Chicago History | Fall 1971

Chicago History FALL 1971

Sunrise on a ruined city. The eastern facade of the Cook County Court House after the Great Chicago Fire.

Chicaqo Hi ... torical Society

Chicago History

THE MAGAZINE OF THE CHICAGO HISTORICAL SOCIETY

Details of post-fire reconstruction at the corner of Clark and Randolph Streets, with the Court House fence in the foreground. The ground floor of the Sherman House, which opened for business on May 1, 1873, is just occupied, and a restaurant is about to open in the basement. Photographed by Thomas Copelin, pioneer Chicago photographer.

E. A. Burchard Col lecUon

Chicago History The 1"\1.aga;:::,ine of tlze Chicago Historical Society FALL 1971 Volume I, Number 4

CONTENTS Cover: Deta ii from a painting of the fire done in 1912 by Mrs. Julia Lemos, Chicago lithographic artist and eyewitness of the fire.

She showed her own neighborhood, somewhere north of Menomonee and west of Wells Street. Though painted forty-one years after the event the Lemos painting is perhaps the most realistic picture that exists of the fire. There is evidence that Mrs. Lemos included some of her own family and neighbors and their experiences in the fiery scene.

CHICAGO BEFORE THE FIRE: SOME PEOPLE, PLACES, AND THINGS / 196

by David Lasswell PERSONAL EXPERIENCES DURING THE CHICAGO FIRE / 204

by Frank ]. Loesch A TRAINED OBSERVER SEES THE FIRE / 214

by Theodore Mosher, Jr., Chicago's weatherman in 1871

Orig inal painting in the Chicago H istorical Society

CHICAGO, OCTOBER 10, 1871 / 215 A Poem on the Fire by Bret Harte

David Lasswell, Editor Elisabeth Kimbell, Assistant Editor

Editorial Advisory Committee

"KATE! THE BARN IS AFIRE!" / 216 Words from Katie O'Leary "WE COULD NOT DO WITHOUT THE CHICAGO FIRE" / 220

by Elisabeth Kimbell

Paul M. Angle, Chairman Emmett Dedmon Jame R. Getz Oliver Jensen Robert \V. Johannsen Herman Kogan \ Vill Leonard Clement M. Silvestro

A MARK OF ENGLISH SYMPATHY / 232

by George M. Bishop, Jr. "GRANDER AND STATELIER THAN EVER ... " / 236

by Herman Kogan Fl FTY YEARS AGO / 245

Robert M. Sutton

BOOK REVIEW: ANOTHER LOOK AT MIKE ROYKO'S BOSS / 250

by Andrew M. Greeley

Printed by R. R. Donnelley and Sons Company Chicago, Illinois

INDEX of VOLUME I / 252

Designed by Doug Lang Copyright, 1971 by the Chicago Historical Society North Avenue and Clark Street Chicago, Illinois 60614

CHICAGO BEFORE THE FIRE:

Some People, Places, and Things

BY DAVID LASSW ELL

THE SUMMER OF 1871 tree-lined Michigan Avenue between Washington and Twelfth streets was well established as the best addre sin town, although there was the old-settler "North Side set" who lived north of the river. By the late sixties "The Avenue" was synonymous to Chicagoans with aristocratic exclusiveness-or at least what passed for exclusiveness in those days.

After all, Chicago had been there less than forty years, and its big money had not had time to grow old. As one recently arrived easterner of some social pretension pointed out in 1871, "The present ancienne noblesse of Chicago, who put on such overpowering style, leading the stranger to believe that they had been raised in a palace, in the early days did their own washing and cooking." And he meant the Tinkhams, Ogdens, Scammons, Newberrys, Arnolds, and Pecks.

Ostentation and airs when put on were not taken too seriously, especially by tho e who could remember when the entire population of Chicago had stood on an equal footing, and it was likely t hat any untoward parade of money might bring the reminder to the would-be aristocrat that he had once clerked at so-and-so's dry goods store.

There was the same easygoing camaraderie among the Chicagoans who had made their pile that there was among Houstonians of twenty or thirty years ago.

Terrace Row exemplified Michigan Avenue tone. It was an entire block of eleven elegantly matched four-story row house between Van Buren and Congress streets. They were built of solid brick but faced with carved Joliet limestone that was pretentiously called "Athens marble." Terrace Row housed such as vVilliam Bross, P. F. W. Peck, Tuthill King, and J. Y. Scammon, who with most of the other householders were mi llionaires. Their homes contained what one contemporary observer described as "valuable libraries, magnificent pain tin gs, gems of art, and thousands of dollars worth of magnificent furniture." Terrace Row burned - the last block to catch fire on the southern edge of the fire. But the modern reader, IN

196

Ch icago History

unless truly devoted to mid-Victorian antiques, need suffer no pangs of regret. There was very little in the way of art or furniture in those houses on the Avenue that would be worth as much today as was first paid for it, except for the now valuable portraits by Chicago painter G. P. A. Healy. William Bross, part owner of the Chicago Tribune, did carry from his Terrace Row house a painting he described as "a valuable picture-a farm and animal scene-by Herring, the great Engli h painter," but no modern Courbets hung on the walls at Terrace Row, nor had the idea of collecting old masters yet become fashionable among American millionaires. Most of what went into such Chicago houses before the fire wa decor-on the same order as the limestone "marble." Even though its inhabitants called it Terrace Row, the populace generally called it "Marble Terrace" with a mocking ernphasi on the word marble.

There were, however, works of art known to have been in Chicago on the eve of the fire that would be highly esteemed today. These do not include a Rubens "Martyrdom of Saint Laurence" aid in r 859 to have been owned by J arnes Robb, a railroad president, nor an unspecified Titian said to ha\'e been owned by a Colonel James D. Graham. Perhap the be t painting that was lost in the fire was Albert Biers tad t's great painting of Yo emite Valley that hung in the art gallery of Crosby' s Opera House. A masterpiece by G. P. A. Healy, who had been a pu pi! of Baron Gro , perished among other of his works at the Chicago Historical Society. This painting, which had won Healy a gold medal at Paris in 1856, was entitled "Benjamin Franklin at the Court of Louis XVI, " and before the fire there was a story about it that circulated among Chicago cognoscenti to the effect that a Chicago newspaper reporter, confused at the lavish court scene and by the identity of Cardinal Rohan in long red robes in the background, had described the painting in his paper as Mr. and Mrs. Benjamin Franklin being introduced to George Washington .

Chicago Historical Society

Terrace Row on "The Avenue" was the height of residential elegance in pre-fire Chicago. It comprised eleven houses, occupied mainly by millionaires .

Looking south from Van Buren Street and Michigan Avenue .

Chicago History

197

Before the Fire

The George F. Rumsey house, set in a large garden at Rush and Huron streets, was typical of the "old settler" area's mansions on the North Side before the fire.

Across the Avenue from Terrace Row, in what is now called Grant Park, was a strip of grass a hundred or so yards wide edging the lake shore.

It was then known on ly as the "Lake Front" and it was where the populace took its Sunday afternoon strolls. Most of the unday promenaders came from the large boarding house district that lay west of the Avenue to Clark Street, between Vhshington and Van Buren. Certainly, some of the Sunday strollers came over from the airless slum of Mother Conley's Patch that lay near the South Branch. (And on the night of the fire they came too, plundering the possessions stacked outside the Avenue mansions. Thus Mr. Bross lost his valuable "farm and animal scene" that he had saved from his house.) On the better part of Wabash stood the Clifton House hotel, a genteel establishment, where Mary Todd Lincoln lived during the fateful summer of 1871. Her eighteen-year-old son Tad died there that summer on July 15, and from the time of that added per onal tragedy Mrs . Linco ln became increasingly distraught. Although there i no definite record of her whereabouts from the autumn of 18 7 1 until the spring of 187 4, there is an old tale, long current in Chicago, that on the night of the fire a bedraggled and dazed Ii ttle woman, dressed in black, turned up at the door of strangers on the North Side with the pathetic plea, "Take me in, I am the President's widow."

Farther down on Wabash from the Clifton House in an enclave of private houses lived a cousin of Gurdon Hubbard, a young mother whose name was to become in its way more famous than that of any other Chicagoan of the time. She was Harriett Hubbard Ayer, then living a happy, domestic life, long before she became the first of the world's great cosmetic queens.

The North Side :\' orth of the river, on what is today's :\' ear North ide, several of the very wealthy families lived in elaborate houses set in block-square gardens among fine old trees that remained from

the original lake-side groves. Before the fire, when the old trees were still standing, the Nor th Side really was "the city in a garden." Life here was almost bucolic. Though butlers tended some front doors, the fami ly milch cow often as not still resided in back. One visitor, impressed with the district, remarked of it that "only the low murmur of the lake, or an occasiona l elegant turnout clopping down the street on an afternoon call disturbed the perfect calm."

The orth Side west of Clark was not elegant.

One writer of the time referred to the area with its mainly German popu lation as the "Nord Seite," where "every other male engaged in selling beer, and the rest of the men, women, and children consume it." Nor was the \,\Test Side elite, except for Union Park whose promoters wildly compared it to the other West End, in London. Mrs. Lincoln had once lived near Union Park, and in the sixties several famili es of the "Kentucky Colony," including the Honores, kept large houses on the West Side, but by the time of the fire it was mostly inhabited by working men and their famil ies, along with their cows and chickens. Generally it was "d ust with no top" in the summer and "mud with no bottom" in the winter. It was said at the time that West Side ladies on the horse cars pretended they were only visiting the district, just as Avenue ladies riding on the horse cars pretended not to know what the fare was and would ment ion that their carriage was out for repairs.

Downtown, the South Side If the more solid part of Chicago's population lived along the A,¡enue, on the North Side, and in family working-class districts, a frai ler sor t inhabited those streets on the South Side that lay west of \Vabash, fringing the business district.

There they plied their trade, often enough in the business district itself. Their badge was their gaudy clothes, in an age when respectable women wore somber colors. Already in 1864 prostitution in Chicago had been tac itly recognized as legal by a regulation that two hou seCh ica go History

199

Before the Fire

holders had to complain before a raid could be made. And no raids would be made at night; and visitors cou ld not be arrested as inmates.

Naturally customers felt immune, especially at night. In September, 1870, the Common Council passed a mild resolution to investigate methods for regulating (not suppressing) the "social evil." But there did exist in Chicago the Magdalen Asylum and the Erring \,Voman's Refuge, the latter partly financed by what fines could be collected from keepers, inmates, and patrons of bordellos. These two institutions were credited with reforming eighty fallen women a year.

Since Chicago had thrived from its beginning on real estate speculation gambling seemed a natural pastime. On the northeast corner of Clark and Madison "stcerers" brought customers into Theodore Cameron's gaming den, which so prospered that he was eventually able to open a place so posh that it even had napping rooms for tired gamblers. It was located at 68 Randolph on "Gamblers Row" which before the fire extended along R andolph between State and Clark and around the corner along Clark down to Monroe Street. The gambling system in the pre-fire city was simply to rent upstairs rooms for dens, then supply chuck-a-luck and roulette machinery-and always a faro bank. There was a variety of ways for throwing money away.

Favored games at the time were poker, brag (a close cousin of poker), seven-up, cribbage; and even whist, chess, checkers, and backgammon.

The house would cut itself in for ten per cent of the wagers, the house owner often sitting in on the game. Keno was the simple bingo-type game played for small stakes; it ran in ground floor parlors. High-stake games were always upstairs.

One contemporary explanation for the high degree of sin in pre-fire Chicago had it that there was a near total lack of anything else for the large unattached male population to do. This unsettled portion of Chicago's population-not counting the drovers, farmers, and other transients-was estimated in 1870 at some seventy-five thousand, or about one quarter of the city's pop200

Chicago History

ulation ! They were the lake sailors, coal heavers, laborers, and workmen of all sorts who in the winter, when the close of navigation on the lakes ended their jobs, migrated to the logging camps of Wisconsin and Michigan. Added to these rough frontier types was a large group of " merchant clerks" who did the white-collar work of the commercial houses. This large floating population lived for the most part downtown, and their lively evening diversions among the saloons and gambling dens kept the area in constant animation. The plays and concerts at the McVic-kers and Crosby's Opera House seldom drew their patronage ; few sailors or counter clerks held tickets for Theodore Thomas's concert of Beethoven with the Brooklyn Philharmonic that was to have taken place at Crosby's the night after the fire.

This large floating population took on a grim aspect for many Chicagoans at the time of the fire. During the sunm1er and fall of 187 r, Chicago, along with many other large cities, had fallen prey to its first "red scare." As the fire spread out of control rumors ran rife that agitators had set it. Memories were still fresh of the summer's headlines describing the outrages of the Commune, who had put the torch to a fourth of Paris, and the newly organized first " International Federation of vVorking Class Parties" was everywhere blamed for that holocaust. Some alarmed Chicagoans, too, would remember that the May, r871, meeting of the First International in New York had included two Chicagoans on its ten-member Central Committee.

(Karl Marx and his influence were well enough known that his death rated a third headline on the front page of the Tribune that September 6.)

It was the rapid and spotty spread of the firefrom the wind-borne brands-that convinced many edgy citizens that the city was being systematically fired. William Bross of the Tribune was among them. He later wrote that on Monday evening after being burned out there was little sleep to be had, "because everybody was in mortal fear that what remained of the city would

Jevne & Almlni, Chicago Historical Society

Randolph Street in the late sixties. Because of the varied character of downtown enterprises the streets remained animated night and day in pre-fire Chicago.

What we now call the Loop was a conglomeration of rooming houses, hotels, theaters, business blocks, saloons, and gambl ing dens.

Chicago History

201

Before the Fire

La Salle and Lake Streets in the sixties. This area, one of the most substantially built in the city, was destroyed in the first hours of the fire. The upper two or three floors of the business blocks housed the " merchant clerks" who did the white-collar work of downtown busin esses.

Jevne &. Alml nl, Chicago Hi stori ca l Society

be burned by the desperados who were known to be prowling about everywhere." On Tuesday when Bross caught sight of General Sheridan's troops coming to patrol the city he relates that: "Never did deeper emotions of joy overcome me."

But there was no proved incendiarism and no large-scale civil disorder. Chicago's lumpen Proletariat would be rowdy, but not revolutionary, and the stories of uprisings, hangings, and shootings that were published everywhere, even in Chicago, have never been proven.

202

Chicago History

Conditions for the working ma n in Chicago seemed more likely to drive him to drink than to revolution. During the late sixties beer was brewed in Chicago at an average rate of seven million gallons a year-and not for export. That meant an annual consumption of twenty-nine gallons a head. Boarding-house life encouraged street life and saloon patronage. Even the better sort of houses-" ... large front single with three meals at nine dollars a week"-leaned heavily on "mystery hash, black acid coffee," and buck-

wheats with molasses. (For some reason New England boys could always be identified as Yankees by their preference at the board for milk rather than tea or coffee.) A common custom of lodging in pre-fire Chicago, especially for the "merchant clerks," was the laying out of sleeping rooms on the two or three top floors of downtown business buildings-a custom recently revived in the building of the Hancock Building.

These rooms were rented to two or three clerks for at most twenty dollars a month: cleaning, fire, hot water, towels, and soap included. Every five or six story block contained from twenty to fifty such furnished rooms on their upper floors, which were not desirable for business in those days before elevators. Some of these establishments got bad reputations from some landlords letting rooms to "a certain class of women," who were popularly called "war widows"-the supposition being that they had been forced into evil ways by the loss of their husbands in the recent Civil War. The low numbers of proven fatalities in the fire, some three hundred, is probably accounted for by these business district dormitories. The first and fastest swath of the fire that Sunday night went straight through the business district and there is no doubt that many upper-story inhabitants never reached the street except as dust. And inquiries would have been few.

Not all of those young men who died in that earthly fire will be found at Judgment with blackened souls. D. L. Moody, the great evangelist, was making quite a stir in Chicago in 187 r. Moody was backed in his mission by John V. Farwell, the rich Chicago merchant who built Farwell Hall (and rebuilt it when it burned in 1868) to house the Young Men's Christian Association. Moody was made director of the YMCA in 1870, and one of the main aims of that institution was to prevent young men recently arrived in the big city from falling into the toils of vice. Among Moody's efforts toward that end was to organize a phalanx of young followers who called themselves the "Yokefellows." They

Courtesy Moody Bible Institute

G. P.A. Healy's portrait of D. L. Moody, Chicago's great evangelist. Moody balked at the pridefulness of saving his own portrait from the fire, but his wife convinced him otherwise. The portrait hangs today in the Moody Home in Northfield, Massachusetts.

met Sunday and Monday evenings at Farwell Hall for a short tea before separating on individual errands to the downtown saloons, boarding houses, and street corners where they urged any willing young men to attend evening prayer services back at the hall. So not all the steering was to gaming dens and the cribs. Moody's influence was so great at the time of the fire that his YMCA membership numbered 1,838 menall devoted to working for God in ridding Chicago of her vices. On the night of the fire Moody was preaching in the new Farwell Hall to a capacity crowd of twenty-five hundred. He had just asked his congregation to give themselves a week to decide for Christ ("The biggest blunder of my life") and then his golden-throated partner, Ira D. Sankey, launched into a solo at the organ of "Today the Saviour Calls." On the third verse he was drowned out by the clanging of passing fire engines and the ringing of the tocsin on City Hall around the corner.

Chicago History

203

Personal Experiences during the Chicago Fire

BY FRANK J. LOESCH

were coming out of their places of worship on Sunday evening, fire bells were ringing furiously and a rapidly increasing red glare towards the Southwest Side indicated that another fire [the West Side had suffered a bad fire the night before] had broken out. A strong hot wind had been blowing from the southwest during the day and it seemed to have gained in strength at this time.

Two of us started out for the scene of the new fire . My companion was young LeRow [William A . LeR ow, a fellow tenant in the author's boardinghouse], somewh at undersized but exceedingly active. His enthusiasm to see the new blaze carried me with him. We made our way speedily to abou t Franklin and Monroe Streets. The fire had just leaped across the South Branch at about Adams Street. I n that vicinity was located the gas reservoir which supplied the South and North Sides with illuminating gas. All about that neighborhood were many small cottages inhabited mostly by I rish people. The destruction of their homes was an immediate certainty. The possible explosion of the gas tank could not be long deferred. The frantic excitement among the people in their fear that they could not save their household goods was most moving. With a sympathy but a heedlessness which neither of us could afterwards account for in the imminent dangers about us, we helped as we could to move their goods into the street. They had better

AS CHURCHGOERS

Fr ank J. Loesch was a bookkeeper in the offices of the Western Union Telegraph Company at the time of the Great Fire, October 8-10, 1871. He was admitted to the I llinois Bar in 1874 and later enjoyed a distinguished career as a Chicago attorney and civic leader.

H is reminiscences of the fire, published here in somewhat condensed form, are considered one of the best eyewitness accounts of the holocaust, despite the inclusion of some incidents from the common body of fire lore. The reminiscences were read before the Chicago Literary Clu b in 1925 and privately published the same year.

204

Chicago History

have been left in the cottages for almost as they were being placed in the street some began to smoke from the heat of the air.

The panic which paralyzes human faculties under conditions like that is illustrated by one instance. From one of the cottages a mother had carried into the street, of all things, a bed tick filled with straw, where burning brands were everywhere falling in increasing numbers, and rushing back brought out and dumped a pair of twin infants upon the straw tick and hastened back into her home just as LeRow and I dropped some household articles and noticed a burning brand fall into the straw tick. He grabbed one infant and I the other. We gave the babes to their frantic mother, urging her to run with them for their lives. As we started to run we noticed the straw tick ablaze. No houses had then begun to burn but most of the people joined us in getting away.

We stopped a few moments at the northeast corner of Monroe and Wells Streets to watch a scene there. Barrels of whiskey were being rolled on skids into Wells Street from several large stores of dealers in beverages, presumably awaiting immediate cartage, though no drays were visible. However, what we did see was a number of men, each two or three with a scantling or piece of board, ramming some of the barrels, and as soon as part of the head had been driven in and the liquor was gushing out the men would throw themselves flat into the street to gulp the whiskey as it poured over them. No one interfered with their amusement. It is very likely that some of those men were among those reported "missing" later on.

There was no time to lose. The streets were being littered with burning brands. We ran east on Monroe Street to LaSalle and north towards Washington Street. orth of Madison Street we were literally running over a coating of red and smoldering fire brands. We saw no other people in that block. About half way in the block LeRow cried out that he was smothering. I grabbed him by the collar and dragged him as

Chicag o Historical Society

fast as I could go to Washington Street, where the air was free of smoke with few cinders on the street, but a strong hot wind was blowing eastward and carrying many burning brands high in the air. Here LeRow revived and we parted, he to go north, I to go into the Telegraph Company's office to learn if I could be of service.

Some three or four of my fellow clerks were there, besides the manager. Some one had opened the vault, into which we put all the books of account that were about, the men having worked on them that day. Unfortunately the chief bookkeeper had been working all day in a private room on the fourth floor on his September accounts and had left many of the books up there for the night. They were, of course, lost. I saw the manager place a lot of gold coins into a small portable office safe at his desk. It was suggested to him that we move the safe into the large vault but he declined to have it done as being unnecessary. After the fire the stack of vaults in that building was found upright amidst the debris of the rest of the building, but the manager's safe had been melted down, and after diligent search amidst the ruins there was found only a little trickle of gold in the shape of a thin vein over some bricks.

The fire still burns. Since no photographs are known to exist of the city in flames, a few pictures like this one of long-smoldering coal piles are the only photographic record of the fire itself. View south along Market (now Wacker) Street and the South Branch of the Chicago River.

All salvage work in our office was being done by the light of the flames. The building opposite on Washington Street was ablaze and the roof of our building was burning. The telegraph operators had abandoned their instruments on the upper floors and were running down the stairway as I hurried into LaSalle Street and ran north to Randolph Street.

The Destruction of the Court House The tunnel at that time and until the late eighties, when it was turned over for the exclusive use of North Side cable cars, had a foot passageway on the east of the teamway. The teamway entrance near Randolph Street was then where it is now, while the foot passage entrance was at Lake Street, the descent being by a stairway to a boardwalk.

I stopped for a few moments at the north corner of Randolph and LaSalle Streets to look about me. All the buildings south on LaSalle as far as I could see, south of Washington Street, were ablaze. So were some north of it. My parChicago Hi story

20 5

Personal Experience s

ticular attention was, however, called to the Court House and City Hall. The former had for its center build ing a brown stone structure surmounted by a cupola in which was hung a large bell. The interior of the building was burning, and the flames being carried up through the open space had set the bell to ringing. Above all the sounds of the roaring fire, the wind, and the excited shouts of a moving mass of people, the bell wh irled on its frame and over its staunchions, ringing out with a weirdness and a desp airing clangorous volume, as though it were p ossessed of sense and were agonizing in its struggle against destruction. For many years thereafter the memory of its clangor often awoke me at night to recall the scene.

The east and west wings of the Court House were constructed of Joliet limestone-the west wing being the City Hall. I watched for some moments, with a fascination which only the growing danger to myself drew me away from, the effect of the fire upon the city hall. The strong southwest wind was driving the heat in sheets of flame from the hundreds of burning buildings to the west upon the southwest corner of the building with such terrific effect that the limestone was melting and was running down the face of the bui lding with first a slow, then an accelerating movement as if it were a thin white paste.

The carelessness with which some people must have viewed the oncoming flames was evident to me when I saw numbers of guests rushing out of the Sherman H ouse onto Randolph Street. Most of them were in nightclothing, carrying whatever other clothing came handiest in the panic.

The Court House opposite must have been burning for over a half hour, for it was now near midnight, and yet those people had apparently waited, or were left asleep, until the hotel was a bout to burst into flames before deciding to leave.

I joined the rush of people passing up LaSalle Street to the tunnel's pedestrian passage entrance. Some time after leaving M onroe and 206

Chicago History

Franklin Streets there was a loud explosion. I learned from the crowd making its way to the tunnel that it was the explosion of the gas works.

Gas lights had gone out everywhere and the escaping gas had doubtless hastened the action of the fire in many buildings. At any rate, the tunnel was dark. As we entered it in pairs with a regularity that seemed as if it were a drill, each person put his hands on the shoulders of the person in front of him and with almost a lock step, with the slogan, "Keep to the right!" "Keep to the right!" "Keep to the right!" repeated singsong by almost everyone, we emerged on the North Side at Kinzie Street. Strange to say that at the same time that a double line of us was walking north through the tunnel a single line was going south in the same order repeating the same slogan. There was no panic, no crowding, only good humor and good order.

A Long Linen Duster and a Dress Vest On reaching my boarding house [at r r o, now 548, North Dearborn] I found Dearborn Street a mass of people and of horses and vehicles. It appeared like an aimless confusion but it was everyone looking out for himself and family without regard to others, and expecting others to do the same. It was exciting but not wildly panicky. We all realized that haste was necessary to get away somewhere out of reach of the flames which were shooting high above the blazing business district and by the light of which we were moving about inside as well as outside the houses, but frankly I saw no evidence of disregard of others' rights in the confused moving to and fro. There were more calm people than one would expect. Our landlady had bethought herself to examine every room a few moments before I returned, she told me, and found two young men sound asleep. I saw one of those two standing on the upper landing of the outer stairs, looking wildly toward the blazing South Side. He had on a dress vest over a long linen duster. His confusion of mind was not much greater than that of most of us later when it came

to a question of what we wished to save and what we could save.

I found that most of the boarders were still in the house but were fast leaving with whatever they could carry. I found two who, ignorant of the extent of the fire, still refused to believe that it would reach the North Side. At that time the air was literally full of burning embers, the wind being so strong that we saw pieces of wood two or more feet long in full blaze being driven northeastwardly.

Individuals and groups were concerned as to the direction to take in seeking to escape the oncoming flames. I joined a company of a dozen or more, broken into smaller groups later, who decided on going directly west on Ohio Street to as near the North Branch as we could get, thence northward toward Fullerton A venue, then the city limits, which no one thought of as ever likely to be reached by the fire. Some of the others decided to go directly north into Lincoln Park.

That was a bad choice. Others decided that they would go east on Ohio Street to the lake and be in safety on the beach which was very wide at that point. That was the worst choice. I recall a lady and her family taking that direction. When next I saw her she was minus much of her hair, eyebrows, and eyelashes. They had been scorched off by the intense heat in spite of the fact that she sat in the lake and frequently ducked her head into the water.

There was, of course, the greatest excitement on all sides as people were leaving their houses with whatever they could carry. The fire had now crossed the river and was making rapid progress on the North Side.

One scene took place, the relation of which will bring a sympathetic thought for an unknown book lover from all my hearers. I was on the walk in front of the boardinghouse when my attention was called to a gentleman who had a set of beautifully bound books in his two arms.

He explained to an expressman that they were a set of Shakespeare and was asking him to take and remove the books. He declined because he

said he was going to try to save his own goods.

The gentleman then offered him fifty dollars to carry the books to a place of safety. This was declined on the ground that he must go quick to save his family. Then the gentleman said, "Won't you take and save the books if I make you a present of them?" "Yes," he would.

"Then take them," said the owner, as he put them into the wagon, turned away, and burst into tears.

Instant Destruction of Three Blocks I remained a moment longer, standing on the top of the outside stairway, and saw a sight which in vividness has never faded from my memory. The fire had crossed Kinzie Street, some four blocks south of Ohio Street where I was standing. The roar of the flames, the air alive with flying embers, the fierceness with which the wind and fire combined were whirling the flames into and circling in and above the street fascinated me. No voice could make itself heard above the roar. Even in the house we had to shout into each others' ears to make ourselves heard. As I came down the steps facing south, the three blocks south of Indiana Street, including the pavement and the sidewalks, caught fire with the suddenness of the explosion of a bomb and were a mass of flames in a moment. It was the first and only instance in which I saw an enveloping movement of the flames to that extent and especially the burning of the street pavement. The dryness of the season, the superheat for hours of the fiercely driven flames, the tarred-over pavement were sufficient explanation to account for the street's burning, while the thousands of falling burning brands, added to the other factors before mentioned, easily explained how three blocks of building, including brick business buildings, could burst into flames at almost the same instant.

I was around the corner in a second after that, with overcoat collar up, sheltering myself from the heat on the north side of the building. It was now after one o'clock of Monday morning.

Chicago History

207

Personal Experiences

Chicago Historical Society

The dense, slowly moving mass of people on sidewalks and roadways hindered any free or fast movement east of Wells Street or south of Ohio Street. There were few moving teams in the roadway at this time.

Birth in the Midst of the Flames However, the passing crowd had a puzzle nearly equal to that of "The Lady or the Tiger."

On my first return to the house I noticed unusual excitement two or three doors south of Ohio Street on the east side of Clark Street.

Making my way there, I found my haberdasher, a Jew and a genial fellow, in the most frantic condition of mind and body. He was running to the rooms above and back again and inquiring 208

Ch icago History

The west entrance of the Cook County Court House after the fire. The author was so fascinated with what seemed to be melting stone that only the increasing danger from the flames drew him away from the scene.

about the fire and looking down the street at the oncoming flames and rushing upstairs and down again with inconceivable rapidity. I did manage to extract from somebody the information that a baby was rr.omentarily expected upstairs, but, not knowing the exigency, it was not entering the world with that expedition which the nervous father, physician, and family in attendance expected of it. Their very excitement, it was said, proved a hindrance. The puzzle therefore was, would the fire or the baby come first to that home? The passing crowd caught the state of af-

fairs, took a humorous interest in it, and were extending good wishes and "hopes for the best."

I learned a year or two later from the father that "it" came first and was a boy. The mother was carried out of the house on a stretcher when the fire had actually reached the south end of that block.

At Ohio Street many people turned west so that with those coming up LaSalle and Wells Streets the crowd seemed no less on Ohio Street west of Wells than it did on Clark Street. It was more dense then than I saw it anywhere else. It was the best-natured mass of people I ever was in the midst of. The women were more soberminded than the men. Losing a home was more serious to them, but endless badinage passed back and forth between the men concerning the suddenness and inconvenience of the moving and the ignorance of a destination or abiding place. I never heard a crying child except in one instance. The children as a rule considered it all a wonderful lark. I occasionally saw old people or sick ones being led or almost carried. On Ohio Street west of Clark Street everybody was carrying something, including babies, but most did as I finally did-left everything to burn and walked on with the feeling that we were lucky to escape with our lives.

An Italian of middle age carrying a load of bedding on his back was crying lustily. On inquiry as to the cause he said brokenly, with great sobs, that he had lost his dog. Someone inquired if he had a wife and children. He replied that he did but had lost those too. To a jibe from someone as to his failure to cry over their loss, his ¡ answer was that they could take care of themselves but the dog couldn't, and he knew he had lost him forever. The uncomplimentary remarks of the refugees manifested their radical dissent from such unnatural feelings.

Six Fingers of Flame By the process of slow walking to Erie Street bridge, where a considerable number of people waited for an hour or two, thence by a ride with

an expressman, a part of our group found ourselves at the east abutment of Chicago Avenue bridge about four A.M. It had a slight grade above the street. From it for two hours we saw the flames everywhere leaping upward but ever steadily making their way toward us. At one time we witnessed six churches, some of them with spires, sending their flames high into the air, making the most spectacular exhibition of the fire on the North Side. They included St. James Church, Unity Church which had two spires, New England Congregational Church, as well as one or two others, the names of which I cannot now recall. None was burning fast, it seemed to us, but it was an awesome as well as a depressing sight. They were the outstanding feature of the fire from our viewpoint for over an hour.

About six A.M. a number of us succeeded in inducing an expressman who was driving north to carry us to Fullerton and Racine Avenues, where some of the party had friends who had a comfortable home. We were welcomed in spite of the fact that about thirty other friends had already taken refuge there, and so many more recalled that it might prove a place of safety that

by Monday evening over seventy homeless people had gathered there.

As we drove up Larrabee Street and Lincoln Avenue, we found the residents out in force on the streets pitying us as we drove by with others in the same condition. In reply to questions we gave what information we could as to the extent of the fire . Not one person, to all appearances, was in the least personally concerned or seemed to have any idea of the peril from the fire to his home. Yet about three o'clock that afternoon I walked down to North Avenue and from there looking down Larrabee and later Sedgwick Street a distance of a half mile saw only deserted streets. Not a human being was visible in that distance with both sides of both streets on fire at about North Avenue.

The fire was burning steadily and rather rapidly northward without a hand anywhere atChicago Hi story

209

Personal Experiences

tempting to stay its progress. It was plain to be seen and often commented on by the fire-dispossessed wanderers that three or four fire engines with hose connections and water could at any time after ten or eleven on Monday morning have prevented all progress of the flames north of Division Street or at least north of North Avenue. The engines could have been obtained.

It only needed water but there was no water. The destruction of the Chicago Avenue pumping station early in the morning had ended all hope of ending the fire so long as there were houses, streets, sidewalks, and fences lo feed it and no rain to quench it. I saw the pavements burning with the same fury as houses and board walks.

Desperate Precautions against the Fire Before sunset I had returned to my place of refuge. Some thirty or forty men had gathered there. At a council it was decided that active measures must be taken to guard our lives. In front and to the south of us and west of McCormick Seminary [then known as the Presbyterian Theological Seminary of the Northwest, at Fullerton Avenue and Halsted Street] were some sixty to eighty acres of prairie, thickly covered with very dry thistles and grass. If the fire swept across that all our lives would be put in jeopardy. It was decided to find a team and plow furrows across that field as at least a partial protection.

The second protection was the tearing down of fences and uprooting posts which fenced in part of the prairie and throwing them into ditches where we could handily find them. The final precaution was the filling of many open kettles and pans with water from a well, and placing them so that, in the emergency feared, each woman and child for herself or itself, or some man for them, could soak a wrap, place it about the woman or child, the man throwing what water he could over his legs and then with his charge run the gauntlet of the prairie fire.

The captain in command told me off with another lively young fellow as one of several 210

Chicago History

pairs to kick off fence boards and pull out posts.

It was long after dark when we got to work but it was exhilarating work as the night chill came on, and kicking in unison we did great execution with the fences as well as to our legs and muscles.

The hardest job was the pulling out of posts which caused lacerated hands, but no one murmured. '-Ne felt ourselves lo be in a desperate situation. Our eyes were ever to the south, watching the steady coming on of the fire as it lapped up in flames street after street of houses.

About 1 :30 o'clock on Tuesday morning, when we had given up hope of any stay and when the last row of houses on Belden Avenue or the street south of it was about being licked up [actually, the fire burned one block beyond Belden and crossed Fullerton Avenue], rain suddenly came down in such volume as to assure us safety and the extinguishment of the fire. Without more ado every man sought some place of refuge. I crept under an outside stairway to find just enough room to lie in amidst several other men who had forestalled me. I had not slept since early Sunday morning. I had had nothing to eat since Sunday noon, but I do not recall that I was either sleepy or hungry.

Coffee, Rye Bread, and Sauerkraut \Vhen I arose about daylight Tuesday morning I could scarcely believe the sight which met my eyes. The prairie which we had so worked over the evening before and which we had left tenantless was filled with a mass of refugees who had drifted there since two A.M. Some one of our crowd made a rough count and reported over three thousand men, women, and children camped there. As I walked about I saw many whom I had earlier seen as refugees. Every group seemed to be engaged in cooking breakfast. Judging by the smell and sight I was of the opinion that the three staples which had been forehandily saved from the devouring flames were coffee, rye bread, and sauerkraut. At my refuge a cup of weak tea and one biscuit was served to each adult. Immediately after that

I

Courtesy Duncan Gallery

hearty breaking of a two days' fast, several of the men started for downtown to find out something of the conditions and what we could do about getting to work or leaving the city.

In our walk south of Torth Avenue we were often nonplussed to identify the cross streets, since former landma rks had been completely destroyed, and where brick business buildings had existed they seemed to have fallen into the streets, making piles of debris. The Ogden House occupying the present site of the Newberry Library stood out prominently, wholly un injured.

The rails of the street railway on Clark Street h ad almost without an exception been burned out of their ties and lay about the street and upon the former sidewalk space twist¡ed and warped like dead black snakes in agonies of con-

The desolation of the North Side as it wou Id have appeared to Loesch Tuesday morning, looking northwest across the intersection of Wei ls and H insdale (now Chestnut) streets.

By Hart an d Anderson of Rockford, Illinois.

tortion. The paving bloc-ks had been largely burned over and were often displaced, leaving holes in the street. The sidewalks and every thing which was inflammable had been burned.

On Chicago Avenue a lot of water mains had been distributed before the fire. Sticking out of one of these we found the legs of a man who had been roasted to death in his place of refuge, probably blindly sought by him in a drunken stupor. v\Te were told that ¡ a few hours after we had left Chicago Avenue bridge and as refugees in vehicles and a.foot were crowding over it in the Chicago History

211

Chicago H istorical Society

Ruins of the Field, Leiter and Company building, ancestor firm of Marshall Field and Company.

face of advancing flames, a small oil refinery near there caught fire, exploded, and caused the death of over a hundred people by burning or by drowning in being crowded off the bridge or jumping into the river in the frenzy and agony of the crowd following the explosion.

The South Side was a mass of smoking ruins. I can recall only one building the walls of which remained standing to about full height. That was the First National Bank Building, then at the southwest corner of State and Washington Streets where the Reliance Building now stands.

It stood out like a monument above all the devastated business district, except that here and 212

Chicago History

there could be seen a stack of vaults. That was the case at the Merchants' Building. After some difficulty I found only a few square feet of unbroken stone, and a warm stone at that, upon which I could sit amidst the ruins of my former business place and observe what was going on. I was there about an hour meditating on what course to pursue and what city I could go to. I had only two dollars in my pocket and had the impression that Chicago would, of course, disappear as a business place. I began to question my impression when I saw a score or more of men at work in the ruins of the Chamber of Commerce, now replaced by the Chamber of Commerce

Personal Experiences

Chicago Histor ical Society

The interior of the Post Office and Customs House after the fire.

Building at the southeast corner of LaSalle and Washington Streets. They were actually removing debris smoking hot, preparatory to rebuilding. I was joined by two or three other of my fellow clerks, all of whom, however, were living out on the West Side. One of them had known nothing of the fire until late Monday morning. vVhile chatting over the supposed loss of our situations and considering what to do, a messenger sent to the ruins to look up any clerks who might gather there informed us that the main telegraph office was at State and Sixteenth Streets, where we were ordered to report at once as our services were urgently needed. The others

decided not to go that day, so I walked alone down South Clark Street to about Twelfth Street where I observed in a baker's window only one eatable article-an apple pie. Fearing the price would be more than two dollars, I entered with some timidity to inquire. Finding the price to be only twenty cents, which I joyfully paid, my courage rose to the point of asking permission to eat the whole pie in the shop. This being courteously granted, I promptly disposed of said pie with no crumbs left and with remarkable mental results. -I walked on with the most intense feeling of pride that Chicago would come back and I must stay right here.

Chicago History

213

A Trained Observer Sees the Fire

BY THEODORE MOSH ER, JR.

Of all the numerous accounts of the fire the official report by Chicagls weatherman) Theodore Mosher) Jr.) is the only one worthy of being called scientific.

The following excerpt from Mosher) s report dispassionate"(y explains several puzzling phenomena recorded in other accounts.

16. Took possession of new office. '.:\o.

West Randolph Street, yesterday. Have been without records from October 8 until today, everything official having been destroyed by the great fire, October 8 and g. The observation at 10:53 P.M . , October 8, was taken and transmitted as usual. At half-past nine an alarm of fire was rung. There had been a very large fire the preceding night, which had been subdued with difficulty. The weather was intensely dry, and the wind blowing from the south-south-west with a velocity of about twenty miles an hour.

Accordingly when by ten P.M. the fire had increased instead of diminishing many people turned out to see it simply for the sake of the spectacle. At 10:30 the fire was still confined to two blocks, with a strong hold of only one. The firemen at this time seemed to have a fair chance of checking it; still the burning was so great as to enable one, by the light of it, to read the time on the city clock, one and one-half miles distant.

At twelve P .M. the fire had increased considerably in area and intensity, but as the wind was south-southwest, and the river ran due north and south, there seemed as yet but little danger to anything beyond the river. Hitherto the fire had been extended merely by contact with the flames, but toward one A.M. the heat had become so intense as greatly to increase the power in the immed iate neighborhood of the flames.

This was especially the case on the east and west of the fire toward the front, the wind blowing straigh t toward the fire in a ll directions. Within fo r ty yards of the blaze I estimated the wind toward it at thirty m iles an hour. This caused a OCTOBER IO

214

Chicago History

decided whirling motion in the column of flame and smoke, which was contrary to that of the hands of a watch.

Blazing pieces of timber of considerable size were now whirled aloft and carried to the northnorthcast, starting new fires as they fell. These new fires, being in the line of the smoke, were invisible to those at the old fire. One of the fires was on the east side of the river, only a few blocks from the courthouse. By two o'clock the courthouse with all the beautiful buildings around it was in flames . The conflagration was now advancing in the line of the wind as fast as a man could walk.

By three A.M. the waterworks, two miles to the northeast of the courthouse, were burned.

The city having thus been divided in two by a sheet of flame, the fire continued to work its way more leisurely to the east and west, al right angles lo the wind, as well as right in the teeth of it. The fire on the night of the 7th alone saved the west division, as it had burned two blocks in \vidth down the west side of the river. The fire on the 8th originated on ly a few blocks farther south, hence it could not progress north for want of material.

On the east side of the river in the south division [i. e., in the present Loop], the fire continued to work toward the east; and this it did with the greatest rapidity at the southern limit of the conflagration, because there the unburned houses broke the wind and caused a back current at the base of the build ings. As soon as the fire had thus got a new swath of houses before it, and the wind behind it, away it went tearing,

sadly surprising many who were congratulating themselves because the first rush of flame had spared them.

The Tribune people thought the strength of their building [Dearborn at Madison Street] had saved them, because it lay at the extremity of one of the swaths. The next one took it. In the north division the first rush of the fire reached the lake, and then it worked its way west to the river.

This it did not accomplish before twelve noon on the 9th.

The wind by nine A.M. had increased to perhaps twenty-five miles an hour, at the distance of three miles to the southwest of the fire.

In the immediate vicinity of it, especially in streets running east and west, it was blowing with the force of a hurricane, on the north side lifting up whole burning buildings and pitching them upon the tops of others. The wind blowing in all directions toward the fire confused some people in their endeavors to escape. This also caused the fire to progress along the tops of buildings before the wind, and along the bases of buildings against the wind.

The heat was intense. The buildings in front and at the sides of the fire began first to smoke from the heat radiating from the burning. Then in many cases, without waiting for a tongue of flame to touch them, they would all at once burst into a blaze. To talk of fireproof buildings

111 the midst of such a furnace is absurd. Steel was melted in innumerable cases, and stones and brick were burned to powder.

The firemen at first endeavored to check the fire in front, but as soon as it had gathered in force this was not to be thought of; not a single drop of water could reach the fire. The wind swept it aloft. At length they saw what they could do and confined themselves to that. Letting the fire have free scope to the north and east, they endeavored to prevent it spreading to the south against the wind. In this they succeeded, cutting it off just as it was laying hold of immense piles of lumber which lay along the river. This was done about three A.M., Monday.

The efforts of the firemen, lamed for want of water, were ably seconded by gunpowder in the forenoon, in the south division. The same agent had been employed to check the northward progress of the fire, but in vain. Toward noon, its farther progress southward was thus checked. In the northern division it had reached its limits at about the same time, having burnt everything that would burn, out as far as Lincoln Park, about four miles from the courthouse.

The loss of life was greatest along the path of the first rush of the fire; it came so suddenly and unexpectedly. Only those who died in the streets have been recovered. The very bones of those who were in the bui ldings were burned.

CHICAGO October 10, 1871 This poem appeared in the November 9, 187I, issue of The Interior, the Presbyterian weekly newspaper

Blackened and bleeding, helpless, panting, prone, On che charred fragments of her shattered throne Lies she who stood but yesterday alone.

Queen of the West! by some enchanter taught To lift the glory of Aladdin's court, Then lose the spell that all that wonder wrought.

Like her own prairies by some chance seed sown, Like her own prairies in one brief day grown, Like her own prairies in one fierce night mown, She lifts her voice, and in her pleading call \Ve hear the cry of Macedon to PaulThe cry for help that makes her kin to all.

But haply with wan fingers may she feel The silver cup hid in the proffered mealThe gifts her kinship and our loves reveal.

Bret Harte Chicago Hi sto ry

2 15

"Kate! The Barn Is Afire!"

Mrs. O'Leary did not know until the next day that the fire that started in her barn had burned Chicago down, and by that time she was not going to admit anything. Nor was she exactly candid in November at the official fire department inquiry.

These excerpts from her and her tenant's testimony are from the unpublished transcripts of the hearings, in the collection of the Chicago flistorical Society.

[The particle O and Mc on Irish names were often dropped at this period.]

Examination by Mr. Chadwick

MRS. CATHERINE LEARY SWORN.

Q. What do you know about this fire?

A. I was in bed myself and my husband and five children when this fire commenced. I was the owner of them five cows that was burnt, and the horse wagon and harness. I had two tons of coal and two tons of hay. I had everything that I wanted in for the winter.

I could not save five cents worth of anything out of the barn. Only that Mr. Sullivan got out a little calf. The calf was worth eleven dollars on Saturday morning.

Saturday morning I refused eleven dollars for the calf, and it was sold afterwards for eight dollars. I didn't save one five cents out of the fire.

Q. Do you know how the fire caught?

A. I could not tell anything of the fire only that nvo men came by the door. I guess it was my husband got outside the door and he ran back to the bedroom and said "Kate the barn is afire." I ran out and the whole barn was on fire. Well I went out to the barn and u pon my word I could not tell anymore about the fire.

I got just the way I could not tell anything about the fire.

Q . You got frightened.

A. I got frightened. I got the way I did not know when I saw everything burn up in the barn-I got so excited that I could not tell anything about the fire from that time.

Q. You thought your house was to burn then.

A. Yes sir. Then the men went and fixed nvo washtubs at both hydrants. There is a hydrant in front of our place and a hydrant in front of Mrs. Murray's.

They set two washtubs and then began to put water on the little house, and everything was gone only the little house, and they made for that and kept it wet all through until the fire was gone.

Q . Is that your house?

A . Yes sir. They kept water on it until the fire went ou t. We had ple nty of water until the fire was done.

2 16

Chicago History

Q. Was there any other family living in your house?

A. Yes sir. There was Mrs. Laughlin.

Q. How many rooms d id they occupy?

A. Two rooms.

Q. Front rooms?

A. Yes sir.

Q. Do you know whether they were in bed?

A . I know they were not in bed.

Q. How did you know that?

A. Because I could hear from my own bedroom.

Could hear them going on. There was a little music there.

Q. They had a little party there?

A. Yes sir. Her husband was a fiddler.

Q. They had dancing there?

A. They had.

Q. Some company?

A. Some company. I could not tell how many were there.

Q. That was going on at the time the fire broke out, that dance, was it?

A. I could not tell you sir.

Q. Did you hear any of these people from the front part of the house passing to the back end of the dwelling, pass back and forth in the alley between the nvo houses?

A. I didn't indeed.

Q. About what Lime did this fire break out?

A . As near as I can guess it was a little after nine o'clock.

Q . Had any of the people who were at the party been in your part of the house?

A . No sir. There was not any of them there.

Q. You could simply hear the music and they were having a jolly time.

A. I could hear anything from our own bed to their rooms. Because they pretty near joined together.

Q. Have you heard from any person who was there anything in relation to anybody's going out to the barn with a light?

A. Yes sir, I have heard of it. I have heard from other folks.

Courtesy Duncan Gallery

Q. Who did you hear anything in regard to it from?

A. I heard from other folks. I could not tell whether it is true or not. There was one out of the party went in for to milk my cows.

Q. Who did you hear say that?

A. Mrs. White.

Q. Where does Mrs. White live?

A. Across the way from us.

Q. There is two two-story houses there right together?

A. Yes sir.

Q. She lives in the east one?

A. Yes sir. She said-the first she told me she mentioned a man was in my barn milking my cows. I could not tell for I didn't see it. The next morning I went over there she told me it was too bad for Leary to have all what he was worth lost. We did not know who done it. Said she and one of the neighbors there was someone from the party went and milked the cows.

Q. Did they state who the person was?

A. o sir. They did not.

Q. What did they want to milk for?

A. Some said it was for oysters. I could not tell anything only what I heard from the outside.

Q. Had these persons in your house been in the habit of getting milk there before if they wanted it?

A. No sir. I never saw them in my barn to milk my cows.

The O'Leary house at Jefferson and De Koven after the fire. The blackened posts to the left are supposedly the remains of the barn. The front of the house with the entrance stairs was rented to the Mclaughlins; the O'Learys lived in the adjoining rear section.

This photograph is from a souvenir stereograph by Chicago photographer Joseph Battersby. The animal (apparently a steer recruited from the Yards) purports to be the culpable cow.

Q. Did you have any talk with Mrs. Laughlin about it?

A. I did.

Q. What did she say about it?

A. She said she never was in the stable.

Q. Did she deny that anybody went from her house?

A. She did sir. She said she had no supper that night. She said her man had supper to a relation and to her brother.

Q. Had no coffee or oysters?

A. Had no coffee or oysters.

Q. Was there any other party in the neighborhood that you know of?

A. No sir. ,veil there was always music in saloons there Saturday night. I do not know of any other.

Q. This was Sunday night.

A. This was Sunday 'n ight.

Q. Is Mrs. Laughlin living in the house now?

A. No sir. She moved out of it.

Chicago History 217

"Kate!"

Q. Do you know whether the tenants of the houses about there were in the habit of getting shavings from the planing mills to burn?

A. There was shavings in every house there.

Q. Put them in the house?

A. Yes sir.

Q. Almost every house?

A. Yes sir.

Q. They got them because they were cheaper fuel than they could get anywhere else?

A. Yes they were shavings in every house. That I can say.

Q. In some houses large quantities of them?

A. Yes si r.

Q. Did you have any packed in your barn?

A. Yes sir. I had some packed in my barn.

Q. How many do you think?

A. When I used to clean out the barn I used to throw in a little shavings.

Q. Did you use them for bedding?

A. Yes sir. ot so much for bedding. I used to clean out the places and take a dish full and throw it in along with the cows.

Q. After you discovered the fire can you state whether there was any engine on the ground, or how soon after did you discover one?

A. The first engine I seen playing it was on Turner's block.

Q. Can you give us an idea about how great a length of time past from your first hearing of the fire until you first saw the engine?

A. I could not, sir. The engine might be there unknown to me-I got so excited. All I had was there in that barn. I did not know the fire was down until the next day.

Q. Had you any insurance upon your barn and stock?

A. Never had five cents insurance-I had those cows one of them was not in the barn that night. It was out in the alley. That one went away. I could not get that one. My husband spent two weeks looking for it and could not find it anywhere in the world. I could not get five cents. I had six cows there. A good horse there. I had a wagon and harness and everything I was worth. I couldn't save chat much out of it (snapping her finger) and upon my word I worked hard for them.

218

Chicago History

CATHERINE MCLAUGHLIN,

sworn November 25, 1871

Q. Where do you live?

A. De Koven Street 13.

Q. Do you own the house?

A. No sir, it was Pat Leary's house. I lived in. The fire took place in-in the front of it. He lived in the rear part of it.

Q. Do you know anything about the time the fire commenced on the night of October 8?

A. No sir. I do not know anything about the fire more than you. Some person came to the door and hollered fire, and just when they come there I went and opened the door and turned and looked back in Leary's yard and heard them holler and say that Pat Leary's barn was on fire ... I went in and told my brother to pick up my child and he took one armful of my clothes across the road and as I went over across the road I fainted and did not know anything more about the fire. I never went back again to bring a thing out.

Q. How many people were there in your apartment at the time the fire commenced?

A. To the best of knowledge I think there was seven or eight boys and two girls. There was a greenhorn brother of mine thereQ. You mean a man just come from Ireland.

A. Yes sir, and Sunday evening and of course the cousins and neighbors of mine came in to see him.

Q. Diel you have music there that evening?

A. Yes sir. My husband played two times on the fiddle that was all. There was one a brother of mine and another lady danced a polka. That i all that was played.

Q. Will you give the names of all those per ons who were at the house that evening?

A. Dan Talbot. George Lewis.

Q. Who is the next?

A. Johnny Hanley.

Q. What is his business?

A. Carpenter I guess.

Q. What is the next?

A. There was John Riley.

Q. What is the next?

A. Richard Russell.

Q. Who were the women?

A. Alice Riley and Mary eedham.

Q. Did any of this party go out of your house during the evening?

A. Of course I do not know that I could not say whether they did or not. If I was going dead 'fore God I could not tell whether they went out or not.

Q. Did you go out yourself?

A. No sir, I didn't since night fall .. .

Q. Did you have anything to eat or drink there?

A. No sir, not a bit. I didn't cook a bit from noon time Sunday until Tuesday evening. I will tell you how it happened. We were invited to supper at Mr. Tai bots.

Q. Sunday night.

A. Yes sir.

Q. You don't know whether any of these persons went out doors for any purpose during the time that this company was there?

A. No sir.

Q. Diel you make any tea or coffee during the time?

A. No sir. If I did of course I should have started the stove ... Not a mouthful of victuals ever came there that evening before Goel this clay.

Q. Diel you hear or know or believe any particular thing connected with the fire or the origin of it?

A. No sir. I do not, nor do I believe that hardly anyone living can tell how it commenced.

Q. You got along pleasantly with Mrs. Leary?

A. Yes sir. An honester woman I never would as to live with.

Q. Do you know whether Mrs. Leary was ever in the habit of going in their barn after night?

A. No sir. I really do not know. I lived in the front of the house. They might or they might not. I was never in the habit of going back in the night.

Q. Did Mrs. Leary generally do the milking?

A. Yes sir. Mrs. Leary used to do the milking about five o'clock.

Q. Diel ever any of your family help her?

A. o sir. I had no one to help her out myself that night. I never put my hand near a cow in my life.

I am going nine years in America, and have never milked a cow since I have been here.

Q. That evening after the alarm of the fire did you leave the house?

A. Yes sir I went right across the road.

Q. You stood there and watched the fire?

A. Of course I didn't watch the fire I wasn't able.

Q. You fainted.

A. Yes sir, I didn't take anything out of my house only me arm full of clothes. They brought them out of course. They were not much good to me when they did bring them. They were all broken and torn.

Q. You are quite certain that no person left the house to bring in refreshments of any kind.

A. No sir there was no one left the house. Only one man went out and got a half gallon of beer or two half gallons I don't know which.

Q. Did you hear anything said by the parties about having an oyster supper that night at your house?

A. Yes sir, I heard a report about it.

Eli sabeth Kimbell

Chicago's monument to the Great Fire. Egon Weiner's abstracted flames standing in the courtyard of the present Chicago Fire Academy m ark the spot where the O'Leary barn stood. It was Mayor Daley's idea in 1956 to build the Academy there as a monument with a practical purpose.

Q. Diel you hear it that night?

A. No sir not a word. There was no talk of oysters.

Q. Did you hear anything said about going out to get milk for the purpose of making milk punch?

A. o sir. That is a thing I never had in my life in my house. 1o kind of liquor or whiskey.

Q. You said a man did go out and get a half gallon of beer.

A. Yes sir.

Q. And brought it in.

A. Yes sir and brought it right in.

Q. Once or twice?

A. Upon my word I could not say. I know he brought one half gallon in to the house. I do not know but he did twice. I am not sure.

Chicago History

219

"We Could Not Do without the Chicago Fire ... " So said Henry Ward Beecher when he saw the seeming miracle of the immediate international effort to relieve burned out Chicagoans.

T he real miracle, however, lay in the succes.iful administration of the reliefprogram by the Chicago Relief and Aid Society.

BY ELISABETH KIMBELL

that confronted Chicago immediately after the Great Fire.

One hundred thousand people were without homes, without food, clothing, or fuel. Many additional thousands were out of jobs, the businesses where they had worked closed down . The flames had destroyed principal stores of grain, flour, and other food staples, of lumber, medicine, coal-everything essential to the day-today operation of a major city. The destitution was massive, frightening. Frantic victims and prophets of doom wrung their hands in despair, convinced that only a miracle could answer the critical needs of the citizenry.

And yet every single one of the one hundred thousand people left homeless was sheltered and fed that Tuesday night, less than twenty-four hours after the rains extinguished the flames.

And in the coming months, throughout that long winter of 1871-72, the hungry were fed, the sick given medical care, the homeless housed, the unemployed provided with jobs-all thanks to the dogged, unselfish work of Chicagoans themselves, and to the overwhelming sympathy and aid that poured into the city from around the world.

I mmediately, men of many nations mobilized in to the first international relief effort in history.

T he news of the Great Fire, the first large-scale d isaster that occurred after the Atlantic Cable linked the Old World to the New by telegraph in 1866, flashed around the globe almost as quickly as it reached neighboring communities in Illinois. Fast modern trains and ocean steamers p layed a part in the relief effort, too, enabling the people of distant cities to send aid quickly and effectively.

FEW CITIES EVER FACED THE PROBLEMS

220

Chicago History

"Will Do All We Can ... " Even as the flames raged north from the business district into the residential neighborhoods of the North Division Monday morning, Chicago Mayor Roswell B. Mason began to receive hurried replies to his telegraphed pleas for bread: "vVc send a car load of provisions by morning train. '\Viii do all we can for you," promised Harrison Ludington, mayor of Milwaukee, in a telegram Monday afternoon. Jared M. Brush, mayor of Pittsburgh, notified Mason the same day that the Pittsburgh City Council had appropriated $ r 00,000 for Chicago; by Tuesday private citizens there had pledged $200,000.

In St. Louis, Chicago's often-bitter commercial rival, the Board of Trade pledged $10,000 and the Merchants' Exchange $100,000. Ten carloads of provisions were dispatched to Chicago, and by Tuesday nearly $25,000 had been privately subscribed. The Common Council added $50,000 to the residents' contributions.

A committee of Cincinnati citizens arrived at Chicago's Kinzie Street depot Tuesday with r I carloads of supplies, 4,000 blankets, and $15,000 in cash. These men readily saw the pressing need for prepared food-stoves and ovens had been destroyed in the fire-and so they were followed a week later by another group of Cincinnati residents who, in the barnraising spirit so characteristically American, rolled up their sleeves and proceeded to serve 4,000 gallons of soup per day from a soup house opened at eight A.M . on October 18 on North Peoria Street. Anyone appearing at the soup kitchen was given as much as he could carry away. Cincinnati's Common Council had al-

- - - - - - - - - - •• - - - - -- - -

-The Homeless and Starving Citizens of Chicago call for Cooked Food.

Let every family

ua

the City eook 1 foofl aod deliver it &t the

(;ourt House (for the h t a 111I 2d wa nts.) a nd at t he Depot of the Chicago Roc k Isla nd & Pacifi c railroad Compa ny, (for the 3d a nd 4th ward:-.) by fi ve o'cloc k thi s evening. Boiled a 11d Roast mea ts hams, poul try a nd bread a rc 11ar ticul arly desi red. It is necessary to send a ca r load bv the cvenin ; train.

• ,.. . A meeti ng of~ hc citize n~ w ill he held at rho Cou r t Hou~c at 12 o'clock, 11. to-day to appoint co mm1ttees and ori:;a mze.

LET ALL · ATTEND. Hoek lslantl, Oct. IO. 1871.

E. CARTER, :Ma.yo:r.

Chicago H istorical Soc iety, Broadside Collection

ready appropriated $100,000 for Chicago, and promised five times that amount if necessary.

The New York State Chamber of Commerce met in emergency session on Tuesday and appointed a Committee of One Hundred to organize a relief program. Members of the Chamber pledged $80,000 before they adjourned. That night ew York merchant Alexander T. Stewart wired $50,000 to establish a fund for the relief of single women, widows, and children.

Men and women in cities all across the nation plunged into the relief work as soon as news of the shocking devastation reached them. Collections were quickly organized. Some towns also sent cooked food to Chicago; a shipment from Fort Wayne reached the burned city Monday evening, hours before the flames were extinguished. Other communities, Indianapolis among them, offered to provide homes for hundreds of dispossessed Chicagoans.

Another prompt contributor to the relief effort was the United States Army, which gave over ninety-three thousand dollars' worth of supp lies-bread, rice, soap, bacon, potatoes, hospital tents, blankets, flannel shirts and drawers, socks, and shoes.

A report filed by a newsman travelling with a relief train through Pen nsylvania shows the spirit that prevailed throughout t he coun try: " I ntense sympathy is manifested all along the road, and numbers of people of all classes are assembled at the depots attempting to throw bundles on board as we whisk past. Goods are piled up at the principal stations awaiting the next train ." "Dense crowds were collected at Binghamton, Owego, and \Vaverl y [New York], notwithstanding the rain," wired another reporter from E lmira, "and handkerchiefs were waving from every cottage and shanty ... " " \,Ve could not do without the Chicago fire," clergyman Henry Ward Beecher proclaimed, in something of an excess of rejoicing over the demonstration of human goodness. T he victims of the fire doubtless disagreed, but few people found fault with the reflections of colu mnist Philip Qui libet of Galaxy magazine: "Chicago demonstrates," he oQserved, "that we sometimes use the almighty dollar as the Almighty ... means that dollars should be used."

Chicago History

221

Leslie's , Chicago H1stoncal Society

Cincinnati's emergency soup kitchen, where volunteers from that city served soup to all comers.

Organization amidst Chaos \,Vith assurances early Monday morning of aid from other cities, relief mci'lsurcs in Chicago were quickly, if somewhat haphazardly, implemented. Charles C. P. Holden, president of the City Council, set up headquarters for relief operations in the First Congregational Church, on the West Side at \Vashington and Ann (now Racine) Streets, at 12:45 P.M. Monday, and ordered a refectory established in the vacant Congregational Church building at Washington and Green Streets. By six P.M., while the fire still burned on the North Side, food and supplies from outside the city began arriving on the fringes of the burned district and were transported to the Green Street refectory where, as word about relief measures got around, many hundreds of the homeless gathered for supper prepared by relief volunteers.

Mayor Mason, aldermen, and leading citizens met at the Congregational Church relief headquarters at eight Monday e,¡ening to organize a General Relief Committee. Named to the committee were Nathaniel K. Fairbank, a wellknown merchant and lard manufacturer, distiller John Herting, Orrin E. Moore, an insurance agent, three city aldermen, and the mayor.

222

Chicago History

Food and water were the most pressing needs, since the city's water works had burned along with most food supplies. The refectory supplied meals temporarily; as for water, relief officials pressed into service privately owned wagons and teams, which carried water throughout the city Monday night from the artesian well in Lincoln Park and from various private wells.

The next morning, Tuesday, the General Relief Committee went into continuous session, naming subcommittees to take charge of unloading supplies at the surviving railroad stations, transporting supplies to volunteer committees at churches and schools, giving out food to hungry survivors, regularizing the water supply, obtaining railroad passes for those wishing to leave the city, providing medical care, and hastily constructing barracks for the homeless from remaining supplies of lumber.

To supplement the refectory and relief headquarters in the Congregational Church, food distribution depots were opened Tuesday in several railroad stations, among them the Lake Shore and Michigan Southern Railway station at Twenty-second and Clark Streets; the Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy station at Canal and Sixteenth; the Chicago and Alton Railroad station near Sixteenth Street; and the Chicago

Succor for the Homeless

and North Western depot at Kinzie and Canal Streets.

Beyond the control of the committee, however, were many supplies sent from other communities that never reached official distribution depots. The downtown railroad stations had been destroyed, so hundreds of carloads (one estimate set the figure at 330 cars) were unloaded wherever the trains could stop. In many cases the boxes were ripped open and the goods given out on the spot. No invoices accompanied the shipments, since the railroads carried them free of charge, so no permanent record was kept of their receipt. (First efforts to house the homeless were equally disorganized and hastily-conceived. The committee's barracks, though they did provide much-needed shelter, were also thought to "engender disease and promote idleness, disorder, and vice," in the words of one Chicagoan active in the relief work, who concluded that the enforced familiarity of these early barracks invariably led to promiscuous behavior.)

The committee also passed a "bread ordinance" on Tuesday, fixing the price of bread at eight cents for a twelve-ounce loaf. Anyone caught trying to profit from disaster by selling bread at a higher price within the city limits was to be fined ten dollars for each offense. On Wednesday the committee opened an intelligence office to help locate lost persons, and began to issue railroad passes obtained for those residents who had decided to leave the city. The same day, fearful that the first supplies would not last, the committee ordered all relief workers at schools and churches to limit the issue of provisions to the "absolute daily necessities (not always the wants) " of the applicants.

Later, when Chicagoans looked back on these first days after the fire, they recognized that with starvation and exposure threatening thousands of people the General Relief Committee could give little thought to systematizing the relief operation or to exposing fraudulent claims for aid.

"Organization and system in the immediate

present were out of the question," they acknowledged. "The methods employed [by the General Relief Committee] were characterized by hesitancy in the absence of authority, and ... uncertainty by reason of the absence of all precedent in the performance of such a work." The General Relief Committee was thus forgiven its confusion, particularly since the initial emergency had been successfully met.

The Relief and Aid Society Assumes Command But, all the same, fear that the relief funds might be mismanaged was apparently not uncommon and, when a handful of city aldermen of questionable integrity claimed a week after the fire that the City Counci l should disburse the relief funds, a much-agitated Chicago Tribune responded with a brutally frank ed itorial assessment of the Council's moral character : "There

Chi cago Historical Soci ety, Broadsid e Collection

TO THE I General Relief Committee

Tho Ifoul Quaro,r, of tho arc at the

CONGREGATIONAL CHURCH, Cor.Washington &Ann Sts., All of the Public School Buildings. M wPII R8 Chnrch~, are open for the ,helter or peNO.OI who do not Bnd c.U.t'!' •cco~modalloos.. When rood

ls not found a, ,uch

bulldins- it will be pronded by the commit.tl!\l on

applitation at Beed Quart.era. ll

a. alA!ilON. M111••

J ff lhAVOT ll' I(. J,\IRB:\N~ .

o.~.. h>fl. j"

l l

w •- B.lTI H.UI., WatOlnaiol

JOWC UIATOO.

~:ban 1I ti.

0.

'r

0---.l lltl,,!C-...ict...

llOTCIIKlSS. S..:rct:Jr:,-

Chicago Hi story

22 3

Succor for th e Homele ss

Chicago Historical Soci ety

On the left, a Re l ief and Aid Society sign posted on the d esolate ruin of the Court House. It lists depots where food and c lothing were available (detail of the photograph on page 208).

is not a donor in all the broad land who would not, had he thought it necessary, have stipulated in advance that no part of it [ the relief fund] should be placed in the hands of the Chicago Board of Aldermen ... " Honest members of the Board, the editorial continued, "know that the Board, as a whole, is not honest in any sense of the word, and would waste, squander, and appropriate for their personal gain this special and sacred fund, even if the streets were thronged with starving people."

So it was that on Friday, three days after the fire, Mayor Mason proclaimed the Chicago Relief and Aid Society responsible for helping the dispossessed people of Chicago. This Society, chartered in 1857, was well-established as the foremost service organization in the city, and Chicagoans generally agreed that with it lay the best hope of aiding the fire's victims. Just two days later, on October 15, officers of the Society, Chicago's shrewd and successful businessmen, informed the Associated Press that the system for providing aid to the sufferers had been "perfected."

224

Chicago History

And indeed it must have been. Three New York volunteers later sent to Chicago to evaluate the relief program expressed a typical opinion of the Society's work: "There seems to be no reasonable ground for withholding entire confidence in the wisdom of [the Relief and Aid Society's] plans, or the integrity of their execution," they wrote. "It does not seem possible that any other agency could so well perform these duties ... " As the General Relief Committee before it had done, the Relief and Aid Society divided its forces into several committees, but, unlike the former group, the Society, always businesslike and efficient, streamlined its committee operations and placed in charge of the entire program an Executive Committee, consisting of the Society's directors and the committee chairmen, who audited the records of all transactions and contributions. Executive Committee members labored long hours at relief headquarters throughout the winter of 1871-72, all of them without pay.

The Society immediately established its headquarters at Standard Hall, Thirteenth Street and Michigan Avenue in the South Division, a roomier structure than the Congregational Church. The Executive Committee divided the city into five approximately equal districts, each with a superintendent to control the district's supply depot (later they established a sixth district to cover those areas of Cook County outside the city limits where victims of the fire had fled).

Each district superintendent employed some ninety men and women to help with the distribution of supplies, to serve as "visitors," much like today's welfare caseworkers, to confirm the legitimacy of relief applications, and to seek out the needy who had failed to apply for aid. A significant part of the contributions sent to Chicago, as a result, was paid out in wages to relief personnel, almost one thousand dollars just in the week of November 18, 1871, when the payroll listed 643 employees.

At the outset, the officers of the Society resolved to keep meticulous records of the relief

Leslie's, Chicago Histor!cal Society

l

program. The name of each aid rec1p1ent was entered in a master ledger, with a complete history of the aid given. To relief supplies were given to any family with other means of support, nor to any applicants who seemed reluctant to go to work. In fact, Society Superintendent 0. C. Gibbs quite bluntly announced on October 24 that anyone shirking work would have to leave the city. Officials even refused aid on the grounds that the applicant had friends who could help him; relief supplies were intended for the utterly helpless, of which there were thousands.

Within a few days of "perfecting" its procedure, the Society was operating the relief machinery at a brisk clip. On October 18, a Tribune writer reported that Plymouth Church had processed thirty-five hundred applicants that day, and he described the Morgan Street depot, Morgan and Indiana Avenues, as "shipshape." By November 25, just a month and a half after the fire, 23,054 people had received food and other relief supplies, and an equal number had been provided with relief shelter.

Long-Term Aid from around the T'Vorld The first month's emergency had been successfully met, but Chicago still needed help to cope with long-term needs. Fortunately, the rest

The Relief and Aid Society's Executive Committee in an after midnight meeting. The committee members, Chicago's leading businessmen , served without pay throughout the winter that followed the fire.

of the world did not forget the stricken city after the first enthusiastic burst of charitable zeal.

Of the hundreds of American communities whose citizens labored over a long period on behalf of destitute Chicagoans, Newark, New Jersey, then a city of some one hundred thousand people, was one of the busiest, and in many ways typifies the continuing relief effort outside Chicago. Just hours after the fire was extinguished, Mayor F. W. Ricord had taken the first steps toward organizing a relief program. All across the city, men and women of all classes made donations ranging from a dollar or two up; many more went to their wardrobes and pantries and sent frying pans, shirts, shoes, hats, coats, tinware, potatoes, onions, dried mackerel, soap, ham, flour, blankets, yard goods, bread, and candles. They were encouraged to contribute by ewark's Quick Dispatch Express Company, which sent a four-horse wagon through the city's residential neighborhoods to collect donations.

Regular meetings of the Newark relief committee were held in subsequent weeks; subcomChicago History

225

Succor for the Homeless

mittees tackled their various responsibilities with breathless zeal; fund-raising activities were plotted. The "Musical Entertainments Committee" staged a "Grand Concert" in Klotz Hall, featuring the Harmonic, Mendelssohn, and Orpheus Societies. The brothers Klotz, owners of the hall, charged no rent for the evening, and the concert netted $245.45 for Chicago's sufferers.

Newark relief volunteers continued to meet throughout the fall, until they considered their work completed. By the final accounting, they had raised a total of almost seventy thousand dollars, including an estimated twenty thousand dollars in food, clothing, and other "contributions in kind." or did people abroad ignore Chicago's plight. Fully one-fifth of the funds collected for Chicago-nearly one million dollars-came from foreign lands. Germans donated $81 ,393.29. Russians in St. Petersburg contributed $ 145.91 through the American legation there, and the Countess of Edla, in Lisbon, sent the equivalent of $317.28. Money poured in from South America, where Peruvians collected over $ro,ooo for the fire's victims, Brazilians nearly $11,000. Residents of Cuba sent $16,393.37.

From China came $2,897.70, from India $2,325.32. Canada donated a total of $171,312.75; Hawaii sent $1,635. Cash contributions in England totalled $435,023.18. Englishmen also turned to the more spiritual needs of the ravaged city, supplying some eight thousand volumes for a new Chicago Public Library.

Author Thomas Hughes organized the collection; Queen Victoria, Gladstone, Disraeli, Tennyson, Darwin, and other notables joined in.

Because contributions were often directed to organizations and individuals outside the Relief and Aid Society, a full tabulation of all money and supplies sent to Chicago is impossible to determine. There is no way to establish, for instance, the number of donors who followed the lead of the Grand Duke Alexis of Russia and Prince Iwakura of Japan, who each sent $5,000 226

Chi cago Hi st ory

to Tribune publisher Joseph Medill, to be distributed as he saw fit. National fraternal organizations and trade unions raised large sums for their own relief programs. Artists in Paris and Dusseldorf contributed works of art to an auction for the benefit of Chicago's des ti tu te artists.

But the Relief and Aid Society, according to its carefully audited report, received just under five million dollars in cash and supplies between October 15, 1871, and April 30, 1874.

Those contributions were well spent.

Providing Jor Basic Needs Supplies sent from other communities did not last long in the face of the needs of the great numbers of people they were meant to help, but as the grocery business resumed in Chicago the Society was able to purchase needed staples through normal channels. These purchases accounted for a significant portion of the relief fund; a bill for groceries bought from just one firm, Best and Dickinson of 212 South Water Street, during the week ending February 2, 1872, amounted to nearly four hundred dollars.

Food supplies were sorted into weekly ration packages that included, for a family of five, three pounds of pork, six pounds of dried beef, three pounds of fresh beef, fourteen pounds of flour, and various fixed amounts of potatoes, tea, sugar, rice or beans, and dried apples.

Curiously, these rations provided a daily intake of roughly nine hundred calories-an amount that corresponds precisely to modern standards of m.inimal daily calorie requirements (a Metrecal diet, for instance, provides nine hundred calorics per day).

To supply these rations, the Society had to keep on hand no less than 6,250 bushels of potatoes per week, 30 tons of pork, 60 tons of dried beef, 140 tons of flour, 30 tons of fresh beef, 35,000 pounds of beans, and 30,000 pounds of dried apples.

Most of the clothing sent to Chicago from other communities was of summer weight fabric, hardly adequate for the coming winter. In addi-

Chicago Hi storical Soc ie ty

tion, American markets could not on short notice supply enough clothing to replace that which was destroyed in the fire, so, to meet the critical clothing needs of the city, the Society sought out fabric supplies in England as well as in the United States. Blankets also had to be purchased in England.

Women's organizations and church groups took charge of the fabric when it reached Chicago, employing many destitute women in makeshift clothing and bedding factories set up in church basements and public halls. The finished products were turned over to the Relief and Aid Society for distribution among the needy.

Housing-perhaps the most pressing problem -was the responsibility of the Society's Shelter Committee, whose members resolved to build small houses for as many families as possible, especially for those who owned their own property or were leasing the land where they had lived. These "relief houses" were delivered unassembled to approved applicants in packages containing lumber, an iron chimney, two doors, three windows, nails, and a movable partition.

When the cost of a stove, utensils, chairs, a table and bedstead, bedding, and crockery was added, the market value of a relief house reached $125.

New York householders donating clothing and supplies for Chicago's homeless. James Fisk Jr., socialite and railroad speculator, volunteers as wagon man.

The committee purchased these items wherever they were available-the Wisconsin State Prison Shop was one of its sources, supplying ninety-two dozen chairs in J anuary, 1872, for $460-and although the Society c harged no rent ei thcr for the houses or for the furniture, the committee estimated that a fair rent would be ten dollars per month. The committee provided 7,893 of these dwellings, housing a total of 35,000 people-roughly half the population of present-day Evanston.

Most of those who received building materials for relief houses put them together themselves, but the cottages were assembled for single women, the sick, and the aged. Fuel was supplied, too, through generous agreements with the Wilmington Coal Company, which worked mines in Will and LaSalle counties in Illinois, and with the Chicago and Alton and the Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy railroads, which carried the coal to Chicag,o free of charge, until victims of the fire began to earn wages again and could pay delivery charges.

Chicago History

227

Succor for the Homeless

The Society, ever on guard against fraud, expected all applications for relief housing to be thoroughly investigated by district visitors, and occasionally these investigations exposed dishonest applications. Even when Chicago Public Works Commissioner Redmond Prindiville recommended that the Society provide housing for one Mrs. Fitzgerald, claiming that "it would be charity well bestowed," a visitor was dispatched to investigate. What he uncovered was startling.

Mrs. Fitzgerald's landlord, snorting in disgust, told the visitor that Mrs. Fitzgerald's "daughter's husband is now in jail for being drunk and disorderly. Both Mrs. Fitzgerald and her daughter are drunken prostitutes. Men frequently stay with them all night ... Mrs. Fitzgerald had in the fall t\vo young men at the house-claimed to be her sons ... Sheriff came for them in Oct. or Nov. and I have not seen them since-" "Not," the visitor concluded after his interview with the landlord, "the class of sufferers that I recommend."

To provide for those people who neither owned nor leased land on which they could

Speci f ications included in Shelter Committee orders to lumberyards for a one-room relief house.

A lmost eight thousand of these houses were put up.

Chicago Historical Society, Manusc ript Collection

SHELTER COMMITTEE. D imcn~i.on,.

••"'••I

Materin.l.

,. _,,._. ::, 1 , ..

} ::::::,~

• (1. IJ.< ,.-r1 •

1•- f:

U II.

h, .. r•11,tl rc,mr Tv. <l \\·1o<lm11 , ~nt rru 110:"

l'>o,i,rTrlm,1111...-:11111-t 11\1 Sall

:. It• ?J. '.\.1.ll io

build new houses, the Shelter Committee put up four barracks in the city, each housing 1,250 persons. The barracks-not to be confused with the crude structures thrown up by the General Relief Committee-were supervised by both police and health officials, and officers of the Society were quite sure that the residents' "moral and sanitary condition was unquestionably better than that which had heretofore obtained in that class."

Measures against Disease Another critical problem was the threat of disease. The fire had crippled the medical profession in Chicago. Two hundred physicians, nearly a third of the 649 doctors practicing in Chicago before the fire, had lost their homes and their offices, their books, records, instruments,· and supplies. Seven hospitals, three medical colleges, a college of pharmacy, and over one hundred drug outlets were put out of operation. Of particular concern was smallpox, which had broken out in cities all across the United States that year. Officials feared that in beleaguered Chicago the disease would flare up uncontrolled.

A massive and immediate vaccination program was an obvious necessity, but to accomplish it the Society's medical officers had to counter the fear of inoculation so prevalent in those times.

They hit upon an ingenious solution: with thousands of people in desperate need of supplies, the Society simply ordered that no applicants be granted aid of any kind unless they had been vaccinated, at the Society's expense if necessary.

Some sixty-four thousand Chicagoans received shots as a result. Smallpox appeared only rarely in the city during that winter, and relief officials claimed that most cases reported here had been contracted outside Chicago.

Typhoid broke out in crowded neighborhoods after the fire, but medical officers of the Relief and Aid Society worked closely with the Shelter Committee to isolate the disease, and with the coming of cold weather typhoid disappeared.

The Society's Committee on Sick, Sanitary,

GOODRICH'S

STEAM BOAT LANDING ,..

,"'~ Rac.ine. MILWAUKEE. Pt.Washington.SHEBOYGAN. Fond du Lac. MANITOWOC, r~R1iER 5,Kewaunee. Ahne pee, f!_5 tR L£K ,MENOMINEE.Sturgc ln Bay.Oconto, Peshtego,

GHEEN BA..Y

th:.

GRAND1 HAVEN,c;~•::p1D5• MUSK[GON.~~~~'"MANISTEE sai;;;~f0:cST JOSEPH, BENTON HARBOUR.·

Chicago Historical Soci ety

and Hospital measures, headed by Dr. Hosmer Allen Johnson, used the same district organization that had been established for the distribution of food and supplies for providing general medical care. Each district employed a medical superintendent and visiting physicians, who examined and treated approved applicants.

Prescriptions were issued and charged to the Society. Visiting physicians also sought out cases of unreported medical need.

Medical dispensaries where the sick were treated and prescriptions filled were established at convenient locations throughout the city, one in the North Division, three in the West, and two in the South. For patients who were too sick to remain at home, the Society provided hospital accommodations, admitting patients on its own account and paying for surgery, nursing, medication, food, and general care. St. Luke's, Hahncmann, Mercy, and County hospitals had survived the fire; the Women's and Children's Hospital, formerly on North State Street, reopened at 598 (now 1651 ) West Adams, and the Chicago Eye and Ear Infirmary, its quarters on Pearson Street destroyed, moved to 579 (now

Mundane as they are, chairs were urgently needed after the fire, since daily activities like eating, sewing, and desk work depend upon them. The Relief and Aid Society purchased chairs throughout the country as part of the furnishing for relief houses.

1628) West Adams. The Society also built hospitals in connection with the relief barracks in the West and North Divisions.

Dr. Johnson's committee was responsible, too, for approving the issue of the city's limited medical supplies to these hospitals, and it was his staff that advised the Shelter Committee on maintaining proper sanitary conditions in the Society's barracks. During the first two months after the fire, only one of the 5,000 barracks residents died. Before it had concluded its work, the committee had provided medical care for just under one hundred thousand people.

Jobs, not Alms Equally as important as providing medical care, in the eyes of relief officials, was finding jobs for the unemployed. There was a city to rebuild, and in any case the officers of the Society did not intend their organization to be a Chicago History

229

Succor for the Homeless

refuge for the shiftless. On the contrary, they hoped that by "rendering timely counsel and assistance to deserving but indigent persons" they might "place them above the necessity of aid." They bluntly announced that they would "discriminate in favor of those in whom habits of temperance, industry, and thrift, give promise of permanent benefit from the aid furnished."

That ¡'those who manifest a purpose to depend upon alms rather than their own exertions for support" would not be considered proper subjects for relief was a matter of organizational policy.

On October 16, manufacturer athaniel Fairbank was named chairman of the Society's Committee on Employment. The same day he and his staff began operations in a temporary building amidst the rubble in the Court House yard. The Committee served two main purposes. It supplied funds to skilled craftsmen who had lost their tools in the fire so they might reestablish themselves in business, and it served as a labor exchange for the unskilled, where businessmen could find able-bodied men to haul building supplies and clear away the rubble that covered the city. The committee did not find jobs for women, but referred them to the various women's organizations that were hiring hundreds of destitute women as seamstresses.

The Committee on Employment also served as a convenient check on the intentions of relief applicants. When an able-bodied man appeared at a district depot to get food or supplies, he was given, along with provisions, a ticket to take to the employment bureau. If the applicant then went to employment headquarters and accepted a job, he turned in his ticket, which the employment bureau then returned to the supply depot.

This informed the depot superintendent that the applicant did intend to provide for himself. Until the ticket was returned to the depot, the superintendent refused any additional applicat ions for food and supplies. Whenever this hardnosed policy was challenged, Society Superintendent Gibbs would quote St. Paul: "If any 230

Ch icago History

man among you will not work, neither let him eat." Before the employment bureau closed on May 1, 1873, it had returned 20,232 men to work.

Charles Goodrich Hammond, a railroad executive, took charge of arranging transportation for those victims of the fire who wanted to leave Chicago, including, undoubtedly, not a few applicants for relief who refused to work. At first, railroad companies honored all passes issued by the Society. Later, Hammond's committee recommended applicants to the railroads, and eventually, as money began to circulate, emigrants were required to pay half fare. By 1873 emigration had stopped, except in the cases of those for whom the Committee on Employment Ind found jobs in the rural areas outside Chicago.

The Special Relief Fund "Having lost in the great fire of Chicago all my property, being deprived of my business this winter, having to support my mother 74 years old, I am in the cruel necessity to apply at the special relief society .. . At the time of the fire I occupied a four stories house No. 26 East \Vashington Street, where I was carrying a good business in flowers, feathers, laces which I imported myself directly from France ... Beside my mother, I have also a sister who was helping me in my business and who is actually, in consequence of my misfortune, without means of assistance. I would like to start again in business but I need some help in money for that purpose ... " The Relief and Aid Society, despite its hardline stand against shiftless dependence upon alms and its insistence that the destitute should rise to meet adversity, recognized the embarrassment that the fire caused many ¡'gentlefolk" like Mlle. Poncelet, author of the letter above .

For these, and for people who were too old or too sick to stand in line at supply depots, the Special Relief Committee was formed.

From its headquarters in the Church of the

Messiah, Wabash Avenue and Hubbard Court (now Balbo Drive) just south of the burned district, the Special Relief Committee provided money with which formerly self-sufficient persons like Mlle. Poncelet could reestablish themselves. Engineers' tools, professional books, and surgical instruments were all purchased with special relief funds. In some cases, the committee provided the money and furniture to open boardinghouses, and for Miss Mary Lawson of 75 Hubbard Court it even purchased an artificial leg.

In particular, the committee persuaded sewing machine companies to sell machines to destitute women at a forty per cent discount. The committee also paid a part of the cost, so that an impoverished woman could buy a new sewing machine for only $22. If the applicant was utterly destitute, the Society paid the entire cost.

The Singer, Wheeler and Wilson, and Howe companies participated in this plan; by a later agreement, the firms gave a fifty per cent discount if the committee advanced the other fifty per cent in cash. Singer provided a total of 2,427 machines, Wheeler and Wilson 235, and Howe 127. In all, the committee spent $437,458.09 on 9,962 approved applications.

Two carpenters who were put to work rebuilding Chicago by the Relief and Aid Society. In many cases the Society replaced for artisans the expensive tools of their trade without which most of them would have been forced onto the dole.

* *

*

During the nineteen months of the fire relief program, the Society provided assistance to a total of 156,968 persons. I ts successes in relieving these hapless victims of the Great Fire can be traced chiefly to the responsible leadership of the Relief and Aid Society and to the hundreds of thousands of people around the world who, suddenly confronted with disaster, rose unhesitatingly to meet the needs of its victims. Certainly attorney Edwin C. Larned, chairman of the Special Relief Committee, spoke for many of them when he wrote, "No work . . . has ever given me so unalloyed and enduring satisfaction; and the recollection of the time which I have devoted to aid in relieving the sufferers by this disastrous fire will ever be cherished . . . as among the most precious memories of my life."

Chicago History

231

A Mark of English Sympathy

BY GEORGE M. BISHOP, JR.

Chicago recognized English novelist Thomas Hughes) author of TOM BROWN'S SCHOOL DA vsJ as the a Father of the Chicago Public Library)) because of his efforts in England to collect a new library for the burned out city) but Chicago has neglected to pay one small debt that she still owes him. are familiar with the story of how after the Great Fire Queen Victoria herself sent books to help start the Chicago Public Library. It is true that she did, but she was only one of hundreds of English people who gave Chicago its library. There still exists a small and carefully guarded collection of books at the library bearing printed bookplates, one of which reads, "Presented to Chicago towards the formation of a Free Public Library after the Great Fire of r 87 r, as a Mark of English Sympathy, by [and handwritten] Her Majesty the Queen Victoria." Certainly fine provenance for public library books!

Thomas Hughes, eminent English writer and social reformer, though he did not originate the idea, was the most influential person behind the plan to provide a new library for fire-stricken Chicago. Hughes needed no prompting toward high-minded acts. He was widely known and respected as a reformer of English workingmen's education. He promulgated the "muscular Christianity" of his time, and his book, Manliness of Christ, was widely read. But he was best known around the world for his convincing story of 1859 about a pure, manly, robust, and cheerful little fellow at Rugby School, a novel that he called Tom Brown's School Days. It became the biggest best seller in the English-speaking world since Uncle Tom's Cabin. As Mrs. MANY CHICAGOANS

Professor George M. Bishop, Jr., is head of the Department of Finance, College of Business Administration, Northern Illinois University.

232

Chicago History

Thomas Hughes, author of Tom Brown's School Days, repaid Chicago's hospitality to him by organizing the English donation of the Chicago Public library.

Stowe's novel of 1852 had taught the world abolitionism, Hughes's taught it the ideals of Victorian middle class education. One Chicagoan of the time compared the good effects of Hughes's book on American education to the influence of Horace Mann!

At the time of the fire Chicago was fresh on Hughes's mind for he had visited the city in September, 1870, just a year before, and had been extremely impressed by some of the people he met there. He wrote from Chicago in 1870: "Robert Lincoln (Abe's son) and a lot of his

friends are our entertainers to-day ... I have never had a more hearty greeting and kinder words and looks than amongst these youngsters ... this kind of young Americans ... is so transparently sincere that you can come quite square with him before you have known him an hour."

By Hughes's own account it was his debt to Chicago's hospitality that prompted him to organize the movement to give the burned city a public library. That he was able to convince the literatti of his day to take seriously his idea of providing the burned down boom town of the West with a complete library was evidence of the moral influence he had.

Putting his idea into effect, he sent a circular that was subscribed by a host of eminent sponsors headed by the Queen herself to publishers, universities, learned societies, authors, and statesmen. The circular outlined a plan not merely of sending random books to Chicago, but of presenting the city with an entire and balanced library, "a complete collection of modern works in all departments of literature-general and professional." The Queen started the ball rolling by sending an inscribed copy of The Early rears of the Prince Consort. Thomas Carlyle responded to Hughes's circular with the objection that the "pick and take" character of the appeal would put off donors, who would be inclined to think that beggars ought not be choosers. But the great historian readily agreed to give autographed copies of each of his own works.

The plan caught on and some eight to ten thousand volumes were sent to Chicago. These included the 2,800 volume set of English Patent Reports, a very valuable compilation that replaced the famous set that had burned at the Chicago Library Association.

Confused Beginnings ot long after the founding of the library, the facts of its origins became obscured in the public mind. On August 8, 1877, only five years after the library opened, the Chicago Tribune, adding to the confusion of facts, published a humorous

Christ Church at Rugby, Tennessee, the colony founded in 1880 by Thomas Hughes to give the younger sons of English gentry a start in America .

piece that pretended to be an interview with Thomas Hoyne, who managed the library after its creation. Hoyne, on promises that the story would not be published in Chicago, described how after the fire Mayor Medill was extremely perplexed with what to do with the proferred English gift of ten thousand volumes that was meant to "reestablish" the Chicago Public Library. Mayor Medill, "an exact man," was supposedly on the point of not accepting the gift, since no official public library had ever existed in Chicago. However, as the newspaper story goes, Hoyne persuaded him to create one so that he could accept the books legitimately.

Overnight a library charter was rushed through the legislature at Springfield and the Chicago Public Library came into existence. This newspaper story was fictitious in most of its particulars, but it irritated those Chicagoans who had actually participated in the founding of the library because it made a mockery of a heroic project. It did however point up some of the bizarre events of 1872.

For one thing, Chicago's embarrassment was not at never having had a public library to reChicago History 233

Engli sh Sympathy

place, but rather over which of the pre-fire libraries was to be reestablished as the "free library" specified on the English bookplates.

Hughes himself probably had in mind the thirty-thousand-volume library of the Chicago Library Association that he had seen on his visit to Chicago in 1870. The Chicago Library Association had burned as had the large collection of books and pamphlets at the Chicago Historical Society. A small library at the YMCA had also burned, as well as various scientific, law, and private libraries.

However, what was confusing (and some thought deliberately so) was the existence of a library on South Michigan Avenue that did not burn, but did carry the name "Michigan Avenue Free Library." It was a small and recently founded Baptist institution, housed in a church. The director of this library, seizing the main chance to fill his shelves, had the nerve to take an advertisement in the Tribune telling citizens of the unburned districts in possession of books they had withdrawn from destroyed libraries to take them back to the Michigan Avenue Free Library. The members of the burned out Chicago Library Association, which had the most to lose, were horrified at such audacity and quickly quashed the ambitious plan. Next, the undaunted director on the Avenue got word around in England that the Michigan Avenue Free Library, as was evident by its name, was in fact the one that Hughes was striving to reestablish, and for a while South Michigan Avenue managed to divert to its shelves books from England that were meant for the greater undertaking of the new Chicago Free Library. (Later, to compound these sins in the eyes of many, the entire collection on South Michigan was sold - donated books includedas a private collection.) Eventually, of course, the true "Free Public Library" of Chicago was established, and the "Hughes Collection," all plated and inscribed by such donors as Darwin, Gladstone, Browning, Tennyson, and Ruskin, was put into circulation in Chicago. These 234

Ch icago History

books, serving the purpose for which they were given, were avidly read by Chicagoans, who soon wore them out. By 1923, the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the library, only a handful of the original plated books survived.

Tom Brown in America Thomas Hughes's connection with Chicago did not cease with the establishment of the library. He came to America again in 1880 to dedicate another project that was very close to his heart, a communal colony in eastern Tennessee for the younger sons of the English upper classes. He named it Rugby after his (and Tom Brown's) old school. These young men, all with Tom Brown public school backgrounds, would inherit no money or estate and were severely limited by the caste rules of Victorian England that permitted a gentleman to seek a living only in a military, law, or clerical career. These professions were greatly overcrowded in the nineteenth century, and it was Hughes's plan Lo settle his Tom Browns on American soil where, free from the class limitations of old England, they might become a class of cultured yeomen owning and working their own land, performing light industry, pursuing the rugged outdoor life and sports of their upbringing. American supporters of the plan, attracted by Hughes's leadership, included Charles Dana, Julia Ward Howe, Theodore Roosevelt, and Hughes's old friend, James Russell Lowell. Fully a thousand young Englishmen came to Rugby in Tennessee at one time or another. "Every public school from Eton to vVestminster, from Clifton to Bedford, from Marlborough to Wellington" was represented. The settlement with its Episcopal church, its little inn named for Chaucer's Tabard Inn, and its cluster of English cottages subsisted through the eighties and nineties, not flourishing, but not languishing. Various setbacks retarded its growth. An outbreak of typhoid fever in 1881 made suspect the town's claim to being a health resort. The inn burned several times, and sheer lack of agricultural and

Auth or's Collecti on

Chicago Public's sister library at Rugby, Tennessee

business skills (not taught at Oxford or Cambridge) led to financial failures. Then Hughes himself died at Brighton, England, in 1896, having spent $250,000 of his own fortune on behalf of Rugby, but never doubting the eventual success of the colony. Without Hughes's encouragement and support, the young Rugbeans slowly disbanded and went off to the large American cities where they found better employment for their upper-class educations.

The Unfinished Story Hughes's relations with Chicago were still not ended. After the dedication of his colony at Rugby in 1880, he had come to Chicago to visit his old friends of r 870. He was feted as the "Father of the Chicago Public Library" by the leaders of Chicago, and when they heard his plans for establishing a library for his colony by donations, as he had done for Chicago, contributions were heartily promised, and a committee consisting of Messrs. F. W. Poole, E.G. Mason, and Norman Williams was appointed to find ways and means to execute the promise. At this point, just where Hughes's story should have balanced out, it went awry. Hughes's beloved Rugby, Tennessee, did get a library, but Chicago, "bound by a double claim against it, gave nothing." In the December 14, 1890, issue of the Tribune a letter to the editor from Rugby reminded Chicago that her promise to contribute to the Rugby library was never kept, and that "an empty, dilapidated bookcase has been placed in the library at Rugby marked 'Chi cago's contribution.' Chicago's fair name is

tarnis hed at Rugby ... Shall Chicago forever bear the ignominious epithet of ingrate? Think about these things, gentlemen; this is Christmas time."

A reply from the editor appeared a few days later explaining that the promise had been made to Hughes by Thomas Hoyne in behalf of the Public Library Board, but that before Hoyne could get the project started he was killed in a train wreck. The Tribune editor continued: It is an unfortunate affair, but the way to get out of it is to get out. It is not too late to make a money contribution to Rugby for the purchase of books sufficient to fill the empty case. Mr. Mason is the president of the Historical Society, Mr. Williams is a trustee of the John Crerar Library, and Dr. Poole is Librarian of the Newberry Library. They are competent to suggest ways and means for keeping the promise, and Chicago should be willing to contribute the small amount necessary. Let the case be filled without further delay, and let the promise be redeemed.

It is now r 97 1, and "that promise remains a promise still. " We ask the same question posed by the writer of the letter to the editor of the Tribune eighty years ago: "Shall Chicago forever bear the ignominious epithet of ingrate?"

EDITOR'S NOTE: Rugby, Tennessee has been made a state historical site by Tennessee. Services are held each Sunday at Christ Church during the su mmer, and the Rugby Public Library, that forgotten little sister of the Chicago Public Library, still serves a small public and occasional visiting scholars who want to know more about the Rugby in America.

Chicago History

235

"Grander and Statelier than Ever ... "

BY HERMAN KOGAN

Chicago's recovery from the Great Fire was as spectacular as the fire itself.

Tuesday morning, October ro, Chicago stared bleakly at the devastation wrought by The Great Fire.

Gone were some two thousand acres of property, nearly four square miles that had been crammed with eighteen thousand homes, stores, offices, churches, hotels, schools, factories, railroad depots, theaters, government buildings.

The losses came to two hundred million dollars, less than half of it covered by insurance. Here and there in the burned-out area stood a smudged dwelling and surrounding it were gnarled girders, ashes, blackened stone, heaps of bricks, and cornices; in the entire business district the sole survivors of note were the partlyfinished Nixon Building at Monroe and LaSalle -later touted, on completion, as "Chicago's First Fireproof Building" -and the Lind Block at Market (now Wacker) and Randolph. Ironically, the O'Leary house escaped, but the land around it had been scorched bare. The known dead totaled 250, the unknown as many or far more; one hundred thousand were homeless, thousands depressed and disheartened.

Throughout the land sounded laments from the sympathetic, and cruel cries of exultation from civic rivals. In a poem epitomizing the grief and pessimism, John Greenleaf Whittier droned, "Men clasped each other's hands and said, 'The City of the West is dead!' " A New Orleans newspaper predicted: "Chicago will be like the Carthage of old! I ts glory will be of the past, not of the present, while its hopes, once so bright and cloudless, will be to the end marred ON THAT DREAD AND DREARY

Herman Kogan is editor of the Chicago Sun-Times' s Showcase magazine, and co-author with Robert Cromie of the book The Great Fire: Chicago 1871, to be published this October.

236

Chicago History

and blackened by the smoke of its fiery fate."

And a Rev. Granville Moody of Cincinnati expressed sentiments echoed by moralists everywhere: "It is retributive judgment on a city that has shown such devotion in its worship of the Golden Calf."

Yet even before the flames had been quelled or had mercifully burned themselves out and while wisps of acrid smoke filtered through the stricken city, there were counter-cries of optimism.

Classic in Chicago history is the account of the meeting on October g between John Stephen Wright and D. H. Horton, who had published many of Wright's books in praise of the city and its promise for the future. Wright was shuffling through the ashes and ruins at Wabash and Congress when Horton asked him, "Well, Wright, what do you think now of the future of Chicago?" Wright's reply: "I will tell you what it is.

Chicago will have more men, more money, more business within five years than she would have had without the fire." And on that very Wednesday Joseph Medill issued his call to recovery with a front page editorial in his Tribune: CHEER UP! In the midst of a calamity without parallel in the world's history, looking upon the ashes of thirty years' accumulations, the people of this once beautiful city have resolved that CHICAGO SHALL RISE AGAIN! George Frederick Root, who had already composed two songs about the holocaust-"Lost and Saved!" and "Passing Through the Fire !"-now dashed off another that teemed with hope and concluded: Our city shall rise!

Yes, she shall rise !

Queen of the West once more!

Chicago's Boomers and Boosters To the East Coast sped William Lloyd "Deacon" Bross, part-owner of the Tribune and former Illinois lieutenant-governor and prime among the city's boomers and boosters. He gave dramatic interviews to reporters about the fire and spoke everywhere-to bankers, financiers and jndustrialists, to crowds of the curious and venturesome. His fierce black beard atremble, his dark eyes ablaze, he cried, "Go to Chicago now!

Young men, hurry there! Old men, send your sons! Women, send your husbands! You will never again have such a chance to make money!" The Great Fire, he intoned, had leveled social and economic distinctions, had made everyone equal in a renewed race for riches. "Now is the time to strike! A delay of a year or two will give an immense advantage to those who start at once." Al though his home on Michigan Avenue's Terrace Row had been demolished and thieves had stolen much of his property from the burning dwelling, Bross was buoyantly confident about the city's future: "I tell you that within five years Chicago's business houses will be rebuilt, and by I goo the new Chicago will boast a population of a million souls. You ask me why?

Because I know the Northwest and the vast resources of the broad acres. I know that the location of Chicago makes her the center of this wealthy region and the market for all its products ... What Chicago has been in the past, she must become in the future-and a hundredfold more. She has only to wait a few short years for the sure development of her manifest destiny!"

The Rev. Robert Collyer, in his sermon the first Sunday after the fire to his flock in his burned-out Unity Church on Dearborn, sounded a similar note: "We have not lost, first, our geography. Nature called the lakes, the forests, the prairies together in convention long before we were born, and they decided that on this spot a great city should be built!" And a pioneer Chicago banker, Henry Greenebaum, devised a sales letter dispatched to Eastern and European

Chi cago H istorical Society

William "Deacon" Bross, ardent Chicago booster, prophesying a greater future than ever for the burned city, proclaimed throughout the East, "Go to Chicago now! Young men, hurry there! Old men, send your sons! Women, send your husbands! You will never again have such a chance to make money!" Bross insisted that the fire had leveled social distinctions and had created vast opportunities for all.

investment bankers in which he emphasized Chicago's position as the focal point of the nation's commerce and stressed opportunities for profitable investments in a city that, for all its recent misfortune, had prospects for a recovery as swift as its growth had been in the decade before the Great Fire.

Reflections of boosterism were everywhere in the city. In the days immediately following the fire hundreds of cheering notices appeared in the newspapers: "We Still Live!" and "Keep the Ball Rolling!" and "Resumed Business!" Imbedded forever in Chicago lore as examples of the prevailing spirit among many are two fellows known only as Shock and Bigford, who became officially the first merchants to set up shop in the burned sector with an old mahogany sideboard on Dearborn Street across from the destroyed postoffice where they sold, at what they advertised as "Old Prices," cigars, tobacco, Chicago History

237

"Grander and Statelier .. "

grapes, apples, and cider; and two house and sign painters named Moore and Goes who informed their customers, "Removed to 1 1 1 Desplaines St. Capital, $000.000.30;" and that enterprising real estate agent, William D. Kerfoot, who gathered friends and colleagues on that very Monday while parts of the city were still ablaze and clapped together on Washington, between Dearborn and Clark, a wooden shanty he called "Kerfoot's Block" whose crudely lettered sign above the entrance bore words typifying the tone of resurgence: "\i\T. D. Kerfoot. All Gone but Wife, Children and ENERGY."

Chicago Begins to Rebuild Foremost among those who set about to rebuild were the managers of the Chamber of Commerce, whose headquarters at Washington and La Salle had been demolished. They were considerably spurred by the Board of Trade, which had occupied the second floor; its members met as the fire ebbed and passed a resolution pledging compliance with its original lease and urging immediate reconstruction "as we wish to reoccupy the building at the earliest possible day." The rubble was quickly cleared, a cornerstone was laid that November 6 and within a month bricklayers were hard at work on a new structure. Major merchants were especially assiduous. They were led by Marshall Field and Le,¡i Z. Leiter, whose splendid establishment at State and Washington, which they had rented from Potter Palmer for $50,000 a year, had been utterly destroyed. They set up temporary quarters in a horse-car barn at State and Twentieth and set in motion plans for a new wholesale building at Madison and Market, completed within a hundred days, and a new retail store on the previous site. John V. Farwell shifted his wholesale house from 106-112 Wabash to Franklin and Monroe, and the Mandel brothers, Leon, Emanuel and Simon, set up their store at Michigan and Twenty-second . Banks and commercial houses recovered in short order. Within forty-eight hours after the fire's end, twelve of 238

Chicago History

the twenty-nine burned-out banks had established makeshift quarters; before the week was out these were ready to pay depositors fifteen per cent, and in four days more all stood prepared to make unconditional payments.

A month after the Great Fire, Joseph Mcdill was elected mayor on the Union-Fireproof ticket and in his inaugural address he vowed action that would make another such catastrophe impossible. In subsequent weeks, ordinances were passed calling for greater use of such fire-resistant materials as brick, stone, and iron, an improved water supply system, a larger fire-fighting force, limits on frame structures, and prohibitions against false fronts.

But as building continued at a feverish ratein the South Division alone 212 stone and brick edifices were going up in the six weeks after the conflagration-many of the ordinances specifying safety regulations were dc,¡iously defied. Too many contractors sidestepped technicalities, too many advertised all-brick buildings-" fireproof" was a flagrantly misused word of the period-that were actually made of wood except for exterior walls of stone. Li ttlc action was taken against such transgressors because the need for housing was so intense and the city lacked sufficiently trained inspectors to root out the ordinance violators. Medill warned frequcnlly of the possibility of another tragedy, and sought valiantly but in vain to punish major wrongdoers; generally, his words were not heeded and construction-bad, mediocre, and good-continued swiftly. "There are no ruins left," exulted the Times early in 1872, "save an arch in Dearborn Street standing like that of Titus in Rome," and a British visitor that summer noted, "Every hour of every working day there is built a brick, stone or iron warehouse."

The Big Four Reestablished That visitor might well have said the same of office buildings, theaters, cottages and hotels. In the latter category, plans for rebuilding were set afoot very early in the post-fire months, es-

'-)'f'Jtl ( 'IOil 11111 IIIVATOW, â&#x20AC;˘'

./i

pecially in the case of three of the Big Four-the Sherman, the Tremont and the Grand Pacific.

All were up again early in 1873, the first again the domicile and gathering place for politicians, the second advertised as "The Palace Hotel of America" and the third notable not only for its luxurious accommodations but for instituting Friday promenade concerts and the custom of having dainty vases of fresh flowers on every dining room table. The biggest of the Big Four took more time. Potter Palmer's State Street property holdings had been almost entirely wiped out in the Great Fire but on his solid reputation he was able to borrow over three million dollars. Foremost among his projects was the restoration of his Palmer House at State and Monroe. During the fire when the hotel, hardly a year old, had been threatened by advancing flames, John Mills van Osdel, its architect, had gathered blueprints, record books and construction plans and buried them in a pit in the basement, covering them with two feet of sand and a thick layer of damp clay. \Vhen the fire ended, these were recovered undamaged-a discovery that later spurred the use of clay tile for fireproofing-and served as a basis for the new Palmer House. Pal-

The only known photograph of "Kerfoot's Block ," Washington Street between Dearborn and Clark, which was famous as the first building put back up in the burned district. In fact, it was nailed together in almost indecent haste while the North Side still burned.

mer took van Osdel with him on a tour of major European cities to study the architecture of their leading hotels, and it was not until 1875 that the new Palmer House was opened. It was considered by most who saw and visited and lived in it a virtual masterpiece among the world's hotels, with large rooms, an assortment of dining rooms, a barber shop in whose floor were imbedded silver dollars. I ts architectural style was a kind of neo-Parisian and generally impressive, although it would have its critics, among them Rudyard Kipling, who scoffed about it, as he did about most things in the city in his later visits, and described it as "a gilded and mirrored rabbit warren" whose ornate lobby was "crammed with people talking about money and spitting about everywhere."

The man who built, the new Palmer Houseit would stand until 1925 before being replaced by the present establishment-was also responsible for the fashioning of a temporary city hall.

Chicago History

239

" Gra nder and Statelier .. "

Near an abandoned water tank at La Salle and Adams van Osdel designed a two-story building rather quickly and it served its purpose until a permanent structure went up at Clark and Randolph in 1885. The water tank itself was fashioned into a library-the city's first free, taxsupported library. The building housing the city hall attracted vast flocks of pigeons and came to be called "The Rookery," a name retained by the imposing office building that later went up on the site and stands yet as one of the city's notable architectural landmarks.

Celebration of the Fire On the first anniversary of the Great Fire, it was evident that virtually a new city had sprung up on the place where disaster had struck. Close to forty-six million dollars in new buildings, mostly of stone and brick, had been erected, thirty-eight million dollars in the South Division that had encompassed most of the business district, and the rest in the North and \Vest Divisions. Most of the streets had been repaved and there were patches of park and stretches of saplings along some streets. Real estate values, of course, soared, especially in the business area, and old fortunes were revitalized and some new ones created. "This is a peerless metropolis," wrote a Lakeside Monthly essayist, "that has proved itself such in its indomitability of spirit, in its solidity of structure, in its development of a sleepless vitality, an unaltering faith and an irrepressible progressive impulse."

To mark the accomplishments, there was a formal opening on October 9, 1872, of the new Chamber of Commerce building with a parade, ceremonies and a speech by Mayor Medill and, true to its promise, the Board of Trade set up there again to stay until it built its own "Temple of Commerce" in the late 188os at Jackson and La Salle. And on October 30, a group of Chicagoans gathered in Central (later Garfield) Park to lay the cornerstone for a monumentwhich, sadly, was never constructed-that would be a reminder of the calamity and "the 240

Ch icago History

glorious resurrection which so quickly followed" and to record "the triumph of energy and enterprise, an example worthy of emulation to the end of time." The following June yet another commemorative rite was held, a "Jubilee Week" sponsored jointly by the Grand Pacific hotel, the Lake Shore and Michigan Southern Railway and the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific line.

When the news of such observances reached other lands, the Times of London sniffed that it was rather indelicate of Chicago to commemorate such a tragedy with celebrations but it did admit that the remarkable recovery was ample cause for what it described as a "rather boastful ceremony."

Still another project to dramatize the resurgence had been proposed even before the year of the Great Fire had ended. Several leading Chicagoans-Palmer, Field, Cyrus McCormick and Richard T. Crane among them-advocated erection of an exhibition hall that would not only stand as a symbol to the world of the city's rise from adversity and apparent ruination but could be used for conventions and to exhibit the agricultural and manufactured products of the burgeoning Northwest, whose central outlet to the world was Chicago. William W. Boyington, a noted architect, was hired to design a building of iron and glass and it had its grand opening, amid much civic hullabaloo, in the summer of 1873 along the east side of Michigan fromAdams to Jackson. It housed the first InterState Industrial Exposition then and ultimatelyuntil it was torn down in 1892 to make room for the regal Art Institute-was the home of political meetings, presidential nominating conventions, concerts by Theodore Thomas's symphony orchestra, farm exhibits, machinery shows, dance festivals and other varied events.

Again, outsiders scoffed at Chicago's seeming pretentiousness but citizens and visitors who flocked to it considered it the city's "Crystal Palace," and even the London's Saturday Review correspondent, viewing it, thoughtChicago"that concentrated essence of Americanism."

a.:.oMlllofblSoctaly

The sheer energy and speed of Chicago's rebuilding can best be grasped today when one sees, as In this picture, block after block of new buildings rising together. This view shows Randolph Street and Its Intersection with La Salle.

Chicago History 241

"Grander and Statelier . . "

Chicago Historical Society

Though built on the same plans, the new Palmer House of 1875 was much more ornate than the pre-fire one.

Potter Palmer's architect, John Mills van Osdel, was sent to Europe for the last word in decorative facades.

There he was smitten with what the French now call their "noodles style."

And Wickeder than Ever ...

The amazing resurgence was not without its unsavory aspects other than the get-rich-quick exploits of some builders. No industry in the flourishing city revived more quickly than crime, vice, and the saloon business; by October 1872, there was one grog shop for every I 50 inhabitants. Dives of all low kinds, brothels and gambling houses grew and thrived. Since 1865, roared the Times, there had been nearly a hundred murders in the city-"and not a single neck stretched!" Some of the worst dens were such barracks as "Little Hell" on the Near West Side, originally built to house victims of the fire, and various other sections of the city, some adjacent to the business district, were jammed with brothels. The busiest and most crowded of the vice districts was bounded by Wabash, the south branch of the river, Van Buren and Twentysecond, forerunner of one of the country's greatest concentrations of such establishments that within five years of the fire had subdivided into areas called "The Levee," "Little Cheyenne," "Satan's Mile," "Hell's Half-acre" and "Dead Man's Alley." The most famous place was Carrie v\Tatson's, opened in 1873 on South Clark 242

Chicago History

and for the next twenty years a leader in these enterprises, a sedate three-story building on the outside and exquisitely equipped on the insideeven to a billiard room and bowling alley-and whose only visible sign of the activity within was a parrot at the door that croaked, "Carrie Watson's. Come in, gentlemen!"

This was a time too for the strong emergence of Michael Cassius "King Mike" McDonald as top man in the city's gambling precincts. At Clark and Monroe stood The Store, McDonald's major establishment, offering every kind of game of chance and a hangout for thieves, city hall fixers, politicians, swindlers, and not a few of the town's first citizens. The Store was the centerpiece of an area of some three dozen firstclass gaming houses that ran day and night within the commercial localities, just as "Gambler's Row" and "Hairtrigger Block" had flourished within steps of the Courthouse in the days before the Great Fire. King Mike would be an underworld and political power not only through the 1870s but well into the next decade, his manifold activities contributing to the molding of the image of Chicago, for all its nobility and heroism in recovering from the 187 1 tragedy, as one of the wickedest cities on earth.

In 1874 the warnings sounded earlier by Medill were borne out. Late in the afternoon of July 14, a fire started at 449 (now about 800) South Clark Street, not far from where the Great Fire had begun. It swept south and east over a shoddy slum area and licked at the business district.

Only lack of winds as fierce as those that stirred the 187 1 blaze kept the city from undergoing an even worse fate. As it was, the damage came to $1,067,260 and, ironically, the destroyed area was ultimately covered by rather substantial buildings, primarily warehouses and factories built of much sturdier materials.

Throughout the rest of the 1870s the trend of recovery continued upward, except for the slump caused by the financial panic of 1873.

Building permits in the wake of that depression dropped from 1,275 to 712 in 1874 and remained

l l â&#x20AC;˘ V\ l I\ \'',h\1-..

' ,.-~a.â&#x20AC;˘â&#x20AC;˘

Ch icago Historical Society

at low levels until 1877, when a new high of 2,698 was recorded. In the depression there was a rise in unemployment and all through 1873 and in the months and several years that followed there were parades and protest meetings of the jobless and the hungry and petitions demanding an eight-hour working day were distributed and there were clashes between marchers and the police. The division between rich and poor sharpened-although Chicago felt the depression less than other urban centers of its size-and the bitterness and strife were climaxed by a strike of railroad workers in 1877 over additional salary cuts and by pitched battles in the streets about which the newspapers shrieked "TERROR'S REIGN!" and in which eighteen men were killed and many dozens wounded. Although lingering traces of the struggle remained to burst into new fury nearly a decade later, much of the turmoil subsided by 1878 and the city's physical resurgence picked up pace.

Fertile Soil for Young Architects row the stirrings in the world of architecture that would burst into an era of greatness were rife. The Great Fire had set a generation of bright young men thinking about experiments in the use of iron supports and of innovative con-

The sun-washed headquarters of the Board of Trade in the new Chamber of Commerce building, which was completed a year after the fire. The Versailles-like magnificence of the hall expresses the spirit of a city where commerce was king.

struction methods. Interestingly, many saw the Great Fire, despite its harrowing results, as the end of one architectural epoch and the start of another. The fires of 1871 and 1874, as writers in Industrial Chicago would later aptly put it, "were fortunate events for the Garden City as a whole, and none profited directly by them so much as art and architects, for the flames swept away forever the greater number of monstrous libels on artistic house-building, while destroying the few noble buildings of which Old Chicago could boast."

So, though there were still more than a few "monstrous libels on artistic house-building" in the post-fire city-especially some of the mansions of the very rich which aped European styles at their worst, with an excess of turrets, bay windows, and vulgar ornamentationimaginations were stimulated. Among the forerunners and later participants in the years that came to be known as Chicago's "golden era" of Chicago History

243

"Grander and Statelier .. "

architecture was William LeBaron Jenney, whose sturdy Portland Block went up in r872 at Dearborn and Washington and whose Leiter Building at Wells and Monroe in r879 would embody new structural principles that would come to fruition in his famous nine-story Home Insurance building in 1885. In r 879, too, Dankmar Adler, a rabbi's son, completed the Central Music Hall at State and Randolph and took on a new associate named Louis Henri Sullivan and together they prepared to step into that decade of immense creativity; and such fledgling architects as Daniel Burnham and John Wellborn Root and William Holabird were here then, too, ready to add their concepts to that period.

Amazing as the exuberant spirits had been in forging projects for recovery, no account of the decade after the holocaust can be authentic without taking important note of the crucial fact that certain vital elements of the city were not destroyed and that, for all the horrors and ruins, Chicago still stood in a strategic position in a section of the country that verged on intense expansion . "The fire," A. T. Andreas would soon write, "could not destroy the conditions that called the city into existence ... Chicago is directly on the line of the great national highway between the two oceans that bound our country on the East and \Vest."

Three-fourths of its grain stores had been unaffected by the blaze and 80 per cent of its lumber yards. Some 600 factories, rolling mills, and machine shops lay outside the burned neighborhoods. Railroad depots had been wholly or partially destroyed but 18 trunk lines with direct connections to thousands of miles of track were almost all intact, along with 20 miles of dockage.

And one of the prime assets, the Union Stockyards, had not been touched by so much as a tiny flaming ember. All these, combined with the kind of evangelism and spirit typified by Deacon Bross and Wright and Medill, were of substantial persuasive help in maintaining the city's financial credit and stability with eastern bankers and other financial interests. And the 244

Chicago History

Union Stockyards continued to thrive and aid in the resurgence. Twice as many hogs were shipped through it in r872 than in r870. Twice as much grain was handled in r 873 than in r 869.

And if forty thousand persons, less hardy and less optimistic, fled the city in the days after the Great Fire, thousands came to replace themand thousands more, for news of the calamity and the way in which the city had rebounded from it had spread to many lands. By 1881, 503, r 85 people were living in Chicago, nearly 200,000 more than at the time of the fire, and by 1890 its population would be r ,099,850-beating Bross's estimate by ten years-and of these, forty-one per cent would be foreign immigrants, mainly from Germany, Ireland, the Scandinavian countries and Great Britain.

The Great Fire had been followed by the Great Recovery. The decade, despite the panic of r 873, had been frenetic and busy and thriving and fruitful, the predictions of the boosters and the boomers had been more than amply fulfilled.

Visitors of high and low degree thronged to Chicago to see for themselves the wonders wrought, and if some deplored the lusty ways and its excesses of style and a certain aggressiveness, few could find fault with the evidence of resurgence from what was then considered a disaster of incredible proportions. Invariably, most came as skeptics and left as confirmed believers.

"The thoroughfares are crowded, busy and bustling," reported Sir John Leng, one of Scotland's major newspaper editors, midway in that decade, "and abounding signs of life and energy in the people and their modes of trading are everywhere apparent." And by the decade's end, a British novelist and journalist, Lady Duffus Hardy, spoke what was in the minds of many: "We expected to find traces of ugliness and deformity everywhere, crippled buildings and lame, limping streets running along in a forlorn, crooked condition, waiting for time to restore their vigor and build up their beauty anew. But Phoenixlike the city has risen out of its own ashes, grander and statelier than ever."

Fifty Years Ago

As recorded by newspapers in the collection of the Chicago Historical Society

1921 Despite communist threats of a workers' uprising in Chicago, the first May Day parade since before the war goes off peacefully.

MAY 2. The official list of draft evaders in the Sixth Army Corps area, which includes Chicago, is published. Authorities offer a reward of fifty dollars for the capture of each of the 17,000 "slackers" listed.

The new Field Museum of Natural History opens to eight thousand invited guests.

Professor Albert Einstein comes to lecture at the University of Chicago, and tells a curious reporter that an explanation to him of the theory of relativity would take five days to complete.

MAY 6. Condemning a recent quick acquittal of a pretty Chicago widow who shot and killed her unfaithful husband, a Chicago Tribune editorial remarks that the killing of husbands has become an indoor sport and is looked upon as an easy means of divorce.

MAY 7. After seven years in divorce court, Judge Jesse Baldwin observes a geographical factor in Chicago divorce rates. Divorce is more likely for residents of Sheridan Road, Racine, and Kenmore on the orth Side; Ellis and Lake Park avenues on the South Side; and Monroe Street on the West Side.

The Glen View Golf Club opens its new clubhouse, rebuilt on the site of the one that burned last May 28.

MAY 8. Best selling sheet music titles in Chicago include "Ain't We Got Fun" and "Look for the Silver Lining."

MAY I.

The Rev. E.G. Smith of Evanston predicts that as things stand in the American home, "the time will come when girls will not know how to make bread."

MAY 9. Irish tenor John McCormack, in a concert at the Auditorium, raises $78,000 for Irish famine relief.

MAY 1 I. Nineteenth Ward political boss Anthony D' Andrea is shot to death on his doorstep in a political feud. A bomb attempt on his life failed last February 12.

Commission men of the old South Water Street Market parade in celebration of its closing and their removal to the expanded Fulton Market on the West Side.

MAY 1 4. Graft in the building unions is revealed when builders of the Woods and State-Lake theaters show that they paid the plumbers' union $54,830 in cash to settle labor problems on the job.

MAY 15. Mae Tinee, Tribune movie critic, says the new German movie "Dr. Caligari's Cabinet" is "undeniably clever ... but keep the children away from the thing!"

MAY 21. Hannah and Hogg, old-time Chicago liquor dealers, go out of business, another victim of the Volstead Act. The firm had supplied Chicagoans since 1873.

MAY 22. The Ralph C. Diggins Company of Chicago offers a same-day round trip flight to the Indianapolis Races on Decoration Day in its "giant six passenger plane" for $125.

MAY 26. Six thousand veterans march into the Loop to protest their unemployment. They call their march "the breadline of heroes."

Ada Dozier of 3515 Federal Street, widow of a Negro victim of the July, 1 gr g, race riots, is awarded $2,300 damages against the city.

There are thirty-eight such cases pending.

MAY 27. The first arrest is made in the round-up of Chicago draft dodgers. Hans Jacob Zimmerman is alleged to have spent the war reading Tolstoy on his father's farm north of the border in Alberta. He claims he couldn't kill a fly.

All of Grover Cleveland Bergdoll's property in the United States is seized by order of President Harding. The rich Bergdoll, since evading the draft, has become a German citizen.

MAY 30. More than one thousand city bakers strike, refusing to accept a twenty per cent wage cut.

JUNE 1. The United States Railway Labor Board orders a twelve per cent wage cut for railway employes.

Chicago History

245

Fifty Years Ago/1921

3. Coroner Peter M. Hoffman says that the automobile death rate has increased fifty per cent in the last six months. It now averages a death a day in Cook County.

JUNE 6. Coalition reform candidates for Superior and Circuit courts win by a landslide over the City Hall slate of Mayor Thompson. The victory is seen as a "great moral awakening" and the "doom of machine politics in Chicago."

JUNE 13. Madame Marie Curie, discoverer of radium, is honored with a reception at the Art Institute.

JUNE 2 1. City Harbor Master J amcs J. McComb reveals that the new Michigan Avenue Bridge was opened 3,377 times in the first year of operation. Some Chicago motorists think it was more times than that.

JUNE 25. The Cook County Real Estate Board reports eight thousand vacant flats in Chicago.

For the first time in many years landlords are eager to please.

The 192 1 summer opera season opens at Ravinia with Rossini's "Barber of Seville."

JUNE 26. Rafael Sabatini's Scaramouche appears on Fanny Butcher's best seller list for the first time.

JUNE 29. The number of marriages in Chicago is ten thousand fewer than at this time last year.

The business depression is blamed.

"Fine silk suits" in shantung by Hart, Shaffner, and Marx are advertised at Rothchilds for twenty-five dollars.

JULY r. Chicagoans of all classes join the exodus to Jersey City for the long-anticipated Dempsey-Carpentier heavyweight match. J. Ogden Armour, as well as Miss Muriel McCormick, have already left; and Aldermen "Diamond Joe" Esposito and Louis B. Anderson are on their way.

JULY 2. Dempsey wins by a knockout in four rounds as crowds in the Loop hear the account from special wires.

President Harding signs the Declaration of Peace, formally ending the Great War. JUNE

246

Chicago History

ro. The prolonged heat wave has forced ice prices up to seventy-five cents a hundred pounds, causing hardship for the poor.

F. F. Bosworth, Texas evangelist, is drawing five thousand persons a night to his revival tent at orth Avenue and Cicero. B. B. Bosworth leads the singing with a trombone.

Methodist Bishop Thomas Nicholson of Chicago, commenting on movie offers to Mrs. Isabelle Cora Orthwein, acquitted of murdering her paramour, says, "It is strange that a woman guilty of everything sinful ... should be offered $100,000 to go into the movies."

JULY 11. Records of a raided "de luxe" bootlegging ring, which operated out of a house at 5406 Ellis Avenue, show that many prominent Chicagoans ordered their liquor there, including author George Ade, who had an order in for four cases of whisky at $170 a case.

JULY 12. A sudden strike by city electrical workers leaves the city without lights from dusk to midnight.

Evanston police equip Policewoman Georgiana Juul with a rowboat in which to pursue bathers in abbreviated suits who swim away at her approach.

JULY 14. Of one hundred prospective jurors, not one man was found who did not have an opinion on the seven "Black Sox" who go to trial July 18 for throwing the 1919 World Series.

JULY r9. "Sleepy Bill" Burns, former White Sox pitcher, takes the stand and-with "fans in the crowded court room hanging breathlessly on his every word"-tells how the 1919 World Series was thrown for $100,000.

JULY 20. Governor Len Small of Illinois is indicted in Springfield for embezzling public funds.

JULY 21. Governor Small may call out the state militia to protect himself from arrest.

JULY 30. Chicago's Pageant of Progress opens at the Municipal Pier. It is the largest exposition in Chicago since 1893.

1 orman Ross, long distance swimmer, wins his second successive Chicago River Marathon-Municipal Pier to Wells Street Bridge.

JULY 31. "Mme. X" of the Tribune society page reports on a strange and fascinating game that Mrs. Arthur Ryerson and Mrs. John H. Winterbotham have just brought back with them from a trip to China. They report that in the Far East the game is superseding bridge in the foreign clubs. It is called mah-jongg.

JULY

July 13. Jack Johnson, former heavyweight champion, is welcomed back to Chicago by thirty-five thousand cheering fans as he returns from his ten-month prison sentence. He is accompanied in his procession down South State Street by his white wife, Lucille Cameron Johnson . Above Johnson poses for photographers.

Chicago Historical Society , Dally News Collection

June 24. Heavily veiled, the pretty Isabelle Cora Orthwein stands before the judge as her sensational trial for the March first murder of her paramour ends in her acquittal. The jury was out less than an hour.

Chicago Historical Society, Dally News Collection

August 10. Governor Len Small of Illinois (on the left) is placed under arrest at Springfield by the sheriff of Sangamon County on charges of embezzling half a million dollars from the state. This ends two weeks of hide and seek with the law during which time Small maintained that he was immune to arrest.

October 27. Charlie Chaplin, stopping over in Chicago after his triumphal first return to Europe, refuses to smile for the photographers. He has smiled his way all over Europe and is tired of it.

Chicago Historical Society, Daily News Collection

Chicago Historical Society, Daily News Collection

September 25. John Weismuller, the Illinois Athletic Club's spectacular seventeen-year-old swimmer, breaks the world's tank record for 100 yards in New York .

November 8 . Peggy Hopkins Joyce gives an interview at the Drake after agreeing to a record one million dollar divorce settlement.

Lumberman J. Stanley Joyce divorced her because of her "many, many, many affairs" with "titled and untitled" Europeans.

Chicago Historical Society, Daily News Collection

Fifty Years Ago/1921

4. The bodies of twenty-two Chicago heroes who gave their lives in France reach the Polk Street station at four o'clock this afternoon.

AUG. 7. The Ravinia Opera Company gives a free concert in memory of Enrico Caruso who died six days ago in Naples.

AUG. g. Italian war hero General Pietro Badoglio is honored at the Pageant of Progress.

AUG. r r. Twenty-nine more bodies of Chicago war dead arrive today.

AUG. I 2. Chicago Police Chief Charles Fitzmorris warns of greatly increased crime this winter unless something is done to reduce the number of unemployed men. Food thefts and failure to pay restaurant bills are becoming common.

AUG. 13. The Illinois Military Commission meets in Chicago to consider opening state armories to shelter destitute and unemployed veterans.

AUG. r 7. Twelve thousand Chicagoans congregate near Lake Zurich, just north of the Cook County line, to attend initiation rites for 2,376 new members of the Ku Klux Klan.

AUG. 2 I. Main Street still leads the Chicago best seller list after many months. A novel by E.M. Hull called The Sheik makes its appearance on the list.

AUG. 29. Federal investigation into Ku Klux Klan activities in Chicago begins.

SEPT. 4. Chicago baseball attendance is far below last season's. Both the Sox and the Cubs are in seventh place.

SEPT. 1 o. The death in San Francisco of Chicago film actress Virginia Rappe after a party causes police to question popular film comedian Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle.

SEPT. I 2. "Emperor Jones," a play by Eugene O'Neill, opens at the Playhouse. The first night audience reacts with confusion to this new kind of play.

SEPT. 15 . A short report from New York mentions that last year's Democratic vice-presidential candidate, Franklin D. Roosevelt, has AUG.

248

Ch icago History

a mild case of infantile paralysis. His doctor at Campobello says, "No one need have any fear of permanent injury in any way from the attack."

Babe Ruth sets a new world's record: fiftyfive homers in one season-and ten thousand straw hats sail onto the field at the Polo Grounds.

SEPT. r 8. Chief of Police Charles Fitzmorris says there will be no Klan parades in Chicago.

Organizations whose members appear masked will not be given permits.

Policeman Albert Hahn singlehandedly breaks up a "red" gathering of 200 unruly demonstrators at the corner of State and Congress. He fells twenty-one of the mob with his club.

SEPT. 1 g.

Twenty federal "booze raiders" from Washington arrive in Chicago to clean up the liquor in Chicago private clubs, as well as in suburban country clubs. Members' lockers, trunks, and other hiding places will be searched.

The Chicago City Council unanimously passes a motion to ban the showing of Fatty Arbuckle motion pictures in the city.

SEPT. 20. Within a period of a few months knickerbockers have become an accepted female fashion. One hundred "knicker girls" turn up at a Chicago charity dance.

SEPT. 2 I. Arthur Burrage Farwell, president of the Chicago Law and Order League, suggests that United States troops be used to make Chicago dry. He says there are three to five thousand Chicago saloons openly selling liquor.

SEPT. 24. Chief of Police Fitzmorris charges that fifty per cent of the police force are bootleggers.

25. John Weismuller, the Illinois Athletic Club's spectacular seventeen-year-old swimmer, breaks the world's tank record for 100 yards (53H seconds) in New York.

SEPT. 27. President Harding sets aside the anniversary of the Chicago Fire as "National Fire Prevention Day . . . for conserving created wealth through elimination of fires."

SEPT.

A year-long building deadlock ends as the construction trades vote to accept wage decisions handed down by Judge K.M. Landis. Construction worth sixty million dollars that has been delayed by strikes and slowdowns will resume.

OCT. I.

Six thousand persons attend the opening ceremonies in Grant Park for the week-long celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the Great Chicago Fire. Rains do not dampen spirits.

OCT. g. Jim O'Leary, retired Yards saloon keeper and son of Catherine O'Leary, says the fire in his mother's barn fifty years ago was spontaneous combustion of "green" hay. "That musty old fake about the cow kicking over the lamp gets me hot under the collar," he says.

OCT. I 1 . The Illinois Vigilance Association plans a statewide campaign against the "one spot wriggle" dances. Demonstrations of proper dancing will be given before patrons of the Arcadia, Dreamland, and White City dance halls.

OCT. 20. The Tribune Paris correspondent reports twenty injured as a bomb is thrown during a communist protest march on the American Embassy. The mob was protesting the death sentence given last July 14 in an obscure murder trial in Massachusetts to two aliens named Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti.

OCT. 2 1. Harriet Monroe, editor of Chicago's Poetry magazine, announces the magazine's ninth annual poetry prizes, which go to Lew Sarett of Evanston, Ford Madox Hueffer of London, and Hazel Hall of Portland, Oregon.

OCT. 24 . Hyde Park turns into a madhouse as University of Chicago students welcome home the Maroons after their victory over Princeton. Snake dances and bonfires honor the coach, "Old Man" Stagg, and the team.

OCT. 30. Admiral Lord Beatty, victor of the Battle of Jutland and First Lord of the Admiralty, visits Chicago on his way to the American Legion Convention at Kansas City. His wife, Lady Beatty, daughter of the late Marshall Field, plans to arrive later in the week.

NOV. I. The \Vashington Home, a private sanitarium for the cure of inebriates here, is closing for lack of business. Prohibition is credited.

NOV. 4. The Chicago Opera Company closes its reservation lists with $240,000 in advance OCT. 2.

subscriptions on hand. Soprano Rosa Raisa will arrive today to prepare for the opening of the season.

NOV. 5. Marshal Ferdinand Foch, generalissimo of the Allied armies during the war, receives a tumultuous welcome as he begins a two-day official visit in Chicago.

NOV. 6. Labor union leaders declare Chicago is in the midst of a building boom, with men in the building crafts eighty to ninety per cent employed.

Richard Strauss accompanies E lisabeth Schumann in a recital of his own songs at the Auditorium. Mary Garden and Serge Prokofieff attend.

NOV. 1 I. The Unknown Soldier is laid to rest in Arlington Cemetery, on a most solemn third anniversary of the Armistice. Chicagoans plant rows of "memory trees" along the highways. In the Loop crowds pay a moment of silent tribute at eleven o'clock.

Fifty thousand people hear Mary Garden sing a radio concert from the Auditorium. The transmitter, KYW, atop the Commonwealth Edison Building has a range of 1500 miles.

NOV. 13. "The Sheik," a moving picture starring Rudolph Valentino, opens at the Roosevelt.

NOV. 1 4. "Samson and Delilah" opens the oper a season. Lucien Muratore and Marguerite d' Alvarez sing the title roles.

NOV. 14. Joy Morton, president of the Morton Salt Company, gives 400 acres of his farm at Downers Grove for construction of an ar boretum. This "laboratory" of forestry and gardening will rival the Kew Gardens of London.

NOV. 1 6. A two-day teamsters strike ends after a series of riots protesting a three dollar weekly decrease in wages.

NOV . 20. The Tribune begins a series explaining the Sacco-Vanzetti trial, which in the past month has become such an anti-American cause celebre abroad.

NOV. 27. A. Stoller Tobinson, former Chicago radical, well known on the \Vest Side, and now president of Soviet Far-Eastern Siberia, is reunited with his American family in Moscow.

Ch icago History

249

BOOK REVIEW

Another Look at Mike Royko's "Boss"

BY ANDREW M. GREELEY

is very fond of telling an incident which is related without comment but whose implications the reader cannot miss. Turn about being fair play, an incident about Royko must be related.

He tangled with Thomas Foran on a Chicago television show and was solidly trounced by Foran who is a much more skillful TV performer than Royko. A couple of days later Foran and his wife were surrounded by a group of reporters who asked half jokingly whether the former U. S. attorney was going to run for the governorship of Illinois. Pointing to his wife, Foran said, "The chief hasn't told me whether I can or not." Everyone laughed. The next clay in Royko's column, the comment was quoted as evidence of Foran's slavish dependency on Mayor Daley.

Mike Royko is a talented journalist with a splendid gift for concrete detail and the ability to convey to the reader a sense that he (Royko) knows exactly what's going on and is telling it exactly like it is. Boss * is great entertainment, but a serious study of Chicago's mayor and politics it most certainly is not. Despite the fulsome praise heaped on it by Royko's friends who have reviewed it in the national press, Boss is a shallow, mean, vindictive book, as much an in. ult to the city of Chicago as it is a sweeping per onal attack on the city's mayor. It is probably impossible for any Chicagoan to achieve any objectivity or impartiality on the subject of R ichard J. Daley but Royko doesn ' t even try.

On page 7 of the book, the reader gets a pretty clear idea of the author's meannes and superficiality.

"Regardless of what he may do in the afternoon, and to whom, he will always pray in the morning." This is a line¡ which has caused vast amu ement among Royko's liberal friends, showing that they have no more moral sense than he does . Royko does not have the courage or the integrity to accu e Daley of hypocrisy, but is content with the sly, snide innuendo.

Daley was probably involved in the r 919 race riots because he has always refu ed to discuss the riots. he probably was involved in the smear of Robert Merriam because he d idn't stop the smear, he is probably a racist because many of hi neighbors are racists, and MIKE ROYKO

Andrew M. Greeley, professor of sociology at the University of Chicago, is Director of the Center for the Study of American Pluralism of the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, and t he author of the book ll'hy Can't They Be Like Us, America's White Ethnic Groups, published last summer. * Boss: Richard J. Daley of Ch icago, M ike Royko, E. P. Dutton , New Yo r k, 197 1. $5.95 .

250

Ch icago History

because he objected when his son was punished at a Jesuit high school for defending his father in a class taught by an enthusiastic young priest. He is probably a coward because many thirty-nine-year-old men volunteered to serve in the Second World War but Daley did not. Daley might not have stolen the White Hou e for John Kennedy but at least he tried. One could go on and on and on, but the Royko style is evident enough. The mayor is tried, convicted and condemned by a steady stream of wisecracks and innuendos. The case is overwhelming and, if the evidence is thin, only the most wary reader will mind because the story as Royko tells it is so fascinating.

Of course, sometimes he gets dangerou ly close to untruth. Vl/e are told that the mayor forced Congressman Morgan Murphy, the son of a c lose friend, down the throats of black voters. In fact, the Third Congressional District is part black and part white and the black voters in the district, many of whom are middle clas and have sent opposition aldermen to City Hall, had a choice of a black militant newspaper publisher in the primary and, nonetheless, solidly supported Murphy. But when one knows everything, as Mike Royko obviously does, such minor details are not imp:irtant, for Royko i telling it like it is.

There is certainly a great need for a erious study of Chicago's mayor and its politics since the death of Anton Cermak. Whether one likes Richard J. Daley or not one must acknowledge that he is one of the most extraordinary political phenomena of our time, so extraordinary, in fact, that a careful, precise, balanced account of his career would have as much reader interest as Boss. The work of a journalist is not that of a political scientist, and we cannot fault Royko for not writing a book about Chicago as have such scholars as Martin Meyerson, Edward Banfield or James Q. \Vil on; yet, one looks in vain in Boss for any se nsitivity to the political, ocial, economic and governmental problems of a city like Chicago. Royko tells us any other city of the country would have elected Robert Merriam instead of Richard J. Daley because the former was young, articulate and handsome.

Royko is obviously mad at his fellow citizens of Chicago because, unlike their counterparts in New York City, they do not consider sex appeal an absolutely irresistible claim to the job of the mayor. New York's mayor is much prettier than Chicago's. Whether he is a more effective administrator is another matter. owhere in Boss, for example, do we have any indication that both the multi-ethnic structure of the city and the "weak-mayor-city council" form of government make Chicago a city where power is wide ly d iffused and decentralized. If a mayor ca nnot deve lop his own personal power base, he simply cannot govern

the city and prevent the city council from deteriorating into faction-ridden chaos-as it did during the administration of Daley's predecessor.

Nor do we read in Boss or in any of the reviews of the book any admission that the tax structure of the state of Illinois and the political constraints the downstate legislature imposes on the city of Chicago make it extremely difficult, if not impossible, for the mayor to cope with most of the problems and misery in the city. That there are some evil, ugly problems associated with race and poverty no Chicagoan could deny but most of these problems can only be solved in Springfield and, more likely, Washington. It is then countered that the mayor should at least provide symbolic leadership on the race question which means, of course, that he should mouth liberal cliches in the pious conviction that such cliches mean anything to the poorest elements in the black community.

Nor is there any indication at all in Boss that to have governed Chicago with any mea ure of effectiveness through the last two decades is an extraordinary feat-one that has led Adlai Stevenson to describe the mayor as the most effective urban public administrator in America. But then Royko and his clique long since stopped taking Senator Stevenson seriously.

Poor Adlai made the mistake of winning an election and for that there is no excuse.

Boss frightens me. It is a two-toned, one-dimensional book, and that intelligent people take it seriously as an analysis of Chicago merely shows how many people are satisfied with simpleminded, moralistic, scape-goaling explanations of urban problems. The idea that Chicago would be a much better place to live in if its mayor was pretty, not Irish, mouthed liberal cliche and did not associate with cronies from Bridgeport would be laughably naive if it were not so mischievously dangerou .

The reception of the Royko book in the reviewing trade is fascinating. I have not seen a single unfavorable review, a fact which is not so surprising when one considers that the book has generally been given to friends of Royko and / or enemies of Daley to review.

The Saturday Review was the most blatant about this in that it turned the book over to Dan v\'alker, a reform candidate for governor, who is running explicitly against the Daley organization. To "balance things," Saturda_p Revieuâ&#x20AC;˘ gave the book al o to a gentleman who has frequently denounced Daley in print and talked about Daley's "Iri h ethic ." Three of the eleven people who e help Royko acknowledges in the introduction also published major reviews of the book: Nelson Algren in the Critic, Studs Terkel (who is described as the one who inspired the book) in the New York Times Book Rezâ&#x20AC;˘iew, and Roy Fisher (who was

Royko's boss) in the New Republic. It's an interesting little group. Mr. Terkel praises Mr. Algren on his radio program. Mr. Algren, in one of his earlier books, praises Mr. Royko. Mr. Royko thanks Mr. Algren and Mr. Terkel for their help in writing the book and they respond in kind by writing laudatory reviews. How all this fits the ethics of book reviewing remains problematic. One wonders how many times, for example, the New York Times gives a book for review to a man who is acknowledged in the introduction as having inspired it. One also wonders how many times someone mentioned in the introduction will accept a book for review.

One cannot, of course, criticize Mr. Algren, Mr. Terkel, and Mr. Royko for being friends. But it ill behooves Mr. Royko, then, to criticize the mayor for cronyi m in politics when he himself takes advantage of literary cronyism.

Royko takes for granted the fundamental liberal model of how Chicago politics operates. Daley was reelected because of vote fraud, the "precinct army," and political ruthlessness. This model is absolutely unquestioned by most Chicago liberals and di plays a naivete about politics that is beyond belief. I do not want to be accused of defending the mayor (though I will be, of course; anyone who does not denounce him must be on his side); like all political leaders, he has made some serious mistakes. But I am defending objective and sophisticated political analysis. The Cook County Organization would be much better off if it had some real opposition, but as long as the liberal opposition persists in its shallow, moralistic and self-righteous analyses of the city and its politics, it will continue to win moral victories-which, of course, is what practical politicians call losing.

David Nichol, a foreign correspondent of the Chicago Daily News, writing on election clay, said that those few Europeans who were aware of the election were puzzled. If Daley was such an ogre, why was it likely that he was going to win by an overwhelming majority and, if indeed he was going to win by such an overwhelming majority, was hem fact the evil man that the press made him out to be? Royko and his allies have a simple answer. The people of Chicago are too dumb and too frightened to do anything else but vote for Richard J- Daley. Hence, on the last election day, despite warnings from Mr. Terkel, Mr. Royko, and Mr. Walker, and most of the University of Chicago community, the mayor won eighty per cent of the votes in black precincts, eighty per cent of the votes in Polish precincts, and SL'<:ty-five per cent of the votes in Jewish precincts (running against a candidate who was Jewish). What a pity that the rest of us Chicagoans are not as smart as Mike Royko.

Chicago History

2 51

Index, Volume I Adamowski, Max: cr1mpaign~ for lower rcstauran1 prices (1920), 179; "carry your lunch" campaign, 182.

Adam.;, Franklin P., verse q uotcd, 69.

Addams, Jane: advised by Dr. Guns·aulus, I03i at school, 101; batchclors' boarding fiat near Hull-I louse, photo., 109; conceives idea for I lull-I louse, 101; co nditions near I lull-llousc, photo ., 103; decides on location of settlement house, 107; given reception by Mrs. Charles I lenrotin, 102; Hull-I louse: cooking class, 1910, photo., 111, interior, phoJo., , 05, opens, 109, schedule, 1 13; invited to join Chicago \Voman 's Club, 102; portrait about 1889, photo., 100; small visitors at I lull-I louse, photo., ro8i visits Toynbee I lall, London, 101; works with \.VCTU, 106 .

Addams, Jane, letters: describes first activi1it·s at llull-llouse, 110; location of, 114; on Christmas at Ilull•llousc, r 12; on neighborhood visitors to l lull-l lousc, , 12; on remodeling and furnishing Hull! lo11sc, 108; on settlement vo lunteers, 108; on source of financial support for I lull-House and encouragement of volunteers, 1o6; on support of Hull- House plan by C. F . Goss of Moody's Church, 104.

Ade, George: in Chicago School 1 172; patronizes boo!legger (1921), 246.

Adler, Dankmar, designs Central Music Hall, 244.

Air travel, service to Indianapolis raC'es ( 1921 ), 245.

Allen, Lee: quoted on Tinker, Evers. and Chance-, 70.

All-Stor_,v magazine: prints first Tarzan story (1912), 21; photo. of co,-cr, 20.

Amhrotype, description of, 1 58.

American Express Co., workers strike ( 1920), 1 16.

Anderson, Louis B.: defends r-.Layor Thompson against charges of Negroes, 183; photo., 183.

Andersonville prison camp, the numerous accounts of, 83.

Angle, Paul: uThc Blue Danube,,, 156: .cNorth A\"cnue and Clark Street.'' 80; rcviev-., of Arch,terture in Chica,e,o and :\fid-.tmtrica by \Vayne Andrews, 60; review of Chicago: Growth of a 1\fetropolis by I larold M. ~,fayer and Richard C. \Vadc, 61-63; review of Chicago on Foot: An Architectural IVall..ing Tour by Ira J. Bach, 61; review of Ei.eht)' rears at Hull-House by Allen F. Davis and Mary Lynn McCree (cd<i.), 124-26; review of Horner of 1/li,iois by Thomas B. Littlewood, 123-24.

"Another Look at Mike Royko's Boss," book review by Andrew r-.L Greeley, 250.

Anson, Cap, opens 19o8 season at \Vest Side Ball Park, photo., 73.

Arbuckle, Roscoe 1 'Falty": films banned in Chicago (192 1), 248; questioned in death of actress (192 1), 248.

Archer, Col. William Beatty, managing commissioner for Illinois and Michigan Canal, 36.

Armistice observances: (1919), 58; (1920), 180.

Armour and Co.: elevator explosion, 185; smoke abatement attempts, 183.

Armstrong. Louis: early career, 136-37; goes to Chicago, 137; in Creole Jazz Band, group photo., 13oj photo., 133.

Ari, in pre-fire Chicago, 196.

Art lnstitutc, lions protested by Jri sh (1920), 180.

Auditorium, crowd cheers attack on \\loodrow \\' ilson and League of Nations, (1919), 57.

Austen, Jane, Edith Franklin \\'yatt compared to, r 75.

Automobile: death rate (1920), 121, (1921), 246; Loop traffic, 179; new roads, 180.

Ayer, Jlarriet Hubbard , in Chicago (1871), 199.

Babai, BC!a: in New York City, 156; music of, 156-57;pl1oto., 157.

Bachrach, Bill, coach, on \-Veismullcr 's style, 28.

Badoglio, Gen. Pietro, honored at Pageant of Progress (1921), 248.

Banks, Chicago, recover quickly after 1871 fire, 238.

Bara, Theda, appears in Blue I-lame (1920), 179.

Barrett, Nathan, role in desiining Pullman 10,,n, 147.

Barrymore, Ethel, in Dedasse (1920), 179.

Beatty, Admiral Lord, visits Chicago, 249.

"Before the. Sunset Fades," ar1iclc by James Brown IV, g6; su also Country house near Chicago.

Beiderbecke, Leon Bismarck "'Bix": dies, 140; early care-er, 138-39; hired by Hoagy Carmichael, 138: innovator of Chicago style, 139; joins Paul \Vhitcman, 140; photo. with \-Vol veriner, band, 141.

Beman, Solon [not Solomon l S.: association with George M. Pullman, 147; helps plan Pullman town, 147.

Bergdoll, Grover Cleveland, arrested for draft evasion (1921), 245.

Bishop, George i\1., Jr. , "A 1'1ark of English Sympathy/' article, 232.

Black Belt, heart of Chicago jazz, r 33.

"The Blue Danube," article by Paul r-.•f. Angle, 156.

Blue Danube, restaurant, described 1 156.

Blue Island Ave. cable car train, photo., 50.

Bookmaking, near North Ave. and Clark St., Bo, 81.

Board of Trade, post-fire headquarters in new Chamber of Commerce building, photo., 243.

Boss: Richard J. Daley of Chicago, by Mike Royko, reviewed, 250.

Bourniqucs dancing school, 146.

Boyington, \Villiam \V., designs Inier-Statc Industrial Exposition building, 240.

Brick making, North Branch as source of brick clay in 185os and 186os 1 45.

Bross, \Villiam Lloyd: portrait photo., 237; promotes Chicago after 1871 fire, 237.

Brown, James IV, "Before the Sunset Fades," 96; see also Country house near Chicago .

Brown, Tom, Dixieland Jass Band, 134-35 .

Bryant, George T ., uThe Gripman \Vore a Sheepskin Coat," 46.

"Bubbly Creek," filled, 122 .

Buder [not Bruder l, Stanley, Pullman: .411 ExperirnenJ in lndusJn"a{ Order a,id Community Plannir1.tJ,, 188o-19.1n, cited, 151 -52.

Burnham Plan, bond issue voted to carry it out, 58.

Burnside, Maj. Gen. A. E., recommends removal of Camp Douglas, 91.

Burns, William "Sleepy Bill ," testifies in 1919 World Series scandal trial, 246.

2 52

Ch icago History

Burroughs, Edgar Rice: career, 18-3 1; circu latio n of works, 18; death, 31; early career, 20-21; earnings, 31; effect of his early lean days on settings of his novels, !23; fan clubs, 24-26; honored White Paper Club in Chicago, 24; in Chicago, 19~53, photo., 19; ak Park, Ill., residences, 24; praises James A ll en St. John 's work, 27; rate of writing, 24; traits of his fictional ch;H"actcr John Carter, 22 ·2 3.

Bushnell, George D. 1 Jr., " \ Vhcn Jazz Came 10 Chicago," art icle, 132 .

Butcher, Fanny, quoted on \V . D. Howells, 177.

b3

Cable car lines, see transportation.

Calumet River port, photo., inside back cover No. 3.

Calumct~Sag Channel: account of building and effects, 42 ·4,~; on map , 39, 43.

Campanini, Clcofonte, director of Chicago Ope1·a, dies, 59.

HCamp Douglas: 'A llellish Den'?," article by E. 8. Long, 83.

Camp Douglas: beginnings, 8+; Bellows, I lenry \V ., recommends abandonment of, 88; boundaries of, 84; Bradley, ?\1. J. (prisoner), observations, go; 'Chicago Conspiracy, ' 93; compared to other prisons, 94, 95; Confederate officers, group photo., 91; Confederate prisoners, photo., 66; death rate, 94; Deland, Col. Charles V., report on, 9 1; 1864 painting of, illus., 85; 1862 llarper's woodcut of, illus, 87; csc.1pes, 89, go; Frcedley, Capt. 11. \.\/ ., report on, go; gamb ling (faro), 92; large number of prisoners from battl<" of Fort Donelson, 84; la x administration, 88; litlw. view, 93; Liv("rmore, Mary A., observations on, 85-86; Mackey, Lt. James Taswcll, observation on, 86; mismanaged growth, 87; r-.1ulligan, Col. .James A., carelessness as commander, 88; official report on, by Brig. Gen. William W. Orme, 92; photo., of relic manuscript song sheet, 82; prisoner population of, 93; rations, go, 92; release of prisoners, 93; rumors about, 87; scurvy at, 89; severe punishments , 89 1 go; Stanley, Sir Henry Morton, observa1ions on, 86; Tupper, Frank \V . (guard), observations on, 85; llnioa and Confederate prisons compared, 93 95; view of, /Jhoto., 89.

Carnegie, Andrew, quoted on buildin'{ Dunleith-Dubuque Bridge, 115.

Carpentier, Georges, photo., 119.

Carhu11, John: Cus1oms 11ou~c photo., by, 160; stereograph by, photo., 163.

Canes-de•visitc, example, /Jhoto., 160.

Caruso, Enrico; in Chicago (1920), photo., 179; Ravinia gi\"C~ memorial concert for, 248.

Chance, Frank, sre Tinker, Joe. Chap lin , Charles, visits Chicago (1921), /Jl1ato., '..?47• Chicago: architecture st imulated by 1871 fire, 24.3-44; breweries, 202; buildings: building bond issues approved ( 1920), 59, Cook County Court J louse and City J-faJI, 205 o6 1 country house near Chicago (article on), 96, Customs I louse, photo., 160, ln1c-r-Suuc Industrial Exposition Building, 240, "Rookery," 240 1 Shepard Block, photo., 161, stadium south of Field Museum planned, 58; clubs to be raided for whisk,·y (, 92 r ), 248; coal shortage ( 1919): causes factory closings, 58, con! rationed , 58 1 leaves cleva1cds hcatless, 58; Fire Department, inquiry on 1871 fire, 216; llarbor (1869), photo., 2; leading families (pre-fire), 196; photographic legacy, 158 -69; population reaches 3,000,000, 59; pre-fire (article on), 196 ; floating population of ( 187 r), 200; reconstruction after firl' (article on), 236; sewer system: constru<'tion of enclosed system begun (1856) 1 38, cons1ruc1ion of treatment plants (1922-39), 45 1 plans for complete revision ;\nd crcalion of the S,1nitary District of Chicago (1888), 42, projected enlargement for storm overflow, 46, ''"·orld's finest system, 45; state of the city in 1847 1 :n-38; water supply: Board of\Vatcr Commissioners appointed, 38 1 diseases from, 38, 41, first pumping station, 38 1 new chlorin,11ing device (1921), 182; see a/Jo Tr;1nsportation.

"Chicago Ix-fore the Fire: Some Pr-oplc, Places, and Things," article

by David Lasswell, 196.

Chicago Chamber of Commerce, rebuilds .ind opens .tfrcr 1871 fire, 238. ,40.

Chirago Conspir;1cy (the), at Camp Douglas, 9.1• Chicago Cubs: heat Cardi nals in 1921 opcn<"r, 1U.,; En·rs, Johnnr, manager, 1 79; in seventh place ( 192, ), :148; leave for tr~\inin~ ( 1920), 59_; lose opener (1920), 117; pennant victories, 69, 74 -75; win g.ime (1920), 118.

Chicago Dai~l _V,u•s, glass negative collection, 167.

Chicago Friends of Irish Freedom, plan parade (19".20), 179.

ChiC'<1go Grand Opera Company: begins season (1919), 58; director dies (1919), 59; fills subscription (1921), 2.19; .M ary Carden dirc.·ctor.

182, photo., 181.

Chicago Heights, aerial photo., 166.

Chicago Historical Society: acquires ('J,irogn Dailv .\'etu photograph collection, 167; funds purchase of Gunther colketion, 118: Official Chicago Fire Centennial Medal. photo,., ~56, back cover No. 4.

Chicago _fuvenile Protective Association, meeting (19:i 1), 184.

Chicago Latin School, on site of Plaza J lotel, 81.

Chicago Libr,1ry Association, burned out in 1871 fire, 234. ''Chicago, October 101 1871,'' poem by Bret Jlarte ~1.5.

Chicago Poli1ical Equality LeagL1c, changes name (19•10), 179.

Chicago Public Library: established in wa1er tank, 240; fictitious Tribune article on founding of, 233; llughcs, Thomas, a founder of (article on), 232; origins, 232-35; receives books from Darwin, Gladstone, Browning, Tennyson, Ruskin after 187, fire, 234.

Chicago Real Es1a1c Board, lists "fair rents" (1921), 184 .

Chicago Relief and Aid Society, 1871 fire relief progr,un: carpenters <"mplored, photo., 231; contributions from foreign countriC"s, 226; employment program, 229-30; employs physicians, 2-:29; evaluated, 224 _: e'\ecutive committee in session, Leslie's illus., 225; investigates applications, -:228; issues railroad passes to refugees, 230; mandatory vacC'ination program, 228; medical dispensaries, 229; organization of program described, 224-25; posters on Court House, photo. 1 224; Pullman a trustee, r 45; relief barracks, 228; relief furnilure arriving, photo., 229; relief houses, 227, floor plan, 228; relief supplies provided, 226,227; Special Relief Committee, 230-31; supplies sewing machines, 231; total of relief funds, 226; total of victims aided, 231; see also, Fire, Great Chicago and General Relief Committee.

Chicago Ri ver: (and branches) map, 33; described by Sara Jane Lippincott ( 1871 ), 40-41; 1833 channel cut at mouth of (on map) 1 35; flow reversed, 40-41; mouth of, 1833 1 map, 35; North Branch aOO\"e North Avenue as source of brick clay, 45; North Branch and its forks described, 34; North Shore channel, map, 33; pollution (early), 38; \Volf Point , map, 35.

Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal: map, 39; under construction photo., 41; see Illinois and Michigan Canal.

Chicago School of fiction: Howells, W. D., essay on, 173-74; members of, 172; Wyatt, Edith Franklin, place in, 172-77.

Chicago Symphony Orchestra: Frederick Slack may leave ( 1921 ), 184; opens 29th season (1919), 57.

"Chicago through a Camera Lens/' article by Glen E. Holt, 158.

Chicago Union Stock Yards, su Union Stock Yards.

11 Chicago Was Theirs," article by James A. Clifton, 5.

Chicago White Sox: in 7th place (1921), 248; lose to Tigers in 1921 opener, 185; lose World Series (1919), 57; 1919 World Series scandal rumored, 59, 122; 1919 World Series scandal trial, 246; players indicted, 122; "square boys" rewarded, 179; win pennant (1919), 57.

Churches: Episcopal Cathedral burns, 184; First Congregational, relief headquarters (1871), 222; North Side, burn in 1871 fire, 209.

City planning: bond issues on Burnham plan carry, 58; by aerial photography, 167.

Civil disorders: communist gathering (1921), 248; Haymarket Riot, 170; SDS demonstration (late 1960s), 187, photo., 187.

Civil \-\~ar prison camps, su Camp Douglas.

Clark, Charles R: photo. by, 163; photograph collection, 164; phot0graphy of, 164.

Clayton, John: compiler, !lliTlois Fact Book and Historical Almanac, 189; expelled from Fiume by d'Annunzio, 58; "I low They Tinkered with a River," article, 32.

C lifton, James A., "Chicago Was Theirs/' article, 5.

Clubs: Glenview Golf burns, 1 1g; Glenview Golf reopens, 245; Union League, honors John Drinkwater, 58.

Coliseum, Cox-Roosevelt rally (1920), 179.

Collyer, the Rev. Robert, urges optimism after 1871 fire, 237.

Colosimo, "Big Jim," murdered, 118.

Columbia Record Co.,Joe "King,, Oliver records for, 137.

Communists: A. Stoller Tobinson, 24~; gathering dispersed, 248; protest Sacco-Vanzetti sentence in Pans ( 192 1), 249; threaten worker's uprising (1921), 245; Ste also Radicals.

Compton, Glover, with band, photo., 139.

Confederate soldiers, su Camp Douglas.

Conley's Patch, 199.

Constitutional Convention (IIl., 1920): Cook County delegates threaten to quit, 180; limits Cook County representation_ in Senate, 180.

Cook County Court House and 01ty Hall: burns 1n 187r fire, 205- c6; ruins of after 1871 fire, photo., 111s1de front cover No. 4, 208.

Cook County Real Estate Board, reports plentiful housing (1921), 246.

Copelin, Thomas, Sherman House, photo., by, 194.

Cosmopolitan State Bank, to build at Chicago Ave. and Clark St. (1919), 57.

Cottage Grove Ave. Cable Car line, 48.

Country house near Chica~o: care of guests, 98; duties of staff at, 96-98; flower room, 99; guests amusements, 99i house and garden, photo., 97; inside staIT, photo., 98; outside staff, photo., 98; servants' uniforms, CO~~-James M., campaigns in Chicago (1920), 179.

Creole Jazz Band: group photo., l'.10; recording for Gennett, 138.

Crime: Arbuckle, Roscoe "Fatty," questioned in death of actress, 248; Chicago criminals threat to rural dis~ricts, 185; . C?losirno, "Big Jim," murdered, 118; gangsters and pzz! 139;_ He1tler-Pearlman whiskey theft (1920), 179; hold-up totals 1n Chicago (19~:20) 1 180; murder rate (1919), 59; Orthwein, Isabelle Cora, murder trial, photo., 247; police aid in whiskey theft, 179; rise in hus?a.n?, -murdcrs, 245; state police force urged (1920), 180; su also proh1b1t1on.

Cudilhy, Joseph M., made president of Sinclair Refining Co., 116.

Curie, Mme. 1\1arie, visits Chicago, 246.

Czolgosz, Leon: assassinates McKinley, 170; implicates Emma Goldman, 170.

Daguerreotypes, popularity in U.S., 158.

D'Andrca, Antbony: headquarters bombed, 183; killed, 245.

Debs, Eugene, meets Emma Goldman, 170.

De Koven, Reginald, dies in Chicago 59.

Dempsey.Jack, match with Gt"orgcs Carpentier (1921), 246.

Disaslers: Armour grain elevator explosion, 185; Porter (Jnd.) train wreck, 184; tornado kills 29, r 17.

Divorce, Chicago gco~raphical factor in, 245.

Dodds, _(ohn, wilh Creole Jazz Band, photo., 130.

Dodds, \i\'arren, wilh Creole jazz Band, photo., 130.

Douglas, Camp, ste Camp Douglas.

Douglas, Slephen A., home, photo., 167. . .

Dozier, Ada, awarded damages for death of husband in J 91 g race nots, 24.'iDr.tft: agitation against, 17 1; Ber&'doll, Grover Cleveland, arrested for evasion, 245; list of Chicago \'\orld \Var f evaders published, 245; Zimmerman, Hans, arrested for evasion, 245.

Drake Hotel: opens (1920), 180; opens, photo., 182j shops in sued, 185.

Drake, Tracy C., opens hmel (1920), 180.

Dreamland Cafe, jazz club, photo., 133.

Drinkwater, John, honored by Union League Club, 58.

Dunavan, Joseph M., Confederate prisoner at Camp Douglas, song ql!Oled, 83.

"The Dunleith and Dubuque Bridge,,, ariicle, 1 15.

Dunleith and Dubuque Bridge: photos., inside front cover No. r, 114; on its building, 1 15.

Eastman, George: box camera, 162-64; introduces "American'' film, 164.

E.conomy: building boom (1921), 249; aITec.ts marriages (1921), 246; employment rises (1921), 182; gasoline pnces (1921), 182; losses by State Street stores, 183; restaurant prices, 182; restaurant prices (1921), 183: Scars-Roebuck lo,-.â&#x20AC;˘crs wages (1921), 184; steel industry unemployment (1920), 179; unemployment among veterans (1921), 245, 248; unemploymeo1 frared cause of crime (192r), 248; unemployment in Chicago (1921), 180, 184.

"Edith Wyatt: The Jane Austen of Chicago~", article by Clara ~f. and Rudolf Kirk, 172.

Einstein, Albert, visits U. of C., 245.

Eisenberg, David: on publication of firs! Tarzan book, 21-22; on James Allen Si. John's studio, 27.

Elections: bombing at D'Andrcst headquarters, 183; Cox and Roosevelt nominated, 121; Ilardjng nominatC"d (1920), 119; Lowden wins presidential primary, 117; reform judges win (1921), 246; Republican national convention opens (1920), 119i voter totals (1920), 122.

F.tevated train lines, sre Transport,lllon.

Elite Cafe, /Jholo., 137.

Employment, see Economy.

Ethnic groups: Chicago Irish, plan protest parade- (1920), t79, prot<'St An fnstitutc lions, 180, urge recognition of Irish Republic, 185; foreign language press adver1ises illegal s1ills, 183; Stt aho Negroes.

Evers, Johnny: manages Cubs, 179; su also Tinker, Joe-.

Eutry One His Own I-Vay, book by Edith \.Vyittt, p. 129; 1lowells praises, 174 1 I 76.

Expositions: 1921 Pageant of Progress, 246; \Vorld's Columbian, trains to, 51.

Fairbank, Nathaniel, employment chairman, 1871 fire relief, 230.

Fairbanks, Douglas, in Chicago ( 1920) 1 photo., 12 1.

Farwell, Arthur Burrage, urges prohibition enforceni('nt (1921), 248.

Farwell,John V., reopens business after 1871 fire, 238.

Fashion: children's short clothes, 145; head bands, 180; knickerbockers, 249; shorter skirts (1921), 180; student fads at U. of C. (1921), 183.

Field, Leiter, and Co.: rebuilds after 1871 firc-, 238; ruins (1871) 1 photo., 212.

Field, Marshall, Pullman dines with, 149.

Field Museum of Natural History, opens, 245.

Films: Dr. Caligari's Cabinet, 245; The Sheik, opens, -249; Tarzan, 22 1 27- 31.

Fires: 1874, description of, 242; electrical fire in Loop (1919), 57.

Fire, Great Chicago: account by Loesch, F.J., 204; account by weatherman, 214; anniversaries of celebrated, 240, 248, 249: banks recover quickly, 238; Bross, William Lloyd, booms Chicago after, 237; building ordinances defied after, 238; burning coal piles, photo., 205; Chicago Library Association burns, 234; Cincinnati relief soup kitchen, Leslie's illus., 222; city's assets not destroyed, 244; controlled by blasting, 215; Cook County Court I louse ruins, j)l1otos., inside front cover, No. 4, 208; evacuation of North Side, 206-10; fatalities, 203; Field, Leiter and Company ruins, photo., 212; gas works burn, 206; general devastation described, 211 - q; growth of city after, 244; llarte, Bret, roem on, 215; hotels rebuilt, 239; inspires first international relic effort, 220; intense heat, 215; Kerfoot, \V. D., rebuilds first, 238; "Kerfoot's Block," photo., 239; long-term international aid to victims, 225-26; 1vlcLaughlin, Catherine (O'Leary's tenant), testifies on origin, 218-19; medal commemora1ing 100th anniversary, photo., 256, back cover No. 4; monument, pltoto., 219; national reaction to, 236; New York collects for victims, woodrnt, 227; North Side ch~irches burn, 209; North Side scene, paintiri~, front cover No. 4; 0' Leary house survives, 2, 6, photo., 217; 0' Leary, Catherine, testifies on origin, 216; other cities send relief, 220-21; Post Office and Customs I louse, ruins, photo., 213; prc~fire city (article on), 196; progress of, 204; Pullmans witness, 144; rebuilding at Randolph and La Salle sts., photo., 241; rebuilding of city (article on), 236; recovery resumes after 1873 recession, 243; rcf ugces camp on pra irie, 2 1o; relief fund totals, 226; relief program (article on), 220; (ue also Chicago Relief and Aid Society a1/tl General Relief Committee); routes of escape, 207; ruins of North Side, photo., 211; spirit of resurgence, 236-38; stimulates architecture, 243-44; water works burn, 214; weather conditions. -214; \.Vcathcr Office records burn, 214; West Side fire of day before, 204, 214; wind movements explained, 214-15.

"The First Year of 1J ull-1 louse, 1889-1890 ... , " article by ?-.,1ary Lynn McCree, 101.

Fitzmorris, Chief of Police Charles: bans Ku Klux Klan parade in Chicago (1921), 248; charges police with bootlegging (1921), 248; secs crime caused by unemployment (1921), 248.

Flower, Mrs. Lucy L., dies, 185.

Foch, Marshal Ferdinand, visits Chicago, 249.

Fort Donelson, battle of, supplied prisoners to Camp Douglas, 84.

Free Speech League, formed, 17 1.

Fuller, Jlenry B., W. D. Howells ranks Edith Wyatt wi1h 1 172.

Fulton Market, opens, 245.

Galena grain elevator (the), photo., 165.

Galli-Curci, Amelita. divorced, 59.

Garden, Mary: gives radio concert from Auditorium (1921), 249; made director of Chicago Opera, 182; photo., 181; shocks audience, 182.

General Relief Committee: disorganization, 223; issues railroad passes, 223; memhership, 222; opens food distribution depots, 222-23; organized after 1871 fire, 222; passes bread ordinance, 223; see also Chicago Relief and Aid Society.

Germania Inn, 80, 8 r.

Gibbs, 0. C., superintends 1871 relief program, 225.

Gifford, Frances, photo. of, -29.

Gitlin, Todd and Nancy Hollander authors, l 'ptown, 186.

Glenview Golf Club: burns, 119; reopens after fire, 245.

Goldman, Emma: deported to Russia. 171; dies in Toronto, 171; imprisoned, 171; in Chicajo, 171; meets Czolgosz, 170; photo., 17 r; removed to Cook County ail, 170-71.

Gooding, William, Chief Engineer for lllinois and Michigan Canal, 36, 37.

Goodrich Co. docks, photo. 1 165.

"Grander and Statelier 1han Ever . . ," article by Herman Kogan, 236.

Grant Park, pre- fire, 199.

Greeley, Andrew M., book review, "Another Look at Mike Royko's Boss," 250.

Greenebaum, Henry, promotes Chicago after 1871 fire, 237.

Greene, P. B., stereograph photo. by, 161.

"The Gripman Wore a Sheepskin Coat," article by George T. Bryant, 47.

Gunsaulus, Dr. Frank VV.: advisesJane Addams, 103; dies, 184; quoted in praise of H ull~House plan, 1o+.

Gunther, Charles F.: Chicago Historical Society funds purchase of his collection, 118; dies, 59.

Hahn, Policeman Albe.rt, breaks up communist demonstration, 248.

Hammond, Charles Goodrich, emigration chairman, 1871 fire relief, 230.

Hannah and I fogg, goes out of business, 245.

Hardin, Lillian: begins jazz career, 135; in Creole Jazz Band, photo., 130.

Harding, \.Va1¡rcn G.: elected, 179; nominated (1920), 119; offe rs Gov. Lowden Navy post, 183.

Harte, Bret, "Chicago, October 10, 1871" (poem), 215.

Chicago History

253

Index, Volume I Harvey, Mrs. J. D., invites Jane Addams to join Chicago \Voman's Club, 102. l laymarkct Riot, inspires Emma Goldman, 170.

J leitlcr, Mike "de Pike.,: convicted, 184; highjacks whiskey, 179; police photo., 185.

I Icnrotin, Mrs. Charles, gives reception for Jane Addams, 102.

J lcslcr, Alexander: Chicago panorama by, 159; exhibits at Crystal Palace (1853), 158; moves studio from Galena to Chicago, 158-59; photo. by, 159.

High Cost of Living Commission, for lower restaurant prices ( 1920), 1 79• I linky-Dink, su Michael Kenna.

I Iolden, Charles C. P., organizes rcli("f after 187 1 fire, 222. llolt, Glen E., uc hicago through a Camera Lens,'' anicle 158.

1 lorsc car lines, su Transportation.

Hotels: Drake, opens, 180, phoJo., 182 ; Flore-nee ( Pullman, 111. ), pltoto., 149; Grand Pacific as Pullman residence, 145i Palmer I louse rebuilt, photo., 242; arc rebuilt after 1871 fire, 239; Sherman I louse, 194, burns ( 1871 ), 206.

Howells, \Villiam Dean: compares Edith Franklin Wyatt to George Ade, 172, to Jane Austen, 174; in group photo., 177; places Edith Franklin \Nyau in Chica{{o School, 176i praist.·s E uery One His Own ll'a)', 174, True love, 173-76; promotes Edith Franklin \V yatt, 17'277; ranks Wyatt with Jane A11sten, 176.

J loync, Thomas, fic1itious Tribune interview with, on founding of Chicago Public Library, 233.

Hubbard, Gurdon Saltonstall: describes l\1ud Lake portage (1818), 32; commissioner for Illinois and Michigan Canal, 35.

Hughes, Thomas: biographica l sketch, 232; Christ Church at Rugby, Tenn. photo .. 233; de-scription of Rugby, 234 -35; e.,tablishes Rugby, colony, 234-35; in Chicago (1870), 2~2-33; in Chicago (1880), 235; library at Rugby, photo., 235; orgamzes English book donation to Chicago after 1871 fire, 232-34; portrait /Jholo., 232; is promised donation from Chicago fo1· Rugby Library, 235; Rugby made state historical site, '235 llull-House, su Addams, Jane; su also Starr, Ellen Gates.

Illinois: Constitutional Convention ( 1920) , 180; ncv, road system, 180; swtc police force urged, 180. lllinois and Michigan Canal: map, 39; authorization and financing, 35; construction begun, 36; costs and runding, 37, 38; estimated cost and plan of construction, 36; fails to prevent pollution of Lake Michiga n (1872 and 1885), 41; funding of reconstructed canal, 41; membership of Board of Canal Commissioners, 35; old lock, fiho10. 1 37; opens (1847), 37; rate of diversion from Lake l\1ichigan and its regulation, 46; r~constructed canal opened, 40-41; reconstruction aut horized (1865), 40; refunding after Panic of 1837 1 36-37; surveyed by M aj.

Stephen Long, 35 : tonnages of shipping handled (1883-69), 44.

Illinois Central depot (1858), photo., 159.

Jl/i,1ois Fact Book and 1-/i.storical Almanac, compiled by John Clayton, reviewed, 189.

Illinois Military Commission, unemployed vc1crans ( 1921 ), 248.

An Illinois Rtader edited by Clyde C. \Valton, reviewed. 188-89.

Ill inois Vigilance Association , against "one spot wriggle," :2:49.

Indi ana Ave. horse car line, 48, 50.

Inter-Stale Industrial .Exposition Buildin.~, opens, 240.

(1920), 116; pre.fire work force, 200; railway wages cut (1921), 245; school engi neers strike (1920), 117; steel strike violence at Indiana Harbor (1919), 57; surface transport struck {1920), 121; teamsters' strike ends (1921), 249; three-week actors' strike e nds (19r9), 57.

Lake Michigan 1 early pollution of, 40.

LaMenthc, Ferdinand Joseph (u Jelly Roll Morton"): death, 141 ; ea rl y career, 137-38; records, in Chicago, 140, " Jelly Roll Blues," 138; photo., 140 ; populari1y declines, 140-41.

Landis, Kenesaw M., accepts baseball chairmanship, 180.

Larned, Edwin C., quoted on Chicago fire relief program, 231.

La Salle and Lake sts., pre-fire litho. illus., 202.

La Salle St. tunnel, used in 1871 fire , 205-06.

Lasswell , David: "The Old New Left: Emma Goldman in Chicago," article, 170; "Chicago before the Fire: Some People, Places, and Things/' article, 196; review of Uptown, Poor ll'hilts in Chicago by Gitlin and l lollandcr, 186.

Lawrence, George R.: career, 166-67; develops aerial photogra phy, 166; develops fl as h , 166; makes world's largest camera, 166 ; photo. by, 166.

League of VVomcn Voters , formed ( 1920), 179.

Lemos, ?vlrs. Julia, fire painting by, cover 1 o. 4.

Lcon ~ird, \,Viii, "Tinker to Evers 10 Chance," article, 69.

Lewis, Sinclair: in Evanston (1921) 1 184; photo., 184.

Libraries, su llughes 1 Thomas.

Lincoln , Mary Todd , in 1871 fire, 199.

Lincoln, Robert, entertains Thomas llughcs (1870), 232-3~.

Lippincott, Sarajane , describes 1·everscd now of Chicago River (1871), 40 41.

Literature : best seller.s (19'20), 180, (1921), 248; Chica~o School , 176; Fitz;ger,dd 's This S1dt oj Parodist reviewed in 1921, 1 17: Galsworthy's In Cha11(ery reviewed in 1921. 180.

Livermon·, 1ary A., quoted on Camp Douglas, 85- 86.

Loesch, Frank.]., "Personal Experiences during tht· Chic..igo Fire," excerpts from article, 204.

Long, E.B., "Camp Douglas: 'A Hellish Den '?," art icle, 83.

Lowden , Florence Pullman, photo. with hu sband, 151.

Lowden, Frank 0 .: offered Navy posl in I larding cabinet (1921) 1 183; dedicates Gov. Oglesby statue, 58; marries Florence Pullman , 15354; photo. as gov., 117; photo. with bride, 151 ; wins presidential primary, 1 17.

Kc~.f~ot, William 0.: "Kerfoot's Block," photo., 239; rebuilds after fire, 238.

Kimbell , Elisabeth: book reviews, Illinois Far/ BooJ. and H istorical Almanac, 189, .Jn Illinois Reader, 188; " \ Ve Could Not Do without the Chicago Fire," article, 220.

King, Frank, baseball poster by, front cover :O•fo. 2'.

Kirk , Clara M. and Rudolf, "Edith \\'yaa: The Jane Aust("n of Chicago?." article, 172.

K ogan, Herman, "Grander and Statelier than Ever ... ," 236.

Kranz, John M., oldest State Street merchant dies, 58.

Ku Klux Klan: investigated in Chicago (1921), 248; meets near Lake Zurich, Ill. (1921), 248; prohibited from parading in Chicago (1921), 248.

~1cClurg, A.C., publishes first Tarzan book, 2 1-22 .

McCormack , .John , sings co ncert for I rish famine relief, 24.5.

M cCo rmick, Edith Rockefeller, offers land for zoo, 59.

McCormick, M.uriel, goes to Demps("y-Carpcntit>r figh1 (192 1), 246. lvfcCormick, Sen. Medill, attacks VVilson and Leagu<' of N;Hion.s, 57.

McCor, The Rev. lsaac, works for union of Potawa1omi tribe, 14 15.

McCre<', Mr1ry Lynn, ''The First Year of llull-flousc, 1889 1890, In Letters by Jan<' Addams and Ellen Gates S1arr /' article, 101.

M.cDonald, ~1ichacl Cassius, emerges after 1871 fire, 24:i.

M cGraw, John, quoted on Tinker. Evers, and Chance, 71.

McSwinry, l\1ary, speaks in Chicago, 183. :V1adi so n St. , cable ca r line, 48.

Mahjong, in1roduced in Chicago, 246.

Mandel brothers, reopen their store after 1871 fire, 238.

1'1ark l\.-Ifg. Co., \·ioknt strike at (1919), 57. " A ~!ark o~ English Sympathy," article by George ?\.f Bishop,.Jr., 232.

1'1arshall Field and Co.: to distribule bonus (1919), 57; Jtt Fie-Id, Leiter and Co. May Dav parade ( 1921 ), 24_5.

Medill , Josep h : ckc1ed maror (1871),_238i issues call to rCC0\'ery after 1871 firt" , 236; urges fireproof buildJOl{S, 238.

Medill School of Journalism, opens (1921), 183. ~{cdill, \.Yilliam, Comm. of Indian affairs, places Powwatomics on Kaw Riv. rcser\'l\ 15.

Metropolitan Saniiary District of Greater Chicago: enlarged and given present nan1c, 45; uc also Sanitary District of Chicago.

Michigan Ave.: pre-fire residences, 196- -97; residents oppose shops in Drake I Jotc-1 , 185.

1'.fichi~a.n A\'e. Bridge: opens (1920), 118; (o\..·er le\'cl opens, 180; stausucs on, 246.

1-lichigan Ave. Free Library, tries to claim English book donation after fire , 234,. l\.1.ichigan Central Railroad: depot, photo. ( 1858), 159, photo. of train (1868), 145. ~1illcr, Flo1ence Lo\-.den (~1rs. C. Phillip}, ''The Pullmans of Prairie A\'{'nue," article, 142. ~1ih-.•aukee Ave ., horse car pholo., 48.

Monument to grcal Chicago Fire, photo., 219. ~food}', Dwight L.: in Chicago (1871); portrait (l(lintme, 203.

1'-loody's Church, The Rev. C.F. Goss supports I ull-1 louse~plan, 104.

Morals and manners: blue laws urged, 180; divorce rates (1921), 245; 11 fast dancing" though1 subslitute for alcohol (1921), 184; immodest bathing suits (1921), 246; ~fethodists oppose inaugural ball (1920), 180; "one spot wriggle" dance, 249; Peggv Jlopkins Joyce divorce, photo., 247; shimmy and toddle dances thought improper 182 ; women's clubs o\',pose public smoking (1920), 118. ' Morton Arboretum csta lished , 249.

Morton, " Jelly Roll," su La:r..fenthe, Ferdinand Joseph Morion, _Toy, gives land for arboretum, 249.

Mosher, '''rheodore, Jr. (Chicago weatherman, 1871 )i " A Trained Observer Sees the Fire,' ' excerpts from report , 214.

Mud Lake: early portage to Des Plaines Riv., 32; on map, 34.

Mundelein, Archbishop George \'V illiam, appointment as cardinal rumored, 183.

Music: "Avalon," bestselling song (1920), 180; Bela Babai in Chicago 156-57; best selling sheet music (1920), 180, (1921) 1 245; stt als~ Jazz.

Labor: American Express Co. struck (1920), 116; bakers strike (1921), 245; building unions graft (1921), 245; carpenters reject strike settlement (1919), 57, end strike, 57; city firemen threaten to resign (1920), 1 17 i city hall cmployes strike ( 1920), 116; city teamsters strike (1920), 116; coal miners strike (1919) 1 58; coal strike closes factories, 58; coal strike ends ( 1919), 58; construction trades' \-,age agreement (1~21), 248; electrical w0t·kers strike (1921), 246; furniture movers strike (1920), 116; hotel help strike (1920), 118; 1\-V\V hall raided by veterans (1 91 9), 57; national steel s1rikc begins (1919) 1 57; Peoples Gas meets pay raise demand (1920), 116; postal workers demand raise

National Fire Prevention Day, established, 248.

Negroes: innuence on Chicago jazz, 135; Mayor Thompson charged with reneging on promises 10 (1921), 183; 1919 riot compensation, 2 45• Newark, N.J. , conducts relief program for Chicago fire victims, 225-26.

Newspapers, advertising illegal stills (192 1), 183.

Nicholson, Bishop Thomas, condemns movie offers to Isabelle Cora Orthwcin, 246.

"North Avenue and Clark Street," article by Paul M. Angle, 80.

Northern Trust Bank , robbed ( 1921), 184.

Jazz: Bucktown Five, 139; Chicago clubs, 133-40; Chicago jazzmen, 133-41: Chicago strle, 139, black influence on, 135, c haracteristics, 132 1 decline of, 140-41 , defined, 139 , where played, 133; Creole Jazz Band, photo., 130; Creole jazz Band , 138; definition of, 132; Dreamland Cafe, 136, photo., 139; Drummer's Band, photo., 139; Elite Cafe, photo., 137; f.riar's Society Orchestra, 138; in Chicago, 132- 41; King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band, 136; Lincoln Gardens, 137; ~lound City Blowers, 139; Original Creole Band. 134, 136, 138; Original Dixieland Jazz Band, 138: origin of name of, 132, 134 ·35; Pekin Cafe, 136; pioneers in Chicago, 1~5; Red Jlot Peppers, 138, 140, record in Chicago, 140; Rhythm Kings, 136, 140, disband 1 140; Royal Gardens Cafe, 135 1 136; Smith , Bessie, bolsters Columbia Record Co., 138; songs recorded by LaMenthe, 138 1 140 ; songs recorded by King Oliver, 13.7; songs recorded by Rhythm Kings, 136; Stomp Six, 139; Washboard Band , 138; \\"olverines, 138, 140 1 photo., 141.

Jenney, \\'illiam LeBaron, designs Portland Block, Leiter Building, Home Insurance Building, 244.

Johnson, Dr. Hosmer Allen , medical chairman , 1 87, fire relief, 229.

Johnson, Jack:photo., 247; sentenced, 122.

Johnson, \Villiam, with Creole Jazz Band, photo., 130.

Joyce, Peggy Hopkins, wins record divorce seulement, photo., 247.

"Kate! The Barn f s Afire!,'' Mrs. O'Leary's testimony on , 871 fire, 216.

K enna, Michael {alderman): closes saloon, 185; disposes of beer glasses,

254

Chicago History

North Federal Savings and Loan Assn., building, 80, 81.

North Shore Channel, completed (1910), 42.

North Side: (pre-fire), described, 199; ruins (1871) pl,oto., 21 r.

Northwestern Univ.: buys downtown tract ( 1920), 1 19; elects president , 122; plans Chicago campus, 57; Mcdill School of Journalism opens, 183; president resigns (1920), 121.

Oak Woods Cemetery: Confederate monument , photo., 95; Confederate prisoners buried there, 83.

Ogden-Wentworth Ditch: on mop, 34; effect on pollution of Lake Michigan, 40.

Ogden, William B. inaugurates construction of Ill. & Mi ch. Canal, 36.

"The Old New Left: Emma Goldman in Chicago/' article by David Lasswell, 1 70.

Old Town, during 1871 fire, painting, cover, No. 4.

O'Leary, Catherine: house, phoJo., 217; house saved, 216; " Kate! The Barn ls Afire," excerpts from her testimony on fire origin, 216; losses, 216; tcpant 's party, 218; tenant's testimony on fire, 218-19.

O liver, Joseph " King, " begins to record jazz, 137; childhood and early career, 135-36; his Creole Jazz Band, photo., 130; offers Louis Armstrong a }ob, 136 ; organizes Creole Jazz Band, r 36.

Opera: "Samson and Delilah" opens 1921 season, 249; rte also Mary Garden and Ravinia.

Orthwcin, Isabelle Cora, acquitted (1921), photo., 247.

Palmer House: rebui lt after 1871 fii·e, photo., 242; Van Osdel architect for rebuilding, 239.

Park Row, two photos . of, 163.

Pekin Cafe, advertising card, p!toto., 134.

Peoples Gas Light a nd Coke Co., gives pav increase (1920), 116.

1 ' Pcrsonal Experiences during the Chicago fire," excerpts from account

by Frank J. Loesch, 204.

Photography: aerial, development, 166, example of, photo., 166, uses, 167; amateur, 162-64; ambrotypc, 158; binocular camera developed, 161 ; box camera introduced, 164; cane-de-v isite, method, 160-162, example photo., 160; city planning with aerial photos., 167 ; commercial, development, 164-67, limiunions, 166, subjects, 164; early limitations, 168-69; flash developed, 166j histo ri ans' uses, 158-69; Kodak introduced, 162-64; largest camera, 166; news photogra ph y developed, 167, examples, photos., 167 1 168; reform photography, development, 167-·68, example, /1hoto., 169, uses, 168; stereogra phs, 161 -62, examples, photos., 161, 163 1 limitations, 162.

Pickford, Mary, in Chicago (1920), photo., 121.

Plaza llotcl: character of, Bo; 1912 photo., 81.

Poetry magazine, awards annual prizes ( 1921 ). 249.

Police: charged with bootlegging (1921), 248; break up communist demonstration, 248; called " rotten" (1920), 119; in whiskey theft, Poli{r~a l Equality League, changes name (1920), 179.

Portages to Des Plaines Riv., map, 3 4.

Port of Chicago: described and ranked, 44- 45; map, 43; traffic at Rush St. Bridge, (about 1900) photo., 44.

Potawatomi lndians: at Council Bluff reserve , 12-14; at K a w River reserve, 15; boy, photo., cover, No. 1; Curtiss Pcquano in trophy headdress, photo.,~; Drum ceremonial, _5-7, 17 ; early history, 9-11; in Blackhawk War, 11 ; in French and [ndian \Var, 10-1 r; participate in Ft. Dearborn Massacre, 8-9; present-day survival, 16-17; present reservation near Topeka, Kans. , 5-6; removal from Jllinois, 11-15; two men in pow wow headdress, photo., 7i wars with plains tribes, 14.

Prohibition: bootlegging ring cracked (1921), 246; causes "fast dancing," 184; Chicago private clubs to be raided (1921) 1 248; effects in Evanston, 184; Hannah & I logg liquor dealers close, 245; " Hinky Dink" Kenna closes saloon, 185; " hooch burglar" gangs operate, 180; newspapers advertising stills, 183 ; rclaLionship to jazz, 139; violated extensively in Chicago, 248; Washington Home for inebriates closes , 249; whiskey smuggled as "Canadian soap," 179; WCTU celebrates anniversary of, 182.

Public J lealth: low typhoid rate (1920), 116; flu epidemic (1920), 59; new chlorinating system, 182; _s mallpox epidemics, 1801 182.

Pullman: An Exjuriment in Industrial Order and Community Planning , 18801930, by Stanley Buder !not BruderL cited, 151-52.

Pullman, Florence, photo. with husband, Frank 0. Lowden, 151 1 wedding, I ,23-54.

Pullman Free School of Manwil Training, established, 1.;,4. l>ullman, George NL : a bill for his entertaining at 1893 fair, ?v!S,photo., 190; death, 154; family group photo., 14~; family, moves to Prairie Ave., 145; house (on Prairie Ave .), described, 153-54, photo. of, 147, drawin~ room, photo., 15'2, torn down, 155; marries, 142; opposes daughter's marriage, 153; philanihropics, 154; with grandson, photo .• 155; plans To""n of Pullman, 148 ; relief activities, 187r fire, 145; youth and training, 142.

Pullman, I larriell Sanger (Mrs. George M. ): dies, 155 1 185; portrait photos., 144, 154.

Pullman Palare Car Co : photos., Detroit Shops, inside front cover, No. 3, offices (1868), 145.

Radicals: anarchists, rounded up (1920) 1 59 1 raided (1920), 179; blamed for 1871 fire, 200-02; Chicago "red scare," 200-02; communists indicted (1920), 59; Emma Goldman, 170--7 1i W. B. Lloyd sentenced, 121.

Raisa, Rosa , arrives in Chicago (1921), 249.

Randolph and l..."\ Salk sts., a{tcr 18( 1 fut", phot• , 2-4-1.

Randolph St., pre-fire, litho., 201.

Ravinia · memorial concert for Enrico Caruso, :248; opens 1921 season, 246.

Real rswte: Cosmopolitan State Bank to build (1919), 57; Northv,·cstern Univ. to build campus at Lake hon· and Chir:ago. 57; oversupply of housin~ (1921), 246; \\.illiam \\'riglcy,Jr. company buys site north of river (1919), 58.

Rcd Star 1nn, 80, note.

Relief and Aid Society, su Chicago Relief and Aid Society.

Republican ·National Convention: meets at Coliseum ( 1920), photo., 120, opens, 119.

Rrstaurants : price boycott (1920), 182; reducr prices (1921). 183.

Robertson, John Dill (health comm1ss_10ner), closes dye works for smoke violation (1919), 57; threatens ncghgcn1 landlords (192o)i 179. " The Rook err," origin of n,:11rn.". 240.

Roosevelt, Franklin D., contrat·ts polio, 248.

Roosevelt Thcat<'r, opens (1921), 185.

Rumsey, G<.'or~e F., house , photo., 198.

Rush Street Bndge: closes, 180; port traffic at (ca. 1900) photo., 44.

Ruth, Babe , new home run record (1921), 248.

Ryerson, Mrs. Arthur, introduces mahjong to Chicago (1921), 246.

St. John, James Allen (illustrator): career, 26. -27; Chicago residences, 26; death, 31; poriraLt photo., 25, work praised by Edgar Rice Burroughs , 27.

Sacc~~Vanzetti trial: protested in Paris ( 192 i), 249; Tribu11e begins series on (1921), 249.

San~er, Harriett.Amelia, marries George M. Pullman, 14·2.

San!tary an~ S_h1p Cana_l, planned (1888), 42 1 complc~cd (1900), 42.

Sanitary D1stnct of Chicago: created (1888), 42, cnJoined on water flow from lake (1920), 119; fills " Bubbly Creek," 122; see also Metropolitan Sanitary District of Greater Chicago.

Schumann, Elisabeth, performs in Chicago (1921), 249.

Servants, duties at country house near Chicago, 96.

Shalx:,nee (Potawatomi chief): opposes Black l lawk, 1 1; photo., 13.

Shepard Block, stcreograph photo. of, 161.

Sherma n I louse, burns (1871), 194, rebuilt, 194.

Slums, first photographs of, 167-68.

Smith, Hermon Dunlap,.on Dun leith-Dubuque Bridge, 115.

Smnh, Platt, confu~cd w1th_Pe~ry Smith by Andrew Carnegie, 115.

Small, Gov. Lc-nnmgton.:. 1.nd1ctcd (1921), 246; photo, (19:;u) 1 247; threatens to call out m1hua (192 1), 246.

Smoke a ba1er:ncm.: Armour and Company violations, 183; dye works closed on v1ola11on (1919), 57.

Socia lists: of Cook Co. permitted to parade (1921), 185 ; su also Radicals.

South \Vatcr Street ?v[arkct, closes, 245.

Sports:. Chi~ago baseball attendance drops (1921), 248; Cubs beat Card~na~s1n 1921 oP<:ncr, 185;Cubsl.ose.1921 ~r<;:~er, 117;8\Vhite Sox 1nd1ctcd, 122; Georges Carpcnuer 1n cxhabiu~m bout ( 1920), 119; Jack Johnson sentenced (1920), 122, leaves pnson. 247 photo.

247; Norman Ro~s wins Chicago River ~[arathon (1921), 246~ rumors of 1919 sencs scandal (1920) , 122; Tigers beat White Sox in 1921 opener, 185; '' Tinker to Evers to Chance," article on the double play combination by \\'ill Leonard, 69; William Lewis Yeeck hires Johnny Evers to manage Cubs, 179.

Stagg, Amos Alonzo, welcomed after victory 0\·cr Princeton (1921), 2 49· Stanley, Sir I lcnry Morion, quoted on his imprisonment at Camp Doug-las, 86.

Starr, Ellen Gates: youthful portrait photo., 107; lellers: describes Jane Addams's plan for llull-llouse, 103--04, on Chicago slum housing 1 1 13- r 4; see also Addams, Jane.

State and Madison sts., photo. (1905), 55.

State Street c.tble car line, 48.

Stockyards, .see Union Stockyards.

Strauss, Richard, performs in Chicago (1921), 249.

Streeter, (Cap'n) George \Vcllington , dies, 183.

S1rect cars, sre Transportation.

Sullivan, Louis I lenri. joins Dank mar Adler, 24,4.

Swing, Prof. David , su pports I lull-House plan, 102, 104, 106.

Tarza.n: effect on children, 18; his traits, 23-!24; in the movies and on radio, 22, 27-31. " TarLan \V as Born in Chicago," article by John I. Tucker, 18-31.

T a ttcrsalls Hall burns, photo., 168.

Tarlor, John i'v.: career of, 165-66; photo. by, 165; photographiccollccuon, 16y-66.

Terrace Row· burned in 187 r, 196; described, t96; photo., I!J7· T~eatcr: Barrymore, Ethel, in D eclasrt (1920), 179; t:mperor Jones opens 111 Chicago (1921), 248; three-week actors' strike ends (1921) 5i• Thomas, Theodore, in Chicago (1871 fire), 200. ' Thompson, William Hale, celebrates electio n (1920), 180.

Th?rnton, Gen. \Villiarn Fitzhugh, president, Board of Canal Commis• s1oners, 35.

"A Thous~nd ~1iles from Broadway," cartoon by Harry Grant Dart, cover, I'\o. 3.

TinCc, May, movie critic, on Dr. Caligari's Cabinet, 245. ·'Tinker to Evers to Chance," article by \Viii Leonard, 69.

Tinker, Joe; Johnny Evers; and Frank Chance, baseball double play combination: Chance becomes Cubs' manager, 74; Chance covering first, photo., 71; combinati?n breaks up ,_ 79; double play records, 70; early careers, 73-74; enmity between Tmkcr and Evers, 72; Evers in 1908, photc.! 71; Evers quoted on famous 19o8 double play, 76; group photo., 75; 111 a double play, photo., 68; later careers, 79; playing records , 72; Robert Smith quoted on, 72; their personalities, 72.

Tobinson, A. Stoller, \\-·i1h family in Moscow, 249.

Tolstoy, Countess \\'a ndayne de , blames Leo for Russian Revolution 183 . ' 11 A Trained Observer Sees the Fire," article from account bv Theodore Mosher, Jr., 214. , Transp,o rtati?n: cable c3:r lines, a breakdown (1903), photo., 46, gripman .s duues, 49, heat mg, 50, how system worked, 48-49, lighting, 50, lines, 48 1 routes, 51, summer cars, 49, train, photo., 50; electric street cars: battery operated, 54, evcninq pleasure rides on (about 1900) , 54_1 parties on. 56 1 passenger transfer ~tween li nes, 53, used for U.S. f\.fad , 54, photo., 53; elevated fares: raised (1920), 121, lowered (1920), 59: elevated trc.ti.n l~ncs: "Alley El," 52, early cars, 52, 53, electnficd, 51, South Slde line (1896--g7) routing, 51, station platforms, 52; horse car lines, last in Chicago, 47- 48, lv[ilwaukce Ave. ca r, photo., 49, on Indiana Ave., 48, used on cable car lines, 48; surface lines fares. ~edu~cd (1919), .;,8, 59; to \ V~rld's Columbian Exposition, 51; trans1t1on m cny services, 54; vanous modes of at State and l\1adison sts. ( 1905) 1 photo .• 55, trolley car parries, 56.

1rue l.ove (novel by Edith Franklin \Vyan):pholo. of 1st ed. cover, 174, e-..:cerp1 from, 1 78.

Tucke~.John l., '·!arzan \-\'as Born in Chica~o," article, 18-31.

Tvpho1d fe"cr . Chicago's low rate (1920), 1 ,6.

Un!on-Fireproof ticket, Mcdill elected mayor on, 238. l!n!on Grovc,_111.. photo. of prairie village, inside back cover, No. r.

Cmon Stock'\ ards: longhorns, photo., inside back cover, No. 2; "A Mile of Pork,'' photo., inside front cover, o. 2; survive 1871 fire 244.

United States tvfail , carried on street cars, 54. ' Cniv<'rsitv of Chicago: celebrates football victory over Princeton ( 192 1) 249; student mores (1921), 183; raises wition, (1920), 116. '

Chicago History

255

Index, Volume I Unknown Soldier, buried on third anniversary of WWl, 249.

Uptown, Poor IVhiles in Chicago by Todd Gitlin and Nancy Hollander, reviewed, 186.

Valentino, Rudolph, stars in The Shtik (1921), 249.

Van Osdcl,John Mills: architect for Palmer J louse reconstruction, 239; designs temporary city hall and library, 239-40.

Vice: Carrie Watson's bordello, 242; districts, pre-fire, 199-200; flourishes after 1871 fire, 242; "Gamblers Row" (pre-fire), 200; Michael Cassius ~1cDonald emerges, 242; prostitution (pre-fire), 199-200; YlvtCA campaign against, 203.

Victoria, Queen of England, donates books to Chicago after 1871 fire,

Vi~~~:s~~n, describes James Allen St. John, 27.

Volstead Act, see Prohibition.

Wahwassuck, John, 7, 8; photo. of, 6.

Walton, Clyde C. (ed.) A11 Illinois lltader, reviewed, 188.

Wananikwc (Santee Dakota prophetess), founds Potawatomi Drum ceremonial, 6, 17.

Waubanscc (Potawatomi chief): lea ds delegation to Washington, 1415; portrait (from litho.) 4.

Weather: heat wave (1921), 246; ice crop (1921), 185; tornado kills 29 (1920) 1 t 17; worst spring blizzard (1921) 1 185. " \ Ve Could Not Do without the Chicago Fire," article by Elisabeth Kimbell. 220.

\.Veismuller, Johnny: as Tarzan, photo., 29; career playing Tarzan, 1, 27-31; Chicago residence, 28; Olympic records, 29; swimming style, 28; at age 17, photo., 247.

Western Un ion Co., offices burn (1871), 205.

West Side Ball Park: Cap Anson opens 19o8 season at, photo ., 73; location, 69; photo. (19o8), 70.

West Side (pre-fire), described, 199. " \'\Then Jazz Came to Chicago," article by George D. Bushnell.Jr. , 132. \.Vinterbotham, Mrs. John H., introduces mahjong to Chicago (1921), 246.

V\Tolverines Uazz band): disband, 140; group photo. , 141; recording for Gennett, 138.

Women (Chicago): Harriet Hubbard Ayer, 199 ; Mrs. George M. Pullman : dies, 185; portrait photo., 1441 154; l\lrs. Lucy L. Flower, dies, 185; Mrs. William B. Leeds, may be.come Queen of Greece, 1 79. \.Vomcn's Christian Temperance Union: celebrates first anniversary of prohibition , 182 ; Jane Addams works with, 106.

World's Columbian Exposition: Pullman exhibit at, 190; transportation to, 51.

World War I: dead returned to Chica~o, 248; 50 1 000 Chicagoans search for fl;:its (1919), ,57; Jewish war relief drive ends (1919), 58.

Wright,John Stephen, quoted on Chicago's future after 1871 fire, 236.

Wrigley Building, completed, photo., 118.

Wyatt , Edith Franklin: compared to Jane Austen, 174 1 r75; included by W.D . llowclls in Chicago School , 176; in group photo., r77; meets Howells and Twain , 175; praised by llowcils, 172.

Young Men's Christian Association, pre.fire, 203 .

Zimmerman, llans Jacob, arrested for draft evasion ( 1921), 245,

THE CHICAGO

OFFICERS

HISTORICAL SOCIETY

Andrew McNally III, President Theodore Tieken, 1st Vice-President James R. Getz, 2nd Vice President Gardner H . Stern, Treasurer Clement M. Silvestro, Secretary and Director

North Avenue and Clark Street, Chicago , Illinois 60614 Telephone : M lchigan 2-4600

TRUSTEES Bowen Blair John Jay Borland Emmett Dedmon J ames R. Getz Philip W. Hummer Willard L. King Andrew McNally II I Mrs. C. Phillip M iller

Bryan S. Reid, Jr. Gilbert H . &ribner, Jr. 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. :tvfembership is open to anyone interested in the Society's activities and objectives. C lasses of membership and d ues are as follows: Annu al, $15 a year; Life, $250 (one payment); Governing Life, $500 (one payment); Governing Annual, $100 (one payment) and $25 a year; and Patron, $1000 {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 H istory $2.25 a copy by mail.

Library subscriptions $15 a year.

The Of{icia/ Chicaoo Fire Centennial Medal, struck in 1971 under the auspices of the Chicaoo Historical Society

"So what if the town did burn? " The jauntiness of the booted little urchin before the desolate ruin of the Michigan Central Depot expressed perfectly Chicago's spirit in the face of the great disaster.

Chicago Historical Society