386 MAN : PAST AND PRESENT. [CHAP. 



tribes, with whom the English settlers had first to do, none have 

 survived the " wreck of nations." 



Chicago, which has a white population probably four times 

 as numerous as all the North American aborigines, occupies the 

 site of Fort Dearborn, which was founded in 1804 to overawe 

 the turbulent prairie Indians, and was in 1833 the scene of a 

 memorable gathering of the Pottawatomis, a numerous branch of 

 the formerly wide-spread Algonquian Miamis. At this gathering 

 they ceded to the United States Government, for very much less 

 than "prairie value," a vast domain of some 20 million acres 

 constituting the present States of Illinois and Wisconsin. Over 

 this tract are now thickly strewn thriving agricultural and industrial 

 settlements of the white intruders, while the original owners of the 

 land are reduced to about 1500 souls, distributed in small groups 

 among the Indian Territory, Kansas, and other Agencies. 



But even the most maudlin of sentimental philanthropists will 

 scarcely venture to affirm that from the humani- 

 R^rvations! tarian point of view there is any serious ground for 

 regretting the transformation. In these Reserva- 

 tions, when honestly administered, as always in the Dominion 

 and now also for the most part in the States, there is little cause 

 to regret an inevitable change, by which the aborigines may 

 possibly be doomed to ultimate extinction or absorption in the 

 higher race, but by which they are in the meantime afforded 

 every opportunity of becoming peaceful and even useful citizens. 

 Many, such as the Chikasaws and Cherokis in Indian Territory, 

 the Six Nations in New York, the Ojibwas and others in Canada, 

 and these Pottawatomis themselves, have accepted their new 

 destinies with a sort of philosophic resignation, and have already 

 made considerable progress in the arts and industries of civilised 

 man. Even letters have not been neglected, and a pleasant 

 surprise was afforded to thoughtful observers by a welt-considered 

 paper on Indian legends and superstitions contributed to the 

 Forum for July 1898, by the Pottawatomi chief, Simon Pokagon. 



and of being the only Virginia tribe still occupying a corner of "the original 

 hunting ground ' ; (J. Garland Pollard, The Panntnkey Indians of Virginia, 

 Washington, 1894). 



