the inauguration of this great work, population began to pour in freely. The Black Hawk war perhaps checked it a little, but with the removal of the Indians, the tide of immigration was resumed. When in 1835, the first canal loan of $500,000 was authorized, a new impulse was given to the settlement of the town, and with the additional legislation of January, 1836, her population swollen to about 4,000, the extraordinary fever for speculating in town lots still rife, and the actual commencement of the work, we find the prosperity of the period to culminate. Shortly after came the great revulsion of 1837, which, with the collapse of the visionary internal improvement system of the State, two and a half years later, would have utterly prostrated Chicago but for the persistency with which the work on the canal was sustained. As it was, our prosperity was checked materially for seven years."

Cook County was organized in 1831, and the "Town of Chicago" was incorporated in 1833; but

it was not until 1837 that the prospect of establishing a great city here was alluring enough to lead the principal inhabitants to incorporate Chicago as a city, which was done on March 4, 1837. Showing at once how new the city is and what a wonderful growth it has had in its brief existence, it is perhaps sufficient to note in passing that Stephen F. Gale, grandfather of the present Mayor of Chicago, William Hale Thompson, helped to draft the first city charter, was the first fire chief of the volunteer fire department of the new city, and was one among the twenty-eight who voted at the first election of trustees held in the "Town of Chicago" on August 10, 1833. Although he was undoubtedly influenced by the proposed construction of the Illinois and Michigan Canal, Gale deliberately selected Chicago as his future home at about the time that James Thompson surveyed and platted the original site, and moved here in 1830 from his ancestral home among the granite hills of New Hampshire.

I have heard his grandson, Mayor Thompson, say that his grandfather Gale selected this spot after a careful study of the topography of this region from which he observed that on account of the location of the Great Lakes all of the travel between the settled country in the east and the new country in the great and growing west would pass through Illinois at or near the southern end of Lake Michigan. That his judgment was good

may be seen today in the fact that all the transcontinental lines of railway of the United States pass through Illinois, between Chicago and St. Louis. Mayor Thompson's mother was born in the Gale home at the corner of Dearborn and Washington streets, and was, at the time it was built, quite a distance from the business section of the town, then located along the south bank of the Chicago River. The outer limits of the city, as platted by James Thompson, were Kinzie street on the north, Madison on the south, State street on the east, and Desplaines on the west. These streets enclosed an area of less than half a square mile, which is now only a portion of the central business district of Chicago, the area of the city having extended until it now covers 200 square miles.

James Thompson returned to Kaskaskia after he had finished the survey of Chicago, and the public records of old Randolph County show that he occasionally held public office and lived a useful life until 1872, the year of his death. For forty-five years thereafter his remains lay in an unmarked grave in old Preston cemetery in Randolph County, and until Mayor Thompson of Chicago, after undertaking without success to awaken the civic pride of the Chicago City Council to their duty in the matter, himself erected and dedicated a fitting monument to the memory of James Thompson on Memorial Day, 1917. It

was a matter of great regret on my part that I was unable to accept an invitation to be present at the dedicatory exercises in old Preston cemetery, which were attended by many of the prominent men of today, including Dr. Otto L. Schmidt, president of the Illinois Historical Society, who concluded his speech on that occasion with these words:

"In reopening these forgotten pages of Illinois history, Mayor Thompson has done a duty for the city of which he is the chief official, a service to the State, and reveals a sacred interest in the past that we hope will arouse the latent talents of others to emulate this public spirited and ideal act."

Besides the delay in the construction of the canal, the early growth of Chicago was retarded by troubles in northern Illinois with the Indians, who had not exactly had a "square deal" from the white man. As civilization advanced westward the red men were driven from one stand to another, until they had a right to question the sincerity and good faith of the treaties we had made with them and had as often broken.

Finally, in 1804, William Henry Harrison, then governor of the Indiana Territory, including Illinois, and later President of the United States and grandfather of another President, made a solemn treaty with the Indians within his jurisdiction under which they ceded to the United States the land they had been nominally holding between

the Illinois and Mississippi rivers, in consideration for which the Indians were to receive one thousand dollars per year "in trade." This land was the habitation and hunting grounds of the Sacs, Fox and Winnebago Indians, and in memory of their occupation we find many of their picturesque names in the geography of the region. Among the Indians who would not be reconciled to the Harrison treaty was Black Hawk, a war leader or general of the Sacs and Fox, which tribes had merged and occupied the beautiful valley of the Fox River in what is now perhaps the most productive and most valuable dairy section. in the world that surrounding Elgin, the home of butter and watches.

By 1830 Black Hawk and his following had sullenly given way before the steady advance of the whites until he and his braves were quartered in a village on the Rock River, near the present site of Rock Island, where, from an adjacent height of land, known since as Black Hawk's Watch Tower, he could see for many miles in every direction. In 1830 Chief Keokuk concluded another treaty with the United States in which it was agreed that he would move all his tribes west of the Mississippi. Black Hawk would not agree to this further surrender and nursed his smoldering wrath until 1832, when, with several hundred followers, he recrossed the Mississippi into Illinois, under the pretext that he and his