Chicago History | Spring 1970

·Chicago History SPRING 1970

The handsome Dunleith and Dubuque bridge was a symbol of Chicago's ties with the rich lands that were opening up beyond the Mississippi in the late 1800s.

Built in wrought iron by Andrew Carnegie in 1868, it spanned the Mississippi for the Illinois Central Railroad and completed a sure and quick route to the Chicago market for the products of northern Iowa . The view here is toward Dunleith (now East Dubuque, Illinois) at about 1875.

Chicago Historical Soc iety

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Chicago History

THE MAGAZINE 0 F THE CHICAGO HISTORICAL SOCIETY

Chicago Historical Society

Chicago History The Magazine

ef the Chicago Historical Society

SPRING 1970 Volume I, Number 1, New Series

Editorial Advisory Committee

Paul M. Angle, Chairman Emmett Dedmon J ames R. Getz Oliver J ensen Robert W. Joh annsen H erman Kogan Will Leonard Clement M . Silvestro Robert M. Sutton

CONTENTS CHICAGO WAS THEIRS / 4

by Jam es A. Clifton TARZAN WAS BORN IN CHICAGO / 18

by John I. Tucker HOW THEY TINKERED WITH A RIVER / 32

bJ• Jolin Clayton THE GRIPMAN WORE A SHEEPSKIN COAT / 47

D avid Lasswell , Editor

by George T. Bryant Fl FTY YEARS AGO / 57 THREE CHICAGO BOOKS / 60

Cover illustration: A Potawatomi boy at a Prairie Band Pow Wow described in James A. Clifton's article " Chicago Was Theirs."

From the author's collection.

Review by Paul M. Angle

Opposite: Traffic in the Chicago harbor in 1869, as seen from near Rush Street Bridge, looking toward the Lake.

The history of the development of the harbor is told in this issue by John Clayton.

Printed by R. R. Oon nelley an d Sons Company, Chi cago, Ill inois Designed by Doug Lang Copyright, 1970 by the Ch icago Historical Society North Avenue and Clark Street Chicago, Illinois 60614 Chicago History

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Chief Waubansee or "Break-of-Day" was Band Chief of the Potawatomi along the Kankakee River. He led the Prairie Band to the Iowa reserve in 1833, where he remained when the Potawatomi were moved to Kansas.

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Ch icago History

M' Kenney & Hall , Chicago Hislorical Society

CHICAGO WAS THEIRS

by James A. Clifton

Today in northeast Kansas lives a group of Potawatomi Indians descended from those who lived in the Chicago region.

Their history began long before the Fort Dearborn Massacre and continues today) 137 years after their removal.from the Chicago area.

Who are these Indians and how has this living remnant of Chicago) s earliest times managed to survive? largely by accident. Before mo,¡ing to Kansas, four years of dealing with i\'estern tribes had convinced me that there were more satisfying things for a young anthropologist to do with his research time than to chase after recalcitrant, deculturated Indians. I had in fact sworn off Indians. I was going to settle in at the University and then Jay plans for a long field trip to a pleasant Pacific island, palm trees, coral strand, and all.

But the Texaco roadmap plainly said that there was a Potawatomi reservation just north of Topeka, hardly fifty miles away. What in the world was an Algonkian tribe doing in Kansas in 1962-;, If they were not in the northern Wisconsin forest, they should have been in Oklahoma, proper Indian territory. So in late summer curiosity and the boredom which comes easily to a Chicagoan living in small town Kansas, moved me to a Saturday's jaunt. Also there was the faint chance that I just might find a few old timers scattered about the reservation, enough to provide a little practical training experience for my students. But might I anticipate finding a substantial population? A functioning community? Intact ritual organizations? Not really.

This was too much to expect. I knew vaguely

1 CAME ON THE PRAIRIE POTAWATOMI

Profes or Clifton. a native Chicagoan, is presently with the Center for Anthropological Studie of Prescott College, Prescott, Arizona. This article summarize portions of his book, The Prairie People, to be published by the Kansas Cniversities Press this year.

that the Potawatomi were originally a Great Lakes area tribe. They were long removed-a century and more-from the old ¡woodlands habitat. They could not possibly have retained much of traditional custom or language, or social forms. No, they were surely long assimilated, an ethnic fragment separated from their heritage by a hundred and fifty years of deliberate efforts to change and convert them to white ways. At best I would discover one more dreary example of rural Indian poverty. Clearly, the road map was decades out of date.

That Saturday morning I stopped first at Mayetta, the half deserted cross-roads village adjacent to the eastern boundary of the "reservation" marked on my map. The gas station lad directed me westwards along a graveled sectionline road. Yes, he allowed, there were still some Indians Jiving over that way. I stopped again for directions a few miles later at Ernest Schimmel's farm house. "Oh yes ... Indians." He'd heard that there was maybe to be a doings that weekend. "Down the road towards High Prairie school. Two mile. Then south some, three quarter mile. Just where you hit the iron bridge on Soldier Creek go right on the dirt a piece. That's where they have their doings sometimes." Off again. West on graveled road . Left a bit. Sweltering in the ninety degree mugginess of the Kansas prairie. Roll up the windows to keep dust out. Across the bridge and right. Slow down.

This isn't a road. It's half willow-hung trail, half dry slough. But plenty of tire marks. Wait a moment. What's the thumping noise? Stop. Roll Chicago History

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The late John Wahwassuck who died in 1969.

He descended from one of the Potawatomi chiefs who treated with Gen. Anthony Wayne at Greenville, Ohio in 1795.

down the window and listen. Not the car but the regular swelling beat of a large deep toned drum.

Rising quickly in crescendo it stops abruptly.

Coming from beyond a stand of obscuring willows. Then swiftly beginning a choral chant.

Men's voices. I'd never heard an Algonkian language spoken or sung and couldn't make it out. Just confused sounds. Something, something, then clearly enunciated Wa-Na-Ni-KweO-Kitclz-1-Ta. Some more noise, then again clearly, Wa-Na-Ni-Kwe-0-Kitch-I-Ta', and yet more-to me-nonsense sounds.

I pulled round the corner stand of brush to see better. On my right a clilapiclatecl, unpainted, sagging antique of a farmstead. An open areadozens of battered pickups and dusty sedans parked there. On my left? I was half reluctant to look. My firm convictions of the early morning were fast dissolving. I parked, quickly grabbing at a ballpoint and notecarcls. Count noses first.

How many? Twenty, forty, eighty ... onetwenty, one-sixty. A minimum two hunclred-oclcl adults, men and women, inside or alongside a cleared, earth-banked ring a hundred feet or more in diameter. Off in the field, several dozen kids running, playing catch, tag. A big cook fire just east of the circle. Bubbling busily, two huge brass trade kettles hanging from forked poles. On the west, near the entrance to the ring, four tall lodge poles stuck upright in line, hanging limply from them in the still heat, four American flags.

And inside the ring. My word! So much to see, note, and understand. \ Vha t kinds of things are there? Five large decorated drums, three in line on one side of the ring, two on the other.

And a place for a sixth? Yes, it's over by the cook fire, a young man holding it on encl warming the hide surface, tuning the drum. Each drum most brightly decorated in that fine geometric and curvilinear \Voodlands style. I'd never seen the real thing before. Other decorations? Bright r. ll"ananikwe Okitchita translates as Stranger (or Sioux) Woman• Warrior. \Vananikwe was an historic personage, a Santee Dakota ,,¡oman who in 1876, following a visitation from Jesus Christ, founded the Dream Dance or Drum Religion. It was a fal l harvest rite of this new religion that I had stumbled onto this day.

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danglers. Silver bells? ); o. Chrom ed thimbles hung like bells. Beaded pouches, four to a drum, decorated with symbols: Man, Buffalo, Panther, Hand-totemic signs? Maybe. And eagle feathers lashed upright to the four stakes holding the drums just off the earth. Stakes:' :\'ot really, they look more like carved war clubs. But the drums.

They are fine. Heads painted half red, half blue.

Colors separated by a yellow slash oriented east and west. And calumets, yard-long stone pipes carved, fluted, some with twisted stems. By each pipe a carved wooden box-tobacco boxes.

Along the center of the ring, again in a line running east and west, cook pots, thermos jugs, cardboard boxes of squaw bread, other foodstuffs. \Vhy so much east and west? Something tugged at my memory. An old reading. In the Great Lakes region east to west was the path of the Sun, and of Life itself; from the eastern beginning towards the western afterworld. My memory worked again: there should be a lot of fours, this was the ritual number: and things should move clockwise, this was the ritual d irection. Four flags, four drummers, four singers, four chants in a cycle and then some other transitory ritual act. Pipe man lights up with a coal from the ritual fire and takes four puffs expelling smoke to the major directions in a clockwise posturing and now he passes the pipe clockwise around the ring. The patterns are coming through.

By now I have moved over to the low fence ma rking the boundary of the drum circle. I stand watching for an hour, yet no on e seems to lake notice of my presence. Then comes an invitation to enter. A banty rooster of a manbrown face and hands mottled by the albino splashes of Yitiligo, dressed in fancy shirt, le\·is and ten gallon straw-he calls to m e. ' ·\\.hy don't you come on in and sit here \,·ith us?" I do and my instruction begins. ··Before you se t go on over and give some tobacco to .\fisho 2 there.

Jfisho tra nslates as Our Grandfa ther. In traditional Pota\\atomi socia l life the gr a ndfath er" as the be ne,·o lent guide and protec tor of the r oung . Thus the Drum is pe rsonified and his power, nature, and role marked.

2.

Your pipe tobacco'll do. But Indian tobacco's better. Give it to the pipeman there. \Valk round the Drum-we call him Misho. Then come sit." Later. "I'm John Wahwassuck. I'm chief on this drum here. It's the Nakombi drum.

We call it that 'cause old man akombi first took it here from the Sac and Fox up north. ).'akombi means Clay Bear. This is my wife Josette. She's the old man's daughter. I'm not really Drum chief. Clayton Bear is. He's the old man's son; but he ain't around much. The old lady there is Grand Ma Bear. She doesn't like the pipe much.

Likes cigars better. She lives out in California now. Here for a visit. Now what's going on here is what we call the Green Corn Dance. It goes this way .... " I certainly welcomed the hospitality, which only increased over the years of our study. \,Vhat I did not then know, however, was that the Potawatomi had always-with a few noteworthy exceptions-been remarked as unusually docile, friendly, civil, and hospitable to strangers. Early French missionaries and explorers along the shores of the Great Lakes were the first to meet with the hospitable reception which I later found in Kansas. Allouez noted their friendliness in 1666, Dablon a few years later in 1670, and years later in r 7 r 8, Cadillac was only slightly less warmly received. ~ot only had I been unaware of their friendly reputation but I really did not understand, in terms of their history, just

Two present-day descendants of Black Partridge and Waubansee at the Kansas reservation Pow Wow.

who the Prairie Potawatomi were. It was more than a year, for example, before I discm·ered that John \Vahwassuck was grandson to \Va\Va-Suk, an important conservative Potawatomi sub-chief in the r86os; and that Wa-Wa-Suk was himself grandson to \Vawasek, 3 brother of Meshegthenogh, who together with the assembled sub-chiefs of the Potawatomi villages of Michigan and Illinois in r 795 at Greenville in the old 1 orthwest Territory had dickered under pressure with "Mad" Anthony vVayne and \Villiam Henry Harrison, exchanging, for pitifully litt le in return, a peaceful association and much of their territory, including that "One piece of land six miles square at the mouth of the Chikago river, emptying into the south-west end of Lake Michigan, where a fort formerly stood."

Later of course I came to know more of the Prairie Potawatomi from historical archives, old anthropological monographs and manuscripts, and from long days spent observing, participating in, and interviewing about Potawatorni life and manners. But even before I had traced my host John Wahwassuck's genealogy back to the time of French-British-American contests for supremacy in the Great Lakes region, I had fixed who these Potawatomi were-the descendants of the very band that had carried out the Fort Dearborn Massacre of August ro, 1812.

Dear old Mrs. Lee of Ogden School had misled and left us hanging. In the unit she taught us sixth graders on early Chicago the evil deeds of the " I ndians" at the first Fort Dearborn in 1812 were always recounted with mild horror. But she let the " I ndians"-never really identified as to tribe, historical position or life-way-simply slip away and disappear after the massacre as if the dry Illinois prairies had swallowed them .

The Prairie Potawatomi did not, I found later in Kansas, just pass suddenly away. In fact, these men and women I watched inside the drum circle were the children of the Black 3. These variant spellings of the name Wahwassuck all represent the same pronunciation. They result from ,·arious attempts at phonetic renderinq- of Potawatomi sounds, none of which sixteen sounds exactly resembles English sounds.

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Ch icago History

Partridge who had rescued Captain Helm's wife; of the English half-breed Chief Billy Caldwell; of \Vaubansee; of the French half-breed Pierre Clair (sometirnes Pere h Leclerc), who had interpreted for the garrison's surrender following the massacre; and of ~Icamis, Shabonee, and all the other young braw·s and war chiefs who had bested Captain Nathan Helm and his troops on the beach south of the Chicago River.

The distant grandfathers of these same Potawatomi had traded in respected friendship with John Kinzie, and even today there are still some examples of that wise Scot's hand-crafted silver in the hands of the Prairie People. Kinzic's neighbor, the French trader Antoine Ouilmette, like so many of his countrymen, had taken a Potawatomi wife, and e\-cn today the Kansas Potawatomi greet one with a bonjour.

Although Chicagoans may ha\·e long since forgotten the Prairie People, in the beginning they knew these fine warriors as "Chica.,.o's own l11dians." But the early settlers ignored the \·astly disruptive impact they were having on Indian life in the lower Great Lakes. They forgot that they were few and the Potawatomi many, that they were interlopers tolerated mainly for their trade goods. And these early settlers too easily believed \Villiam Henry Harrison's inflated boasts of decisive victory at Tippecanoe in 181 1.

Thus they ignored the fact that the Prairie Potawatomi were staunchly allied to the British cause in Xorth America and that, above all, they had heeded Tecumseh's teachings that the land and its products were theirs, tO be shared perhaps, but not to be sold or ~iven. The Prairie Band in Kansas has never forgotten Chicago nor their victory al Fort Dearborn. Today, somewhere on the edge of Little Soldier Creek on the Kansas reservc>.tion lies buried afely in an old copper kettle a now too-dangerous-to-handle sacred Potawatorni war bundle. And in that bundle one of the most magically powerful talismans of all is an old Union Jack, \·intage 1810, symbol of the military might of Britain, sealing an allegiance made in Ontario at Fort Malden

with the Potawatomi. The war bundle a Chikako Potawatomi shaman appealed to for spiritual power and victory in the dark night of August rr, 1812, and some young war chief carried it successfulJy to battle the folJowing morning on the shores of Lake Michigan.

Now some fundamental questions. Who were the Potawatomi to begin with? What were they doing as masters of Northern Illinois in 1812?

What happened to them after the Peace of 1815?, and before leaving Illinois? Had not some Potawatomi sided with Black Hawk in 1832?

What was this one aged ritualist I saw in Kansas doing sporting a trophy Sioux headdress, buffalo horns and alJ? And the other old man with the Pawnee bead-and-quill breast plate? What was the significance and origin of this drum ceremonial I witnessed? It was not the Grand Medicine Lodge-that was all male and secret, they would not have alJowed me in. It was not an Oklahoma style Pow \Vow. These are designed to separate the white man from his dollar; no one had sold me an entrance ticket. It could not be a clan ritual, too large a group and the drums were wrong for that. It was not an old ceremony probably, and did not date from the Great Lakes era. But more important than the origin of the Drum ceremony, how had this band of Potawatomi managed to sun¡ive and persist in the Kansas heartland as such an enthusiastic and culturally distinct group?

Early History and European Contacts Before the arrival of Europeans to map their locations and note their customs, the Potawatomi were one people with the Chippewa and Ottawa. And they were closely allied too in language and culture with others whom we today identify as separate and distinctive tribes: the Sac, Fox, Kickapoo, and Menomini, as welJ as the more distantly related tribes of the Illinois confederacy and the Miami and Shawnee of the great valley of the Ohio.

Potawatomi, Ottawa, and Chippewa oral history tells of their original unity and places their

Curtiss Pequano at the annual Pow Wow sporting a trophy Sioux headdress captured by an ancestor in battle on the high plains in the nineteenth century.

ongms in an inexplicit East-by the "Great \Vaters"-and mentions briefly a trek up the Saint Lawrence into the Great Lakes region. \Vhence they came and when no one yet knows exactly. We do know that by 1500, at the latest, they were moving westwards along the northern shores of lakes Huron and Superior. The Potawatomi, Ottawa, and Chippewa then consisted of a number of small bands of nomadic hunters, fifty to a hundred each, foraging for their subsistence over a large territory, non-agricultural, unable to settle long in any one place. In such circumstances, small component groups of men who are culturally and linguistically like tend to become isolated from one another and to grow dissimilar in their ways of speech. Thus the Potawatomi split off from the Ottawa and Chippewa, as many years earlier these three as a group had divided from the ancestors of the Kickapoo, the Sac, and the Shawnee, all of whom together we now know as one great related language family, the Central Algonkians.

The Potawatomi first came to the attention of a European, Samuel de Champlain, in 1616. In that year they were identified to Champlain by their enemies the Huron as a people probably living in the northern peninsula of Michigan.

But a few years later they were fleeing eastChicago History

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wards from woodlands Sioux (Winnebago) incursions. And next they once again recoiled westwards, this time from the dread threat of Iroq uois raiding parties that came thrusting up the Sa int Lawrence and across the lakes, contend ing for control of the fur trade. At this period the Jesuit fathers fixed the Potawatomi accurately around Green Bay, where they were on ly temporarily settled in their flight. They did not remain confined to this refuge long. By the end of the seventeenth century they had expanded in population, power, and territory southwards along both shores of Lake Michigan, to the Milwaukee River on one side and the Saint .Joseph on the other. The relative peace brought by French authority and negotiations, and the new trading posts established by French traders and military, protected and en couraged this expansion.

By the opening decades of the eighteenth century the Potawatomi were no longer small scattered bands of hunters sca\'enging the woods and streams for their subsistence. ?\or were they any longer exclusively nomadic. This south\\'ard move had brought the Potawatomi into the climatic zone which allowed producti\'e horticulture, given the techniques and plants available to the Indians of this area at the time. Similarly, the new ec;onomic conditions of the fur trade, the liberal credit policies of the French (and later the English, but never the cash-and-carry Yankees), and the introduction of steel tool and firearms further encouraged a swifter evolution of Potawatomi society away from the small, loosely kn it band towards a complex tribal organization. Now the Potawatomi, one widespread people, were composed of many constituent band-communities linked together by marriage ties, political alliances, ritual and clan sodalities, as well as by common identity and self-interest. Each of these segments of the tribe, the band -villages, was situated near a central lake, a stream, a hunting ground, or-increasingly so - convenient to a French trading post or fort. They had been drawn into the fringes of 10

Chicago History

the European economy as reliable producers and eager consumers, just as they would soon be drawn into the vortex of European political rivalries as staunch allies in war.

In the late eighteenth century as they pushed southwards into the mixed belt of prairie and woodland around the southern half of Lake Michigan, their mastery of agriculture, the benefits of the fur trade, and the development of large-scale hunting further promoted the growth of these now semi-sedentary Potawatomi bands. Semi-sedentary, for their economy was dual, a seasonal one. In summer the Potawatomi settled in their villages, some of which became small towns, with the women planting and harvesting the corn, squash, pumpkins, and beans. In fall came a move to temporary hunting and trapping camps, and spring brought th e Potawatomi out onto the prairie or west to the plains for the great communal buffalo hunt. By 1 7:P a few of the villages, tho e near Fon Saint Joseph, Fort Detroit, and Chicago, had become quite large towns (although never as substantial as those of the Shawnee), each with several satellite villages clustered about. These population concentrations provided a reasonable measure of protection against the continuing threat of Iroquois and later Sioux raids, which had in turn stimulated further political and military evolution. Each village or town increasingly came to be identified-in the eyes of whites-with the name of its principal headman or one of the proliferating self-made "chiefs" who often competed for and shared power with traditional hereditary leaders.

For decades the Potawatomi alliance \\'ith the French continued strong. In 1 758, during the French and Indian \\'ar, Potawatomi warriors defended Fort Duquesne against British attack.

In 1763 they recaptured forts aintJoseph, Sandusky, and Wayne from the new British garrisons. And of the 870 fighting men of all tribes that Pontiac mustered for the long, unsuccessful siege of Fort Detroit that same year, a full r 50 were Potawatomi under \,Vashee of the Saint

Joseph band. Although the Potawatomi were among ¡the first to support Pontiac and formed some of his finest units, they were also the first to desert that great leader when he proved incapable of the fine art of protracted siege warfare.

Following the Peace of 1763, and with the development of British authority and economic power in the old Northwest, the Potawatomi transferred their fealty to the interests of Great Britain, as some years later they would realign themselves with the new nation then germinating on the eastern seaboard.

Under British auspices the Potawatomi continued to grow, prosper, and extend their range.

By 1 800 they had gained ascendancy over a vast territory that included what is now southeastern Wisconsin, most of Michigan, northern Illinois, and Indiana south to the Wabash. From this secure territory, and with continuing British support, the Potawatomi now took up arms against the fledgling United States and remained in near constant hostilities with that expanding state until, as the garrison of Fort Dearborn and Chicago's earliest citizens discovered, they fired some of the opening shots of the War of 1812.

Earlier the treaty of Greenville in 1 795 had brought only a temporary truce; British influence had continued strong and the old alliance stable. Furthermore, the Potawatomi had remembered Tecumseh's preachings and promise and sought to defend and preserve their lands from the rolling waves of settlers coming across the eastern mountains.

The Peace of 1815 brought relative stability to the Great Lakes frontier. But it also increased the flow of American settlers, traders, missionaries, agents, promoters, and speculators, who were coming across Michigan and Indiana along the old Potawatomi trail into the heart of Prairie Potawatomi country. These years were the beginning of the end of Potawatomi occupation of the lands they had controlled during most of the previous century. Yet these two decades, from 1815 to 1835, brought very few acts of armed resistance. These years were

marred only by the small comfort some young Potawatomi gave the \tVinnebago prophet in the abortive 1827 Winnebago uprising, and then the minor support a few local bands of young warriors gave to Black Hawk in his magnificent 1832 effort to imitate Tecumseh's attempt to defeat the advance of the Americans. Although some Potawatomi braves had supported the able chief of Black Hawk's British Band (the Indian Creek massacre in May 1832 was carried out by a Potawatomi war party), most local villages refused the rebellious Sacs aid and succor. On his last trek it was the Potawatomi who refused Black Hawk the corn he so desperately needed to continue h is resistance, and it was fina lly a Potawatomi who convinced him that aid was not to be expected from the British, the faintly nourishing hope on which the British Band had been subsisting. Some Potawatomi leaders, especially Billy Caldwell the Saguanash (who had after all served Chicago as justice of the peace in 1826) and Pontiac's grand nephew Shabonee, effectively opposed the obstinate Sac war-chief's effort to terrorize Ill inois settlements and escape to Canada. Finally it was a group of Potawatomi, auxiliaries scouting for General Henry Atkinson, who located Black Hawk's last refuge and brought the much harried, half-starved British Band to its final defeat.

Removal from Illinois and Life on the Plains Such services to the Americans did not delay Potawatorni removal to the Trans-Mississippi \Vest. The fact that many Potawatomi were voting in local elections, serving on town councils, holding public posts, and performing public service in peace and war had not reduced the new settlers' fear of I ndian violence. Nor could any public service or economic tie daunt the in satiable hunger speculators and farmers had for the rich tracts of land owned and occupied by Potawatomi communities. It was at this point that private wanrs would neatly coincide with Federal policies. Following the War of 1812 the United States Treasury was bankrupt, and soon Chicago History

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the insolvent government hit upon the convenient fund -raising device of forcing the sale for a pittance of huge sections of Indian lands in the old Northwest, moving the Indians westwards, and then immediately reselling the land to homesteaders for substantially higher prices.

Thus the Federal government, prompted by local politicians and influenlial citizens, expelled the Potawatomi from their lands in \ Visconsin, Illinois, Michigan, and Indiana.

Although some fled to the northern forests of \Visconsin and to Ontario, and a few Christianized Potowatomi families remained assimilated into white communities in the Great Lakes area, the vast majority of all Potawatomi were soon removed west of the Mississippi.

The process of removal began when several bands of Potawatomi were brought together for the Treaty of Chicago on September 26, 1833.

This treaty ceded all their lands in Illinois in exchange for five million acres of what was soon to become Iowa territory. Here for the first time the Illinois Potawatomi were labeled the United Nation of Chippewa, Ottawa and Potawatomi.

Previously they were known collectively, if ambiguously, as the Prairie Bands of Potawatomi.

The United Nation label was a convenient fiction. The Ill inois Potawatomi were not genuinely united in any strong political sense; and they certainly were not a nation. Moreover, the Chippewa and Ottawa residents among the Potawa tomi of Illinois comprised no more than a few intermarried or adopted individuals. The idea of their being a united nation was, in fact, the concept of the Baptist Missionary I saac McCoy, the United States agent in charge of removal, who although he spent much of his life among the Potawatomi, remained largely ignorant of their institutions during his entire life. This new label stuck for only a few years.

O n the Iowa reserve the Prairie People came to be known as the Bluffs or Council Bluffs Band.

But under whatever name, whether in Illinois, I owa, or later in Kansas, they were always noted for their cul tural, linguistic, and social 12

Chicago History

conservatism. Unlike their mission-taught halfbreed relatives of Indiana and Michigan, these nativistic Illinois Potawatomi continued to resist change and assimilation, as they do to this day.

Thus the Illinois Potawatomi-the Prairie People-Chicago's Indians, moved as a group from the lake region in 1833. Although other relocated eastern and Ohio Valley tribes had had to be forcibly driven and herded westwards, it is difficult to read the descriptions of the Potawatorni migration without concluding that when the day came they went voluntarily and with some sense of anticipation. Apparently the rapidly developing frontier society in Illinois had lessened the value of the region to the Potawatomi. For them the west had come to hold opportunity, a better possibility of sidestepping pressures to assimilate, of avoiding new experiences and adventure. Unfortunately the American contractors responsible for directing the migration took the Prairie People to the wrong place: instead of treking to western Iowa they first went into the Platte Purchase, an area soon to be incorporated into the new state of Missouri. They remained in Missouri only until 1837, unsettled and partly demoralized. Knowing that they were soon to move, they had little motivation for putting clown roots. Once again the Reverend McCoy was on the scene working at his privately defined mission of keeping the several Potawatomi bands together in one place -close to American settlements, where they might be more easily civilized and melded into one great Christian Indian nation. But the Prairie People would have none of it.

On to Iowa in 1837, there to remain just ten years until the following tide of white immigrants and the prospect of Iowa's statehood compelled one more relocation, the last, this time to Kansas, then Indian territory. While in Iowa the Potawatomi were largely free from sustained, directed efforts to civilize them . Although traders and bootleggers were as plentiful as blowflies, of teachers and missionaries there were very few, and they were boycotted and ineffectual. The

Shabonee or "Shaped-Like-a-Bear" was a village chief in northern Illinois. Grand nephew of Pontiac and personal aide to Tecumseh, in his later years he helped Illinois settlers in the Black Hawk War. He promoted the removal of all Potawatomi beyond the Mississippi, but he himself settled on a small estate in Illinois where he died in 1859. From an ambrotype of about 1855.

reception granted m1ss10naries was always less than warm. When the eager Father Pierre de Smet once came by steamer to Council Bluffs in these years he was overjoyed to be met at the landing by a thousand Potawatomi all dressed in their finest, and suddenly disappointed to discover that they had come to meet the steamer only in anticipation of the annuity goods it carried. It took him a week to locate a single Catholic woman in need of his offices. He did not long tarry before setting his hopes on the far west and its prospects of more fruitful fields for his missionary labors.

Avoiding the distractions of American culture the Potawatomi took eagerly to the lusty life of the Great Plains. The period spent in Iowa, and the early years in Kansas as well, saw the Prairie People working at the task of establishing themselves as a power among the existing plains tribes and adapting themselves to the new imperatives of Indian life in the area. The first tasks included the critical one of carving out hunting grounds for themselves, which immediately brought them into sharp conflict with established tribes and meant perfecting and applying the skills of mounted warfare. Between 1837 and 1854 the Prairie People were frequently at war with the powerful and numerous Dakota and Pawnee, as well as with the lesser Oto and Omaha. With few exceptions it was a Prairie Band chieftain who took the initiative in the fighting. Eventually, although Indian agents constantly proclaimed the Dakota threat, it came to light that 3,000 Yankton Dakota warriors were more worried by 300 Potawa tomi braves than the Potawatomi were by them.

Highly skilled leadership, superior and more disciplined tactics, better firearms, and an undaunted lust for battle spurred the Potawatomi to success. During a visit in r 840, the Reverend McCoy was shocked to discover that Prairie Band leaders were attempting to forge an intertribal coalition (that fine art learned in dealing with British and Americans in the Woodlands) aimed at exterminating the Dakota. Clearly 14 Chicago History

the Potawatomi (numbering 2,000) and not the Dakota (about 28,000) were the aggressors.

By this time these former residents of the Chicago prairies had come to be warmly regarded by the isolated white settler, trapper, and trader, as well as by the half trained troop of dragoons at Council Bluffs. Indeed, why not? They formed a welcome defensive buffer between the frontier settlements and the threatening tribes of the high plains.

But life at Council Bluffs was never better than hard and temporary. The Potawatomi's agricultural skills were not entirely fruitful on the plains, while hunting was rarely so productive as it might have been. Soon the Potawatorni became largely dependent on their government annuity payments and rations. Immediately after arri\'ing in the Iowa reserve they came under pressure to again relocate. The Reverend Isaac McCoy was still at work promoting his ambitious scheme of union, but he was ignored.

The traders as a group cautioned against removal-to hold out for the highest price. Their motive was to secure sufficient cash payments so that the Potawatomi could pay off their debts.

Then in 1845 the well-respected principal chief \Vaubansee had a dream which contained a message, a vision of his leading a delegation to Washington there to treat with his opposite number the president. As is true of all Central Algonkians, there was no better validation of the merit of \Vaubansee's proposal than that it came in a mysterious hallucinatory vision. So in 1845 Waubansee took his delegation to Washington, there to share the delights of the capita l, to march his sub-chiefs down its avenues, to negotiate, and to meet with James K. Polk. The outcome of the trip was, for the Prairie People, a satisfactory one. They arranged the exchange of their Iowa reserve for a smaller tract in Kansas. ¡ Again the Prairie People thwarted the Reverend McCoy, who was holding out for a smaller reserve close to white settlements in eastern Kansas, to be shared with the agricultural Mission Band from Indiana and Michigan.

But the new reserve that Waubansee secured was astride the Kaw River, surrounding the site of modern Topeka, a thirty-mile square containing 600,000 acres, a considerable reduction from the five million ceded in both Iowa and Illinois. By now open lands for Indian reserves were in short supply, and the relocation of one tribe required the prior removal of first one and then another. The Trans-Mississippi West was getting crowded.

Moreover, the Kaw River reserve had to be shared by both the Prairie People and the Mission Band of Potawatomi. This forced reunion was happily encouraged by Isaac McCoy. I twas viewed with some trepidation by the Mission Indians who cast wary eyes on their heathen kinfolk. It was tolerated by the Prairie Band, who behaved as though they could easily handle the convert Baptists and Catholics. And it was quite erroneously rationalized by William Medill, Commissioner of Indian Affairs, as something all Potawatomi warmly wished. Medill argued that all separate Potawatomi groups wanted a homeland in common where they might be contented with their mutual interests, and that such arrangements would make possible more simple and economical relations with the Indian Bureau. Although the latter phrase was close to Medill's own intent, on the whole the fiction of a genuinely united nation of all Potawatomi was a classic example of the early Potomac wishful doublethink. Privately, Medill expressed the hopeful anticipation that the Potawatomi might probably soon die out, prey to the diseases of civilization. And he slipped into the treaty a provision providing for a dimunition of annuities and payments were this to occur, which it fortunately did not. In any event, the Mission Potawatomi neither actively opposed nor even negotiated the treaty fixing the limits of the Kaw River reserve. They simply accepted the terms negotiated by Waubansee, and this the Prairie Band has never let them forget.

No important political or social linkages between the Mission Potawatorni and the cultural-

ly exclusive Prairie People ever developed in the fifteen years they lived together on the Kansas reservation. This brief experiment at union was doomed to failure from the beginning. But meanwhile the Prairie Potawatomi came under increasing pressure to change their ways. Forced education finally came to them. Their traditional chiefs, jealously guarding Prairie Band autonomy and traditions, were increasingly threatened, thwarted, humbled and shackled by powerful Indian Bureau agents who were far more interested in promoting their own financial interests and those of the notably generous land and railroad speculators than they were in serving needs of either the Indian or the United States. More and more, the malcontent Prairie Band members were pressured to simply abandon the reserve. Many did so, singly or in small bands, going back to Wisconsin to live among the Forest Band of Potawatomi, or returning to Iowa, or migrating to Texas and Mexico with the rebellious Kickapoo. But others remained, and Prairie Band warriors once again fought the high plains tribes, continuing their mission as frontier guard against marauding bands of Sioux, Commanche, Kiowa, and Arapaho. It was success in these battles which yielded the booty in the form of captured headdresses and breast plates I saw proudly displayed in Kansas a century later.

By I 860, in which year the old Kaw River reserve was broken up in the interests of financing railroad expansion and providing lands for white settlers, much of the pattern of late Prairie Band communal life was set. Prairie Band leaders did manage to fight one delaying round. They held out for and gained an eleven mile square diminished reserve northeast of Topeka to be held in comm¡on as a tribal estate.

The Mission Indians, on the other hand, meekly submitted to division of their lands in severalty, each taking his small homestead and the status of citizen, but within only five years to be swindled out of title and land.

The small Prairie Band reservation also reChicago History

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mained under constant attack. The Dawes Allotment Act of 1887 was construed by its au th ors as a "mighty pulverising engine grinding down the tribal mass .... " The Prairie People resisted division of their lands into individual holdings with every available device. Their new conservative leader \Vakwabushkuk once more led a delegation to \Vashington, but was unsuccessful, and was imprisoned in the stockade at Fort Leavenworth for his pains. But the Prairie People continued to maintain a common front , against division of their lands until the turn of the century when the local Indian agent, desperate to carry out his instructions under the Dawes Act, began assigning double shares of the best Potawatomi tracts to anyone who would accept them: to stray mixed-bloods of other tribes, to whites recently and conveniently "adopted" into the Prairie Band, to remnant Mission Band or "citizen" Indians, and to his own relatives.

The tactic was not missed and could not be stopped by the Prairie People. Shortly they capitulated and accepted title to farmsteads in severalty, with the excess being sold to whites.

From the early 1900s to the present, the fragmented lands yet owned on the old reserve in Kansas have served the Prairie People as a refuge. Today they own hardly more than twenty per cent of their last reserved lands.

Some live¡ permanently in their simple clapboard homes there. Many men commute to work in the factories of nearby Topeka, others are dependent upon rental of their lands to white farmers, old age benefits, welfare payments, or odd jobs. Only a few Prairie Band members have ever become effective small farmers, for by the time some had become willing to attempt this means of livelihood, the entire scope of farming activities in Kansas had changed to a heavily capitalized, semi-industrial pattern beyond the skills and means of these Indians. But although the Prairie People are poor, they do not exhibit what Oscar Lewis has called the "culture of poverty." They are committed, instead of apathetic, absorbed with responsibil16 Chica go History

ity rather than alienated, striving rather than indifferent. The Prairie People continue to be a people who grasp eagerly at life.

The Reservation Community Endures The first question I asked soon after my visit to the Kansas reservation was, How do they manage to endure? Another was, vVhat is the sense and meaning of the complex ritual I witnessed that first clay? The answer to the second query is part of the answer to the first.

Because the Prairie People are relatively few in number they have to face the possibility of biological extinction. A household census quickly revealed that these conservative Indians meet this threat by the simple device of marrying out into other groups of conservative Central Algonkians in other state~. I thus discovered that if both spouses were not Prairie Band members, then one was a Sac, a Kickapoo, or a Chippewa, and not a Sioux, Osage, or member of some other language family. Moreover I found that Prairie People reside on the reservation. Many move away in youth, but visit regularly during the active years of adulthood and return to retire there when they grow older. But another human problem is to maintain commitment to a group. It soon became evident to me that the Prairie People in the education of their young do not produce a generation of rebellious youth.

These conservative Indians know very well that they are in open competition with many alluring features of the surrounding culture. Thus children are treated permissively, handled with constant dignity, rarely disciplined physically, and allowed to choose freely. Few grow up hostile to their heritage. They may leave, but they do return. The community continues to serve as a refuge.

But no reservation community such as the Potawatomi, differing radically in language, customs, and values from the dominant civilization surrounding them, can long endure without some positive means of teaching and reinforcing the meaning of a group identity. By and large,

together¡with other social institutions, this is the proper function of religion and ritual. The Drum ceremonial I watched that first clay was not very old. It was in fact a new religion, one created in 1876 by the Santee Dakota prophetess Wananikwe. The Prairie People acquired their first know ledge of the new religion in 1 88 r, and their first Drum and associated trappings in 1882 .

The promise of this new rite is survival, pure and simple. Its dogma states this clearly. Its mythology justifies why and how this should be.

I ts beliefs tell of the techniques by which the Prairie People can endure. The four United States banners waving over the Drum circle are not there by accident. They have a mythological and magical significance. The Drummers believe literally that so long as the American flag flies over their ceremonial grounds they will be allowed to practice their customs in peace. "Is

this not written 111 your constitution?", I am asked. "President Harrison made us that promise. Will you call him liar?" But myth, belief, and legend have little effect unless corresponding ritual translates them into reality. The.Drum ceremonial does just this. Four times each year, for four days each quarter, the Drum draws together this once cohesive, village-dwelling people from their now scattered homes and ,varms them into unity. An executive of the Bell Telephone laboratory in Los Angeles comes. So does the machinist in Topeka. The old attend, as do the young, the stalwart, the lame, the blind, the dying. The young corporal in Normandy (or Korea or Viet Nam) sends his regrets and the Prairie People pray for his safety. Inside the Drum circle is only good feeling. It is a living, ritual symbol of the Potawatomi ethos. Thus do the Prairie People persist.

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TARZAN WAS BORN IN CHICAGO

by John I. Tucker

The most popular fictional character ef the twentieth century grew out ef the combined talents ef three Chicagoans.

He was born in Chicago and so was his biographer, Edgar Rice Burroughs. Chicago is in fact Tarzan town because it is not only the birthplace of Tarzan and his creator Burroughs, but also because J ames Allen St. John, best illustrator of Burroughs' novels, was born on the South Side. And Johnny \Veismuller, longest lived of the movie Tarzans, got his basic education as Lord of the Jungle on the beach at Fullerton Avenue.

Burroughs' novels have sold sOineth ing over fifty-five million copies, have been translated into thirty-six languages, and his most famed cha racter, Tarzan, has had enormous coverage in such disparate media as radio, television, and com ic str ips, as well as on sweat shirts, and ice cream wrappers; and even two towns were named for him. St. John, a well-k nown painter, illustrated almost all of the Tarzan books and a great n umber of Burroughs' other works. \iVeismuller, und oubted ly the world's most famous swimmer, was Tarzan of the movies for seventeen years and his ape-man's yell loses nothing in translation for audiences all over the world-India, Africa, South America, and Asia, including even Russia and China.

I first learned about Tarzan when I was eight years old . I heard my brother dying in the backyard and ran into the house to tell my mother about it. He was, after a ll, her first born a nd she would have to learn sometime. "Ernest is being killed," I shouted. "Out in the backyard!" "- o," she said calmly, continuing to sort shirts, "he is merely giving vent to the victo r y cr y of the bull ape. He does it rather TARZAN WAS NOT BORN IN AFRICA.

Chicagoan John Tucker has spent most of his life in newspaper work, advertising, and public relations. He has written radio and television features, and has published poems and short stories.

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Chicago History

well." This story is told in the fam il y to illustrate my mother's imperturbability, along with the yarn about the time she threw my father's pay check in the fire thinking it was a Lucky Strike package.

She was imperturbable and she damned well had to be in those days when every able-bod ied young male in the neighborhood was Tarzan and very vocal about it while hanging from our fami ly tree. Our backyard was the largest for several blocks around, and the tree was the biggest, ideal for sitting in and hollering at each other, trying to echo Tarzan-Weismuller's victory cry of the bull ape. The victory cry of the bull ape, by the way, is indistinguishable from the ceremonial cry of the bull ape, which is voiced during the intricacies of the Dance of the Dum-Dum. We had a Dum-Dum, a mound of clay in the middle of our yard. This when beaten very hard with a stick sounded exactly like a mound of clay being hit hard with a stick.

The tribe of Kerchak, Tarzan's foster fami ly, got a much better acoustical effect from their drum, but then they had more trees as sounding boards.

Each new Tarzan adventure was read by the m embers of the \ Vilson Avenue branch of the tribe of Kerchak as soon as someone in the group could afford it. The books were passed from paw to paw and we talked ape talk to each other, discussing methods of doing in lions with pocket knives and scaling rocky cliffs aided only by sin ewy nrnscles and a grass rope. I knew Tarzan pretty well and can still quote full chapters of his life. But only recently did I find out anything much about his creator, Edgar Rice Burroughs.

And his life reads like fiction, except that its author seems to have been Horatio Alger-not Burroughs.

Burroughs was born at home, September 1, 1875. The house, in what is now the 1800 block

Edgar Rice Burroughs while on a visit to Chicago in 1933.

Chicago Historical Society

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of \\'est Washington Street, was probably a substantial one since his parents, George T. and Mary E., were able to send their son to a succession of good schools and, according to one account, gave him a monthly allowance of 150 dollars. In an article in the New York Sunday TVorld, October 27, 1929 Burroughs broadly covered his career up to the time he hit the publishing world a full circuit clout. "I was born in Chicago. After epidemics had closed two schools that I attended my parents shipped me to a cattle ranch in Idaho where I rode for my brothers who were only recently out of college and had entered the cattle business as the best way of utilizing their Yale degrees. Later I was dropped from Phillips Academy, Andover, Mass.; flunked examinations for West Point and was discharged from the Army on account of a weak heart. But my brother Henry backed me in setting up a stationery store in Pocatello, Idaho. That didn't last long either."

This brief admission only hints at Burroughs' life-long affection for the military, insti1lecl perhaps at military academies. At one time he sought a commission in the Chinese army, then seeking new talent from overseas. However they did not want him. He tried to get a commission in the Nicaraguan army, but his father had it cancelled. At age twenty he enlisted in the Seventh Cavalry but instead of fighting Indians was assigned to dig ditches. He volunteered somewhat later for the Rough Riders, but got a note of regret from Teddy Roosevelt instead of a commission. In 1 goo Burroughs was again in Chicago with his wife Emma, daughter of Colonel Alvin Hulbert, owner of Chicago's Tremont House and later of the Sherman House, as well as several other hotels in Chicago and St. Louis. Their address is given in an old city directory as 194 Park Avenue. This address is now 2004 West Maple Avenue. The following year the directory shows that they had moved to , 34 Robey Street. Robey Street has since gone the way of Park and the address would now be 445 North Damen Avenue.

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Chicago History

Stanleigh B. Vinson Co ll ectio n

Tarzan made his first appearance in the October, 1912 issue of The All-Story magazine. Clinton Pettee made this first representation of the hero.

From r goo to r 903 Burroughs worked for his father who was president of the American Battery Company. It was a dull life, he found, and besides he did not get along \¡ery well with his father so he and Emma joined his brothers, who had switched from cattle ranching to placer mining in Oregon. The gold mining effort failed.

Edgar and Emma found thernseh-es way out west with no job and a doubtful future. Burroughs got a job as a railroad policeman which he considered as marking time until something better came along. But nothing did and the couple returned to Chicago. The only job Burroughs could find here was as a salesman peddling light bulbs and candy, door-to-door and store-to-store.

He was a great reader of want ads. According to Alva Johnson in the Saturday Evening Post of July 29, 1939: "He was constantly obtaining new positions not quite equal to his old ones.

Added to that he was always ready to join his own pennilessness to the pennilessness 0f some other man, and to found a partnership in any

naive dream of avarice." One of the more solid jobs was manager of Sears, Roebuck's accounting department. In later years Burroughs said that if Sears had given him a raise he believed he deserved he would never have written a word of fiction. But he failed to get the raise and left Sears to go into an operation that might be called doubtful in the extreme. The job was with a publication called System. Burrough's task was to write letters of advice to business men. On payment of fifty dollars a year for the publication anyone wanting advice from the efficiency experts who ran the magazine could write in and be told how to be a personal or business success. Burroughs delivered, according to Johnson's Saturday Evening Post article, "words that rumbled with portentous wisdom but were too vague to enable any industrial baron to act on them."

Some time later, in I gr r, he was employed by a firm that prepared and distributed a product named "Alcola," a cure for alcoholism. He was in charge of arranging the advertisements for the product, most of which appeared in pulp magazines. Checking the magazines to be sure that the ads the company paid for really appeared, Burroughs (who claimed that he had never read any kind of fiction) apparently absorbed by osmosis many of the tales of blood and thunder in which fantastic heroes performed unbelievable deeds.

Burroughs thought he could write as well or better. His poverty, th,\¡arted ambition, and a deep desire to prove himself drove him to try it, and his incredible rise to fame and fortune began. The first success came when Burroughs sold a story to Thomas :\Tewell Metcalf, editor of All-Story Magazine, for 400 dollars. The story was submitted in two sections. \,Vhen Metcalf read the first half he wrote Burroughs that he liked it and that if the second part was as good as the first he thought he might use it. If Metcalf had not given him this encouragement Burroughs' writing career would have ended before it began. He remembered: "I should

never have finished the story and my wntmg career would have been at an end since I was not writing because of any particular urge to write nor for any particular love of writing. I was writing because I had a wife and two babies, a combination which does not work well without money."

The story was titled by Burroughs "Dejah Thoris, Princess of Mars," and was the first of the Mars stories starring John Carter, an earthman. Metcalf changed the title to "Under the Moon of Mars," and the story appeared in the magazine as a serial in six parts beginning in February, 1912. It was not published as a book until 1917, with Burroughs' original title restored, at least partially, as A Princess of Mars.

Burroughs adopted the odd pen name of "I'\ ormal Bean" possibly to assure readers that the author was not really nutty but had a head and mind like any other earthman. In Lhe first All-Sto1y publication, however, some printer, believing the "Notmal" to be a misprint, spelled it "Norman," a more normal name. It was a wry twist: the first of Burroughs' one hundred and eight titles appeared under a title the author had not selected and was signed w ith a name that was not only not the author's but one he had not chosen.

"Under the Moon of Mars" was just another weird tale of impossible adventure when it appeared. But later in the same year Tarzan came swinging through the jungle, and Burroughs' life and fortunes swung right along with him to dizzying heights never before reached by a writer of popular fiction. All-Story Magazine first printed "Tarzan of the Apes" complete in the issue of October, 1912. Not until 1914 did Tarzan make it between hard covers when A. C. McClurg printed a thousand copies of the story almost as a gesture of recognition to Burroughs' determination to see his work in book form. In the interval, several newspapers in this country and in England had printed the story as a serial.

The story of how McClurg contracted for the Chicago History

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publication of the first Tarzan book has been preserved by David Eisenberg, a retired Near North Sieler who joined McClurg on coming out of the anny in r gr g. He relates that," At that time McClurg was reportedly sending Burroughs royalties of about roo,ooo dollars annually, and Joe Bray, who was head of the publication department and my immediate boss at McClurg, liked to tell the saga of Burroughs' success as an example of how perserverance and persistence could pay off. Bray maintained that he would never have signed the 1914 contract for Tarzan of the Apes if it had not been for Burroughs' own tenacity. Every clay for several months the author would come to the retail store that McClurg kept on South \'\/abash Avenue and report to Herb Gould, the head man-or to anyone else from the company who would listen-on the mounting popularity that Tarzan was achieving in magazines and newspapers, both here and in England. His persistent campaign eventually convinced Bray to bring out the thousand-copy edition of the first Tarzan book."

From that small beginning the Burroughs empire arose, built of some fifty-five million copies of his books in thirty-six languages, published in every part of the world. That empire of books even has its geographical locations-two towns, one in California and one in Texas, proudly bear the respective names of Tarzana and Tarzan. And then there were the movies ....

Tarzan's enormous success in the movies and Burroughs' share in the profits thereof are testimony that he had an almost uncanny gift for seeing where the big money of the future would come from-he had the foresight to retain future serial rights to his stories. \Vhile the magazine serials were fine and gave him a quick profit, it was hard-cover books, reprint and movie rights that gave those lovely royalties that provided the greatest financial reward. The first check sent to Burroughs by All-Story for a Carter story, had written across it "for all rights."

Burroughs objected to this, and after considerable correspondence the publishers agreed 22

Chicago History

that their rights were confined to the first serial and that all other rights were Burroughs'.

They asked him, "Why all the fuss? What other rights are there?" Burroughs replied, "I don't know. Movies, maybe?"

This was at the time when movies were in their infancy. Pioneers-David Wark Griffith, Maurice Costello, Lillian Gish-were still striving to create an imaginary world with something most people looked on as a toy. But Burroughs early recognized the tremendous appeal that Tarzan would have. Besides, he had plans for the ape-man. As early as 1913 he and Emma took a trip to California to see if the cinema was ready for Tarzan, but apparently they decided to let the movies get along without the help of the ape-man because a short time later, still in 1913, the couple had an Oak Park address.

Burroughs' imagination and inventive powers, spurred by his drive for success as a writer, produced thousands and thousands of words about the two heroes he had working for him; Tarzan in Africa and John Carter on Mars.

VVondrous words they were, too. Although Tarzan was my favorite character, John Carter was given some truly magnificent lines. Carter, a captain in the Confederate Army, raised himself to Mars by the simple but unscientific deYice of deeply wishing to be there. A swordsman, a fine gentleman and fearless leader, Carter had a style all his own. Declamatory but solid! In The Gods of Afars he speaks these lines: Then my old time spirit reasserted itself. The fighting blood of my Virginia ancestors coursed through my veins. The fierce blood lust and the joy of battle surged over me. The fighting smile that has brought consternation to a thousand foemen touched my lips.

I put the thought of death out of my mind and fell upon my antagonists with fury that those who escaped will remember to their dying day.

Surely this can be compared in martial spint to Homer's line: Terrible was the clang of the silver bow And ever the funeral pyres of the dead burnt brighter.

Or even to the glory of a war horse described in the Book of Job: He paweth in the valley, and rejoice th in his strength: he goeth on to meet the armed men. He mocketh at fear, and is not affrighted; neither turneth he back from the sword. The quiver rattleth against him, the glittering spear and the shield. He swalloweth the ground with fierceness and rage; neither believeth he that it is the sound of the trumpet. He saith among the trumpets, Ha, ha! and he smelleth the battle afar off, the thunder of the captains, and the shouting.

John Carter talked like this a lot and was one hell of a fighter with swords, fists, rocks, or most anything that was handy. But it was hard for us on Chicago's North Side to identify ourselves as closely with him as we did with Tarzan. It is hard to emulate a man, earthling though he may be with all kinds of bona fides as a hero, who can jump thirty feet and deal out wallops in mid-air to brutes who are green and have six arms. Besides, Dejah Thoris, Carter's queen and true love, laid eggs and Carter's son Cathoris is hatched. No, although Barsoom was a good place to visit, we did not want to live there.

Tarzan was the image we liked. Besides, you could be Tarzan all by yourself, up high on a tree branch surveying the jungle that teemed with lions, panthers, elephants, antelope, deer, boar, snakes, friendly natives who wore white hats, and unfriendly ones who wore not much of anything, Roman legions, Neanderthal men, ant men, gorillas, hulking anthropoid apes (bigger than gorillas, who walked like men and talked a basic English), and assorted creatures, some of them contemporaries of Tyranosaurus Rex. \Vhat is more, Tarzan was always stumbling over treasure, and that was to his credit. The stamp that years of hard times had left on Burroughs is probably responsible for the riches that came to Tarzan. In Tar:::.an of the Apes the jungle giant digs up a chest filled with gold coins. In all of the Mars series John Carter is surrounded with walls full of jewels and when anyone of social standing wears clothes at all these are of begemmcd supple leather and soft

fur. Everyone sleeps on silks and furs. The title of Burroughs' twenty-sixth book, Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar, pretty well foretells the gemencrusted contents. The book was published in r gr 8 after the author had reached a position of prominence and considerable wealth, but the memory of the lean days lingered and he made up for them in putting scenes of fabulous wealth on paper.

What better model for living could a growing boy ask for? A hero who is stronger than a gorilla, courageous, resourceful, and not only Lord of the Jungle but a titled lord of the realm. Yes, Tarzan's real name, Lord Greystoke, was inherited from his father along with all the other good traits that make up the best of an English lord and blue-blooded gentleman. All of Tarzan's traits were admirable. He viewed his wealth with commendable calm. He was always temperate, never surly, nor did his heart pound when clanger confronted him. 'We learned many good habits from Tarzan, except table manners-his were atrocious. We learned that gallantry to women is an honorable attitude, although the trappings of phoney civilization are to be scorned. We learned that swinging from trees builds mighty muscles, or "thews", a word all of Tarzan's literary captives will recognize immediately. I am sure that Tarzan and his adventures among the arboreal giants accounted in that period for a large part of the popularity of traveling rings and trapezes in playgrounds throughout the nation. I know I used to spend summer vacations swinging from trapezes and traveling rings in the nearby playground, getting up at ghastly hours to get in some good practice before the crowds of other seekers after truth, virtue, and muscles lined up for their turns. \Ve learned it is a good thing to suffer in silence and not complain when hurt, keeping the upper lip stiff even when an arm was dislocated on the trapeze. We learned: "It is a noble and beautiful spectacle to see man raising himself, so to speak, from nothing by his own exerChicago Histo ry

23

tions; dissipating by the light of reason, all the thick clouds in which he was by nature enveloped; mounting above himself, soaring to the celestial regions, like the sun encompassing with giant strides the vast extent of the universe."

Tarzan was, indeed, Jean Jacques Rousseau's noble savage.

Burroughs never went to Africa for background research. All that he knew about the Dark Continent was learned from books, most of them from the Chicago Public Library. Here too he did the reading of English history necessary to his second story "The Outlaw of Torn." The novel, about Simon de Montfort and the barons' wars of the 13th century, was finished before the author started on the first Tarzan story. Five publishers rejected it. Finally Street and Smith bought it for New-Sto1y Magazine. It appeared in January 1914 with the cover done by . C. Wyeth, father of Andrew Wyeth. However, "Outlaw" was not the howling success Tarzan was, and no movie, sweat shirt, or gum wrapper ever picked up the title. Burrough's favorite story was not about Tarzan, .John Carter, or de Montfort; he favored Billy Byrne, the hero of The Mucker, a product of the streets and alleys of Chicago's great West Side. "From Halsted Street to Robey and from Grand Avenue to Lake Street there was scarce a bartender whom Billy knew not by his first name ... " Billy Byrne, a mugger, basher, all round bad fellow, wins salvation and riches through the love of a good woman and in the interval spends time in Mexico with the 13th Cavalry, a literary response to Burroughs' lifelong ambition to be a military man.

The Mucker was written in 1913, a year divided between Chicago and California. In that year, according to a chart of word output that Burroughs kept carefully, he wrote 413,000 words, the equivalent of four 300 page books. He kept writing in California while dickering over movie possibilities of Tarzan, but nothing came of those discussions. On their return from California the Burroughs moved to Oak Park, 641 5 Augusta Street, now 415 Augusta according to the Oak 24

Chicago History

Park division of maps and plats. Other addresses listed in Oak Park telephone directories show them at 700 Linden Avenue in 1917, and in 1918 with an office at rn20 North Boulevard and a residence at 325 North Oak Park Avenue. In Oak Park Burroughs wrote some perfectly awful poetry which appeared in the Chicago Tribune, again over the name of Normal Bean, the pen name he had tried without success to use with his first Mars story in 1912. The Tribune got the name right, but Burroughs never again sought refuge behind a pen name in signing a book or magazine story.

Story after story poured from "his dreadful fluent pen," as Kingsley Amis once termed Burroughs' amazing productivity. While living in the Chicago suburb Burroughs completed forty novels. His removal from Chicago to California, where he was to live for the rest of his life, was the occasion for a farewell banquet given him by the White Paper Club, an organization of writers, publishers, editors, and other forms of the genus bookman. It is obvious from the sentiments expressed at this banquet that Edgar Rice Burroughs was honored among men in the trade as a friend and good fellow as well as the most productive and highly successful of any Chicago author. Tewspaper accounts of the banquet quote humorous and affectionate remarks of the speakers. Emerson Hough, author of several well-known books, including The Covaed Wagon; Frank Reilly, publisher; Hiram Moe Green, editor of Women's World; Vincent Starett, author and poet, were among those who bade Burroughs fond farewells.

The elaborate menu printed especially for the banquet is now a collector's item. It was illustrated by J. Allen St . .John, Burroughs' illustrator, and is a prize item in the collection of Stanleigh Vinson of Mansfield, Ohio, one of the high priests in the Burroughs sect. Vinson and over a thousand others are members of The Burroughs Bibliophiles, an international fan club started in Pittsburgh at the Science Fiction Convention in 1960. Through correspondence, yearly meetings,

James A llen St. John in his Chicago studio in 1923, with his fa m ous painting Tarzan and the Golden Lion in the background.

Courtesy of Mrs. James Allen St. John

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and fanzines (fan magazines) club members keep abreast of all new developments in the Burroughs legend and refresh their allegiance to Tarzan, John Carter, and the other characters, beasts, and places that Burroughs wrought. vVith drawings, maps, glossaries of Burroughsinvented vocabularies, theories on the location of Tarzan's gold vault in Opar, and even a study of Burroughs' use of the semi-colon, the literature of Burroughs studies accumulates.

Vernell Coriell, one of the original founders, now heads the group in Kansas City, Missouri.

Stan Vinson's collection is perhaps the most extensive of any, and has supplied much of the biographical and graphic material for this article. Other information came from A Golden Amziversaiy Bibliography of Edgar Rice Burroughs by the Reverend Henry Hardy Heins, pastor of St. Marks Lutheran Church, Albany, ~cw York.

This work might well be one of the most complete bibliographies of one man's work ever assembled. It contains entire listings of aJI the stories, manuscript material, illustrations, and advertisements, as well as several subject indexes of Burroughs' work. Heins also gives a short biographical note on the remarkable St. John, Burroughs' illustrator.

James Allen St. John was born on Chicago's South Side. in 1872. He probably received some of his earliest training in use of pencil, pen, and brush from his mother, the former Susan Hely, an accomplished artist who worked in the studio of G.P.A. Healy. It is likely that she applied her considerable and well-recognized talent to some of the portraits hanging in many Chicago manors and museums that carry Healy's name.

It was the custom for good technicians to paint backgrounds, -draperies and other necessary detail while the famed artist did the main subject and put on the fine finishing touches. Dr. Josephus St. John, James' father, a graduate of Rush Medical College in Chicago, studied in Europe, practiced in New York, and returned to Chicago in his final years. During his father's last illness, James kept bedside vigil. In the 26

Chicago History

Jong nights he wrote and illustrated The Face in the Pool, a tale of doughty knights and of damsels in distress. McClurg published the book in r 905.

I ts success convinced James he could make a better living at writing than at painting so he went to a secretarial school to learn shorthand and typing.

At school he met Ellen Munger. " He was a handsome man with the most beautiful hair I'd ever seen .. . red, with gold glints. I suppose it was a whirlwind courtship. When he asked me to marry him I gave up all ideas of a secretarial career and accepted. We lived in the little South Side house where James had lived with his family. It was on Twenty-Sixth Street near Prairie Avenue. In earlier days the St. Johns' n eighbors had been families such as the Marshall Fields, the Byron Smiths, and the Chatfield-Taylors. But the neighborhood had changed. Residences were giving way to industry, and when a highrise to our north cut off the good north light, we moved to the Tree Studio Building.

James gave up the writing idea because he was too well-paid and too busy as an illustrator."

Among the publishers that kept St. John at the drawing board and easel were McClurg (who gave him the most work); Rand McNally and Company (Kipling's Bo)'s' Stories and King Arthur and His Knights ); Reilly and Lee; Bellows, Reeve and Company; as well as the publishers of R ed Book, Fantastic Adventure, and Tl'eird 1 ales, among others.

Mrs. St. John remembers the many times that Burroughs visited the Tree Studio apartment.

The meetings were not social and Mrs. St. John absented herself after being sure that the men had whatever refreshment they required. "Mr. Burroughs was all business. He had to be, because he was writing so furiously. After he moved to California his correspondence dealt mainly with the drawings and sketches James did for the books. His letters were always friendly and complimentary."

The artist and his wife in their studio were an illustration in themselves and could have posed

for the ideal portrait of artist and wife. Both Dave Eisenberg and Stan Vinson remember the two-story studio and surrounding balcony with a Spanish shawl draped over the wro1,1ght iron railing. " I'd bring him galley proofs from a book

by Burroughs or some other of our authors," Eisenberg said, "he'd greet me as though I was the one person on earth he most wanted to see.

There'd be wine handy. He'd offer me pipe tobacco, an import from Scotland. I learned to smoke a pipe just so I could accept. He had a huge phonograph playing chamber music.

For a kid just out of the army it was opening a door to true worldliness and sophistication. I loved it."

Stan Vinson remembers St. John's pleasure when admirers of Burroughs came calling. "He got a big charge out of the developing interest in Burroughs and the books that he, St. John, had illustrated. He didn't look on the work he'd clone in drawing jungle animals or creatures from Barsoom as beneath his dignity as an artist. He'd clone the best he could with the illustrations, and he was delighted when people all over the world asked him about them."

One of Burroughs' letters to St. John epitomizes his appreciation of the artist's contribution to the stories. Dated May r 8, r 920 from Tarzana Ranch, Van Nuys, California, the letter reads in part: " ... I think you visualize the characters and scenes precisely as I did. If I could do the sort of work you do I would not change a line in any of the drawings. I think your work for Tarzan the Untamed is the finest thing I have ever seen." In "TU" as the book is known in the shorthand of the Burroughs fans, Tarzan, with an occasional assist from the British Army, wins German East Africa away from the enemy (World \Var I ) . TU is the only Tarzan book not translated into German. It may well have been the last book that Burroughs worked on in Oak Park, and he may have torn himself away from it to attend the \\'hite Paper Club banquet.

The speeches and menu for that banquet contain frequent references to pigs and goats. This

puzzled me when first confronted by these mentions of domestic animals because none of the Tarzan or Carter stories made any particular reference to barnyard creatures. The mystery was solved when Paul Angle, who needs no introduction to readers of this publication, found in the Chicago Tribune of March 12, 1919, the following: " Edgar Rice Burroughs may go to Africa for ape heroes, but when he wants a practical man he goes to Oak Park. That's why he chose Frank R. On thank, a former Oak Park motorcycle policeman, as supervisor of his Angora goat and prize pig ranch at Tarzana, his estate in the San Fernando Valley, California, formerly known as Milflores. Onthank, who has considerable experience with the temperament of goats and peculiarities of pigs, will go west with his family next Friday."

Goats and pigs were not the prime reason for the California move. Tarzan had made it in the movies and Burroughs wanted to be on the filming scene. Tarzan of the Apes had opened !11 ew York in 1918, starring barrel-chested muscle-man Elmo Lincoln. It had been an immediate success (it was one of the first films to gross over a million dollars), and the second Tarzan movie, Tar;::an' s Romance, was also setting box office records.

Several actors followed Lincoln as Tarzan.

One of them was Jim Pierce, a former AllAmerica center from Indiana University.

Pierce was not a screaming success in Tar;::an and the Golden Lion, but he won acclaim and the hand of Joan Burroughs, the author's daughter. Joan and Jim became the stars of the Tarzan radio series, a sequence of 364 episodes of adventure written by Edgar Rice Burroughs and produced

by Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc. (By this time the author had incorporated himself and was involved in many enterprises.) Sold to broadcasters across the country, the series became the first packaged serial, another tribute to Burroughs' good business sense.

Lincoln, Pierce, and several other Tarzans had faded from the screen by the time Johnny Chicago History 27

Weismuller swung and swam into view. \Veismuller's first film was a remake of Tarzan of the Apes, produced for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in 1933 by Irving K. Thalberg, who spent over a million dollars on the production. \t\Teismuller could not have fi ttecl the role any better if he had actually studied and trained for it all of his life. Almost everything that Weisrnuller had clone since childhood pointed him to the role of the most satisfactory characterization of Tarzan, before or since. \Veismuller was Tarzan-he still is to millions who saw him.

Even now audiences are making his acquaintance because the Weis111uller-Tarzan films are now permitted in Russia and China, where they were formerly forbidden.

The Weismullers li\'ed in Chicago, at , 92, Korth Cle,¡eland Avenue, while Johnny ,,¡as serving apprenticeship to the career as the world's greatest swimmer and the role of the best film Tarzan. He was a scrawny kid, so sickly-looking that the bigger boys in his class at Saint Michael's down the block picked on him all the time. Johnny had been christened Peter John and his younger brother John Peter, but the boys decided that this was confusing. When John Peter was old enough to make important decisions regarding personal nomenclature the boys switched names, and from then on Peter John \\¡as John P. \\'eismuller. The brothers were good friends and went together to Fullerton beach where both discovered a great affinity to water and swimming. Johnny was so enamored of the sport that in order to have a place to swim during the cold weather he claimed to be fifteen when he was twelve so that he could swim. in the pool at the Larrabee YMCA, just south of North Avenue. Johnny had a strange and different style of swimming. He did not like to put his head under water and swam with his back arched. Later, under the tutelage of Bill Bachrach, the swimming coach at the Illinois Athletic Club, he perfected this style which was largely responsible for his becoming the world's best swimmer-and the Tarzan with tenure.

28

Chicago History

Bachrach explained the advantages of the head-high style, "It means that the upper torso offers less water resistance." He told Johnny to use his arms and legs as if he were trying to climb out of the water as fast as he could. The method worked and Weismuller was on his way to win more swimming records than any swimmer has ever claimed. Sixty-seven world records were his along with fifty-two national records and five Olympic medals. \Veismuller's freestyle stroke was his own and earned him the title of "human hydroplane" from sports writers. \'Vhen cameramen and film directors saw Johnny swim they were delighted because interesting footage could be shot of Tarzan raising a bow wave racing to rescue someone, usually Jane, from crocodiles or vengeful tribesmen. Jane, Tarzan's mate, was played by Maureen O'Sullivan in several sub equent Tarzan-\Veismuller movies.

Another kind of training helped \Veismuller to fill the character. His swimming gave him lung power that he used in singing. The singing in turn led to yodeling at which his father was an expert. The cider Weismullcr kept a saloon near the Cleveland Avenue home and yodeled a lot for his customers. The reader might remember the street peddlers who made summertime in Chicago resound with cries of "wat-tee-watteemellooooh 1" and " reel, ripe tomatooooooh ! sweeeet corn!" There was such a peddler in Johnny's neighborhood whose voice was inadequate to the necessary \'Ocal advertising, so he hired Johnny to do it for him. This added even more muscle to the \ Veismuller larynx.

From this came the \Veismuller trademark, the Tarzan yell. Earlier Tarzans had to resort to recorded yells in which the crie of large animals in distress were mixed with operatic sopranos and violins, buLJohnny's yell was Johnny's own, and one hell of a yell it was! \Vhen the young vVeismuller was not hawking tomatoes and sweet corn during the summer he was usually in the water somewhere. In Lake Michigan at the Fullerton or Oak Street beach

Johnny Weismuller as Tarzan in Sol Lesser's Tarzan Triumphs. It is Frances Gifford with him, in the role of Zandra.

or at th~ YMCA pool. One day a neighborhood friend who was a member of the Illinois Athletic Club water polo team invited Johnny to the club as his guest. Johnny entered with vigor the water polo scrimmage. When Coach "Big Bill" Bachrach saw Johnny in action he knew that this boy had tremendous potential. Bachrach worked hard with Johnny and saw his labors rewarded when his pupil won three gold medals in Olympic competition in Paris in 1924.

Back in the United States \Veismuller continued to set national and international records.

His speed in the JOO yard free-slyle, 51 seconds, stood as a record for 16 years, and then was only shaved by two-tenths of a second. In the 1928 Olympics Johnny won more gold medals and new acclaim. Back in Chicago he was offered a contract by the BVD Company of Piqua, Ohio, where the company " ¡as starting to manufacture a new line of swimming suits. \'\That better promoter of the new line than the world's most famous and greatest swimmer?

Johnny was hired. On the eve of leaving for Piqua he was feted at a banquet in the Illinois Athletic Club where Andrew McNally II, as master of ceremonies, !amen ted Johnny's retirement from amateur competition, pointing out that the Chicago boy had almost single-handedly brought swimming to a new importance in the world of sports. The BYD Company made Johnny their traveling ambassador to pool and seaside resorts where in exhibitions and as guest swimming instructor he showed off the newest BVD swim suits. His travels took him to California where casting trials for the new version of Tarzan of the Apes were just about running out of candidates.

Cyril Hume, a famous screen \\Titer, who had been engaged by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer to do a new screen treatment of the old Tarzan, saw .Johnny and recognized in the face, frame, and swimming style the Tarzan he had been writing about. A screen test, and several legal wrangle over his BYD contract followed. (One of the concessions made by MGM was to permit BYD

promotions to use photographs of all their contract players in BVD swim suits, and among MGM's players were Jean Harlow, Marie Dressler, and Greta Garbo.) This all resulted in a new Tarzan swinging across the screen jungle-a Tarzan eminently suited to battle or make friends with jungle beasts, an ape-man who scorned the trappings of civilization, who could call elephants to his aid or frighten lions with his battle cry. In short, a Tarzan that was everything a growing boy could wish to be-a hero. And you hardly find that kind anymore.

Irving K. Thal berg, the boy wonder of MGM, produced the film in Thalberg style, spending a lot of money. Herds of elephants, tribes of pygmies, villages of natives, and a few gorillas all added to the outdoorsy flavor of the new version of Tarzan of the Apes. In the Tarzan books, Jane's role was always a minor one. v\Then Tarzan went off adventuring she was often left home on the Range, the estate that Tarzan bought with some of the jewels and gold he was always finding. If she did enter the plot it was usually because she had been kidnapped or did some other stupid thing that got her into trouble from which she had to be rescued.

"Mc Tarzan, you Jane" is widely quoted as Tarzan's first and nearly complete vocabulary. \Vrong. Even in the film the correct quote is "Tarzan!....:..Jane!" delivered with appropriate pokes of the finger. But in the Burroughs version Tarzan's first words directly quoted were "Mais oui!" spoken with an authentic Parisian accent learned from Lieutenant D' Arnot, an officer in the French navy. D' Arnot had been rescued in the jungle by Tarzan, became a good friend, and appeared in several other Tarzan stories.

Burroughs never understood why screen writers refused to follow his characterization of the ape-man and his original plots of the tales, but would insist on making up their own. He did not think that the cinema treatments were any improvement. Tarzan as originally conceived was the son of John Clayton, Lord Greystoke, an 30

Chicago History

English gentleman sent on an un-named assignment to Africa. With him was his pregnant wife.

The crew of their ship mutinied, and Lord Greystoke and his wife were marooned by the mutinous crew on the beach of a small cove on the west coast of Africa. Here the heir to wealth and position wa born in a tiny cabin Clayton had built. The young mother died and Lord Greystoke was killed by the great apes of the tribe of Kerchak. Kala, a member of the tribe, had just lost her first born. She exchanged the dead baby for the live one, and Tarzan was raised as an ape, believing himself to be Kala's child. Quite a bit later he discovered his true identity and claimed his heritage. However, although he was welcomed in London clubs and Paris theaters, he was at home only in Africa, in loin cloth, armed with crude weapons and his own muscle. The screen writers changed all that and Tarzan\Veismuller was essentially a jungle man who spent a lot of time in the water.

I do not remember how the Tribe of Kerchak, Wilson Avenue branch, felt about the liberties screen writers took with the official version, but I do recall that there were un-apelike discussions about one of the movies in which TarzanWeismuller in a playful mood tugged off the leather costume that Jane-Maureen was wearing as she plunged into the pool close by the treetop abode. "Gee, did you see?" Buddy Peters said. "\\Then she hit that water she wan't wearing anything. She was naked! How'd they film that?"

Sex, nudity, love, and marriage were always causing problems for Tarzan although sometimes the problems had fortunate results. The movies had to soft-pedal the fact that Tarzan and Jane never went through a wedding cerc111ony on ca1ncra, always glossing over the lack of wedding ring. When the writers gave Tarzan a son the lad was adopted. More recently, about ten years ago, a school teacher in Downey, California ordered all Tarzan books from the library shelves because, she said, Tarzan and Jane never got married. The case won attention from all the news media. Neither school teacher

nor the - news stories had the facts, which are these: Tarzan and Jane were married. In Burroughs' book The Return of Tarzan the two were united by Jane's father, Archimedes Q. Porter, an ordained minister of an undisclosed sect. However the Johnny Weismuller-Maurecn O'Sullivan pair were never married on screen. The furore raised by the library ban and subsequent tempest in the journalistic tea pot brought about a renaissance in Tarzan books and spawned a new publishing company whose sole purpose was to reprint books by Burroughs. Book dealers' shelves were flooded with Burroughs' titles and a new generation was made familiar with the old heroes: Tarzan, John Carter, Tars Tarkas, the Waziri, Jane Porter and all their friends and enemies. The new interest also produced a new Tarzan-this time for the television screen.

Several million middle-aged men must have been delighted, as I was, when a video Tarzan gave promise of bringing the ape-man's adventures to yet another generation. Some may even have tried out stiffened larynxes in a sotto voce version of the victory cry of the bull ape, or started to leap for a branch overhanging the sidewalk only to find that it was a crack in the eyeglasses that they were about to reach for.

But it must be faced, you cannot return again.

We are not young who knew Tarzan as he swung fresh from Burroughs' pen, the St. John brush, and vVeismuller's sound-stage trees. The TV Tarzan just does not swing and swim like Johnny.

Burroughs died before the TV Tarzan came

along. In California after leaving Chicago he had produced many new stories and organized the Edgar Rice Burroughs Corporation, which published some of the books and handled the spin-off business from the Tarzan image. He served as foreign correspondent during \Vorld War II, and died peacefully in bed while reading the Sunday papers on March r 9, 1950. At the time of his death over a hundred Burroughs titles had been published, and the writer's total income from all sources-books, magazines, newspapers, movies, radio, etc., was estimated to have been in the neighborhood of$ r 5,000,000.

James Allen St. John survived Burroughs by seven years, living his last clays in the Tree Studio Building that had for so long been his home and working place. Mrs. St. John stiJ! lives there.

Johnny \ 1Veismuller after his long Tarzan career-seventeen years-became Jungle Jim in a series of African adventures that won little critical acclaim. When that string ran out he became a promoter for swimming pools for the General Swimming Pool Corporation of Addison, Illinois. He spends much of his time in Florida where he is curator of the Fort Lauderdale Swimming Hall of Fame.

It is difficult to end this memorial to the three men who 1neant adventure and good entertainment to more people than any trio in history, but the article will have achieved its main purpose if it stakes a claim to new recognition of our city as the place where they grew upEdgar Rice Burroughs, James St. John, and Johnny Weismuller-three Chicago boys.

Ch icago Histo ry

31

HOW THEY TINKERED WITH A RIVER

by John Clayton

The extensive reshaping of Chicago's waterways has not only made the inland ci-ty a major world port, but has led to the development ef the most advanced of metropolitan waste disposal systems. when the most recent great ice sheet had disappeared and Lake Michigan was spilling the melt over its southwesterly rim into an Illi nois River much larger than it is today, the nature and flow of the Chicago River was determined. Winds and currents, eddies and backwaters caused li ttle depths and shallows right up to the lake edge which lay some miles west and south of where it now is, and these, whether north or east of the shore, generally paralleled it. As the waters receded the depths and shallows became wrinkles in the new land that would carry the abundant rainfall into Lake Michigan and eventually, by way of other la kes and rivers, to the Atlantic. Many more ,,vould contribute their runoff to the Illinois, the Mississippi, and finally to the Gulf of M exico.

This watershed, if you can call a difference of a few feet by so pretentious a name, is seld om more than a dozen miles from the lake shore.

The two streams that emptied into Lake Michigan from any part of the state of Illinois were the C hicago and the Calumet. The Chicago's two branches, one flowing north and one south, merged at \ Volf Point near the present Lake ABOUT TEN THOUSAND YEARS AGO

John Clayton's main career has been in advertising, aJ though he served as a pilot in both world wars and as a Chicago Tribune foreign correspondent during the Twenties (see "Fifty Years Ago," Oct. 31, in this issue). His Illinois Fact Book and Historical Almanac1673-r!fiB will be published next month by the Southern Illinois University Press.

The comprehensive mapping of the Ch icago canal and harbor system for this article is the work of Chicago cartographer Barbara Long.

32

Chicago History

Street and \Vacker Drive and continued east less than a mile to flow at rivermouth over a sand bar so shallow you could wade it without getting your ankles wet. The two branches of the Calu met, the Grand and the Little, met south of Lake Calumet and continued in a looping northeasterly course to the lake eleven miles south of the Chicago. ¡when northeastern Illinois still was Indian land there were two much-traveled portages between the Chicago and the Des Plaines (which the French called the Riviere aux Plaznes, and the American fur buyers the Oplane). One, of on ly three and a quarter miles, closely followed present-day Touhy Avenue . The other, more difficult but much more convenient for travelers from the lake to the Illinois, ran from the Sou th Branch to the Des Plaines. This one was of unpredictable length, since a vast bog, called by the fur traders Mud Lake, spread and receded with changes in the weather. At times a man cou ld drag his canoe and splash his way the entire distance without removing the cargo. At others the load and ,¡ehicle had to be carried on the man's back for as much as three miles across the marshes. Gurdon Saltonstall Hubbard, in his autobiography, tells of his first trip across the portage in 1818, when at sixteen and an appren tice to John Jacob Astor's American Fur Company, he struggled to reach the Des Plaines. He and his score of companions needed three full days, and half the nights between to bring their twelve heavy bateaux through the muck and mire between the Chicago at about Thirty-first Street and the Des Plaines near Forty-seventh and Harlem. It was a battle all the way, and a good part of the nights was spent removing the leeches with which Mud Lake abounded.

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Chicago History 33

Early voyage rs from Lake Michigan to the I llinois and Mississippi rivers found the most convenient portage over the watershed to be thro u gh a marsh that stretched from what is now Thirty-First Street and the West Fork to about Forty-Seventh Street and Harlem Aven ue. The Ogden-Wentworth Ditch was dug in the early 1860s to drain Mud Lake for land development.

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Generally the Chicago was a clear stream, clean, with sandy bottom. The water was clouded only after a heavy rain. \Vith its two branches and their forks, it was a little more than fifty mi les long, but it was destined to play an enormous part in water transportation. Its banks were wooded with white and bur oak, shag bark hickory, cottonwood and poplar, black locust, ash, basswood and maple, beech and elm, elders, and the hawthorne in many varieties.

The clear waters and wooded banks remained until men began to build villages by the shady streams and toss their rubbish and waste into the waters.

The Middle Fork of the North Branch rises among the many springs, ponds, and marshes between present-day Libertyville and Lake Bluff.

An eastern fork called the Skokie flows out of a spring-fed pond just north of the city limits of Lake Forest, a mile and a half west of Lake Michigan and half a mile south of Rockland R oad. The West Fork of the orth Branch 34 Chicago History

emerges from an extensive area of marshy ground along Saunders Road west of Lake Forest, and becomes an intermittent stream south of Everett Road. By the time Half Day Road is reached the little run is receiving enough water for continuous flow. The Skokie passes under the new Botanic Gardens south of County Line Road through a concrete culvert four feet in diameter, emerges into man-made lagoons operated as a refuge for waterfowl and small game by the Forest Preserve District of Cook County, flows under the Edens expressway at the Wilmette Golf Club and joins the main stream of the North Branch a few hundred yards west. The \-Vest Fork merges with the two only a short distance away, about half a mile southeast of the village of Golf, still on Forest Preserve land. In , 96, I canoed over much of the three streams and tramped beside the rest with seven Boy Scouts who were checking for sources of pollution, taking readings of the Ph factors, and making bacteria counts as part of Governor Kerner's

clear streams program. All of us received badly needed typhoid shots or boosters, for when a heavy rain taxes the capacity of the sewers, weirs along the river bank open and disc_harge raw sewage, much diluted by rain water, into the stream.

In the 1670s Marquette and Jolliet wrote of the many benefits that would derive from a canal between the Riviere aux Plaines and the Grand Lac. Before there were other than Indian encampments on the banks of the Chicago (save for a trading post and fort at its mouth) men were talking in Congress and elsewhere of a ditch that would provide a water route into the southwestern portion of the Northwest Territory and beyond. A strip of land twenty miles wide and extending a hundred miles from the mouth of the Chicago to a point on the lJlinois west of the Fox was acquired in 1816 by treaty with the Chippewa, Ottawa, and Potawatomi then reThe mouth of the Chicago River as it was before a new channel to the Lake was dredged in 1833. Chicago's history as a port dates from the making of the cut.

,

V

siding on the lJlinois and Milwaukee rivers and along the southwest shore of Lake Michigan.

The route for the canal between Lake Michigan and the lJlinois River was surveyed by Major Stephen Long, then an engineer officer of the United States Army; and in 1819 John C. Calhoun, Secretary of War in Monroe's cabinet, recommended the construction for military purposes. The Congress passed the buck to I11inois in an act which authorized the state to dig the canal. The General Assembly could not find the money for the task, then estimated to cost about $700,000. After ten years of negotiation, the rejection of a bid made by a private company headed by three former or future governors of I11inois, and debate over other ways to get the job clone, Congress deeded to the State of l11inois half the land in the canal strip, including all that lay within ninety feet of either bank, to be disposed of as the state should decide for financing an I11inois and Michigan canal. The towns of Chicago and Ottawa were platted in 1829, but little money resulted from the first auction.

There was more debate, this time about the profile of the canal. Should it be a deep cut that would permit the waters of Lake Michigan and the Chicago River to flow gently toward the I11inois, or a shallow cut with locks, and feeders from the Calumet and Des Plaines rivers?

The first canal bill, calling for the more costly deep cut, was introduced in the I11inois house by Colonel Gurdon Saltonstall Hubbard, representative for Vermilion County. It passed the lower house but was killed in the senate early in 1833. That same year Chicago became a port, thanks to a $25,000 Federal appropriation for dredging a channel through the sand bar, and the building of two piers, each 500 feet long, opposite Fort Dearborn. On.January 9, 1836 the legislature authorized the deep cut, Jake-level profile and ordered construction to begin. The terms of the Board of Canal Commissioners having expired, a new board was appointed, consisting of General William Fitzhugh Thornton of Shelby County, president; Hubbard, who had Chicago H ist ory

35

moved to Chicago, treasurer; and Colonel William Beatty Archer of Clark County, managing member. In early June 1836 the commissioners received an estimate of costs from Chief Engineer William Gooding. Of a total of about $8,750,000 almost $6,000,000 was for the first section from the Chicago River to what later became the site of the first lock, soon to be called Lockport, because almost twenty of this first twenty-eight miles were through limestone. After sufficient study the commissioners authorized their engineers to contract for the first several sections of the Summit division and the last several of the western division, terminating at LaSalle on the Illinois River . The canal would be built from its terminals inward.

On the Fourth of July 1836 the commissioners, with William B. Ogden (who would be mayor of Chicago the following year), Dr. William B. Eagen, Richard Hamilton, and others proceeded on a shallow-draft steamer from the vicin ity of Wolf Point; fought a pitched battle w ith hitch-hikers (whom they defeated, brought aboard, and secured in the hold), and arrived at the designated point near what is now the 2900 block of South Ashland Avenue where they were joined by most of the population of Chicago.

There followed many speeches, predictions of great wealth to be won because of the new canal, patriotic oratory in deference to the Glorious Fourth, and a sharp altercation with youngsters who had filled the official wheelbarrow with unofficial muck. Then one (or perhaps several) of the dignitaries turned the first shovel of earth that inaugurated construction of the Illinois and Michigan Canal.

I say "one or several" advisedly, because historians are far from agreeing as to who dug the first dirt. The honor is assigned to Ogden and to all three of the commissioners. A fellow researcher suggests that perhaps, as often is the case today, all had a hand in it. In any event there stood Chicago, its boots deep in the muck and its eyes fixed on the stars. In the next few years on occasion those stars might be dimmed, 36

Chicago History

but not for long. The panic of 1837 alarmed some as purchasers of canal lots defaulted on payments of principal and interest. The State Bank suspended specie payments, but the workers cheerfully took canal script while the contractors discounted bonds by as much as twenty cents on the dollar. Their profits were considerable. Discouragement reached the extreme in 1842 when the canal commissioners found themselves out of cash, $4,000,000 in debt, and without a market for bonds or script; construction ceased to the despair and suffering of thousands who were thrown out of work. It took a year to resolve that crisis, and almost three more to get any substantial work under way.

Costs were cut by recommending to the legislature that the completion act be based on the shallow profile. On February 1, 1843, the General Assembly, influenced by Thomas Ford, seventh governor of Illinois, passed An Act for Completion, etc. which authorized the commissioners Lo negotiate a loan for the $1,600,000 that Chief Engineer Gooding estimated would be required for a canal with locks and feeders that would leave the flow of the Chicago River as it was. Under this statute the loan would be for six years and bond holders would have first rights to subscribe; $600,000 would be offered in New York and $1,000,000 in London. Control would pass from the Board of Canal Commissioners to a board of three trustees Lo whom a trust deed to all canal lands and properties would be gi,¡en. Two of the trustees would be elected by the bond holders with each share holder receiving one vote for every $ 1 ,ooo of indebtedness held by him. The other would be appointed by the governor of Illinois.

It looked as if the loan would be quickly subscribed, but such was not the case. The American creditors agreed, but those in London pointed out that Illinois already was in default of interest and principal on more than $10,000,000. They would subscribe another million they said, if the state would agree to a tax at least sufficient to pay the interest on the earlier debt. Governor

Ford, •~·ho had told the legislators a year before that Illinois must either accept the burden of new taxation or face the disgrace of repudiation, immediately asked for a special revenue act placing one mil per hundred dollars of valuation at the service of the state's creditors. Such an act was approved by the General Assembly March 1, 1845. It was agreed that the loan and other indebtedness would be funded on completion of the canal under provisions that the new issue would be retired in twen Ly-five years or less.

Some work had been done on the canal in late 1844 and early 1845 under Gooding's direction, but it was not until June 24, when the trustees reappointed him chief engineer with sole authority and responsibility for construction, that work got under way at full speed. On April 10, 1847, the passenger steamer General Fry traversed the ditch from Lockport to Chicago. Eleven days later a similar steamer, the General Thornton, made the journey from Ottawa to Chicago and the canal was declared open. Construction expense had reached $6,468,854.25-about two million less than Gooding's first estimate for a deep cut profile, and well within his estimate of the amount required to finish; but unpaid interest and discounts on land sold for the canal account brought the amount lo be funded to $8,000,000.

What was Chicago like at the time the canal was opened' For some interesting facts we are indebted to Jesse Burgess Thomas, Jr. who was recorder of the Rivers and Harbors Convention in Chicago,July 4-7, 1847. Thomas, nephew of the first Illinoisan to sit in the United States Senate (by invitation the elder Thomas occupied his seat in December 1818, three months before he became eligible), was at the Lime a justice of the Illinois Supreme Court. The convention was reported in great detail in :'\cw York, \Vashington, and even in London. Chicago had been selected as the site because of the great impact the completion of the canal was expected to have on the commerce of the Great Lakes. It drew delegates from fifteen northern and three southern states,

Chicago Hi storical Soci ety

A lock on the old Illinois and Michigan Canal from a photograph taken at about 1900.

among them a young lawyer from Springfield recently elected to Congres who signed the roster A. Lincoln. Justice Thomas reported: In 184 7 the population of Chicago was seventeen thousand. It had t\\·o architects, fifty-six attorneys, one bath-house, fifteen barbers, five bowling saloons, three brewers, three colleges, three libraries (with 12,500 volumes), twentyfive tailors, and in 1846 exports of $2/296,299 and imports of$2,641 ,852.52. (The adverse trade balance was more than made up by cash brought into the city by the amazing flow of newcomers.)

There were four public schools with ten teachers for 1,500 pupils and fifteen private schools with twenl y teachers for 1,ooo pupils. Largest item of export in 1846 was 1,974,304 bushels of wheat.

Only 67,315 bushels of corn were exported.

Continuing Thomas' statistics: The Lake Michigan fleet of cargo and passenger craft totaled fifty-seven, with a tonnage of 9,366.

Twenty-one were owned in Chicago, seventeen in Milwaukee, five in Racine, four in Southport (Kenosha), one in Little Fort (Waukegan), one m ew Buffalo and eight across the lake in Grand River. Largest was a barque of 380 tons at Grand River, the smallest a schooner of Chicago History

37

thirty-five tons at New Buffalo. (This obviously did not include Chicago-trading ships owned in other than Lake Michigan ports. One of these, the Phoenix, a propeller-driven steamer, was lost by fire in November 1847, with most of its 250 passengers and crew.)

The delegates memorialized the Congress, urging it to take vigorous action to develop harbors on the Great Lakes and dredge deeper channels on major rivers. It also asked for a railroad from some point on the Mississippi to San Francisco.

After opening the Illinois and Michigan Canal the trustees remained in control for twenty-three years and made an excellent record; although there was some criticism about the salaries they voted themselves. In come from the canal included a proportionate share (about half) of the one mil tax, sale of canal lands, a share of the Illinois Central Rail Road fund, and cash from the sale of water power, used machinery, sand, timber, and stone, the last of which a great quantity had been quarried between the summit of the watershed and Lockport. There also was cash income, which grew as land became more valuable, from leases of parcels in the ninety foot strips along the canal banks. All this income, except the cash needed to operate the canal, went to retire the bonds.

However; while the canal was financially healthy and prosperous, the river in another way was not. The stream in its lower reaches and the lake close to the shore were in bad shape and rapidly getting no better. In the early days of the city, drinking water came from shallow wells.

There was a public pump and watering trough at Michigan and Lake. There was of course no plumbing and only outdoor privies. Almost every home had a stable. The wells were polluted and the river itself was an unfit source of supply, for the rains washed street and barnyard filth into its waters, and these in turn fouled the lake near its mouth. The death rate from water-borne diseases- typhoid, amoebic dysentery, cholerawas among the highest in the nation.

38

Chicago History

For a while water from the lake was peddled door-to-door. In 1840, when Chicago had 4,500 residents, the Chicago Hydrolic Company, a private venture, built the first pumping station and reservoir at the corner of Lake Street and Michigan Avenue. The intake pipe extended only 150 feet into the lake. The water was delivered to about a third of the city through cedar logs with holes three to five inches in diameter bored lengthwise through their cores. In 1 8y2 a threeman Board of \Vater Commissioners was appointed. A pumping plant was built on the lake shore at Chicago Avenue and water was fed to high tanks near Jackson and LaSalle, Chicago and Orleans, and Madison and Halsted. An attempt was made to build a crib for an intake point 600 feet from shore, but rough water and lack of technical knowledge spoiled the plan. The water was taken from about a hundred feet offshore, within a small breakwater that was no protection from the river's filth. Water-borne germs continued to kill. (From typhoid alone the death rate averaged sixty-five per roo,ooo population between 1860 and 1900.) In 1854 a cholera ep id em ic took the lives of 5.5 per cent of the population. Immediately after this disaster an underground sewer system was authorized. \'Vhile sewers had existed from ancient times Chicago was the second city in the world to have a fully enclosed system. (Hamburg, Germany, in 1852, was the first.) Construction began in 1856.

In what was to become the Loop, the construction served a double purpose. The brick sewers, several feet in diameter, were laid in the center of the streets to replace a V-shaped flume that had carried away the wastes flowing into the planked roadways. These sewers then were connected with smaller brick ducts leading into the buildings, and everything was covered with earth, which raised the level of the streets and sidewalks about ten feet. In outlying areas the sewers in trenches below street level were of brick or wedge-shaped oak scantlings held together by the pressure of the earth that was tarn ped around them. The good deriving from this project was

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The Illinois and Michigan Cana l, with its locks, opened in 1847; the deep cutting of the canal , which reversed the flow of the Chicago River, was accomplished in 1871. The reverse flow carried Chicago's sewage away from Lake Michigan, the c ity 's water supply. The much larger Sanitary and Ship Canal was completed in 1900, and the supplementary Calumet-Sag Channe l in 1922 .

Chica go H is to ry

39

that it took the sewage out of the gutters-the evil, that it dumped the scourings of a growing city into both the river and the ten-mile ditch dug from Evanston in the fifties along the lake front to drain the marshy land. This ditch poured its polluted flow into the Chicago River near its mouth .

A few years later the Ogden-\i\lentworth ditch was dug from the Des Plaines to the ¡west Fork of the South Branch by those pioneer developers of subdivisions, "Long John" Wentworth and William B. Ogden, to drain Mud Lake and make the area habitable. This ditch also increased the pollution of river and lake.

Something had to happen to correct this situation or Chicago would become a dead city choked on its own wastes. The only possible solution seemed to be the old plan of a deep-cut profile for the Illinois and Michigan Canal, which would reverse the flow of the river and carry the sewage, greatly diluted, by lake water, to the Illinois, which was an accepted method of the clay, for it was a widely held theory that any stream, after a few miles of flow, would clean itself. Reconstruction of the canal on the deep cut plan was authorized by the General Assembly in 1865 and completed only seventy-six days after the last of the old canal bonds were paid and retired on April 30, 1871. Chicago had reversed the flow of its river, and the state was again in debt, but this time only to the amount of $3,000,000. The Chicago Tribune of July 16, 1871 (a Sunday), published this account on page '2 under the title "The Canal Completed."

It read in part: Ye terday the ringing of the court house bell announced that the canal gate had been opened and the South Branch of the Chicago River permitted to run into it. The stream was admitted slowly, so as to guard again t accidents, and if nothing happens to prevent it, the success of the long-expected improvement will be fairly tested by Saturday next. Two ends are sought by the improvement, and both have been confidently promised by the advocates of the work. One is the increase of business on the canal to an extent that will repay to Chicago the money expended on the deepening, and the other is that it will so thor40

Chicago History

oughly drain the Chicago River a to keep the water of the latter pure. Considerable doubts have been expressed as to whether either result will be attained, but the experiment is so near a demonstration that it is idle to speculate.

Sarajane Lippincott, author, poet, and newspaper correspondent, reported the event in quite another and more colorful vein in her book )\rew Life in New Lands, published in J\7ew York in 1873, she \\Tote: There was a grand celebration by triumphant Chicagoans in honor of the wedding of the Chicago and Illinoi Rivers-Othello and Desdemona. There was a canal-boat excursion-which must have seemed like a dream of other clays-of the city magnates, and all the power of the press, distinguished strangers, and a stray major-general or two, and many hundreds of the common people-that is, men not worth over half a million,-all headed by his Honor the Mayor.

They ay the going forth of the Doge of Venice to wed the Adriatic could never have been a circumstance to this excursion. There may have been more regal pomp and splendor on those old occasions, but nothing like the bounteous feeding of yesterday.

There may have been a richer display of costumes, but nothing like the amount of Bourbon and lager drunk.

I need hardly say that the enterprise of regenerating is a success.-for of course they wouldn't celebrate a failure,-ancl Chesbrough, the bold engineer, may take up the brave iteration of Galileo, 'It moves!' The great deeps of mud and slime and unimaginable filth, the breeding beds of miasmas and death-fogs, are being slowly broken up, are passing away. One can actually perceive a current in the river at some points, and straws, after ome moments of indecision, will show which way it runs. On Monday, wa bing day, Lake Michigan really buckled down to her work and did wonders in the cleaning line. We early drove down to see how far dilution and clarification had proceeded in the thick, black torpid stream, more interested than though about to witness the annual miracle of aples,-the liquefaction of the blood of San Gennaro. vVe noticed first that the color of the water had changed from almost inky blackness to something of the tawny hue of the Tiber after a storm.

Then, looking steadily, we perceived it moving sluggishly, sullenly, as if in obedience to an unusual and imperative morning call-a call from the old Father of Waters himself.

The Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal under construction at about 1895.

Chicago Historical Soc iety

They ay there is a great reJ01cmg among the millers and manufacturers along the river down by Joliet at the increase of water which, even at this dry season, sets all their wheels whirling. The change is not only a blessing to factories, but to olfactories.

There is an immense modification of the peculiar overpowering odor which was like what a grand combination of the 'thirty thousand distinct smells' of the city of Cologne would be-an odor that only last week sickened the air for a half a mile on the leeward side, and for as far heavenward, probably, so that it would seem impossible a bird with a delicate constitution could pass through it unharmed.

So much for esthetics. On the financial side, while the canal trustees turned over $94,000 in cash to the new Board of Canal Commissioners, the state was right back in debt for its deeper ditch. The cost of $3,000,000 for the deep cut was funded over a period of years at a rate of $300,000 a year. This money provided a channel that withdrew four hundred second feet ( cubic feet per second) of Lake Michigan water. The flow was gentle, for the slope was only a foot in ten miles, about three feet between Chicago and Lockport.

The new canal worked well for a year. Then a heavy flood in 1 8t2 enlarged the Ogden-Wentworth ditch and from that time every freshet backed up the river waters into Lake Michigan.

The theory of cleansing by dilution proved faulty, and on hot, still summer nights the residents of the southwest towns as far away as LaSalle were plagued by foul, miasmic odors from the canal.

There was a slight increase in barge traffic, which peaked a little more than a million tons in 1882 but fell off in the next decade. The failure of the canal to accomplish that for which it was designed was underlined on the second of August, 1885. Shortly before dawn a "cloud buster" began that poured more than six inches of rain on the city and its environs. The entire basin of the Chicago Ri,¡er received the full force of the deluge. The rain scrubbed the streets and sewers clean, and most of the foul, black mass entered the lake, spreading far beyond the intake cribs which had been built beginning in 1867 to assure the city of an unfailing supply of drinking water.

Chicago's typhoid death rate, down from the astronomical figures of the fifties to 67.5 per 100,000, climbed until it reached a peak of r 74 per 100,000 in 1891.

From the effects of the 1885 flood it was apparent that only the most radical measures could accomplish a cure. Chicago engineers went to work on an entirely new concept-a much larger and deeper sanitary and ship canal Chicago History 41

and a complete revision of the Chicago sewer system. The engineers went to work with members of the state legislature; their plan and the legislation to implement it was ready before the end of 1888. Under the requirements of the act a resolution creating the Sanitary District of Chicago was presented to voters of the cities and towns affected on November 5, r 889. The vote was 70,958 in favor and 242 against. On January 18, 1890 organization of the district was completed. It was 185 square miles in extent, and included the City of Chicago, Oak Park, Berwyn, Cicero, and Stickney. The new canal would have a minimum depth of 24 feet and a width of 160 feet at the bottom, with sloping sides from Canalport to Willow Springs Road.

From Canalport to Summit, a distance of 7.8 miles, the canal was in earth, and from Summit to Willow Springs in earth over rock. From there to Lockport the bed was in solid rock, and there would be no sloping sides. The grade would be one foot in forty thousand in those sections where all or part of the sides were in earth, and one foot in twenty thousand where the entire ditch was in rock. It was designed to carry a flow of ro,ooo second feet at one and a half miles an hour.

The second part of the prqjeet was a system of intercepting sewers along the lake front that would prevent reversal of flow back to the lake under the most severe conditions. The Jake would be sealed from pollution by the Chicago sewer system. These interceptors, from six to twenty-seven feet in diameter, would receive the flow from the street sewers, those on the north side converging at the Lawrence Avenue pumping station and those on the south side at the one on Racine Avenue. From the beginning the project raised the hackles of our neighbors. It was attacked on the basis that so heavy a flow would lower the level of the lake to a dangerous extent. Litigation was begun first by states along the Great Lakes, and later by Canada. The new canal also was denounced by the State of Missouri because of pollution from sewage.

By the end of the decade, during which a lot 42

Chi cago History

of mudhogs and hard rock men learned much about canal digging that they later applied to the Panama Canal, the new Sanitary and Ship canal was about ready to receive water. A few clays after Christmas in 1899 the Board of Trustees learned that the State of Missouri had decided to sue in Federal court to prevent activation of the new canal. Knowing it would be much more difficult to stop the flow once started, the trustees rushed the final work and water from the lake entered the huge ditchJanuary 2, 1900. On January r6 the controlling gates were lowered at Lockport, and Lake Michigan water began its journey to the Mississippi. Minutes later the Missouri suit was filed. Within the year Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New York began their efforts to stop or restrict the flow from the lake into the canal.

Leaving these contests to their lawyers, the trustees proceeded with the completion of their plans-a barge and drainage canal from Lake Michigan at Wilmette to the orth Branch at Lawrence Avenue, and a similar channel from the Little Calumet at Riverdale to the Sanitary and Ship Canal at the western encl of Saganashkee Slough.

Not much if any barge traffic uses the orth Shore channel, completed November 29, 19ro, but the Calumet-Sag channel, short as it is, has become one of the world's major inland waterways. Begun in 191 r and finished in 1922, it originally was sixty feet wide at the surface.

After the Second \Vorld \Var major changes were made in the harbor of Chicago. The principal dockage area was removed from the heart of the city to the Lake Calumet area and widening of the Cal-Sag channel to 225 feet was begun. \\Then the project is completed there will be two outlets into Lake Michigan for the Cal-Sag, one by way of the Little Calumet, and the other via the Grand Calumet, and a short channel to Indiana Harbor. This ties in with the deep waterway along the Illinois River from Joliet to Grafton and by way of the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico. The widening of the Cal-Sag

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After World War 11 the principal dockage area was removed from the heart of Chicago to the Lake Calumet area, and the Calumet-Sag Channel was widened, with several more outlets to the Lake put under construction. The Chicago, Indiana Harbor, and Gary port system comprises the nation's fourth largest port.

Chicago History 43

A view of port traffic at the Rush Street Bridge in about 1900.

The bridge linked Michigan Avenue and Rush Street.

Chicago Historical Society

channel, begun in r 955, is more than eighty per cent completed. Several major bridges have not yet been lengthened in places where the canal already has been widened, but the work is proceeding at a satisfactory pace.

The effect of the main channel and the CalSag on commerce is pointed up by a few statistics furnished by the Corps of Engineers for the forthcoming Illinois Fact Book and Historical Almanac.

In r 883, the peak year for the Illinois and Michigan Canal, it carried a total of, ,01 r ,287 tons of cargo. The building of the ship canal by the Sanitary District spurred action by the state, with the aid of the Federal government, to provide a deep waterway from Lockport to Grafton.

Despite interruption by a world war and a depression (and with Federal aid on the Illinois 44

Chicago History

River below Ottawa) the channel from Chicago to the Mississippi was completed and opened in 1933. In r 935 a million tons were carried by the two main canals of the Sanitary Distri c t. In 1940 the figure reached nearly five million tons, in 1950 it was in excess of twelve million, and in r 960 close to twenty million tons were transported. This did not include the ten to fifteen per cent that originated or terminated at places between Lockport and Grafton. The corps of Engineers' office in Chicago estimated for the writer that the 1969 total for the canals of the Sanitary District would be 29,450,000 tons, and the overall total from Grafton to Lake Michigan would be 31,855,000 tons.

This, together with tonnage supplied by the St. Lawrence Seaway and the Great Lakes,

probably will make Chicago, in 1969, the nation's fifth largest port, surpassed only by New York, New Orleans, Houston, and Philadelphia in that order. If cargo incoming aqd outgoing from Indiana Harbor and Gary was included, Chicago would be pushing Houston for third place. Xor is this in any way surprising, for the Chicago River (a hundred fifty years ago little more than a brook in the wilderness) has been for almost a hundred years the major part of a major harbor. At the beginning of the century not only were the banks of the river jammed with schooners, square-rigged ships, and steamers from its mouth to the newly opened Sanitary and Ship Canal on the South Branch and to the turning basin at North Avenue on the );"orth Branch, but there also were miles of slips crowding the area from Halsted Street to Darnen Avenue and from Cermak Road to Thirty-first Street. To the city were brought lumber and lime in the sailing vessels, iron ore in the steamers; from the city were taken thousands and thousands of tons of wheat and corn, oats and barley, machinery and canned meats in such quantities that Chicago, according to an article by Elliott Flower in the February 1902 issue of Century magazine, was the fourth largest port in the world, its commerce in 1900 (14,186,100 tons) , exceeded only by that of London (16,529,085 tons), New York (16,020,290 tons), and Hamburg (14,198, 8, 7 tons). Chicago was first in arrivals and departures with 17,017 vessels entering or clearing the port that same year.

An interesting sidelight: the channel of the North Branch below North Avenue was not deepened or widened for navigationad purposes.

Below its waters lay the finest clay in the area for making bricks. Much of Chicago in the eighteen fifties and sixties was built from Chicago River mud.

Together with the importance of the canal in the development of trade, its problems of pollution were the most significant factor in the creation of the world's finest system for the treatment of domestic and industrial wastes . The suit by

the State of Missouri resulted in a court order for the Sanitary District to cease disposing of untreated sewage in the canal, no matter how greatly diluted. The District argued that the massive dilution produced by 10,000 second feet purified the stream long before it reached the confines of Missouri. After the justices had inspected the lower reaches of the Illinois it was a case of "the nose knows."

The District took the order to the Federal Court of Appeals, and after they had lost there, to the United States Supreme Court, meanwhile hastening the design and construction of treatment plants. The Calumet treatment plant was in use in 1922, the North Side plant in 1928 (enlarged in 1937), the West Side plant in 1931, and the Southwest plant in 1939. The last two were combined and greatly enlarged in the early fifties. Improvement in methods constantly were being made. In the middle fifties, when the District had been enlarged to include more than a hundred communities from the Kendall County line to Lake Michigan and from the border of Lake County to that of Will County, the name was changed to The Metropolitan Sanitary District of Greater Chicago. Today it serves Chicago and another Ir 4 communities, great and small, covers about goo square miles in area, and has more than twenty treatment plants that feed into the canals.

A principal objective of treatment was the recovery and reuse of all or nearly all the water pumped from Lake Michigan for domestic and industrial purposes, and the consequent reduction of the amount of diversion from Lake Michigan needed to keep the canals in operation. The officers of the District always claimed, and still do, that the lowering of the lake level by diversion was only a small fraction of the change brought about by natural causes, even if the original r 0,000 second feet had been maintained .

The maximum effect of such diversion would lower the level of Lakes Michigan and Huron by two and three quarters inches, that of Lake Erie one and five-eighths inches, and of Lake Chicago History 45

Ontario one and a half inches. Annual variations between low water in February and high water in July were more than a foot, and from highest level in June 1886, to lowest in February, 1926, was more than six feet.

In spite of these facts the Supreme Court on April 21, 1930, entered an interim decree ordering cl iversion for the canal to be reel uced to 6,500 second feet by July 1, 1935, to 5,000 second feet by December 3 1 of that same year, and to 1,500 second feet by December 3 r, 1938. That rate was ordered to be maintained until a review by the Supreme Court set for 1965. A final decree, effective March 1, 1970, was entered June 12, 1966, which ordered that withdrawal from the lake or its watershed by any entity of the State of Illinois be limited to 3,200 second feet.

This would include use of the waters that otherwise would have entered the lake from the Chicago and Calumet rivers and their tributaries.

The order of the Court has had one effect of great benefit to the nation and the world. It has caused the Metropolitan Sanitary District of Greater Chicago to develop a sewage treatment process to a point where every bit of domestic and industrial waste entering the sewers is converted into clean organic fertilizer and an inert ash suitable for fill. Most of the water pumped from the lake is cleansed of all harmful particles and returned to a second useful life on the great inland deep waterway that extends from the mouth of the St. Lawrence River to that of the Mississippi.

46

Chicago Histo ry

On Nov. 7, 1969, Mayor Richard J. Daley announced that a solution of the problem of storm overflow had been developed and would be put into operation in the shortest possible time. Ninety-five miles of huge tunnels, roo to 300 feet below the surface, will girdle the Metropolitan Sanitary District of Greater Chicago.

Storm runoff, instead of carrying water and a high percentage of sewage into the Chicago and Des Plaines rivers, will be stored in these tunnels until it can be processed by the sewage treatment plants of the district. Within a few years, the mayor suggested, one will be able to fish anywhere along the river during his lunch hour.

Cost of the program, $650,000,000, will be shared by the city, the sanitary district, the state and the federal government. Vinton Bacon, superintendent of the sanitary district, speaking on television the same day, compared this price tag with four billion dollars that would be required for a system of separate storm sewers.

Howe\'er, when all this is accomplished, much will remain to be done. The control of water pollution, so well achieved within the city of Chicago and the borders of the Metropolitan Sanitary District, must be extended by voluntary or legislative action to the entire Lake Michigan littoral, or, while the river lives a new life, the lake will die. This is one of the most urgent problems facing the legislators of Illinois, Wisconsin and Michigan. We have only to look eastward, where Lake Erie has died already, to realize what can happen here.

THE GRIPMAN WORE A SHEEPSKIN COAT

by George T. Bryant

A Memoir on Local Chicago Transportation at the Turn beginning in 1894, when I was three years old and old enough to know one kind of car from another, and 1907 or r 908, when I was a young teen-ager, I was witness to the great transition in public transportation in Chicago. My early recollections run the gamut from the horse cars, the cable car trains, the El trains pulled by steam locomotives, to the El trains electrically operated, and the electric street cars. I daresay that there are few of us alive today who can say as much.

Almost all of the horse car operations occurred before my time, but still there were two specific DURING THE SPAN OF YEARS

The author was born in Chicago in 1891. After a long career in advertising and government service he has retired to live in New York City. This article is drawn from his longer description of various aspects of life in Chicago at the turn of the century.

ef the Century

cases of horse car use which remain clearly in mind. One concerned the I ndiana Avenue line.

It is a matter of record that when the l ine started in 1865 the route started at 31st Street.

North cars operated via Indiana Avenue to 18th Street, to State Street, and on to Lake Street.

In 1882, when the cable cars began operating on Cottage Grove Avenue (and Wabash Avenue), the Indiana Avenue horse cars went as far as 18th Street and Wabash, where the teams were removed and the cars attached to cable car trains for the trip downtown. The cars made a loop east on Washington Street, through a court in the rear of the public library, and west on Randolph Street to , vabash Avenue, where the return trip started.

T he grip m an in h is fur coat st and s at t h e front of h is cable ca r duri ng a t emporary reve rsi on t o horse powe r aft er a ca b le brea k on t he Cottage Grove lin e durin g ze ro weat he r , February 19, 1903.

At 18th Street the trailing horse cars were uncoupled and the horses took over again for the trip to 31st Street. The horse cars were last used on Indiana Avenue in December, 1896, when the line was electrified as far as 18th and \!\Tabash. For some years the electric cars \\"ere carried down town from there, attached to the cable cars. In due time, of course, trolley wires were strung on \Vabash Avenue, and the Indiana Avenue cars went their full route without the help of the cable cars.

I comment on the Indiana Avenue horse cars, and later the electric cars, because dozens of times I saw the cars attached to the Cottage Grove cable cars and carried around the downtown loop.

The other horse car service which I recall applied to the use of the cars as owl cars on the cable lines between 1 :oo A.M. and 6:oo A.M. At least that was true on the Cottage Grove Avenue line and, I assume, also on other cable lines in the city. Actually, the cars were the same as the trailer cars pulled by the grip carsexcept for the motive power. During the dark hours the grip cars on the cable lines carried huge oil-burning headlights mounted on the front platforms; the horse drawn owl cars did the same, the only difference being that on the owl cars, the lights were visible only between the horses. In size and type those large lamps reminded me of those used on steam locomotives in that period. The owl cars had another feature: one of the horses wore a tinkling bell, somewhat like a typical cow bell, and the sound of this, plus the ambling clop, clop, clop of the horses' hooves, could be heard for two or three blocks.

About the Cable Cars :\Tot being an expert on the subject, I have only a limited knowledge as to the number of cities which had cable cars operating between their horse car days and the days of electric street cars. I can only relate what I remember about those cable car lines in Chicago, and specifically about the lines on the South Side, 48

Chicago History

these being the ones I rode so many dozens of times. I was personally familiar with the Cottage Grove Avenue line, its 71st Street branch, and the Jackson Park branch (these were the blue cars); and the State Street line with red cars. I had only brief experiences with the other linesoccasionally to go to Lincoln Park, or on the Madison Street line (the yellow cars) to the Union Park neighborhood, where my parents had some friends. One Saturday, in October, 1896, (when I was five), we visited these friends on Loomis Street, and I recall that all of us, that is our friends and we three, went to Union Park to see torchlight political parades that evening.

All I remember is that hundreds of men and boys marched around the park carryina burning flares, banners and pictures of McKinley and Bryan. The recollection of those names probably registered because of the then popular campaign buttons. To return to the subject of street cars, we were so late leaving our friends that evening that we had to use the horse drawn owl cars when going home. Today, in retrospect, I surmise that our travel time was over two hours that night.

For those who have not heard much about the cable cars, perhaps some description is in order. The motive power was a continuous steel cable, moving underneath a slot in the center between the tracks. This endless cable ran along on pulley wheels and made a steady humming sound that was part of the street scene on miles of streets served by those lines. The various power houses were located at strategic intervals along the routes. I recall the one at the northeast corner of Cottage Grove Avenue and 55th Street, because more than once I stood in the open doors and looked inside. In the power house the cable wound around a series of huge flywheels, which were driven at an even speed by steam-powered engines. This procedure gave the cable the required speed and insured an even pull for the grip cars whenever the cable was engaged.

The grip cars (open type, with seats for

Chicago T ransit Aut hority

approximately twenty passengers), were named for the obvious reason that the gripmen controlled the cars by using a m etal gripping device to engage and disengage the moving cable. In simple terms this mechanism might have been called a friction clutch. The car operator controlled it with a long (chest high ) lever, at the lower end of which was a ratchet assembly which kept the grip or clutch engaged while the cars were moving. To retard the forward motion of the cable train the ratchet was released, thus clearing the gripping device from the evermoving cable. To bring the cars to a dead stop the operator pulled taut on a heavy hand-lever (also chest high) to actuate the brakes. Along both sides of the grip cars there were running boards which served two purposes: first, to permit passengers to enter and leave the cars; and second, to provide a means for the conductor (from the trailer car), to go back and forth to collect his fares. On each supporting upright there was a long vertical hand rail which the conductor used in his adroit fashion. Each grip car had a warning bell mounted near the roof; to ring it the operator yanked on a short pullcord which hung down within convenient range.

When heavy traffic was encountered the bell was rung furiously, but many were the times when obstinate drivers of delivery wagons and heavy drays pretended they didn't hear the bell. To help out, the conductors often stood on the front platforms of the trailer cars and vigorously rang the signal bells used by the conductors in the trailer cars to signal stops and starts to the oper-

Horse cars of this type operated on all lines, other than the cable lines, until various dates in the 1890s and early 1900s.

ators of the grip cars. (Remember, there were no electric buzzers or bells in those cable cars.)

Normally a grip car pulled one trailer car, although I imagine that during rush hours two trailers might have been used on some lines. The trailer cars were of two types: open summer cars, and closed winter cars. As was customary with the later electric trolley lines, the open-type summer cars were favored in season, but even then there were some problems. I refer to the rainy days, when the only protection for the passengers were the several cloth curtains which dropped down in the space at each row of crosswise seats. A heavy rain would elude the curtains, with the result that no one wanted to sit on the end seats. Obviously the old rule of first come, first served seemed to apply, for the end (and wet) seats were left for the late comers.

The only other disadvantage, to my knowledge, was the fact that during such rainy periods, it was difficult to see out and watch for one's street. On the positive side (forgetting the rainy periods), it was a pleasure to use those summer cars. The only air conditioning in those days was the open air, and if it could be enjoyed by riding in something that moved, so much the better. On the other hand, riding during the cold months wasn't all peaches and cream, even in the closed cars. Of coui¡se, the grip cars were open to the elements and their one-time loyal Chicago History 49

Chicago Tra nsit Au thority

passengers switched to the more comfortable closed cars during the inclement weather . I'm sure that the hundreds of cable car gripmen in Chicago during those days might well have thought that they had a lot of fair weather friends.

These closed cars were heated by coal burning stoves placed in the center of the cars. Even under favorable conditions the cars were not warm, and things were made worse by passengers opening the sliding doors at each end to enter or leave. In very cold weather the modicum of warmth in a car would be dissipated in one sudden swoosh whenever the doors were opened. It seemed like a hopeless battle. Just as the passengers chose the seats in the center of the summer cars during rainy days, passengers in the winter cars had equally smart ideas about ways to assure their personal comfort. The fortunate ones huddled near the stoves in the middle of the cars, allowing the others to endure the frequent wafts of cold air coming in through the doors. What about the poor gripman, standing in the open car winter and summer? Summer time wasn't so bad, even during a heavy rain, because he stood in the center of the grip car 50

Ch icago Hi story

The grip and trailer cars of a typical cable car train.

This one awaits departure at the Blue Island-Leavitt terminal. There were eighty-six miles of track in the Chicago cable system.

and had the protection of the car roof. In the winter it was different-the four sides were open and there was nothing to prevent the icy winds from blowing right on the operator. Most of tho e fellows wore heavy fur coats for protection, which made them look about twice normal size.

The interior lighting of the cable cars was provided by large oil-burning lamps suspended from the ceilings. They shed a less-than-bright glow of light, just about enough for passengers to find their way to or from their seats. Think of the tremendous maintenance job in caring for the lamps in hundreds of horse cars or cable car trailers operating in Chicago during the preelectric days!

I have already mentioned about the Cottage Grove A\'enue cable trains lending a hand by carrying the Indiana Avenue horse cars (and subsequently the electric cars), on Wabash Avenue between 18th Street and Randolph Street. \Ve should not forget that the State Street cable car trains also rendered a similar

service {or several electric Jines whose routes did not have troJley wires aJI the way into the main downtown area. For some time-I do not know exactly how many years-State Street cable trains picked up electric street cars from various routes at Archer Avenue for the trip downtown and return. These routes included the Archer, vVaJlace-Racine, Halsted-Downtown, AshlandDowntown, and the 38th-Archer routes. The downtown loop for the State Street cable trains was east on Madison Street, north on \Vabash Avenue, west on Lake Street to State Street, where the return trip started.

The Elevated Trains My first interest in the El trains in Chicago came about in two ways. In the South Side areas, where I first Jived, we were not conveniently located to the elevated lines and consequently had to depend upon other means of transportation. However, whenever I was taken downtown I could not help but see the loop El structure and the trains which went back and forth on those high-in-the-air tracks. GeneraJly I saw the trains from street level, but occasiona ll y, when I was on an upper floor of a department store, I had a bird's-eye view of the tracks and whatever trains should pass by at the time.

My second awareness of these fascinating trains happened about the same time (1896-97), but under somewhat different circumstances.

One of my grandmothers Jived on Prairie Avenue, just south of 47th Street, in a location only a stone's throw from the El, and where there was nothing between the house and the tracks. Having had previous interest in watching the IJlinois Central trains when in Hyde Park, it came natural to be intrigued by the steam trains on the El. The view from the house was perfect for me, because the trains made the stops at the 47th Street station, and there was some activity every time a train came to the station. When approaching the stop, the engines would blow off steam; when starting up, they puffed and wheezed pretty hard to gain momen-

tum-and of course there was plenty of black smoke to show for that effort.

Upon making some inquiries, I have learned from the Chicago Transit Authority that the first trains on the South Side EJ line were run June 6, 1892, the terminus being at Stony Island Avenue and 63rd Street. This routing not only was convenient for thousands of South Side residents, but also it was ideal for other thousands who would later ride to the World's Columbian Exposition, which opened in the spring of 1893. IncidentaJly, the El trains became the third major transportation facility for the several hundred thousand visitors who would come to the great 1893 fair; the other two were the Jackson Park cable car line (to a terminus near 57th Street), and the Illinois Central Railroad, with stations at 57th, 60th, and 63rd Streets.

The motive power for the new elevated line consisted of forty-six pint size steam locomotives made by the Baldwin Locomotive Works of Philadelphia. This type was designed for use on an elevated structure where light weight and nominal speed were requirements. These chubby little locomotives were only twenty-six feet long and they weighed only twenty-nine tons, a size very much smaller than the models used on ground level rail lines. Even so, they were most suitable for their intended service, day after clay puJling four or five passenger cars, to give the public a form of rapid transit such as it had never dreamed of before.

Those intriguing little locomotives did their work on the South Side transit line from that 1892 date until April 1898, when they were taken out of service to make way for the new third-rail electrification of the route. I was seven years old at the time of the changeover, and because of my boyish love for trains and engines, I think I must have had some regrets about seeing the steam service disappear, although at the same time surely there must have been some curiosity about the new electric trains. In the case of the El Jines the change was welcomed by adult riders for more than one reason-mainly, Chicago History

51

the cars were cleaner because there was neither smoke nor cinders; additionally, no doubt the running times were improved. As for any disadvantages, I doubt if there were any, although several years after the start of the all-electric service, I heard my father talk about it with some friends and he said that the cars on the electric El were not comfortably warm during the winter days. If there was a problem it concerned the feelings on the part of many people that the third rail was dangerous and might cause trouble. I am sure that during the first freeze or sleet storm when the third rail shoes on the cars threw off a small shower of sparks the skeptics must have been sure of the predicted danger!

As time went on the original novelty of riding on the "Alley L" diminished somewhat because of my more frequent trips with Mama and Papa.

Incidentally, "Alley L" is what many people called the eleYateds, for the obvious reason, I presume, that many of the steel structures were built over the alleys-at least that was true with much of the trackage of the South Side and North Side lines. By the time I was twelve ( r 903), there was a modest revival of interest for me in riding the El because I was then permitted to make downtown trips alone, or with some of my young friends.

One of our favorite Sunday diversions was going downtown with the idea of making a continuous round trip ride. At that time the South Side trains made the full loop downtown and continued to complete the round trip to the end of the line at 63rd Street and Stony Island Avenue; if we were not reprimanded by one of the guards, we stayed on the train until we reached the station near home. The early El cars had open end platforms, ( unlike the enclosed vestibules today), and there were metal gates which were operated by the guards who straddled the platforms of two cars. As there was no guard on the rear platform of the last car, we boys could stand there without being called down. I don't know why we thought it was better 52

Chicago History

than being seated comfortably inside one of the cars, but at that time it seemed like a good thing to do. Arriving back at the Madison Avenue (now Dorchester) station, we had completed our intended round trip-and were ready for a new venture. Any thought about that particular El station brings to mind that in spite of the promised convenience of the El trains to our new location on 62nd Street there was a problem. If I recall correctly it had to do with the height of the station above the street level, and the consequent long series of steps to climb to reach it.

The El tracks at this point were raised higher than normal in order to make the crossing over the Illinois Central Railroad tracks, which in turn were located above the 63rd Street surface streetcar line. The long climb up the steps proved quite a strain on Mama, and after a few tries, she shunned the El in favor of street cars or the Illinois Central suburban trains.

For a few Saturday mornings that summer and fall we had a special errand to run for the father of one of my good friends, which suited us just fine. The gentleman in question had some kind of job which gave him frequent Saturdays off, and on those days he asked his son ( and a friend) to go downtown to a small restaurant on North Wells Street and pick up a quart bucket of something I had never seen or heard of before-chili con carne. On the first such trip Allan and I dutifully went to the restaurant and he told the counterman that we wanted a "quart of chili for my father." The man didn't know Allan from Adam's off ox, but when his father's first name was mentioned, he said: "Oh, of course, why didn't you say that Al sent you down? I'll fix it up right away-why don't you boys sit at the counter and have a dish of chili? It's on me." )lot being averse to accepting a free sample, the small dishes of chili were set before us and we started to eat. Allan had eaten chili before but it was new to me, and besides, I had no idea that it was somewhat hotter than the average food I had been eating! These errands to \Yells Street meant a trip on the El,

Chicago Transil Authority

so we had no complaints. When I arrived home after my first experience with chili, I told Mama all about it, and her only reply was something like "Heavenly days, what's chili? And where is this place?" etc., etc. Later that evening the matter was mentioned to Papa and Mama wanted to know: "What kind of place is this where they get that chili stuff?" My father assured her that it was not a Mexican den of iniquity, so further errands were permitted .

The downtown El trips were interesting in more than one way. The station platforms, then as now, had numerous advertising posters displayed, and on these trips each of us selected the name of some product, or service, to see which one of us could tally the largest number of our respective ads while on the round trip. There was no bet, but it gave us something to do, and besides, I guess that we became about as advertising conscious as any kids our ages.

The Ia you t of those early El cars is still clearly in mind. At each end were lengthwise seats, while toward the center there were cross-wise seats accommodating sixteen passengers-eight riding forward, eight riding backward. \!\Then boarding a car at the start of a trip it was amusing to see how people went for the seats facing forward; it seemed to me that not one person in twenty-five would deliberately choose a 'backward' seat when the others were available.

One of the twenty-five U.S. mail cars that operated from 1895 until 1915 between the central and branch post offices.

Electric Street Cars For those who were adults during the years r 893-1906, and who had to travel about Chicago, I can well imagine that the transition period from the horse car days to the more modern electric cars must have been a most interesting experience, because surface transportation in Chicago was in various states of change much of the time. Around the turn of the century the city's streetcar lines were in the hands of a number of independent owners, each operating its particular routes with little or no coordination with other lines. To go from one local area to another often required two fares, sometimes three. In fact it wasn't until r 902 that some legal action forced most of the street car companies to adopt a transfer system between them. As an example of what was going on, just look into the situation which existed on North and South Halsted Streets. In late 1896, after the horse cars had been discontinued, a passenger had to ride three separate cars and pay three separate fares between the :"â&#x20AC;˘forth and South Sides. An electric trolley route operated on the South Side between 69th Street and 23rd Place; a cable car route operated between 23rd Place and Van Buren Street; and an electric car line Chicago History

53

operated on the North Side between Van Buren Street and the intersection with Broadway, just a short distance from the present Cub's ball park. In 1901 the Broadway-Van Buren line was extended to 23rd Place.

Changes did come about and they formed a bridge between two eras-and what a long bridge it was! For certain, the city's transportation facilities did not jump from the horse car age to the electric troll ey age in one appointed moment. The time gap was, of necessity, stretched out over a period of many years, and during that time the passengers lived through a variety of services. Whereas the switch from steam trains to third rail service on the South Side E l in r 898 was more of a definite over-night change, the transformation of the myriad of surface lines could not be accomplished in such an orderly fashion.

For some years there was a potpourri of d ifferent services. Consider, for example, the year r 893. In the early months (I speak only of the South Side lines), you could have used the horse cars on Halsted Street, Wentworth Avenue, and on the cross town routes on 26th, 3 1st, 35th, 43rd, 47th, 61st and 63rd Streets.

Consider another date: by August 1895, you would have also ridden the new electric cars on the 26th, 31st and 43rd Streets cross-town lines, and on the Wentworth Avenue route. Concurrently, I am sure that there was equal activity in other areas than those I have mentioned. Later in that same year of 1895 you would have seen the new all-white United States Mail cars, ru nning on the recently electrified routes, carrying mail to and from the various post office substations. There were twenty-five such cars, and they operated u ntil I gr 5. Benefitting many residents living south of 63rd Street, in June r 896, a new service started; this was a line using battery operated street cars, from a loop at 63rd Street and South Park Avenue, on a route foll owing a zigzag course, mainly on 71 st, State and Halsted Streets, to 87th Street. One year later, in June r 897, an extension carried the 54

Chicago History

service across 86th Street to Loomis and then south to gr st Street. Another extension was via Vincennes Avenue, Monterey Street, through Morgan Park and on over to r r r th Street and Sacramento Avenue . This enterprise continued with the battery cars until J unc r go r, when troJley cars were put into service. A few more changes were yet to take place, such as the conversion of the cable car lines, with their horse drawn owl cars, to electric service, but the real basic improvements came with two later events: the beginning of operations of the Chicago Surface Lines in I g 14, and when the consolidated Chicago Transit Authority began operating as a unit in 1947. As a w itness, from the horse cars, cable cars, early electric cars and steam powered El trains to the diesel bus and subway days, I have often wondered how all of the pieces were put together. ¡when Chicago's transportation system was growing up, " That's how it was."

The Evening Streetcar Rides Whi le commenting on the early street car days in Chicago, I would be remiss if I didn't say a word about what we used to ca11 a "streetcar ride." With air conditioning not yet available, and electric fans hardly heard of, the flat buildings often became unbearably hot during July and August. After a three or four-day hot spell the brick walls stored up heat and then did a good job of overheating the rooms at night.

On those unpleasant evenings any way of getting out into the open was desirable, and for the lack of other transportation, the evening "streetcar ride" seemed to fill a need at the time. Consequently, for those families who wanted to go somewhere, the car ride was quite the thing; in fact it was a common diversion during the so-called Gay :\Tineties period. In our case, when we lived in Hyde Park, we used the cable cars for the six-mile trip downtown and the six-mile return-after all, a twelve-mile ride for ten cents wasn't bad, was it? We usually boarded at the starting point of the line near Fi fty-Seventh

Various modes of city transportation at State and Madison in about 1905. Included are the State Street cable car (at left), the electric trolley, a hansom cab, and an electric automobile.

Street (where the cars made a loop through the arcade), tried to get front seats in the gripcar, and then rode downtown. When the cars made the downtown loop through the court between Washington and Randolph Streets we kept our seats, paid the fare and used another hour returning home. Most often Papa begged off, saying that he'd already had his rides for the day. I recall two or three times when we came home to find him sitting on the front stoop, with a pitcher of ice water by his side. The car rides were not much of a "go-go" life, but for the moment they were a relief of sorts.

Trolley Car Parties While the evening car ride, just described, was fine for two or three people, there was another attraction better suited for large numbers of pleasure seekers. I refer to the then very popular troJley parties. Again mentioning the fact that at the turn of the century the private automobile was yet to become a common family possession, and that there was no radio or television for amusement, people naturally had to take advantage of the available social contacts and other recreation. especially during the summer, when being out of doors was desirable.

One such event, common to the time, and which remains in my memory, was the trolley party.

It wasn't as exciting or as exhilarating as the Lake Michigan boat trips, but it had its points. A group of friends or members of some lodge or church would charter a summer-type trolley car, which could be gayly decorated with colored lights, and possibly some bunting and flags. (If I recaJI correctly, I think my father told me that it cost about twelve dollars for three or four hours' use of the special car.) The particular parties that I remember were on two different car lines. One trip started at Stony Island Avenue and Sixty-Third Street and went south from there for about an hour or so when

56

Chicago History

the people left the car for a little stretch. Soon everyone reboarded and the return trip started.

For the young ones it was an outing of a kind; I'm sure the elders enjoyed the ride just as much, not only for the ride as such, but because of the congeniality that prevailed. It was a sort of party, you might say, only it was on wheels.

There was ice cream, there was soda pop, and I dare say there may have been something drawn through a spigot in a large keg! One other trolley party I recall was on one of the battery operated cars which departed from South Park Avenue and 63rd Street-the line clcscribecl in a previous comment. As we moved along, the conductor (who had little to do), explained to several of us boys how the large batteries were recharged, how the lights operated (few in number), and how the motorman's controls worked. Diel the men and women tell stories and risque jokes during the Gay ::\Tine ties days?

At the time of those trolley parties I'm sure I didn't know anything about such things, but years later, as I reflect on those car trips, I couldn't help but remember the little groups scattered around the car, the chitchat and at times the outbreaks of chuckles and hearty laughter. My father was somewhat of a raconteur, and he was never backward about telling stories to a group of friends. I'm sure he did his best to liven up the trolley parties.

An afterthought about the trolley partieswhenever and wherever I rode on one of them (or witnessed one), I reca11 that people sitting on their porches or stoops, walking on the sidewalks, or riding in a passing streetcar, would wave and shout a cheerful greeting to the party.

Seems as though, in those clays, everyone wanted to join in on the fun-and this included groups of boys standing on street corners. I have since wondered what kind of a greeting would be extended by some of our present-day corner gangs. I hesitate to guess!

FIFTY YEARS AGO

As reco_rded by newspapers in the collection of the Chicago Historical Society.

2, 1919. Health Commissioner John Dill Robertson closes the Steiner-Lee d ye works for violating the smoke abate ment ordinance.

This is the first closing of a Chica go plant for this reason.

SEPT. 7. The actors' strike, which had closed most Chicago theaters for the last three weeks, ends. Playhouses reopen a t once.

SEPT. ro. The carpenters' strike and contractors' lockout comes to an encl, subject to approval of the settlement by the carpe nters' union.

An overflow crowd at the Auditorium Theater cheers three senators- \Villiam E. Borah of Idaho, Hiram Johnson of California, and Medill McCormick of Illinois-as they attack \'Voodrow Wilson and the League of Nations.

SEPT. 16. The carpenters reject the recent settlement and the building impasse continues.

SEPT. r 8. The Loop is paralyzed when an overloaded electric cable burns and starts an underground fire.

SEPT. r 9. The contractors grant the demands of the carpenters. The men will go back to work on September 22 .

SEPT . 21. A nationwide steel strike begins. The men want recognition of their union, an eight-hour clay, and higher wages.

SEPT. 23. The first violence of the steel strike in the Chicago area comes at Indiana Harbor when 450 strikers attack 30 workers as they leave the coke plant of the Mark Manufacturing Company. Several men are badly beaten.

SEPT. 24. The \Vhite Sox win the American League pennant by defeating the St. Louis Browns at Comiskey Park. The Cubs hold third place in the ~ational League as the season draws to its end.

SEPT.

26. After speaking in behalf of the League of Nations at Pueblo, Colorado, President \,Vi]son is stricken with illness and cancels the remainder of his tour. Physicians call his ailment nervous exhaustion and prescribe complete rest.

OCT. r. As leases expire 50,000 Chicagoans are hunting in vain for vacant flats.

In the first game of the World's Series, played at Cincinnati, the Reds defeat the While Sox 9 to r.

The Cosmopolitan State Bank announces plans for a new building at the corner of Clark Street and Chicago Avenue.

OCT. 3. The White Sox win the third game of the series, 3 to o.

OCT. 9. Northwestern University announces plans for a Chicago campus at Chicago Avenue and Lake Shore Drive. Land and buildings will cost $4,450,000. The schools of medicine, dentistry, Jaw, and commerce will be located here.

The Cincinnati Reds win the eighth and final game of the World's Series by defeating the White Sox ro to 5.

OCT. 14. Hundreds of veterans raid an I. \,V. W. hall in South Chicago, seizing and burning piles of propaganda pamphlets.

OCT. 15. Marshall Field & Company announces that for the year 1919 it will distribute a bonus of $1,500,000 to its employees.

OCT. 17. The Chicago Symphony Orchestra opens its twenty-n inth season. Frederick Stock, conductor, receives a long ovation.

SEPT.

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57

23. John Drinkwater, English poet and playwright, speaks at a dinner given in his honor by the Union League Club. Lincoln's sudden death, Drinkwater says, made the President's life a work of art.

OCT. 25. The University of Chicago's Maroons swamp Northwestern 41 to o.

OCT. 31. John H. Clayton, Chicago Tribune correspondent, is expelled from Fiume for sending dispatches which Gabrielle d' Annunzio, the dictator, found objectionable. 1 NOV. 1. Union coal miners to the number of 378,000 go on strike in spite of an injunction obtained by the federal government.

Nov. 3. The campaign for funds for the relief of Jewish war sufferers ends. Chicago has raised $1,750,000, exceeding its quota by $250,000.

NOV. 4. In a municipal election voters approve bond issues totaling $34,000,000, mostly for carrying out phases of the Burnham plan.

They also vote to divide the city into fifty wards with one alderman each instead of the present thirty-five wards with two aldermen each.

NOV. IO. The official canvass of votes reveals that the fifty-ward bill was defeated by 5,297 votes.

The coal strike ends officially under government pressure, but few expect the miners to go back to work.

NOV. 1 1. The city observes the first anniversary of the signing of the armistice by a minute of silence at I I :oo a.m.

NOV. 18. The opera season opens with a presentation of Italo Montemezzi's "La ~ave" at the Auditorium. The audience is described as the "most brilliant" since r 91 4.

NOV. 20. The coal shortage, caused by the refusal of miners to work under the settlement imposed by the federal government, begins to shut big factories. The Corn Products plant at Argo, employing 2,600, will close in forty-eight hours.

Nov. 21. In Lincoln Park Governor Lowden dedicates a statue of Richard J. Oglesby, three times elected governor of lllinoi and United States senator for one term.

OCT.

1

See pages 32-46.

58

Chicago History

Elevated trains run without heat because of the coal shortage.

NOV. 25. The public utilities commission reduces surface line fares to 6 cents if tickets are bought in blocks of fifty. The cash fare will remain at 7 cents.

NOV. 28. The regional coal committee orders rationing of coal to all Chicago householders.

Rumors persist that President , vilson is suffering from paralysis and is almost totally incapacitated.

DEC. 2 . The U. S. Fuel Administration orders all electric signs shut off to conserve coal.

DEC. 3. The South Park Board selects a Holabird and Roche plan for a stadium seating rno,ooo south of the Field Museum. Cost is estimated at $4,000,000.

DEC. 4. on-essential industries are ordered to shut down. In those allowed to remain open the business clay is cut to six and one-half hours.

DEC. 5. Two senators-Albert B. Fall of New Mexico and Gilbert M. Hitchcock of ebraska-have a forty-five minute interview with President Wilson. They report that though physically infirm he is mentally alert and thoroughly capable of performing the duties of his office.

DEC. 8. Plans for a Roman Catholic theological seminary at Area, near Libertyville, arc made public. Initially, the buildings will cost NOV. 22.

$3,000,000.

The coa l strike ends as union leaders accept a settlement proposed in the name of the President. The miners gain at least a 14 percent increase, perhaps more. For the public, coal-saving rules remain in force for the present.

DEC. 14. John M. Kranz, said to have been the oldest State Street meffhant, dies at his home, 1547 North Dearborn Street. He had been in the candy business in Chicago for more than fifty years.

DEC. 15. The William Wrigley Jr. Company pays $217,920 for a building site on the ,,-est side of Michigan Avenue north of the river.

DEC. , 1.

r9. Cleofonte Campanini, director of the Chicago Grand Opera Company, dies at fifty-nine. The opera closes for three days.

DEC. 20. Gen. John J. Pershing receives a warm welcome in Chicago. He addresses the American Legion at the Auditorium, reviews troops, meets the public at a reception at the Art Institute, and speaks at a banquet in the evening.

DEC. 23. The state public utilities commission reverses itself and orders surface line fares reduced to a straight 6 cents.

DEC. 29. Mrs. Edith Rockefeller McCormick offers a tract of land comprising r 50 acres to the forest preserve board as a site for a zoo.

The land, valued at $300,000, is situated on the Des Plaines River.

Rumors spread that several \'\lhite Sox players were in league with a syndicate of gamblers and threw games in the 1919 world series. President Comiskey of the Sox is investigating.

DEC. 3 r. During r 91 9, 40 1 Chicagoans were killed by automobiles; 31 1 were murdered.

In spite of prohibition liquor flows in the cafes. Patrons supply their own.

JAN. 1, 1920. Forces of the state's attorney and chief of police round up r 50 alleged bolsheviks and anarchists. Aliens will be deported; citizens will be tried under the state's antisyndicalist law.

JAN. 5. In Superior Court Mme. Amelita Galli-Curci, opera singer, wins a divorce from Luigi Curci on charges of infidelity.

JAN. 16. Reginald De Kovcn, composer of"Rip Van \Vinkle" and other operas, dies suddenly while attending an after-the-theater party at the residence of Mrs. Joseph Fish, 5490 South Shore Drive.

Chicago is in the grip of a new flu epidemic.

In one clay 390 new cases and 4 deaths are reported. Deaths from pneumonia arc occurring at the rate of one an hour.

JAN. 20. The number of new cases of nu reported in twenty-four hours jumps 10 2,514. The disease is relatively mild, causing only 36 deaths as against 214 a year ago.

JAN. 21. Public school teachers turn down a proposed raise of $500 a year. They want more.

DEC.

Thirty-five men and three women, all members of the Communist Labor Party of America, are indicted in criminal court for conspiracy to overthrow the go\'crnmcn t.

JAN. 23. The grand jury brings in indictments against eighty-five more communist leaders.

JA . 24- With more than half of Chicago's census books completed, conservati\'e estimates place the city's population at 3,000,000.

The annual auto and truck show opens. So many passenger cars arc entered that they have to be exhibited in four buildings: the Coliseum, the Coliseum Annex, the First Regiment Armory, and the Greer Building.

The truck show is housed at the In tern a tional Amp hi theater.

JAN. 29. The public utilities commission orders cle,¡ated fares reduced from 8 cents to two tickets for 15 cents.

FEB. 1. "Hinkey Dink" Kenna, first ward alderman, orders all his unique beer glasses, each holding I pint 9 fluid ounces, removed from the back bar of his former saloon, the Workingrnen's Exchange.

FEB. 2. Ground is broken in River Forest for a new Catholic college for women, Rosary.

FEB. 10. Charles F. Gunther, pioneer candy maker and collector, dies at eighty-three.

FEB. 1 1. Chicago public school teachers \\¡in raises ranging from $400 to $450 a year.

Many remain dissatisfied.

FEB. 15. Officers of Augustana Hospital open a drive to raise $700,000 for building and equipping a new hospital at Sedgwick Street and Garfield Avenue (now Dickens).

FEB. 18. The city council passes a zoning ordinance and provides for a commission to enforce it.

FEB. 24. Voters by an overwhelming majority approve six bond issues totaling $2 r ,000,000.

The action paves the way for the completion of Grant Park, the erection of the lake front stadium, the widening of South Park Avenue, and the acquisition of several small parks on the Sou th Side.

Charles R. Crane, former resident of Chicago, is appointed U. S. Minister to China.

FEB. 28. Thirty Cub players and officials leave for spring training at Pasadena.

Chicago History

59

TH REE CHICAGO BOOKS

by Paul M. Angle

many times that Chicago has long been the architectural leader of the country, but we have never seen the statement made so forthrightly as Wayne Andrews makes it in a handsome book, ArchiWE HA VE BEEN TOLD

tecture in Chicago and Mid-America: A Photographic His tory:* " It is a happy fact and not a boast that in the

last hundred years no nation in the world has matched the architecture of Chicago and the Middle West."

Historically, Chicago's pre-eminence rests upon the invention of the skyscraper: the steel frame building in which the skeleton rather than the walls supports the entire structure. Whether William Le Baron Jenney knew the implications of what he wa doing in 1883 when he used this type of construction-for the first time anywhere-is doubtful, but at one stroke he freed arch itects from the strict limitations of loadbearing wal ls. Hereafter buildings could oar to any height that was economically feasible , and as much glass as desired could be used in the walls. Holabird and Roche, Daniel Hudson Burnham, and John \,Veilborn Root immediately adopted the new type of construction for notable buildings, and in 1889 Dankmar Adler and Louis Sullivan completed the Auditorium, still recognized as a masterpiece. Skyscraper appeared in the big cities of the Middle West, but as Mr. Andrews puts it: "To architects and to that apparently growing number of people who find architecture a fasc inating subject, Chicago is where it happened. They know that Chicago can claim, as can no other city, to be the birthplace of modern architecture."

Mr. Andrews takes a far more charitable view of World's Columbian architecture than many critics.

Thirty years after the Fair, Louis Sullivan, in the last year of his life, expressed what came to be the preva iling opinion about the disastrous effect of the classic buildings that delighted millions of visitors.

They were unaware, he asserted, that " what they saw was not what they believed they saw, but an imposition of the spurious u pon their eyesight, a naked exposition of charlatanry in the higher feudal and dominating culture, conjoined with expert salesmanship in the materials of decay . . .. " Sullivan concluded: " The damage wrought by the World's Fair will last for half a century from its date, if not longer. It has penetrated deep into the constitution of the American mind, effecting there lesions significant of dementia." *New York, Atheneum, 1968.

60 Chicago History

$20.00.

Mr. Andrews points out that Sullivan's own building at the Fair-the Transportation Building-was universally admired although it was not in the classical tradition. Andrews also believes that Sullivan was trying to blame on the Fair circumstances and personal failings that led to his own decline. The Fair could hardly have been blamed for the long depression that followed the Panic of 1893 and stringently reduced new construction. Adler left the partnership, and without his busine s acumen, Sull ivan floundered. He took to the bottle, and had to be content with commissions for small-town banks. Though some were works of art they contributed little, at the time, to his reputation or his income. " It will always be accounted a tragedy," Mr. Andrews summarizes, " that the twentieth century made such thin use of his talents.' ' If the Fair had uch a disastrous effect upon American taste why did Frank Lloyd Wright win his great reputation in the twenty-five years that followed 1893?

Mr. Andrews does not go into the details of Wright's career, nor does he even mention Mies van der Rohe and others of the present Chicago school in his Introduction. His regard for their work and the high estimate he places upon it come out, instead, in his pictures of their buildings.

For Architecture in Chicago and Mid-America is primarily a picture book. Call it, if you will, a "coffee-table book" - there couldn't be a better one. While the emphasis is on recent architecture, older buildings are not ignored. There are, for example, good views of tl1e residence of David Dale Owen, built in 1859 at New Harmony, Indiana; of the residence of Dr. Andrew L. Hays, Marshall, Michigan ( 1838); of the residence of J. Russell Jones at Galena (1857); and of houses and other buildings of a century or more ago. Commercial buildings no longer standing-the Marshall Field vVholesale Store, the Home Insurance Building, the Tacoma Building (second candidate for the distinction of being the first skyscraper)-are well represented.

For most of these Mr. Andrews had to rely upon his-

torical archives, including the Chicago Historical Society; photographs of more recent buildings he took himself. 'vVayne Andrews was born in Kenilworth . After graduating from Harvard College and taking a doctor's degree in history al Columbia he has been in succession Curator of Manu cripts at the New-York Historical Society, an editor at Charles Scribner's Sons, and, since 1964, Archives of American Art Professor at Wayne Slate Gniversity. His many books range in subject matter from The Vanderbilt Legend (1941) and Battle for Chicago ( 1946) lo Germaine: A Portrait of Madame de Stael ( 1963) and Architecture in Michigan (1967).

When a publisher prices a book at $120.00 it had better be worth it. This one is. \ Vayne Andrews' book is well complemented by Chicago on Foot: An Architectural Walking Tour* by Ira J. Bach with photographs by Philip A. Turner.

Mr. Bach has outlined thirty-six walks. each of which may be completed in from one to two hours.

Each walk has its own map, with buildings and other places of intere L clearly located. Wisely, the author did not restrict himself lo notable buildings. Included also are a great many which would win no architectural prize but which are interesting and often appealing. A case in point is 1802 Lincoln Park West, which is de cribed as .. a charming, well-maintained midVictorian house, built about 1880. The brick wall and fine old trees make a delightful pattern." We are grateful for the description-we have owned the place for twenty-three years-but we wish Mr. Bach would tell us where to find that brick wall. The high board fence which encloses the back yard is about to fall down, and to replace it will cost a pretty penny.

This little error is of no consequence, but unfortu nately, there are too many like it, and they are not always trivial. Lincoln Park, for example, was not designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, who laid out Central Park in New York. Henry Hobson Richardson was a Boston architect. not a Chicagoan, although he did do the Marshall Field wholesale building and houses for J. J. Gies ner and Franklin MacVeagh. These, however, were only a small fraction of his work. G . \ V. Snow, rather than A. D. Taylor, is commonly cred ited

with the invention of balloon construction, a notable Chicago architectural achievement. And Andrew Carnegie was never a partner of George M. Pullman in the Pullman Palace Car Company.

The list could be continued, but that would be unfair. Mr. Bach is sound enough in architectural comment and description, which is what the book is all about. Anyone with good legs will find it an invaluable companion in walks in Chicago. The photographs are excellent and the price is low.

Dealing largely with buildings but not with architecture per se is a truly monumental book-monumental in size, monumental in interest, and monumental in importance-just three months off the pre s.

Entitled Chicago: Growth of a Metropolis,* it is the work of Harold M . Mayer, formerly of the University of Chicago but now Professor of Geography at Kent State, and Richard C. Wade, Professor of History at the University of Chicago.

The authors of a book as unusual as this have a right to state what they have been up to. They do, in their Introduction, which we paraphrase here. They have tried to describe how, in 150 years, the city expanded from a site which contained a fort and a few dwellings, and had no special prospects, to a metropolis with 7,000,000 inhabitants. They have also attempted to show why thal metropolis looks the way it does. I n pursuit of these objectives the authors include the modest buildings in which ordinary people lived and worked as well as the monumental structures which have given Chicago its reputation in architecture . Indeed, they include also a substantial number of slum buildings and slum scenes, mostly in black neighborhoods. Suburbs and "satellite" cities are of course covered. '¡In short," the authors ay, the book "tries to reconstruct metropolitan Chicago and to see it as it appeared Lo successive generations of residents and visitors."

Fortunately, photography developed on ly twenty years after the birth of the city. Fortunately al o, many thousands,even hundreds of thousands,of photographs have been preserved. In this book they do more than illustrate the text: they often serve as documents upon which the text is based. Of Alexander Hesler's panorama of Chicago in 1857-a round -the-compass view

*Follett Publishine; Company, Chicae;o and New York, 1969.

Cloth, S5.9 _5; Paper, 3.95.

*University of Chicago Press, 1969 . $32.00.

Chica go History 6 1

of the city taken from the cupola of the court housethe authors say: ·'It is a visual census of the city which tells us things that we cannot get easily or at all in other ways. For instance, the mixture of land useswith residential, commercial, and industrial buildings abutting each other-is clearly displayed: it reveals the scale and spatial relationships of the urban environment; it fixes the relationship of the city to the lake and to the surrounding countryside, and it locates the traffic in the river."

Inclustcial establishments contributed lo the growth of the metropolis. These too are pictured: the McCormick Reaper works as it looked at various times after its establishment in 1847, the lumber yards and grain elevators (supporting columns of the economy for many years), the stock yards, the steel mills, the great retail and wholesale stores, the Pullman plant at Pullman, the huge Montgomery Ward and Sears & Roebuck complexe , even the Dresden Atomic Power station of Commonwealth Edison. The coverage in this field is selective . Had it been comprehensive, another volume would have been required.

No facility is more closely involved with urban growth than transportation. \Ve use the term in two sen'e : general and local. In this volume both are well illustrated: lake shipping, the railroad which made Chicago the freight and passenger hub of the country for many years, the Illinois and Michigan Canal, now forgotten but of major importance in its time, the Sanitary and Ship Canal, and the airplane. Within the city the evolutionary process is illustrated: from omnibus and horse car to cable car to electric trolley, and on the elevated line , from the little steam-powered locomotives to those driven by electricity. And of course the automobile. \\le could go on and describe many other facets of this ab orbing book, but we prefer to sum it up in a brief statement: if there is anything material in the growth of the metropolis omitted here, we have failed to discover it.

Thi goes even for the principal milestones in the city's history. Although Chicago: Growth of a Metropolis i in no sense a narrative history it moves chronologically and thus takes cognizance of the major events: the di covery of the site by Marquette and Jolliet, the location there of Fort Dearborn, the boom clays of the 1830s, the building of the Illinois and Michigan Canal and the simultaneous coming of the railroads, the Great Fire of 1871 and the city's amazing recovery 62

Ch ica go Hi story

from it, the \\'oriel's Columbian Exposition, the Burnham Plan and its effects, the speculative madness of the 1920s and the subsequent crash and depression, and the building explosion which began after World War II and is still with us.

All this, and much more, i related in a text which takes up a relatively small part of the book. We have not bothered to make a computation, but our guess is that pictures and captions cover at least two-thirds of the space. Indeed the captions are an unu. ual feature.

They are generally long and often include quotations from contemporary travelers and other observers. Some readers, afflicted by impatience and repelled by mall type (though not too small), will be tempted to skip them, but they will do so to their very great loss.

Evidence abounds that for many years and for large numbers of Chicagoans the quality of life was low. In 1883 an advertisement for brick cottages near \Vest Division and\ \I es tern priced them from S 1650 to $1800, with ··extraordinarily easy payments." (Whoever thought that installment buying was a recent phenomenon?) Floor plan show a vestibule, a parlor, two bedrooms, l\,·o clo ets, and a kitchen and parlor on the first floor. and two large rooms on the second story, but no bathroom or toilet facility anywhere. Another advertisement, also 1883, offered lots in La.kc View, ju t north of the city limits. Here the appeal was: "'Outside fire limits! You can build \,·ooden houses!

J:\o city taxes!" In captioning a photograph of the goo block on North Cleveland, taken in 1940, the authors write: --well over fifty per cent of the dwelling units were branded as ·needing major repairs or unfit for use,' and nearly seventy-five per cent of them had no bath or toilet."

Inevitably, one makes comparisons between the past -and often the not-too-distant past-and the present. \Ve talk of traffic congestion today. If the reader will note a photograph of the intersection of Dearborn and Randolph tree ts taken in I go.'i he will sec a congealed mass of streetcars, drays, and pedestrians far beyond anything that affiict the city now. Kot too long ago many miles of Chicago streets were unpaved and unlighted . Dilapidated housing seemed to be everywhere except in the wealthier residential districts. A survey in 1950 put twenty-eight per cent of all dwellings in this category. At the encl of World War II prophets predicted that the city would become a dead husk surrounded by thriving suburbs.

To be sure, the suburbs have multiplied in popula-

tion but-the city has refused to die. Mayer and Wade sum up what has happened: "Dismal predictions about Chicago's future overlooked the civic revival that was under way already.

Initially evident in public redevelopment projects, it was soon visible in many parts of the city. Not only did the city tackle the historic problem of cleaning out the slums, but private investment returned to the city in unprecedented amounts. Two massive modern filtration plants assured clean and abundant water for a whole generation to come. Port improvements and the opening of the St. Lawrence Seaway gave added impulse to Chicago's water commerce. O'Hare International Airport pushed the city once again towards leadership in the air age. A new expressway system, transit improvements, and changes in railroad commuter services relieved the growing paralysis of the circulatory system within the metropolitan area. Tew residential con truction and high-rise apartment buildings partially stemmed the outward flow of middleand upper-income urbanites, and a new skyline rose spectacularly over the city's center. To be sure, the critics still talked about the 'death of the city,' but the fa ct everywhere belied the theory."

In our opinion, the authors give credit where it belongs. Recently, especially among intellectuals, it ha become fashionable lo throw barbs at the mayor, but Mayer and \Vacle, intellectuals themselves, have only praise. "The central figure in the Chicago revival," they write, ¡'was Mayor Richard J. Daley, first elected in 1955 and then re-elected three successive time . His position as head of the majority party and chief executive of the city provided him with both the political power and administrative strength to focus and direct the divergent forces demanding public

action. Enjoying cordial relations with business and labor, and managing to establish effective contacts with most neighborhoods, he emerged by the r g6os as one of the nation's most formidable mayor .... At a time when many raised the question, ¡Are American cities really governable?' Chicago developed the most energetic administration in its history."

No reader of this book can escape dismay at many aspects of the city, present as well as past. On the other hand, he cannot help deriving enormous respect for the energy, ingenuity, and unflagging confidence of preceding generations of Chicagoans. Is there any reason to think that those of the present are lacking in these qualities, or that those to come will not pos ess them? We believe that the answer is no.

In only one respect is this fine book disappointing.

Too many of the maps, though skillfully drawn. are almost impossible to interpret. Sometimes this is the case because a single map attempts to show more than it can reasonably be expected to show. There is also the difficulty of differentiating between symbols: between, for example a thin line de ignating the city limits as of one date and a line only slightly heavier showing them as of a different elate.

A final word about the photographs. By our computation there are 887 illustrations, not counting specially drawn maps. Of these, 524, or approxim3.tely 60 per cent, are credited to the Chicago Historical Society. vVe can assume that without the Society' collection of prints and photographs this book could not have been produced. If that is an overstatement, no one can deny that without the Society's collection the book could not have been produced with anything like its abundance of pictorial documentation.

PAUL M. ANGLE

Chicago History 63

THE CHICAGO HISTORICAL SOCIETY North Avenue and Clark Street, Chicago, Illinois 60614 Telephone: Michigan 2-4600

OFFICERS

Andrew McNally m, President Theodore Tieken, 1st 1-1'ce-President James R. Getz, 2nd I'ice-President Gardner H. Stern, Treasurer Paul M. Angle, Secretary Clement M. Silvestro, Director TRUSTEES

Bowen Blair John Jay Borland Emmett Dedmon James R. Getz Philip \V. Hummer \Villard L. King Andrew McNally m Mrs. C. Phillip Miller

Bryan S. Reid, Jr. Gilbert H. Scribner, Jr. Alfred Shaw Harold Byron Smith, Jr. Hermon Dunlap Smith Gardner H. Stern Theodore Tieken Mrs. Philip K. Wrigley

MEMBERSHIP The Society is supported almost entirely by income from its endowment, by contributions, and by memberships. Member hip is open Lo anyone interested in the Society's activities and objective . Cla. es of membership and dues are as follows: Annual, $15 a year; Life $250 (one payment); Governing Life, $500 (one payment); Governing Annual, $ I oo (one payment) and $25 a year; and Patron, $ 1 ooo (one payment).

Members receive the Society's magazine, Chicago History, invitations to all special functions held by the Society, and periodic notice of new exhibitions.

Single issues of Chicago History $5 a copy.

Library subscriptions are $ 15 a year.

The prairie village, so commonplace in the Midwestern landscape, here reveals its fundamental importance to Chicago's existence. The railroad spur and grain elevator, the store and loading platform on the highway are the history of Chicago's growth. This is the town of Union Grove, Whiteside County, Illinois, located on Route 30 and the Chicago and North Western Railway, photographed in 1960.