vessels mooring or weighing anchor there numbered 17,553, and brought and
carried away cargoes aggregating 14,236,190 tons. Nevertheless, for some
years, because of the quagmire condition of streets and the frequent
inundations from lake and river, Chicago was termed derisively the
"amphibious town." By filling in the land, the city long since literally
lifted itself out of the mud, the level of streets to-day being eight feet
above the original marsh. But even before the transformation of the town
into a city, it was plain that the founders had come to build it into a
centre of trade and population. Encouraging progress was being made on the
Illinois and Michigan Canal, the population of the town was increasing,
neighboring prairies were being tilled, and the water carriers who drove
their carts into the lake, filled their barrels, and then distributed water
by the bucketful, were giving way to the Hydraulic Company. A new era was
at hand, and Chicago on the 4th of March, 1837, became an organized
municipality.
The first census, taken in July, 1837, showed a population in the city of
1800 men, 845 women, and 1344 children. With a colored population of 77,
the grand total of inhabitants in this its first year's existence as a city
was 4066. To-day its population is nearing the two-million mark.
O.D. Wetherell, ex-city Comptroller, recalls a letter, written at an early
date by a citizen, in which the prediction was made that some day Chicago
would become a city of 10,000 people! At the time, that prophecy seemed to
be more wildly optimistic than would a prediction now that the city might
ultimately harbor the amazing total of ten million persons.
The early promoters of Chicago were sanguine of a great future, but none
dreamed of the amazing destiny in store. At a political gathering in 1838,
addressed by Stephen A. Douglas and John T. Stuart, his competing candidate
for Congress, a local orator, warmed by the enthusiasm of the occasion,
uttered what was derisively referred to the next day as "flamboyant
prophecy."
"The child is already born," he exclaimed, "who shall live to see Chicago a
city of 50,000 souls."
"Town lots, town lots!" shouted the audience in amiable sarcasm, not
wishing the visiting statesman to depart with the suspicion that dreams of
real-estate speculation had destroyed the sanity of the whole community.
For three years the town had been the centre of a great land craze, one of
the first real-estate booms that have played so important a part in the
location and development of Western cities. Dr. Horace Chase, writing in
1883 from Milwaukee, says:
"Soon after the sale of lots in Chicago, in 1833, I think, Robert
Kinzie, on his way to Detroit, stopped at Marsh's trading post near
Coldwater. There happened to be several of us present and Bob began
to boast about Chicago and what a great city it would become. 'Why,'
said he, 'I bought some of the best lots in Chicago for twenty
dollars apiece, and those lots are worth sixty dollars apiece
to-day!' It seemed to us utterly absurd that a lot should be worth
sixty dollars, when two hundred dollars would buy one hundred and
sixty acres of the best quality. Not a single person in the crowd
believed Bob's yarn."
[Illustration THE ART INSTITUTE, CHICAGO.]
As an example of the spirit which animated these old pioneers who came in
the early days to the great city that was to be, the story of one man
furnishes an interesting illustration. The writer had it from the lips of
the man himself, who recently died at the ripe age of eighty-two.
"I had heard of the West," he said, "in the little hamlet in
New England where I was born. My ambition was fired, and I
determined at all hazards to seek my fortune there. I soon
found myself in Buffalo with seven dollars in my pocket, and
with this I had to pay my transportation to the young city in
the West. After considerable 'higgling' with the captain of a
schooner I arranged for deck passage at a cost of three
dollars. Part of my money was then expended to get some cotton
cloth. This I sewed up in the shape of a bag, and into it I put
some shavings to soften the hard planks of the deck of the ship
at night. The balance of the money went for boiled ham, cheese,
and bread.
"I was twenty years old, had been a farm boy, and had attained
no special knowledge of any manual trade.
I arrived in Chicago and found it a dismal, swampy place, but
with every appearance of thrift and activity. My money was
exhausted, and work was indispensable. Going along the one
important street or road I found a man building a rather
pretentious boarding house. He asked me if I 'came off that
ship in the harbor,' and when I answered 'yes,' he inquired
whether there were any carpenters on board. I told him there
was none excepting myself. He wanted to know if I could 'lay
out work' so that his men could saw and hammer, which was all
they could do. It seemed to me that I could 'lay out work'
better than anything else, and engaged myself to him at four
dollars a day. Two days satisfied my new boss that my technical
knowledge was deficient, and he paid me off. I soon afterwards
found work in a harness shop, and by assiduity and attention I
acquired a knowledge of that business. Thus I got my start."
This man lived continuously in Chicago for more than sixty years. By early
and judicious investments in real estate he acquired wealth. He bought a
lot, now centrally located, for $400, and sold a part of it thirty years
later for $62,500. He sold it too soon, however, for that same corner will
bring at the present time not less than $500,000. At his death he left an
estate valued at between $5,000,000 and $6,000,000.
Fortunes were made over night. In 1835 the Federal Government opened a land
office, and this intensified the excitement. Boundless acres of outlying
farmland changed hands in Chicago. Towns and cities that had no existence
save on the blue prints of imaginative and wily promoters were plotted, and
their mythical blocks sold to hasty and credulous investors. But the panic
of 1837 brought both legitimate and illicit real-estate traffic to a close
with a crash. The dishonest and the defrauded went down in a common ruin.
By 1838 the sheriff was the only real-estate agent who could dispose of
property, and at these forced sales the returns were meager. Panic
paralyzing business, a mysterious disease like Asiatic cholera stopping
progress on the canal, and a drought destroying crops, impoverishing
streams, and spreading devastating fever in the city, was the calamitous
record of 1838.
Chicago as a city began with $1993 in its treasury. The need for municipal
improvement was imperative. Where to get money for sanitary drainage, for
the paving of a few streets, and the purchase of two fire engines, was a
problem. The Common Council appointed a finance committee with power to
act.
[Illustration STATUE OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN BY ST. GAUDENS.]
Peter Bolles was made chairman. It was finally decided to borrow $25,000
from the State Bank of Illinois, pledging the city to redeem the obligation
in five years. In due time the committee submitted as its report the
following letter:
"STATE BANK OF ILLINOIS,
"SPRINGFIELD, May 31, 1837.
"PETER BOLLES, ESQ.,
"_Dear Sir_:
"Your letter of the 18th, addressed to the president of this
bank and proposing on behalf of the city of Chicago a loan
from this bank of the sum of $25,000, has been laid before the
directors of the bank, and, I regret to have to state,
declined.
"I am very respectfully,
"Your o'bt serv't,
"N.H. RIDGELY, Cashier."
In 1900 the city which sixty-three years before could not borrow $25,000,
could boast of bank clearances amounting to $6,795,876,000.
The poverty and disasters of early days seemed only to nerve the city to
renewed determination and prepare her to meet with stoic faith the
appalling calamities of later years. In this résumé it is only possible to
catalogue the misfortunes that visited her. Floods swept away her shipping,
fire destroyed her accumulating industries, raging epidemics reduced her
population--cholera alone in 1854 causing 1424 deaths--and financial panic
again and again returned to manacle activities. Many times in Chicago's
history citizens could well exclaim: "One woe upon another's heels doth
tread, so fast they follow!"
Unconquerable in the presence of these recurrent visitations, the city
pressed forward to her place as the metropolis of the Mississippi empire.
At an early day "prairie schooners," pioneers of the great freight trains
to come, laden with grain from the fertile areas round about began to line
the prairie roads leading to Chicago. In 1839, two years after the city
was begun, a crude grain elevator was constructed. The farmers, too poor to
furnish sacks, brought their grain in sheets, blankets, and pieces of
canvas. It was hoisted by hand with block and tackle to the elevator, and
in the year mentioned 2900 bushels of wheat, consigned to Black Rock, New
York, were dumped loose into the hold of the brig _Osceola_. From this
primitive beginning has grown a mighty volume of trade in grain. In 1900
the wheat, corn, oats, rye, and barley shipped from Chicago amounted to
232,267,109 bushels, while the receipts aggregated 307,723,135 bushels.
It was not until 1843 that the Common Council came to the conclusion that
the place was sufficiently advanced as a city to warrant the enactment of
an ordinance declaring that hogs should no longer be permitted to run at
large in the streets. In 1900, far from being unwelcome, over 8,000,000
hogs, safely penned in cars, arrived in the city and were sent to the
slaughter.
In writing of Chicago it is customary to deal in superlatives, and this is
necessary in the nature of things. Its Union Stock Yards cover 400 acres,
nearly twice the area of the original town. Twenty miles of streets
thread this meat-packing colony, which pays wages amounting to nearly
$9,000,000 a year. In 1900 there were shipped to Chicago 277,205 carloads
of hogs, cattle, sheep, etc. Its trade in grain leads every city in the
world, while its general mercantile traffic is surpassed by few.
The first railroad at that time was the Galena and Chicago Union, which was
chartered January 16, 1836. Galena at that time was believed to be destined
far to outrival her neighbor, and therefore demanded and secured the place
of honor in the title of the road. To-day thirty-nine distinct railroads
enter Chicago, more than half the railway systems of America make that city
their objective point, and the aggregate distance travelled by freight and
passenger trains daily entering the metropolis is over 80,000 miles. In the
thunder of this traffic the clamor of rivalry long since died away. The
British critic, Mr. Archer, remarked that he was unable to detect the
slightest evidence of competition with Chicago even in a "Pisgah view from
the top of the Auditorium."
The employment of large adjectives in the recital of the city's history is
not without warrant. "The trouble with you people in Chicago," remarked a
visitor, "is that you exaggerate too much." "We have to," retorted a
citizen, proudly, "in fact we have to lie to tell the truth." Even when we
speak of the fire of 1871, we must call it the "great Chicago fire," for
never before perhaps in the history of the world were so many of the
piled-up monuments of man's hands consumed so rapidly. Such awful moments,
happily, seldom come in the history of communities. It was as if the fires
of Dante's Inferno had been permitted for a night and day to devastate a
great city of this planet. One thousand four hundred and seventy acres of
buildings were utterly consumed. The entire business portion of the city
vanished in smoke and flame. One hundred thousand persons were left
homeless and in many cases penniless. Seventeen thousand four hundred and
fifty buildings were destroyed, the total valuation of the loss by fire
being $186,000,000.
In the presence of a catastrophe, so vast that the imagination reeled as
the eye wandered over the mighty paths where the cyclones of fire had
swept, social inequalities and race prejudices were ignored. All
right-minded men stood together in a common bond of fellowship. Doubtless
much of the present spirit of amalgamation of the people of the city is an
outgrowth of the calamity which thirty years ago brought the
representatives of those divers races elbow to elbow in the common cause
of rebuilding their homes and reconstructing their lines of industry. The
riots at the Haymarket did not indicate bad blood between the races of the
city, but merely an incidental if not accidental social unrest not uncommon
in all our greater cities.
[Illustration RUINS OF THE GREAT FIRE, CHICAGO.]
The city staggered, but did not fall, under the woful wreck the great fire
wrought. Through a grim schooling of disaster in the past the city had
developed a force of character that fire could not consume. "Nothing,"
exclaimed the great French Cardinal and Premier of the seventeenth century,
when he was temporarily overthrown, "nothing remains but the indomitable
spirit of Richelieu." Chicago had similar faith in her own inherent power.
There were some broken spirits who, gazing on the melancholy ruin, caught
no glimpse of the magnificent city that was to rise, as if by command of a
magician's wand, upon the smoking desolation. But the majority did not
permit the calamity to crush. The faithful were exhorted to rebuild the
city. It was predicted then that Chicago would live, and live to be so
mighty and so vast that the great fire would be but an incident in its
history. The city was to live because beyond it were the giant forces, the
teeming millions, the imperial area of the mighty West, which, having made
Chicago the gateway to the East, would recreate it under the same natural
necessities.
The city's optimistic faith and determination enlisted the sympathy of the
world, and $5,000,000 in relief contributions poured in and thousands of
telegrams offering credit to merchants supplemented this hearty and timely
exhibition of Good Samaritanism. The deeds of valor displayed by firemen
and citizens in fighting an unequal combat with the fire were equalled only
by the heroism which appeared in the rebuilding of the city. The first
structure to rise over the ruins was a board shanty, twelve by sixteen feet
in dimensions. It was on Washington Street, between Dearborn and Clark,
near the site of a former flourishing block, where W.D. Kerfoot had
conducted a large business in real estate. The tiny structure was built
hastily on the morning of October 10th, while the surrounding ashes and
heaps of twisted iron were so hot that the little building had to be set in
the middle of the street. The comical cabin bore the legend, "Kerfoot's
Block. Everything gone but wife, children, and energy." Small as the shanty
was, it was an inspiration. It marked the beginning of a city now so vast
that the municipality existing before the fire seems but a shadow. Through
the city run paved streets whose aggregate length would reach from Chicago
to New York, and start the traveller some distance on his way to Boston.
More than 100,000 street lights, kept "trimmed and burning" by the
municipality at an annual cost of over $1,000,000, twinkle in the city by
night.
Over a quarter of a billion of gallons of water are consumed daily by a
city now protected by an efficient fire department against a repetition of
the disaster of 1871. Nearly 1500 miles of sewers preserve the sanitation,
while the superb ingenuity of engineers has changed the courses and
reversed the currents of rivers, and with connecting canals turned the
city's sewage toward the Gulf of Mexico.
The ambition of this characteristically American city is to excel in
everything. When she undertook to hold a World's Fair, she determined to
eclipse any previous exposition, and to secure a phenomenal attendance.
When she held a Parliament of Religions she arranged that the faiths of
every clime should be represented by their most learned and pious men, and
that the teachings there set forth should constitute a memorable
contribution to the best thought of the world. It has been said of Chicago
that when she decides to be the home of the greatest poet among mankind,
she will go out and get him, or, better still, produce him.
Cities affecting a more advanced culture sniff at the stock-yard atmosphere
which they pretend to believe permeates the literary life of Chicago, and
Eugene Field, in playful mood, accepting the jibes of distant critics,
printed as the frontispiece of his _Culture's Garland_ a wreath of sausage
links; but William D. Howells has acknowledged that out of Chicago is
coming a literary virility destined to leave classic record in the annals
of letters. Field himself occupies an honored place in the American
Pantheon, and his "Little Boy Blue," though dead, forever sings his way to
our firesides.
The city takes high rank as a centre for advanced education. In addition to
technical schools like the Armour Institute, it has two famous
Universities; the Chicago, and the Northwestern. The Chicago University
began its career ten years ago. The old denominational University of the
same name having been sold at auction under foreclosure, John D.
Rockefeller decided to reorganize it and found a great institution of
learning, and to that end pledged a portion of his fortune and secured as
President, Dr. William R. Harper, of Yale. The University opened in 1892
with 702 students. To-day it has nearly 4000. It began with no less than
135 instructors; it now has 205. The University made its start with
grounds, buildings, and equipments valued at $1,600,000, and invested funds
amounting to $1,500,000. To-day its productive funds aggregate over
$15,000,000. Women have been prominent among the University's donors, and
in all the departments women students enjoy equal status with men. A
student may enter at the beginning of any quarter and receive his degree at
the end of any term. The colleges continue throughout the year. Recently
the Chicago Institute, founded by Mrs. Emmons Blaine for training school
teachers, was absorbed by the University. In fact, Dr. Harper has succeeded
in merging so many professional schools that he has been amiably accused
of attempting to form an educational trust. The Northwestern University,
located partly in the city and partly in Evanston, a suburb, was founded in
1851. It has 296 instructors and over 3000 students. Its productive funds
amount to over $3,000,000. Although conducted under denominational
auspices, its charter provides that no particular religious faith shall be
required of students. It has a campus of 45 acres on the Lake Michigan
shore. The University includes a college of Liberal Arts, and schools of
medicine, law, pharmacy, dentistry, music, and theology. Many of the
departments are coeducational.
[Illustration PUBLIC LIBRARY, CHICAGO.]
The public schools of Chicago are crowded with three quarters of a million
children of parents for few of whom "Plato and the swing of Pleiades and
the tall reaches of the peaks of song" had a meaning. And these children of
every kindred and tongue are not herded into classes and indifferently
taught. Modern science assists them from the start with anthropometric
examinations, and scientific methods are in use in every school. There
could be no more hopeful "sign and portent" of the city's future than is
furnished by its public schools.
Voluntarily, by popular vote of the people, civil service was established
in all branches of the city administration, and the principle laid down
that industrious merit rather than political influence should fill the
thousands of positions in the school department and city branches in
general, a graphic illustration that the spoils system is not a Chicago
ideal. Benevolent institutions thrive under the munificent endowment of its
men of wealth. Seers like Professor David Swing have preached the Gospel to
an eager people, thousands on Sunday being turned away, unable to press to
the pews through the multitude of churchgoers. All these phenomena present
the interesting psychological truth that with Chicago's liberty and
cosmopolitan make-up has been developed a reassuring force "making for
righteousness." The city is not yet prepared for canonization, but in many
ways it is, in its largeness of life and tolerance, an example to the
cities of the world. She is still apt, perhaps, in speaking, for example,
of her art galleries to dwell overmuch upon the cost of the buildings and
paintings and the number of acres.
The unprejudiced critic or historian knows that not all Chicago is pork and
pig-iron, though why these industries are not as honorable as poetry and
prose, perhaps they who sit in the seat of the scornful will explain.
Booker T. Washington well says that a people cannot be truly great until
they recognize that it is as dignified to till the soil as it is to pen an
epic, and in the same line of thought it might be said that a people who
"live laborious days" packing meat and handling lumber, particularly by the
thousand carloads, are not necessarily belated travellers on the highway
that leads to national integrity and renown.
In wealth, in population, in the high character and eager attendance in her
great schools, in libraries, art, and architecture, as evidenced by
institutes, buildings, and academies of design, in her letters, as
displayed by the literary output, in her spiritual conquests, as shown in
the teachings of her poets and preachers, and even in the periodical
reforms that purify the political atmosphere, Chicago's future will
undoubtedly be, like her past, phenomenal.
[Illustration]
FOOTNOTE:
[10] Among the Sacs, "Checagau" was the name of one of their
valiant warriors and colonizers, and meant "He that stands by the tree."
Among the several tribes of the Algonquin group "Chekago," "Chicagong,"
etc., was pronounced in a variety of ways and had as many meanings.
[Illustration]
MADISON
THE CITY OF THE FOUR LAKES
BY REUBEN G. THWAITES
In 1836, that portion of Michigan Territory which lay west of Lake
Michigan, was erected into the Territory of Wisconsin. Within the borders
of the nascent commonwealth there lived at that time about twelve thousand
whites and nine thousand Indians. Many of the sites of future cities of
Wisconsin were already occupied by agricultural settlers, isolated or in
tiny groups.
Green Bay, a straggling French-Canadian settlement, had come down from the
seventeenth century, maintaining a sickly existence upon the fur trade and
the coasting traffic of the upper Great Lakes; Forts Winnebago (at Portage)
and Crawford (at Prairie du Chien) were surrounded by meagre hamlets,
chiefly of French creoles; the lead-mining region in the southwest,
although sparsely settled, contained the bulk of the white population, with
Mineral Point as its centre--a village having at the time an apparently
brighter prospect than the new settlement at the mouth of Milwaukee River;
there were also a few notches carved, at wide intervals, from the gloomy
forest bordering the western shore of Lake Michigan. Outside of the
settlements just enumerated, Wisconsin was practically uninhabited by
whites. Here and there was to be found an Indian trader, the Yankee
successor of the _coureur de bois_ of the old French _régime_, or some
exceptionally adventurous farmer; but their far-separated cabins only
emphasized the density of the wilderness, through which roamed untrammelled
the shiftless, gipsy-like aborigines,--the comparatively harmless
Chippewas, Menomonies, Pottawatomies and Winnebagoes.
[Illustration THE STATE HOUSE, MADISON.]
On the 4th of July the territorial officers of Wisconsin qualified at
Mineral Point, with Henry Dodge, a Black Hawk War hero, as Governor. In
October following, the first Legislature assembled within a two-story
battlement-fronted house in the little lead-region hamlet of Belmont. The
highway which it faced bristled with stumps, while miners' shafts and
prospectors' holes thickly dimpled the shanty neighborhood. A month was
spent in selecting a capital for the infant Territory. There were seventeen
applicants. Some of them were actual settlements, like Green Bay, Fond du
Lac, Milwaukee, Racine, Portage, Belmont, Mineral Point, and Platteville;
but others were "paper towns," existing only on maps made by real-estate
speculators. Of such shadowy substance was Madison, the victor.