Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: PIONEER HISTORY. CHICAGO AS IT WAS IN THE EAELIEE DATS. FACTS AND INCIDENTS FP.OM VARIOUS SOURCES OF AUTHENTIC INFORMATION. In his masterly essay on History, Dr. Willmott says that the biography of a nation embraces all its works. No trifle is to be neglected. A mouldering medal is a letter of twenty centuries. Antiquities which have been beautifully called history defaced, composed its fullest commentary. In these wrecks of many storms, which time washes to the shore, the scholar looks patiently for treasures. The painting around a vase, the scribble on a wall, the wrath of a demagogue,, the drollery of a farce, the point of an epigram—each possesses its own interest and value. A fossil court of law is dug out of an orator;. and the Pompeii of Greece is discovered in the Comedies of Aristophanes. Nothing is unimportant that legitimately belongs to the history of a nation or a great city. That we are permitted to go back more than two hundred years, to 1669, for notes of .our sketch of the history of Chicago, will appear novel to a majority of even the more intelligent of our readers, for the impression is very popular, and has obtained wide currency, that not more than half a century ago the spot where the city now stands was worse than a howling wilderness and a terra incognita, supposed to be inhabited only by Indians, outlaws and beasts of prey. In some respects this view is not entirely foreign to the truth; but at the time to which we refer it was a trading post of no little importance. Let us go back, however, to the beginning of its existence as a depot for commodities, and find what all its greatness and importance sprang from. The best authenticated records inform us that the first white men who landed here were the French Jesuit missionaries and fur trad... --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.