City of the Century: The Epic of Chicago and the Making of America

City of the Century

The Epic of Chicago and the Making of America

Donald L. Miller

Copyright

City of the Century

Copyright © 1996, 2014 by Donald L. Miller

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

Cover design by Misha Beletsky

ISBN ePub edition: 9780795339851

In loving memory of my father, Donald L. Miller, and of my nephew Andrew Miller

Rough-and-tumble-business Chicago after the Great Fire was a regional capital, and in many ways, because of its innovations in industrial method and in architecture, because of its mixture of brutal wickedness and revolutionary newness, the blood of the Yards, the showpiece gems of the Lakefront, the seething of its immigrant slums, because of its violence, corruption, and creative energy, it was also a world city.

—SAUL BELLOW

Contents

Preface

I

Introduction: City of Dreamers and Doers

1 Discovery

1. THE PRIEST AND THE EXPLORER

2. JOLIET’S DREAM

2 Didn’t Expect No Town

1. WILD CHICAGO

2. BANISHING THE PAST

3 Ogden’s Chicago

1. THE FOUNDER

2. A PRAIRIE ARISTOCRACY

3. THE GRID AND THE BALLOON FRAME

4 The Great Chicago Exchange Engine

1. THE BIG JUNCTION

2. THE MECHANICAL MAN

3. STACKER OF WHEAT AND WOOD, PACKER OF PORK

5 Empire City of the West

1. CHICAGO AGAINST NATURE

2. CITY OF EXTREMES

6 My Lost City

1. THE GREAT FIRE

2. UNAPPROACHABLE IN CALAMITY

II

Introduction: Let Us Build Ourselves a City

7 That Astonishing Chicago

1. GRANDER AND STATELIER THAN EVER

2. AMERICA’S CITY

8 The Chicago Machine

1. EMPIRES OF ORDER AND BLOOD

2. A FORTRESS OF OPPRESSION

3. THE PULLMAN IDEA

4. STEEL RAILS TO COUNTRY KITCHENS

9 The Streetcar City

1. PALACES OF DESIRE

2. THE LOOP

3. CITY AND SUBURB

4. SUNDAY IN CHICAGO

10 Stories in Stone and Steel

1. SOMETHING NEW UNDER THE SUN

2. BURNHAM AND ROOT

3. THE MAJOR’S BIRDCAGE

4. FACTORIES IN THE SKY

11 Sullivan and Civic Renewal

1. THE AUDITORIUM

2. A PROUD AND SOARING THING

12 The New Chicago

1. BURNHAM’S WHITE CITY

2. HUTCHINSON’S THREE-RING CIRCUS

3. HARPER’S UNIVERSITY

4. THE SOCIAL DEFENSE OF CASTE

5. THE NEW CHICAGO WOMAN

6. CLEANSING THE CITY

13 The Battle for Chicago

1. POLITICS AIN’T BEAN BAG

2. WHY THE WARD BOSS RULES

3. HAYMARKET

4. IT’S HARRISON AGAIN

14 1893

1. THE FAIR

2. THE GOMORRAH OF THE WEST

3. STORIES OF THE STREETS AND OF THE TOWN

15 After the Fair

1. IF CHRIST CAME TO CHICAGO!

2. REGENERATION

Abbreviations Used in Notes and Bibliography

Notes

Bibliography

Illustrations

Endnotes

Acknowledgments

Chicago around the time of the fair.

Preface

On the evening of October 7, 1871, George Francis Train, a popular lecturer on moral themes, gave a talk in Chicago to a packed house at Farwell Hall. There is no record of the topic of his address, but his concluding remarks were noted. This is the last public address that will be delivered within these walls! he thundered. A terrible calamity is impending over the city of Chicago! More I cannot say; more I dare not utter.

The following night, around nine o’clock, a fire broke out on the West Side of the city in the cow barn of Mrs. Patrick O’Leary. Aided by strong winds off the prairie, it turned into a one-and-a-half-day holocaust that consumed the entire core of the city of some 300,000 people, leaving 90,000 homeless and nearly 300 dead. It was the greatest natural disaster up to that time in American history. Frederick Law Olmsted, sent by The Nation to the stricken city, reported that many of those caught in the inferno thought they were witnessing the burning of the world.

The morning after the fire, fear gave way to disbelief. Everything was gone. All familiar landmarks—churches, street signs, corner groceries, bars—had disappeared into thin air, and people wandered around like shock victims, lost in their own city. For three days after the fire we walked through the streets, covered everywhere with heaps of debris and parts of walls, and could not help comparing ourselves to ghosts…, one man observed. All those magnificent streets, all those grand palaces, which but yesterday were the pride and glory of the chief Western metropolis, are today indeed a mass of scattered, shapeless ruins.

But more amazing than the destruction was the recovery. The rebuilding began while the ground was still warm in the burned district, and within a week after the fire more than five thousand temporary structures had been erected and two hundred permanent buildings were under construction. Derrick hoists crowded the main streets, and the air came alive with the sound of hammers and the shouts and whistles of draymen and carpenters. In the midst of a calamity without parallel in the world’s history…, Chicago Tribune editor Joseph Medill wrote immediately after the fire, the people of this once beautiful city have resolved that CHICAGO SHALL RISE AGAIN. Chicagoans were convinced they had survived a biblical test, a terrible but purifying act that had cleared the way for a vast regeneration that would transform their ruined city into the master metropolis of America.

Such inflated boosterism was standard fare in the city before the Great Fire, but the fire gave it greater urgency; and with astonishing rapidity, fact almost aligned with myth. By 1893, when the city held the World’s Columbian Exposition to celebrate—one year late—the four hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s discovery of the New World, Chicago had the busiest and most modern downtown in the country, with a dozen and more of the highest buildings ever constructed. Chicago would never become as big or as consequential as New York, its greatest rival, but it had made good its boast as the city that could accomplish almost anything.

***

There is in the life of any great city a moment when it reaches its maximum potential as a center of power and culture and becomes fully conscious of its special place in history. For Chicago that moment was 1893. In that year the world’s first skyscraper city had a population of over a million people, and among them was an early settler who remembered it as a desolate trading post of some thirty souls living between a swamp and a sand-choked river. Without ever leaving Chicago, this old man had moved, by 1893, from the country to the city, from an agrarian to an industrial America, and had lived, in the process, through the entire history of his still-growing city.

This book is a history of Chicago in the years of its ascendency, from the first recorded discovery of the site by a missionary and an explorer in the service of France to the Columbian Exposition, the culmination of a postfire burst of physical growth and technological and artistic achievement, a civic awakening unparalleled in the history of American cities. It is about the nineteenth century’s newest and most explosively alive metropolis, the city of the century, the first of the great cities of the world, in the words of Henry B. Fuller, its first important novelist, to rise under purely modern conditions.

The epic of Chicago is the story of the emergence of modern America. Child of the age of steam, electricity, and international exchange, Chicago [is] the very embodiment of the world-conquering spirit of the age, an English writer observed in 1893, a city people visited to witness the forces that would shape the next century. Chicago was also, many people thought, the most typically American of the nation’s big cities, a scene of boiling economic activity and technological ingenuity, American industrialism’s supreme urban creation. In an unreservedly commercial country, it was, a visiting French writer noted, the purest kind of commercial city. The novelist Frank Norris described a cable-car ride through late-nineteenth-century Chicago: All around, on every side in every direction, the vast machinery of Commonwealth clashed and thundered from dawn to dark and from dark till dawn…. Here, of all her cities, throbbed the true life—the true power and spirit of America. Chicago was the only great city in the world to which all its citizens have come for the one common, avowed object of making money, Fuller captured part of its character. There you have its genesis, its growth, its end and object. Yet Chicago’s wealth and vitality—along with its overwhelming problems—drew to it some of the most creative young architects, writers, and reformers of the time, who came there to record, interpret, humanize, or simply experience the new phenomenon of metropolitan life.

No large city, not even Peter the Great’s St. Petersburg, had grown so fast, and nowhere else could there be found in more dramatic display such a combination of wealth and squalor, beauty and ugliness, corruption and reform. City of idealists and dissenters, of Jane Addams, Florence Kelley, Clarence Darrow, Mary McDowell, Thorstein Veblen, Albert Parsons, and Ida B. Wells, a young African-American insurgent who moved to Chicago in 1893 to mobilize a national crusade against lynching and racial segregation, it was also the city of thieving aldermen and plundering capitalists, of the sharp-dealing transportation king Charles Tyson Yerkes and his political procurator, Johnny Powers, and of those legendary boodlers Michael Hinky Dink Kenna and Bathhouse John Coughlin, aldermen who gave one dollar to the needy for every two they stole. Chicago in 1893 was the city of Marshall Field, Philip Danforth Armour, and George Mortimer Pullman, the Chicago Trinity, the newspapers called them, and of those who wrote about them and a hundred other urban figures, in what became the first realistic American reportage and fiction about the big city—Theodore Dreiser, Eugene Field, Hamlin Garland, Robert Herrick, George Ade, Henry B. Fuller, Ray Stannard Baker, and Finley Peter Dunne, creator of the affable saloon-house philosopher Mr. Dooley. And to Chicago, after the Great Fire, came the young founders of modern American architecture, John Wellborn Root, Louis H. Sullivan, and Frank Lloyd Wright, to join such visionary builders as Daniel Hudson Burnham and William Le Baron Jenney in creating urban works of audacity and beauty. In the time of these makers and dreamers, Chicago was the site of some of the greatest achievements and failures of American urban life.

Civic boosters and chauvinistic city historians portrayed Chicago in these years as a unified community that had called together its enormous resources after the Great Fire to build a new city on the ash and rubble of the old one. But Chicago was a deeply divided, corrupt, and violent city, a place of extreme contrasts, and it was this that gave it its character. I have tried to capture the spirit of this queen and guttersnipe of cities, to describe the historic forces that shaped its physical form and personality, and to give a sense of what it was like to live there when its leaders in business and the arts were calling it the wonder of the world. Recalling his life in Chicago in these years, Theodore Dreiser remarked that it is given to some cities, as to some lands, to suggest romance, and to me Chicago did that daily and hourly. It sang, or seemed to, and… I was singing with it.

***

With the ancient Greeks as my model, I have tried to write a city history that gives prominence to geography and personality, to the way the natural environment and human beings interact dialectically to create culture. And with Lewis Mumford as my modern inspiration, I have tried to write a natural history of urbanization in which the city is treated in the context of its regional economy, culture, and ecosystem. By studying the city in this way, Mumford argued, we arrive at true appreciation of the environmental consequences of urbanization—not just the impact of the spreading city on its rural hinterland but the impact of its growth on its own land, air, water, and people. Built on a windswept prairie marsh—a place so forbidding the Miami Indians refused to settle on it—modern Chicago was a triumph of engineering over nature’s constraints. This was the source of the city’s famous I Will spirit, the belief that it could surmount any obstacle nature or man put in its way. Yet when surging Chicago built shoddily or in defiance of nature’s ways, it felt nature’s reactive fury. The city of heroic engineers and architects, of great water supply and drainage systems and twelve-story buildings that stood straight and strong in shifting mud and against ripping winds, was also the city of natural calamities—of consuming fires, cholera and typhoid epidemics, poisoned water and air.

The great theme of Chicago’s nineteenth-century history is the battle between growth and control, restraint and opportunity, privatism and the public good. Chaotic Chicago seemed to have sprung up spontaneously, without planning or social foresight, a pure product of ungoverned capitalism. Yet the city that was a sprawling spectacle of smoke and disorder had a magnificent chain of parks and boulevards, one of the best sewage and water-supply systems in the world, a Sanitary and Ship Canal that was one of the engineering marvels of the century, and a splendid complex of cultural and civic buildings along its downtown lakefront. The city that critics compared to a gigantic real estate lottery, where everything was for sale, even its streets, undertook some of the most ambitious public improvement projects of the age. In 1893 it was a place well known for both its unlicensed cupidity and its strong civic consciousness. Even if Chicago provides no easy answers, the story of its unresolved struggle between order and freedom remains instructive for our time, as we seek ways to build and maintain cities that retain their humanity without losing their energy.

The story of rising Chicago is one of big and small folk—of assembly-line meat cutters and millionaire beef barons, of five-dollar-a-week salesclerks and magnificent merchant princes, of stenographer-typists and the architects who built their new offices in the sky, of devil-may-care French Canadians and straight-living Protestant improvers who drove them from their frontier trading post and built there a perfectly gridironed capitalist canal town. The lives of these people remind us that ecological history must merge with cultural history if it is to encompass the full life of the city. This type of urban history sees the city itself as a culture-creating system of biotic relationships and as a place not only where the goods of civilization are made and exchanged but also where experience is heightened and transformed into art, ritual, and civic pageantry. A product of nature, the city is also a product of human nature, the pioneering Chicago sociologist Robert Park reminds us. But the city, in turn, reshapes human nature. This two-way process of people making Chicago and of Chicago making people is the dominating theme of this urban story.

Part I

Chicago on the eve of the Great Fire.

Harper’s Weekly, 1871

Introduction:

City of Dreamers and Doers

When Louis Sullivan arrived in Chicago from the East to begin his architectural career, he felt he had been chosen for a special destiny and that this rejuvenated city was the place for him. Ashes and debris still covered much of the city in 1873, but no one wanted to talk about the ruins. All interest centered on the rebuilding. The past seemed to have no meaning to these incessantly forward pushing people, and civic patriotism was the prevailing religion. Big—or rather, biggest—was the word on every Chicagoan’s lips, Sullivan recalled in his autobiography. Chicago was the biggest livestock, lumber, and grain market in the world and the biggest railroad center. Chicagoans even boasted that theirs had been the biggest conflagration ‘in the world.’ But the Chicago shouters, as Sullivan called them, were not spinning tales. There were powerful builders and visionaries in this city of superlatives, and seventeen-year-old Sullivan thought it all magnificent and wild: A crude extravaganza: An intoxicating rawness.

After apprenticing for seven months in a firm headed by William Le Baron Jenney, Sullivan left for Paris to continue his studies, and when he returned in 1875, work was hard to find because the city was in the grip of an economic depression. So for Sullivan this became a time of preparation, a chance, as he put it, to get the lay of the land. Every day he would walk twenty miles or more around Chicago and out into the yellow prairie that stretched beyond it. What explained this raw, robust place? What gave it its impelling drive, the sense of big things to be done and the will to carry them through?

Nature gave him the first clue. She had favored Chicago with an unrivaled agricultural hinterland, which Sullivan had first seen from the window of his inbound train from Philadelphia stretching like a floor to the far horizon. Here, he thought, was power—power greater than the mountains. Then there was the inland sea, silver-blue Lake Michigan, born, like the prairie, of the slow advance and retreat of ancient ice sheets. It opened Chicago to the lumber lands to the north, to the ports of the East, and from them, to the world. On occasions when bad weather kept the lumber fleet in port, Sullivan would watch, as the skies cleared, the long lake schooners pour in a stream from the mouth of the Chicago River, spread their wings, and in a great and beautiful flock, gleam in the sunlight as they moved with favoring wind, fan-like towards Muskegon and the northern ports. Without the lake, born companion of the prairie, there would be no Chicago, he realized. But Sullivan saw the key to it all in the old portage, a narrow ridge of marshland, long since built over, between the Chicago River—the city’s busy harbor—and a prairie river, the Des Plaines, that reached the Mississippi via the Illinois. That low divide over which Indians and French traders had portaged their canoes linked Chicago to the vast, resource-rich mid-continent. Nature had thus set the stage for Chicago, offspring, Sullivan called it, of the prairie, the lake and the portage.

Nature had not created Chicago, however; she had merely made it possible. The city would not have been set on its course had not men of energy and empire first envisioned and then cut a canal through the portage. While Chicago’s earliest historians insisted that geography had determined the city’s future, Sullivan, the architect, saw city building as a supremely human art. Nature provided opportunities as well as constraints, but cities and civilizations were the work of proud people and their power to create. If ever there was a place shaped by the actions of big men, surely it was Chicago, Sullivan thought.

On his solitary urban surveys, Sullivan would sometimes walk from the place where the Chicago River flowed into the lake, down the south branch of the river to the old-time historic portage, and across it (then a place of fevered commercial activity) to the forest-bordered River Des Plaines. It was here that Jacques Marquette and Louis Joliet pulled their canoes from the river on a September day in 1673 to cross the portage to the future site of Chicago on the final leg of a historic exploration. To learn more about what happened on this spot, Sullivan read Francis Parkman’s wonder stories of Marquette and Joliet and shared in mind the hardships of these great pioneers.

Chicago did not have to invent a heroic past, Sullivan discovered. It already had one, a history in which fact often read like fabulous fiction. The story of the exploration that led to the discovery of Chicago was a founding legend as unexpectedly true as the boasts of the Chicago shouters, a simple and inspiring tale of two men seeking new lands and souls to save.¹ And Sullivan must have been delighted to learn that it was Joliet, an adventurer and visionary, who first suggested building a canal across the portage to link the lake and prairie at the site of what he surmised would become a city of continental importance. He was the forerunner of the men of destiny who were building modern Chicago. So the story of the first Chicago became, in Sullivan’s mind, a living part of another story just beginning, the creation of a new city on the blackened ruins of the old one. It was the approach of this new story that most excited him. He would bide his time.

Sullivan arrived in Chicago in the year, and close to the month, of the two hundredth anniversary of Marquette and Joliet’s passage up the Chicago River, the first white men on record to see the site of his adopted city of dreamers and doers. They were not looking for it, having come upon it by accident on one of the great voyages in the history of exploration. They had set out from the upper Great Lakes in search of the Mississippi River and found it. And with them, a priest and an explorer heading home as fast as they could to report their find, the history of Chicago begins.

1

Discovery

1. The Priest and the Explorer

The voyage that brought them to the site of Chicago had its origins in a spectacular pageant of possession in the wilderness of the northern lakes. It was called in 1670 by the intendant of New France, Jean Talon, to establish France’s claim to the entire mid-continent, an unmapped territory of unknown extent, rich in minerals and fur-bearing animals and of tremendous strategic importance. Talon had been sent to the struggling colony by Louis XIV’s chief minister, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, to begin a program of economic upbuilding, part of the young Sun King’s design for a French imperium. When Talon arrived in Quebec, the territory of New France extended just a few miles beyond the junction of the Ottawa and St. Lawrence Rivers, west of Montreal; and he came with orders from Colbert to strengthen the foundations of the central colony before launching any precipitous campaigns of territorial expansion. But Talon was an eager imperialist, anxious to claim for France the interior of the continent, hemming in the English on the Atlantic seaboard and challenging Spain’s claims to the American Southwest. All the while, in a more contested theater of expansion, his king prepared to war on the Dutch and the Spanish in an effort to push back France’s borders to the Rhine and the Alps, inaugurating an age of French dominance in world affairs.

Since the interior of the continent was still an unknown world, Talon, with no army to speak of, had to rely on French-Canadian fur traders and explorers, like Joliet, and Jesuit missionaries, like Marquette, to carry out his design. The Jesuits had already pushed across the continent to the southern shore of Lake Superior, where Marquette had a mission on remote Chequamegon Bay; and the traders had built a network of alliances with the tribes of the western lakes, who coveted glass beads, iron tools, tobacco, and if they could get it from unscrupulous traders, brandy and whiskey. Now Talon moved to consolidate these gains and establish French influence over the lands and native peoples to the south of the lakes, as far as Florida and Mexico. When he accomplished this, he intended to send an expedition in search of the mysterious river the Indians called Messipi, the Great Water. If it flowed into the California Sea, as some guessed it did, his explorers would be the discoverers of the long-sought western waterway to Cathay.

In 1670, Talon sent out messengers to the chiefs and captains of the tribes of the North to gather that following spring at Sault Ste. Marie for a council with an ambassador from the king. Talon chose a commanding and symbolic site for the occasion. Located at the head of the Great Lakes, on the explosive rapids that carried the waters of Lake Superior into Lake Huron, the sault was the nerve center of French fur trading and missionary enterprise in the Northwest. As the grand monarque’s envoy, Talon named Jean-Baptiste de Saint Lusson, a nobleman and soldier of fortune whose only claim to a place in history was his command of this expedition into that far-away corner of the world.

Waiting for him at the sault were representatives of fourteen tribes. They had come, in part, out of curiosity—to see the man Talon had promised to send, the voice of the captain of the greatest captains, whose house, they had been told by the traders and fathers, contained more families than the largest of their villages. But they were there mainly to cement trade ties with the French, a trade the Indian tribes were becoming utterly dependent upon, to their ultimate disadvantage.

On the morning of June 14, 1671, the missionaries assembled the tribal chiefs on a hill overlooking the village, the mission, and the falls of Ste. Marie, with the pine-scented forest in the background. It was a time of great beauty in the northern woods, and the tribal delegates were greased and perfumed for what they had been told would be the most solemn ceremony ever observed in these regions. On the ground just in front of them, at the highest point on the hill, lay a large wooden cross of fresh-cut timber and a cedar pole with some kind of plate on it.

The Indians watched in silence as the gate of the mission stockade swung open and a procession wound its way to the place where they were waiting. At its head were the black robes, holding crucifixes in front of them and chanting a Latin hymn. Then came the traders dressed in buckskin, among them Louis Joliet, who had a thriving fur business at the sault, and a French-Canadian voyageur, or river man, who would accompany Joliet and Marquette on their journey to the Mississippi. Finally, Saint Lusson came into the Indians’ sight, magnificent in his crimson uniform and glistening helmet, a ceremonial sword in his right hand.

After the cross was blessed and planted in the ground, the cedar post bearing the royal arms of France on an escutcheon was placed beside it, while the priests chanted the twentieth psalm. At this point, Saint Lusson stepped forward and in a loud voice took possession for his monarch of Lakes Huron and Superior… and of all other countries, rivers, lakes and tributaries, contiguous and adjacent thereunto, as well discovered as to be discovered, which are bounded on the one side by the Northern and Western Seas and on the other side by the South Sea including all its length and breadth. Then Father Claude Allouez, the most revered missionary in New France, called the chiefs close to him and spoke to them in their tongue of what sort of a mighty man he was whose standard they beheld, and to whose sovereignty they were that day submitting.

When members of Saint Lusson’s cortege left the sault, one of them slipped a copy of the report of the annexation behind the escutcheon. After they were gone, the Indians removed it and burned it, fearing that the paper was a spell that would cause the death of all the tribes that had sent representatives to the sault. Then they returned to their people. They were not sure exactly what they had witnessed or what it portended. There was no misunderstanding in Quebec, however.

Talon saw the ceremony at the sault as a prophecy to be swiftly fulfilled. France had laid claim to the largest colonial possession in the world; now she must occupy and hold it. At the pageant there had been more talk, which reached Talon, of the river the Indians said rose in the north and flowed south to a place they had not reached in their longest journeys. No Frenchman had any idea that this was the river Hernando de Soto had crossed and claimed for Spain a century before. The memory of that find had dimmed with time and Spain’s falling fortunes in Europe, and those few cartographers who knew of de Soto’s river speculated that it was but one of many that flowed north to south through the continent. Without orders from Colbert, Talon formed a party of exploration and named Joliet, at age twenty-seven the colony’s most accomplished explorer and mapmaker, to head it. Joliet’s orders were to find the Mississippi and follow it to where it entered the sea.

Son of a wheelwright, the Canadian-born Joliet was educated by the Jesuits in Quebec, intending to enter the order until the lure of the wilderness claimed him. He had spent some time with Marquette at the mission station at the sault, where they had talked of making a voyage together to the river that several Illinois Indians had described to the priest. Marquette had promised that he would carry the gospel to their lands, which bordered the Mississippi, so he was the logical choice of Claude Dablon, his superior, to be chaplain of the expedition. Some Jesuits thought that the more experienced Allouez should be the first apostle to the Illinois, but Marquette was younger—in his mid-thirties—had skills as a geographer and cartographer, and had mastered six Indian languages since his arrival in Canada in 1666, immediately after his ordination.

Marquette had the blazing zeal of the Jesuit martyrs of the Iroquois massacres he had read about back in his native Laon. He seems, Francis Parkman wrote of him, a figure evoked from some dim legend of medieval saintship. But in addition to being apostles, Marquette’s generation of Jesuit missionaries were explorers and men of science, eager to travel to unknown lands and send back fact-filled accounts of climate, geography, soil conditions, plant and animal life, river currents and lake tides, and the habits and customs of the native peoples they encountered. On his and Joliet’s journey, which took them north, west, and south of the future site of Chicago, Marquette kept an accurate journal of the places they passed through and, with the help of nothing more than a compass and an astrolabe, drew the first reliable map of this part of the world. Joliet also kept generous records—which have been lost—gave a full account of the journey to his superiors, and made a better map than Marquette’s. These records and recollections form the first picture we have of the bounteous forests and flatlands—the far-spreading hinterland—that would give rise eventually to a major market and transporting center at the site of Louis Sullivan’s historic portage. They are the first natural history of the Chicago region. Reading them today we understand why there became a Chicago. They are, as well, a thrilling tale of origins and adventure, a Chicago Aeneid.

***

They left for Illinois country on May 17, 1673—five voyageurs, the priest, and the explorer—in two birchbark canoes. Their jumping off point was the mission of St. Ignace that Marquette had founded in 1671 on the Straits of Mackinac, at the far northeastern edge of Lake Michigan. Their outfit was light for so long a journey: a supply of smoked meat and Indian corn, a package of trading trinkets, powder, balls and muskets, paper and bottles of ink for taking notes, and Marquette’s storage box filled with vestments, altar wine, a supply of Communion hosts, and his breviary. The first leg of their journey took them through territory already mapped and explored: across the northern rim of Lake Michigan and south to the bottom of sheltered Green Bay, where Allouez had established the mission of St. Francis Xavier, and from there up the Fox River, through its treacherous rapids and falls, to an Indian village deep in the hardwood forests that would help feed nineteenth-century Chicago’s insatiable hunger for lumber. When they arrived at the settlement of the friendly Mascoutins and Miamis, twenty-two days from St. Ignace, they reached the farthest limit of French penetration into the continent. There they called a council of the elders and asked for guides to show them upriver to the portage that they were certain, from Indian reports, would take them to a western river that discharged into the Mississippi.

Their hosts had a great fear of these interior lands, the country of the hostile Sioux—the Iroquois of the West, as the French called them—and they tried to persuade Marquette and Joliet to proceed no farther. The Big Water they hoped to reach was filled with horrible monsters which devoured men and canoes together, these Indians and others they had met farther north told them, and its banks were home to bands of warriors who would break their heads without any cause; while to the south, if they made it that far, they would run into searing heat, which would wilt them, turn them black, and eventually kill them. I thanked them for the good advice…, Marquette records, but told them that I could not follow it, because the salvation of souls was at stake, for which I would be delighted to give my life. On the tenth of June, with two Miami guides, they left in the sight of a great crowd, who could not sufficiently express their astonishment, Marquette writes, "at the sight of seven frenchmen [sic] alone and in two Canoes, daring to undertake so extraordinary and so hazardous an Expedition."

They paddled up a sluggish stream broken by a maze of swamps and stagnant lakes, and when they reached the portage, the Miamis left them. They were alone now, in the hands of providence, cut off from lands and people in any way familiar to them. Before boarding their canoes, Marquette called them together, and they knelt on the forest floor for a prayer to his patroness, the Virgin Mary. They then paddled down the broad and beautiful Wisconsin River, the voyageurs timing their river songs to the strokes of the paddles. On the seventeenth of June they entered the Mississippi with a Joy, Marquette wrote in his journal, that I cannot Express.²

Atlas of American History, ed. Kenneth T. Jackson and James Truslow Adams (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1978).

Here… on this so renowned river, Marquette and Joliet began to take more careful notes—on the current and depth of the river, on the variety of fish and game along its course, on everything that excited their curiosity. They saw wildcats, what they described as Swans without wings, and monstrous fish (probably catfish), but it was the bison, or wild cattle, as Marquette called them, that most interested them. Huge herds of them blackened the prairies, and they were the first Europeans to give eyewitness accounts of them. When one of their men killed a bison, Joliet and Marquette examined it like eager surgical students and jotted down detailed anatomic notes. From this point on, the flesh and fat of the bison was the best dish at [their] feasts.

In this country where we knew not whither we were going, they proceeded with great caution, on the lookout for hostile Indians. Toward evening, they made only small fires on the riverbank to cook their meals, and after supper they slept in their canoes, which they anchored in midstream, posting an armed sentinel for fear of surprise. They traveled down the meandering Mississippi almost 200 miles without seeing a trace of a human being, the only sound on the river the splash of their paddles in the current. Then, on the twenty-fifth of June, they saw through the morning mist footprints on the west bank of the river and a path leading into a spacious prairie. Thinking it would take them to an Indian settlement, Joliet and Marquette decided to follow it, unarmed, leaving the voyageurs behind to guard the canoes. Both of them had the courage, Dablon would write, to dread nothing where everything is to be feared.

After walking almost six miles, they spotted a village on the bank of a river and two other settlements on a hill in the distance.³ They approached so near that they could hear conversation and laughter. Saying a prayer together to summon up their courage, they decided to reveal themselves by standing in the open and shouting with all Our energy. Their yells set off alarm in the village, and the Indians came streaming from their wigwams to gather around their chiefs. Seeing Marquette’s black gown, some who traded in the North probably recognized them as Frenchmen, and four elders were sent out to greet them, two of them bearing calumets, sacred smoking pipes elaborately decorated, which were a sign of peace. They walked slowly and silently toward the Frenchmen, raising the pipes toward the sun.

Marquette spoke first, asking them if they were Illinois. They said they were and escorted them to the village of their chief, where gifts were exchanged and Joliet explained the purpose of their presence on the river. A great feast followed, with the Master of Ceremonies, as Marquette quaintly called him, feeding his guests from a spoon as if they were children. That night they slept in the cabin of the chief, and the next day six hundred Indians accompanied them to their canoes. As they pushed off, Marquette began making notes of their customs and usages. On his lap, as he wrote, was a calumet the chief had given them. It was to be displayed, they were told, whenever they confronted danger, for even in the hottest of the fight warriors would lay down their arms when it is shown. In the canoe ahead of Marquette, curled up behind Joliet, was the chief’s ten-year-old son, whom he had given to them, he said, to show them his heart.

Drifting downriver at a rate of forty miles a day, they passed, a week later, a tremendous stone cliff painted with the lurid images of two monsters which at first made Us afraid, and upon which the boldest savages dare not Long rest their eyes. They were so vividly depicted, Marquette says, that "good painters in france [sic] would find it difficult to paint so well. No savage, he thought, could be their author." Was the devil in these lands? Or perhaps the Spanish? Marquette made a drawing of the monsters, and as the Frenchmen pulled their canoes together to speculate about their meaning, remembering, perhaps, Indian warnings about man-eating river creatures, they ran into real trouble.⁴

Coasting through calm water, they heard the sound of what appeared to be rapids ahead, and as Parkman describes the scene, before they could react, a torrent of yellow mud came rushing at them, boiling and surging, sweeping in its course logs, branches, and uprooted trees. Marquette clung to the gunwales and prayed for his men’s lives as their light canoes spun in circles and entire floating islands rushed by them. But they recovered control and held their way down the turbulent and swollen current of the now united rivers.

This watery whirlwind had poured forth from the mouth of the Missouri River, which Marquette named Pekitanouï, an Indian word meaning muddy. It is still the Big Muddy to farmers along its shores, who joke that its waters are too thick to drink, too thin to plow. Marquette and Joliet were probably the first whites to see it, and Marquette speculated that it led to the southern sea, toward California, which he resolved to discover someday by way of this angry river.

Below the desolate, forested site of the future city of St. Louis, Chicago’s nineteenth-century urban rival, they passed the mouth of a stream called Ohio, or the Beautiful River in Iroquois. At that point the scenery and climate changed dramatically. They saw majestic cottonwoods and elms, their branches filled with flocks of parakeets, and cane growing so thick along the riverbanks that wild cattle had trouble pushing through it to reach their watering spots. The heat became unbearable, as the northern Indians had warned them, and they were attacked by swarms of mosquitoes. To shield themselves from the sun and the bugs, they built canopies with their sails, and while drifting downriver under the protection of their awnings, they came into a clearing and saw an Indian village ahead. A cry of warning went out, and savages… armed with bows, arrows, hatchets, clubs, and shields raced to the riverbank. Some of them jumped into huge wooden canoes and quickly surrounded them, while others rushed into the water to try to overturn their birchbarks. Marquette, crying to his men not to fire their guns, held up high the calumet, and as he did, a club flew over his head. But just as the warriors on shore were about to release their arrows, several old chiefs standing on the water’s edge spotted the calumet and stopped the attack.

When they landed their canoes with the chiefs’ protection, Marquette and Joliet found an old man who could speak a little Illinois. They questioned him about the river and other matters, but he told them all their queries would be answered the following day, when they would be taken to Akansea, the chief village of their nation. This was near the mouth of the Arkansas River and not far from the village where de Soto died of fever in 1542 while searching for gold. At the main village the warriors, naked and with beads hanging from their pierced noses and ears, gathered around the Frenchmen while Joliet explained their mission and Marquette told them of his God. The Arkansas Indians said it was only five days to the sea (actually it was more than seven hundred miles) but warned them to go no farther because warlike tribes with guns acquired from Europeans infested the area. Surely this meant the Spanish, who were now at war with the French.

That evening, following a feast, a group of warriors plotted to kill the Frenchmen and steal their guns, but the chief learned of their scheme and put an end to it; and to reassure Marquette and Joliet, he danced the calumet dance and smoked the tobacco pipe with them. It was a sleepless night, however, for the priest and the explorer. All evening they debated what they should do next. Should they push on farther, risking capture by Spaniards or attacks by Indians expert in firing guns; or should they be satisfied with their great find: that the Mississippi flowed into the Gulf of Mexico, not into the Atlantic, near Virginia, or into the Vermilion or California Sea? They agreed that their discovery was too important to jeopardize and the next morning informed their hosts that they would head back north after resting awhile.

Nine years later, René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, passed through the Chicago portage in the middle of winter and reached the mouth of the Mississippi, where he took possession for his king of the lands watered by the river and its tributaries, naming the country Louisiana. It was a territory stretching from the Alleghenies to the Rockies and from the Red River to the headwaters of the Missouri. Two centuries later, Chicago would claim it as its economic domain.

What now remains of the sovereignty thus pompously proclaimed by La Salle, Joliet, and Saint Lusson? asked Francis Parkman in the 1893 edition of his magisterial La Salle and the Discovery of the Great West. Now and then, the accents of France on the lips of some straggling boatman or vagabond half-breed—this, and nothing more. That November the Homeric historian of Anglo-Saxon manifest destiny died at his home on the banks of Jamaica Pond, near Boston, two weeks after the closing of the Columbian Exposition in Chicago to celebrate several centuries of American progress and land expansion. What did not die with Parkman was the explosive mixture of romanticism, racialism, religious zealotry, nationalism, and economic cupidity that powered French and Anglo-American expansion—for good and ill—for three centuries. That summer of 1893, another historian, Frederick Jackson Turner, had taken the podium at a gathering of his colleagues at the Columbian Exposition to announce the end of the North American land frontier, while in Congress imperialists screamed for the seizure of Hawaii as part of a new American overseas empire. Had he been alive, Talon would have smiled knowingly.

***

Joliet and Marquette started back for Canada on the seventeenth of July, retracing their steps; only now they had to battle a powerful river current in overbearing heat. The journey became a horror for Marquette, who came down with dysentery. When they reached the mouth of the Illinois River, forty days upstream, the Indian boy in Joliet’s care told them to enter it, as it would greatly shorten their return to Lake Michigan.

Paddling up this wide and clear stream, they thought they had come into an earthly paradise, a land even more beautiful than L’Ile de France. We have seen nothing like this river that we enter, as regards its fertility of soil, its prairies and woods; its cattle, elk, deer, wildcats, bustards, swans, ducks, parroquets, and even beaver, Marquette wrote in his weakened condition, which prevented him from taking fuller notes of this lush country. Joliet made a more complete record in his lost journal, the contents of which he summarized in his reports to officials in Quebec, for he was eager to return to Illinois country to plant a colony. There are [great] prairies, he told Claude Dablon, the Jesuit superior, in a series of interviews, with grass five or six feet high, so high that they had trouble seeing bison grazing within a stone’s throw of them. These wide sweeps of unbroken grassland presented a magnificent vista, relieved by upland streams and patches of forest.

They had entered, without knowing it, an inland sea of grass more than a thousand miles long and bordered on both east and west by dense forests. They were in the part of it known today as the Tallgrass Prairie, extending, roughly, from western Indiana to eastern Oklahoma, where farther west the grass is less continuous and not as high. It was a landscape entirely alien to them, as strange as the painted monsters they had seen on the bluffs of the Mississippi. Having no word in their language for these billowing grasslands, they called them prairies, meaning large meadows in French. They had heard about them from the Indians, but they were the first white men to describe them, however sketchily. Later accounts of travelers coming upon the untouched prairies for the first time give a fuller indication of what Joliet and Marquette saw, of what every overland traveler to Chicago would see coming west two centuries later, before the entire prairie had been obliterated to meet the exploding needs of urban markets for agricultural products.

Some travelers found them empty and desolate—even frightening—places. But most accounts play upon their distinctive form and beauty. Many likened a journey across them to ocean travel, a recent experience for most immigrants and foreign visitors. It was not just the waving grass in the strong breeze, like the heavy swell of the ocean, or the enormous midland sky; there were no landmarks or guideposts in these endlessly open spaces, and coming upon a forest grove, or solitary island, as Louis Sullivan had described a cluster of trees on the prairie outside Chicago, was like approaching a friendly port of call.

After traveling for many weeks under the oppressive forest cover of the east or the north, it must have been a thrilling experience to enter this great grassland of endless horizons and wide-open sky, with eagles and hawks wheeling high overhead.

Joliet had expected to see nothing but field after field of green and brown grass, but the late-summer Illinois prairie was ablaze with colors. The new stalks of bluestem grass had reached full height by August after spring rains, and great numbers of brilliantly colored wildflowers grew up between them—black-eyed Susan, blazing star, prairie dock, aster, and goldenrod. By then, the tall grasses of all varieties took on a multitude of shades—bronze, copper, crimson, and gold—colors that seemed to change and blend as the sun moved across the sky and clouds threw off lengthening shadows.

From the Kaskaskia Indians they met in the area, Joliet learned that the soil was so fertile that it yielded corn three times a year, and he was sure that wheat and grain of all kinds could be easily grown here, in what would later become part of the greater Chicago corn and wheat belt. He also saw what would eventually draw waves of immigrants here. A settler would not… spend ten years in cutting down and burning the trees; on the very day of his arrival, he could put his plow into the ground.

His head filled with plans for a settlement in this abundant valley, Joliet pushed his voyageurs upriver and toward home, after Marquette promised the Kaskaskia he would return to instruct them. A party of Indians escorted them to the Des Plaines River, a branch of the Illinois, and through its rapids to the Chicago portage. After carrying their canoes across the portage, they passed up the south branch of the Chicago River and out into the lake. They were back at the mission of St. Xavier on Green Bay by the end of September, having paddled from there some twenty-five hundred miles in four months.

***

Joliet would never again see the Illinois Valley, or the site of Chicago, but Marquette returned to this region the following winter in fulfillment of his promise to the Kaskaskia. After spending the year at the mission of St. Xavier recovering from his illness and completing his journal, he set out on October 25, 1674, with two voyageurs, Jacques Largillier and a man who had been with him on his first voyage, Pierre Porteret. They were accompanied by a party of Indians heading home to Illinois country.

It was a horrible time of the year to be on the lake, and they had trouble reaching the sheltered Chicago River in their nimble but fragile canoes. They ran into blinding snow and punishing winds and were almost wrecked by floating masses of ice. Huge waves, as high as Marquette had seen on the Atlantic, forced them to shore for days at a time, and they camped near the stone bluffs, which were very poorly sheltered. After several weeks of this, Marquette’s illness returned, and he was barely able to sit up in his canoe.

They entered the river of the portage on December 4 and found it frozen solid. After camping at the mouth of the river, where they killed some game, they moved six miles downstream to a spot where the portage began and decided to winter there in a makeshift cabin, for Marquette had begun to hemorrhage and could not continue. The Illinois who accompanied them went ahead to their people but alerted other Indians in the area of the Frenchmen’s presence on the portage, and parties came to their cabin to trade meat, pumpkins, and robes of ox skin for tobacco. Marquette’s voyageurs also found two French traders camped about fifty miles from them, and these men, one of whom, Pierre Moreau, had been with Marquette on his first voyage, brought them Indian corn and berries. After Christmas, Marquette told his companions that he was sure he would die soon, but he asked them to join him in making a novena to the Blessed Virgin so that he would be spared until he could take possession of his dear Mission. His health improved the following month—a miracle, he thought—and when the ice broke on the Des Plaines in late March, flooding the portage, they paddled across it and downriver against strong winds and over dangerous rapids to the village of the Kaskaskia, where Marquette was received as an angel from Heaven.

On Holy Thursday Father Marquette said mass in a beautiful prairie clearing carpeted with Indian mats and bearskins. His congregation, made up of five hundred chiefs and elders and several thousand younger men, women, and children, sat around him in an enormous circle. On Easter morning he called another council and preached again to the entire village, telling them that his mission would have to be carried on by other black robes who would follow him, for his illness obliged him to return to his home mission of St. Ignace. On the day of his departure, delirious from loss of blood, he was placed on a stretcher made of buffalo robes and lowered into his canoe. A band of Illinois escorted him to Lake Michigan and urged his men to head back along the eastern border of the lake, which the French had not yet explored, as this route would save them several days’ travel to the Straits of Mackinac. On the lake, Marquette began to lose his sight and became so weak, his voyageurs later reported, he had to be handled and carried about like a child. The evening before his death he told his companions very Joyously, that it would take place on the morrow and gave instructions for his burial. They should dig a grave in advance, he said, and as soon as he expired, they should take the little handbell he used in the mass and sound it while he was being put in the ground.

As they pushed up the line of the lake, they came to the entrance of a river, flanked by a stretch of high ground, and Marquette asked his men to paddle ashore. This is where he wanted to die. They prepared a shelter for him and carried him to it. Prostrate and too enfeebled to raise his head, he heard their confessions, begged them not to weep for him, and gave thanks that he would die as he had always prayed he would, in a wild and empty land in the service of souls. Then he told his men to get some sleep, as his hour had not yet come. He would wake them when it was time. Several hours later, he called out for them. When they came to him, he removed his crucifix from around his neck and asked one of his men to hold it before his eyes. And so with a countenance beaming and all aglow, he expired without any Struggle, and so gently that it might have been regarded as a pleasant sleep. In this way Jacques Largillier and Pierre Porteret described his death, which took place on May 18, 1675, on the shores of the Michigan river that now bears his name. He was thirty-seven years old.

That night, they slept close to his body, and in the morning the only sound on the forest shore was Father Marquette’s little chapel bell. Before they left the site of his death, the voyageurs planted a wooden cross near his grave as a sign for passers-by.

But God did not permit that a deposit so precious should remain in the midst of the forest, unhonored and forgotten, Dablon wrote in his own account of Marquette’s death. Two years after Marquette’s burial, a hunting party of Christian Indians located his grave, opened it, washed and dried the bones, put them in a birch box, and carried them back to St. Ignace, chanting their funeral songs along the way. They sent a canoe ahead, and as the funeral procession of nearly thirty canoes approached the mission, the priests, traders, and Indians crowded the shore. After gaining assurance that this was the body of Père Marquette, the Jesuits buried it in a vault beneath the church, where it rests, Dablon closes his account, as the guardian angel of… our missions.

***

In 1877, six years after the Great Chicago Fire, Marquette’s grave was discovered at the site of the mission of St. Ignace. Only a few bones remained; the rest were believed to have been taken by Indians who considered him a forest spirit. His remaining relics are at Marquette University, under the care of his order. And this gentle missionary who dreamed of the glory of martyrdom in the wilderness became, in time, the closest thing to a patron saint that gritty Chicago would have. The location of the cabin in which he spent the winter of 1674–75 was officially sited in 1905 by a committee of the Chicago Historical Society and marked two years later by an impressive cross of mahogany, to which Catholic immigrants in the neighborhood came to pray for the intercession of the saint. By standing on this site in 1905, it was possible to see, to the West, the entrance of the recently completed Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal, which connected the city to the great river Marquette’s journal disclosed to the world.⁵

Three years after the fifteen-foot Marquette Cross was placed in its concrete pedestal, J. Seymour Currey, a leading member of the Chicago Historical Society, published a celebratory history of Chicago’s Century of Marvelous Growth. Most of it is given over to the achievements of builders and businessmen, but Currey opens the book with the exploits of Father Marquette, the patron saint of the people of Chicago. Marquette’s story should be told in every Chicago home…, he writes, to awaken a pride in our earliest annals. Twelve years later, Mayor William Dever named December 4 Marquette Day in Chicago.

Marquette, the missionary, was a perfect founding hero for a city at times anxious to prove that it was devoted to more than money and merchandising, but Joliet, the trader, would have had a far more secure place in Chicago history and mythology had it not been for a stroke of bad luck he suffered in the rapids above Montreal.

2. Joliet’s Dream

In the spring of 1674, Joliet headed up the Ottawa River for Quebec to make an accounting of his expedition for the new governor, Comte de Frontenac. After he passed through forty-two rapids and all danger seemed over, his canoe capsized in the fierce waters of Sault St. Louis, almost within sight of Montreal. It was a near total calamity. His two voyageurs and the Indian boy who had led him to the Illinois River valley were killed, and all his papers and maps were lost. Miraculously, he managed to cling to a rock for four hours until some fishermen pulled him from the river, unconscious. When he recovered, he hurried to Quebec, informing Frontenac that he had left a copy of his journal of the expedition with the Jesuits at Sault Ste. Marie. Later that summer, the mission house at the sault was set on fire by feuding Indians, and Joliet’s journal was never found. The loss of that journal, as one historian has said, secured [Marquette’s] fame forever.

Joliet did, however, make a full oral report of his expedition to both Frontenac and Claude Dablon, and they sent a record of it to Paris. These documents exist, as does the map he made from memory for Frontenac and a letter he sent to the bishop of Quebec, his patron, indicating his great disappointment about what had been lost. Except for this shipwreck, Your Excellency would have had a quite interesting relation, but all I saved is my life.

While Marquette’s journal provided extraordinary information about the lands and peoples they encountered, it was subtly shaped by its author and its editor,