I must not omit to mention one of the prettiest little events of the day. About noon, Lieutenant Cushing, of the Monticello, with a crew of six men, put off from his ship for the purpose of making soundings in front of the fort--the object being to obtain a closer range for our guns, if possible. The enemy permitted him to approach within about five hundred yards of the beach, when they opened upon him a brisk fire from their guns. Shots fell round him thick and fast, but still the boat sped on, the irrepressible Cushing deliberately standing up in the stern of the boat and marking the depth of water himself. Having obtained the desired information, the courageous Lieutenant turned his tiny craft in the direction of the fleet, and again ran the gauntlet of the guns of the fort on his way to the flag-ship to make his report to the Admiral. The boat was struck but once during the perilous trip, resulting in the loss of a leg to one of the crew. While this was going forward, Commander Guest sent several boats in front of the fort from another direction, and dragged the channel for torpedoes. The knowledge obtained by these several reconnoissances proved of the utmost value to us during the continuance of that and the succeeding attack. A SKETCH OF FORT DEARBORN. BY COLONEL J. G. WILSON. In the year 1685, M. de la Durantaye, who had been stationed at Michilimackinac, erected a fort at Chicago, Illinois, which probably stood on the identical site occupied by Fort Dearborn. In the Chicago Historical Society's collections there is a map, made at Quebec in 1688, by J. Baptiste Louis Franquelin, in which "Fort Checagou" is laid down in its proper position, on the shore of the "Lac des Illinois or Michigany;" and in the narrative of the Rev. J. B. de St. Come, a Canadian priest, who visited Chicago in 1699, he speaks of it as being "built on the bank of the little river, having the lake on one side, and a beautiful prairie on the other." At what date "Fort Chicagou ceased to exist does not appear-probably prior to 1744, at which date French maps make no mention of a mission or fort, but simply of the "Port de Chicago." In 1763, when the Ottawa chief, Pontiac, combined the Indian tribes of the Northwest to destroy all the posts held by the English, no mention is made of the fort at Chicago, which, had one existed at that time, would unquestionably have been the case. Posts at Mackinac, Green Bay, Sault Ste. Marie, Sandusky, Presque Isle, and St. Joseph's fell, one after another, into the hands of the In dians. Detroit, the only post west of Niagara, and Fort Pitt, which was not captured by the savages, sustained a fifteen months' siege, when the garrison was relieved by the arrival of General Bradstreet with an army of three thousand men. None of the Pottowatamies or other Indians, whose huntinggrounds were in Northern Illinois in the early part of the present century, had any personal recollection of the fort; but that one formerly existed on or near the site of Fort Dearborn, was a well-known fact among them. The post at Chicago, designated Fort Dearborn, was garrisoned, on December 3, 1803, by one company of the 1st Regiment United States Infantry, commanded by Captain John Whistler. The fort was named in honor of General Henry Dearborn, then Secretary of War; but by whom erected, or the exact date of its erection, is not known-probably, however, by Captain Whistler, during the autumn of the same year, 1803. It consisted of four log-houses, used as barracks, and two blockhouses, also constructed of heavy logs, containing three cannon; the whole surrounded by a palisade about twelve feet high, surmounted by crows-feet of iron. Except the fort, there was but one other building in Chicago sixty-two years ago, and that was a small log-cabin on the north side of the river, owned and occupied by Pierre Lemay, a French Canadian trader, and his pretty Pottowatamie wife. The year following it was purchased by John Kinzie, also an Indian trader, whose descendants still reside in Chicago. Two of his sons are paymasters in the army, and Major-General Hunter is a son-in-law. Fort Dearborn was commanded continuously by Captain Whistler, until September 30, 1809, at which date Captain Nathan Heald, of the same regiment, took command of the post, and retained it until its evacuation by order of General Hull, August 15, 1812, when the battle or massacre of Chicago occurred on the lake shore, about two miles south of the fort. There were killed in the action Surgeon Isaac V. Van Voorhis, Captain William Wayne Wells, the interpreter; Ensign George Ronan, thirty-six privates, two women and twelve children. The next day the Indians set fire to the fort. Fort Dearborn was rebuilt early in the summer of 1816, by Captain Hezekiah Bradley, by whom it was reoccupied with a detachment of troops, July 4th, nearly four years from the date of its destruction by the Pottowatamies. It continued to be a garrisoned post until September, 1823, when it was again evacuated. From that time until 1828, it was occupied by Dr. Alexander Wolcott, Indian agent, and used for the temporary accommodation of the few families who arrived in Chicago during that period. August 14, 1827, General Scott was directed to reoccupy Fort Dearborn, but the order was countermanded September 5 following. It was again occupied, October 3, 1828, VOL. IV.-21 and a third time evacuated, May 20th, 1831. From that date until June 17, 1832, the fort was left in charge of George W. Dole, as agent for the Government, who afterwards delegated his charge to John Kinzie, sub-agent. The post was again occupied by United States troops, under the command of General Scott, upon the breaking out of the Sauk war. The number of deaths by cholera, which prevailed that season at the fort, was seventy-five. Out of this number were two young officers, Brevet Second-Lieutenants Gustavus Browne, and George W. McDuffie. Fort Dearborn continued to be a regularly garrisoned post until December 29, 1836, when the Indians having been removed west of the Mississippi, it was finally abandoned by virtue of General Order War Department No. 80, dated November 30, 1836. The grounds surrounding the fort, known as the Fort Dearborn Reservation, were sold in 1839 by order of the President. From its evacuation in 1836 until within less than ten years, it was held by the Government for the occasional use of its army officers, engineers, and agents connected with the public works. During the summer of 1856 the principal buildings were torn down, and the old block-house, an object of very great interest as a relic of bygone days, was also completely demolished. The following is a complete list of United States officers in command of Fort Dearborn from its erection in 1803, until its final abandonment as a military post in 1836 :— Captain John Whistler, from December 3, 1803, to September 30, 1809. Brevet Colonel John McNeil, from August, 1821, to July, 1823. SNICKER'S GAP. THE great battles have their bright chronicles, which are like the illuminated initial letters of medieval MSS. They are elaborated, and colored, and made much-often justly as the turning-points, the beginnings of paragraphs and chapters in the history of the war. But the marches and skirmishes are the ordinary characters making up the body of the page. No one thinks of them as individual affairs; and as a letter or a comma would be noticed only in its absence, there have been a myriad of skirmishes that are unknown except to the memory of the participants, or the few friends mourning the fallen. When McClellan was moving on his last march from the field of Antietam, it became our duty to hold for a day or two Snicker's Gap. Few of us subalterns had ever heard of "Snicker's," and we could only speculate whether the topographical knowledge in the gray pates of our seniors embraced the queerlynamed place. 66 A careful study of the geographical nomenclature of our country is amusing as well as instructive; and while a critical investigation might easily write its local history, those who pass over its surface, whether in peace or war, have many temptations to laugh at the national taste that baptizes a roadside hamlet "Damascus or Corinth," ," and yet can find no loftier title for a portal into the Valley of the Shenandoah than "Snicker's Gap." So along the dusty road we had our jests over the whole Snickerish commune, and laughed and wondered what the locale resembled. We laughed in the distance, but as we crawled up the winding road towards the depression of the Gap, our admiration for the panoramic beauties around us threw out of view the insignificance of the name. Additionally to the natural charms of a magnificent valley, there lay exposed what to our eyes was more than these-the greatness of the Army of the Potomac. Few of us, participants though we had been in every march, had ever beheld such a display of its strength in its working-dress. There were under our feet immense swarms of blue-clad life, great columns of moving battalions, covered with the dusty mantle every march weaves itself, and crowned with the diadem of steel; cities of white tents, glistening in the sun of that early November afternoon; cluster after cluster of guns, too far off to be grim, thrown into bright relief by their crimson blankets; acres of impedimenta, representing our potential existence; cavalry dotting the distance, and reduced to mere spots and moving specks; clouds of dust that might persuade one the earth had burst into blossoms after its kind; and all these stretched off to the blue shadows that lie around the Upper Potomac, towards Leesburg, that unfortunate town, never sure of six consecutive weeks of Federal or rebel rule-towards the hills that watch Bull Run, and southward, along the eastern flank of the Blue Ridge, where our vanguard cannon send heavenward their smoky offerings, and back to us their messages of victory. We forgot" Snicker in the grandeur. Other troops had preceded us a few hours, and, passing rude rebel barriers here and there across the way, we followed the coiling path till, just where it began its downward Shenandoah curve, when the valley changed its golden sunshine for the gray of dusk, and day lingered for a moment among the rocks and pines, we met their leader, Hancock, well called "superb." We heard him tell our commander how half an hour's advantage had decided the occupancy, when his foremost guns threw their shells into the enemy's column creeping up the western slope, and we won the Gap. Minie looked with an admiring awe upon the general whose yet fresh Williamsburg laurels were but the beginning of his wreath of glory, who, even then, had shown himself as gallant under the sparkle of bayonets as he was graceful beneath the ball-room tapers. And as it grew dusk and chill, our brigade took the left of the road, and relieved Hancock's troops. So we found ourselves at dark strung along the crest of a mountain in the woods, among rocks, with precipices in front, chasms in rear, and our left flank Mars only knew where. There were but two well-defined points in our situation: there were no rocks above us, and the rebels were in our front. And so we were on picket. The enemy might be crawling, Indian fashion, under our very feet, or might be beyond cannon-shot. We could only watch. A tin of coffee and half a dozen “hard bread" made a sumptuous supper, and Minie, who was not a watcher, sharing the blankets of Pyfe, went to rest on the top of the backbone of the Blue Ridge. The sensation is curious enough to feel yourself lying on a geographical summit, a ridge whence the slightest impulse would roll you back into the nationalism of one side or down the abyss of rebeldom the other. And as you lie gazing at the heavens, you wander back over the days of peace, when the banner's stars were as bright as those-past colonial and aboriginal eras, when savage wars vexed the same forests; to those other days and other lands, when Magi learned their signs, and in their night-watches talked with these sons of God; and you drowsily wonder on what future the stars will shine, and then, half asleep, hum out of tune a snatch of a camp-song: "The stars we saw by memory's light were eyes of ladies, oh!" |