so that it would not be necessary to open the Fort to them. This agency
building was a rather large two-story log house, not erected for any
purposes of defence. Along the southern side of the stream, in both
directions, the soldiers had excavated numerous root-houses, or cellars,
in which to store the products of their summer gardens,--these
excavations fairly honeycombing the bank.

Such was Fort Dearborn in August of the fatal year 1812. It stood ugly,
rude, isolated, afar from any help in time of need. Its nearest military
neighbor lay directly across the waters of the Great Lake, where a small
detachment of troops, scarcely less isolated than itself, garrisoned a
similar stockade near the mouth of the river Saint Joseph. To the
westward, the vast plains, as yet scarce pressed by the adventurous feet
of white explorers, faded away into a mysterious unknown country, roamed
over by countless tribes of savages; to the northward lay an unbroken
wilderness for hundreds of leagues, save for a few scattered traders at
Green Bay, until the military outpost at Mackinac was reached; to the
eastward rolled the waters of the Great Lake, storm-swept and unvexed by
keel of ship, an almost unsurpassable barrier, along whose shore
adventurous voyagers crept in log and bark canoes; while to the southward
alternating prairie and timber-land stretched away for unnumbered leagues
the Indian hunting-grounds,--broken only by a few scattered settlements
of French half-breeds.

From the walls of the Fort the eye ranged over a dull and monotonous
landscape, nowhere broken by signs of advancing civilization or even of
human presence. A few hundred yards to the east the waves of Lake
Michigan broke upon the wide, sandy beach, whence the tossing waters
stretched away in tumultuous loneliness to their blending with the
distant sky. Southward, along the shore of the lake, the nearly level
plain, brown and sun-parched, soon merged into rounded heaps of
wind-drifted sand, barely diversified by a few straggling groups of
cottonwoods. To the westward extended the boundless prairie, flat and
bare as a floor, except where the southern fork of the little river cut
its way through the soft loam, and gave rise to a scrubby growth of
cottonwood and willow; while northward, across the main body of the
river, the land appeared more rugged and broken, and somewhat heavily
wooded with oak and other forest trees, but equally devoid of evidences
of hab