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Chicago For the Tourist Art Print
Proehl
24 in. x 36 in.
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Framed Mounted
chicago posters, travel posters, retro railway ads, photographic prints, travel destinations, united states, chicago travel posters, urban landscapes, vintage north american travel
Chicago Skyline at Sunset, IL Photographic Print
Segal, Mark
16 in. x 12 in.
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Framed Mounted
Chicago is stupefying. It knows no rules, and I know none by which to judge it. It stands apart from all the cities in the world, isolated by its own individuality, an Olympian freak, a fable, an allegory, an incomprehensible phenomenon, a prodigious paradox in which youth and maturity, brute strength and soaring spirit, are harmoniously confused.
Call Chicago mighty, monstrous, multifarious, vital, lusty, stupendous, indomitable, intense, unnatural, aspiring, puissant, preposterous, transcendent–call it what you like-throw the dictionary at it! It is all that you can do, except to shoot it with statistics. And even the statistics of Chicago are not deadly, as most statistics are.
First, you must realize that Chicago stands high in population among the cities of the world, and among those of the Western Hemisphere. Next you must realize that there are Philadelphia people still alive who were alive when Chicago did not exist, even as a fort in a swamp at the mouth of the Chicago River–the river from which, by the way, the city took its name, and which in turn took its own name from an Indian word meaning “skunk.”
Just one two hundred years ago Fort Dearborn, at the mouth of the river, was being rebuilt, after a massacre by the Indians. 220 years ago Chicago was a village of one hundred people. 230 years ago this village had grown into a city of approximately the present size of Evanston–a suburb of Chicago, with less than thirty thousand people. More than hundred years ago Chicago had something over one hundred thousand inhabitants. More than hundred years ago, at the time of the Chicago fire, the city was as large as Washington is now–over three hundred thousand.
In the ten years which followed the disaster, Chicago was not only entirely rebuilt, and very much improved, but also it increased in population to half a million, or about the size of Detroit. In the next decade it actually doubled in size, so that, twenty-five years ago, it passed the million mark. Soon after that it pushed ia from second place among American cities. So it has gone on, until to-day it has a population of two million, plus a city of about the size of San Francisco for full measure.
The first existing records of white men in Illinois were made by Father Jacques Marquette. On May 17, 1673, he and Louis Jolliet, with five voyageurs, left Mackinac, paddled over parts of Lakes Huron and Michigan into Green Bay, thence up the Fox River, crossed at the portage, and went down the Wisconsin.
On June 17 they entered the Mississippi. On the west side of the river, in what is now Iowa, they encountered and exchanged friendly greetings with the Kaskaskia tribe of Illinois Indians. The adventurers passed the mouth of the Missouri, saw the famous Piasa or Thunder Bird painted on the cliffs near the present city of Alton, and reached the mouths of the Ohio and Arkansas Rivers. There, having determined that the Mississippi flowed not into some western ocean, but into the Gulf of Mexico, and fearing Spaniards and hostile Indians, the Marquette party turned back late in July 1673.
They returned by way of the Illinois River, which Marquette described in his Journal: “We have seen nothing like this river for the fertility of the land, its prairies, woods, wild cattle, stag, deer, ducks, parrots, and even beaver.” And Jolliet later reported that the valley was “the most beautiful and most suitable for settlement.”
Near Starved Rock they encountered the same tribe of Kaskaskia, now returned to their ancestral village site (about nine miles below the town of Ottawa), and their friendliness so won Father Marquette that he promised to return and set up a mission among them. From the Desplaines River they took the ancient portage trail to the Chicago River, thence to Lake Michigan, and up to Green Bay. Here Marquette, ill from the hardships of the voyage, was left behind, and Jolliet went on alone to Montreal where, almost in sight of the town, his canoe overturned and his carefully kept Journal was lost. Nevertheless he gave enthusiastic verbal descriptions of the new country, of its fertility, and ease of cultivation; he spoke of its marvelous transportation facilities, and showed how, with a canal built through “but half a league of prairie,” a boat could sail from Lake Erie down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico.
On October 25, 1674, with two voyageurs as companions, Father Marquette set out from Green Bay to keep his promise to the Kaskaskia. The voyage proved a hard one, and not until December 4 did the party reach the mouth of the Chicago River. Because of the severe cold and the recurrence of his old illness, Marquette stopped “two leagues” above the mouth of the river for the winter. With the spring his strength returned, and in Easter week, 1675, he established the first mission in the Illinois country at the Great Village of the Illinois, calling it the Mission of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin. But then, weakened again by illness, he decided to return to St. Ignace (Mackinac). He was canoed up the eastern shore of Lake Michigan by his two faithful companions; finally, when he was unable to go farther, they landed near the river named for him in the present State of Michigan. There, on May 18, 1675, he died.
Robert René Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, the French explorer, came later to the Illinois country. In 1679, after the sinking of his Griffon on Lake Erie, he erected a fort at the mouth of the St. Joseph River, ascended that river, portaged to the Kankakee, and canoed up the Illinois River to Lake Peoria, where he made friends with the Peoria tribe of the Illinois. About two miles below the lake, on the south side of the river, he built Fort Crèvecoeur in January 1680. In his absence the men mutinied and plundered the fort, and raiding Iroquois burned the Peoria village. Upon his return to the Illinois Country in 1682, La Salle, with Tonti, built Fort St. Louis at Starved Rock as a key to the vast empire of forts and commerce he had conceived. But his enemies at court prevailed, and he was soon recalled. Returning to France, he received permission from the king to establish a colony at the mouth of the Mississippi; on March 20, 1687, on a branch of the Trinity River, he was shot from ambush.
Tonti, La Salle’s lieutenant, obtained in 1690 the privileges previously granted La Salle. In 1691-92 he moved Fort St. Louis from Starved Rock to Pimitoui, on Peoria Lake. For ten years he devoted himself to bringing in settlers, missionaries, and trade supplies. When he died in 1704, a chain of forts stretched from Montreal to Mobile. Tonti had at last succeeded where his chief, La Salle, had failed.
The Mission of the Holy Family was established at Cahokia in 1699 by priests of the Seminary of Foreign Missions. In 1703 the Jesuits moved the Mission of the Immaculate Conception to the Indian village of Kaskaskia, sixty miles below Cahokia, a short distance from the mouth of the Kaskaskia River. These two towns on the American Bottom, Cahokia and Kaskaskia, soon became the centers of French life in the Illinois country. In 1720, after the collapse of the Mississippi Bubble, the commandant of the Illinois country completed Fort de Chartres, 17 miles north of Kaskaskia. The name Illinois was first officially used when the seventh civil and military district of the French province of Louisiana was so designated.
Meanwhile British colonists were advancing on French territory. New York fur traders reached the Great Lakes by way of the Mohawk Valley; Carolina frontiersmen pushed around the southern end of the Appalachians into the lower Mississippi Valley; the English continued their Hudson Bay fur trade. Land speculation grew among the English colonists.
In 1747 the Ohio Land Company was organized, and in 1749 was granted 200,000 acres of land near the forks of the Ohio on condition that the territory be fortified and a hundred families settled on the land within seven years. Thus began the struggle which, at the end of the French and Indian War, found England in possession of all French territory on the North American continent.
The English occupation of the Illinois country did not begin at once. Pontiac, chief of the Ottawa, rose against the British in 1763, and captured all but three of the newly acquired forts in the Lakes Region. He was not defeated until the following year, and it was not until October 10, 1765, that the French flag was lowered and the British raised at Fort de Chartres. Here, on December 6, 1768, was held the first court under English jurisdiction in the Illinois country.
By this time the British colonists were moving into the land beyond the Alleghenies. Speculators in Virginia, Connecticut, and New York were organizing colonies, and colonial firms engaged in extensive trading operations. But few if any American settlers were attracted to Illinois, and the British showed no capacity for dealing with the French inhabitants. Chaos prevailed, and the population diminished.
Thus there was widespread sympathy in Illinois for the Colonial cause in the American Revolution. In 1776-77 powder purchased from the French and Spaniards was run up the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers from New Orleans to Wheeling, West Virginia. As the war progressed, the strategic position of the Illinois country as a link with Spanish and French allies, and as a base for attack on the British at Detroit, became apparent.
The task of winning this country was undertaken by George Rogers Clark in 1778. Authorized by the Governor of Virginia, he floated down the Ohio River with a band of 175 men. From Fort Massac he set out overland for Kaskaskia. On July 4, 1778, while Rocheblave, the expatriate Frenchman in command for the British, was penning another of his whining letters to England, Clark entered the village, and was greeted warmly by the inhabitants. Father Gibault, at Clark’s request, traveled to Vincennes, won the allegiance of the people there, and persuaded them to sign the Oath of Vincennes. Hearing of Clark’s successes, the Virginia Assembly decreed on December 9, 1778, that Illinois was to be a county of Virginia. But six days later Vincennes was lost to the British under the command of Governor Hamilton of Detroit.
Seeing the entire territory threatened, Clark set out for Vincennes with 170 men. It was February; the rivers and bottom-lands were flooded; for miles the men waded in water up to their waists on one of the most courageous marches in American history. At Vincennes Clark succeeded in detaching the townspeople from the garrison, and on February 25, 1779, Hamilton capitulated. Later that year Clark planned a campaign against the British at Detroit, but it was not carried out. The next year, when the British attacked the Illinois towns, Clark came to the aid of Cahokia and helped beat them off. As the war drew to a close, military operations ceased except for periodic Indian raids at the instigation of the British.
To organize the vast territory which Clark’s conquest had secured for the United States, the Ordinance of 1787 was passed. It created the Northwest Territory as a Federal territory to consist of the present States of Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin; slavery here was prohibited, except as a punishment for crime; a territorial government with limited suffrage was set up; provision was made that any area with sixty thousand persons could organize as a State and apply for admission to the Union.
Despite the Treaty of Paris in 1783, trouble with the British and their Indian allies continued. In 1794 American forces defeated the Indians at the Battle of Fallen Timbers, and by the Treaty of Greenville of the next year the Indians ceded small tracts of land at every important post and portage throughout the territory, including the site of the future Fort Dearborn, one at Peoria, and another at the mouth of the Illinois River. The United States then adopted an Indian policy which by 1809 had obtained from the Indians practically all of Ohio, eastern Michigan, southern Indiana, and most of western and southern Illinois.
Against this growing threat of the white man rose Tecumseh, and his brother, the Shawnee Prophet. They organized the Indians of the Northwest Territory, ordered white men barred from Indian villages, and forbade the selling of any more land to them. The Battle of Tippecanoe in November 1811, though a victory for the whites, had deterred Tecumseh little, and the Indians in the conspiracy remained active throughout the War of 1812, aiding the British in gaining possession of most of the Northwest Territory. Detroit was captured; the garrison and inhabitants of Fort Dearborn were massacred by the Indians a few miles from the fort as they attempted to flee on August 15, 1812. The end of the war brought the Northwest Territory back to the American republic, but the problem of the Indians continued down to the Black Hawk War of 1832.
Illinois remained part of the Northwest Territory until 1800. In that year, by an Act of Congress approved May 7 but not effective until July 4, 1801, it became part of Indiana Territory. In 1809, by an Act approved February 3, the Territory of Illinois was created, which included within its bounds the present State of Wisconsin. Illinois became a territory of the second class on May 21, 1812; during all of this territorial period Illinois was governed by Ninian Edwards. Finally, on December 3, 1818, shorn of the Wisconsin Territory, it was admitted as a State of the Union, although its population was only 40,258, far short of the 60,000 stipulated by the Ordinance of 1787.
A State constitution was ratified without being submitted to the people, and Shadrach Bond, elected without opposition, became the first State governor of Illinois. The first capital was Kaskaskia; two years later Vandalia succeeded it. Through the efforts of Nathaniel Pope, territorial delegate from Illinois, the northern boundary of the State, fixed by the Ordinance of 1787 at an east-west line placed at the tip of Lake Michigan, was moved 51 miles north, to a line along the longitude 42° 30′, and as a result Illinois obtained a shoreline on the Great Lakes. The reason given was that “additional security for the perpetuation of the union” would be afforded if Illinois were identified with the northern States. Today this added territory contains 55 per cent of the population of the State.
Illinois entered the transition stage during which Chicago developed from a mud-rutted town of 29,963 in 1850 to a city of 296,977 in 1870, probably the swiftest growth of a metropolis in history. The State boasted ten incorporated cities in 1850: Chicago, Alton, Springfield, Beardstown, Pekin, Quincy, Peoria, Bloomington, Galena, and Rock Island. Their difficulties were many: houses were scarce, rents high, the streets so bad they became quagmires in rainy weather; according to a contemporary newspaper, the gutters were filled with “manure’ discarded clothing, and all kinds of trash, threatening the public health with their noxious fluvia.”
One of the issues of the day was the hog nuisance; the streets, squares, and parks were public hog-pens. “Urbana had a record of more hogs in the community than people, and the porker had an equal right with the citizens to the streets.” Nor were there public utilities until the middle fifties, when the more progressive communities began to install water systems and gas for street lighting.
Twenty years after the rush to the lead mines at Galena in the late 1820′s, at which time a group of tent-cities containing more than 10,000 people had sprung up, the gold rush to California swept through Illinois. In 1849 more than 15,000 men and boys left the State for the western fields. The exodus subsided in 1850 as a result of discouraging letters and editorial warnings, but in 1852, with new stories of gold discoveries, the rush was revived. With the opening of the fertile lands of Kansas and Nebraska to settlement in 1854, still another migration took place. In the gold rush to Pike’s Peak in 1859, additional thousands left the State. The whole of the fifties was characterized by this draining of Illinoisans to the West.
In their place came new families from the East and South. In 1849 there appeared in the Boston Post a poem which began:
Westward the of Empire Moves:
Come leave the fields of childhood,
Worn out by long employ,
And travel west and settle
In the State of Illinois.
The Yankees settled in the northern area, the Southerners in the “Egypt” delta and the southern region. The sharp division of Illinois into “upstate” and “downstate,” reflected in habits, politics, and culture, persisted for years.
In even greater numbers immigrants arrived from Europe. French Icarians under Cabet set up a communistic colony at Nauvoo, the old Mormon city, in 1849. Portugese came to Springfield and Jacksonville; Scandinavians to Chicago, Rockford, Galesburg, Victoria, Andover, and Moline. The Bishop Hill colony was settled by Swedish Janssonists in 1846. But by far the most numerous were the Germans, fleeing their country after the defeat of their Revolution in 1848, and the Irish, driven out by potato famines and British oppression. By 1860 there were 130,804 Germans in Illinois, living chiefly in Chicago, Belleville, Galena, Quincy, Alton, Peoria, and Peru, perpetuating their rich culture in music societies, literary clubs, and Turnvereine. Many of the Irish were brought to Illinois to work on the canals and the railroads under the infamous system of contract labor; herded like cattle from Boston, New York, and Philadelphia to further Illinois internal improvements, they found, not the promised land of newspaper advertisements, but bad housing, improper diet, and unsanitary conditions, which took a large toll in illness and death.
Nowhere in the United States did the railroad fever of the fifties rage more than in Illinois. Farms were mortgaged, counties and municipalities subscribed to stock, Eastern capitalists poured millions into the enterprises. Many of the politicians in the State, from Governor French and Senator Douglas to township officials, speculated in land and railroad stock, and became wealthy. Charges and countercharges of corruption were hurled; the Illinois State Register declared in 1853 that the railroad bills “were prepared in New York and first canvassed by Wall Street men before they were sent to Springfield to secure legislative endorsement.” Senator Douglas persuaded Congress to grant 2,707,200 acres of land, scattered over 47 counties, for the long-awaited Illinois Central Railroad, and in 1851 articles of incorporation were granted by the legislature to a group of Eastern financiers, headed by Robert Rantoul of Massachusetts, on condition that the State be paid 7 per cent of the gross receipts annually. In September 1856 the railroad was completed. Seven other roads were constructed in this period, and one, the Galena and Chicago, was able to pay dividends of 20 per cent after the first year of operation.
The railroads had a revolutionary effect on the life of the State. Most of the early settlements had been near rivers. Now the rich fertile prairie lands of the vast interior were opened to farming and mining, to become soon one of the greatest corn-producing and coalmining areas in the world. The coming of the railroads brought a wave of prosperity; by 1860 farm values had risen 50 per cent over those of 1850; farm and city, raw materials and markets, were brought together. Towns sprang miraculously out of the prairies. Communities off the railroads faded away.
In the struggle that split the Union and led to the Civil War, Illinois furnished the two opposing national leaders, Stephen A. Douglas and Abraham Lincoln. The State itself was soon as divided as the Nation. As early as 1796 and again in 1802, memorials from the Illinois country had been addressed to Congress asking for repeal of the prohibition against slavery in the Ordinance of 1787. In 1824 a movement to amend the State constitution to allow the introduction of slavery was defeated. The kidnapping of free Negro residents in the State was countenanced for two generations, and the “black laws” of 1819 were still in effect. In 1837 the State legislature, excited by the spread of Garrison’s abolitionism, passed a resolution excluding abolition papers from the State and making the circulation of abolition petitions to Congress illegal.
In the same year, November 8, the valiant abolitionist newspaper editor of the Alton Observer, Elijah P. Lovejoy, while defending his fourth press from destruction by Alton mobs, was shot dead. Lovejoy’s fight was continued by such men as Benjamin Lundy and his Genius of Universal Emancipation at Hennepin. Antislavery societies grew. In 1840 the Liberty Party was formed in Illinois, and by 1846 it had gained a majority in 13 northern counties.
Yet in 1853 an act drawn by John A. Logan providing that free Negroes who entered the State could be sold into servitude was passed by the legislature. This bill aroused the anger of Democrats and Whigs alike. Even so, the Democrats might have maintained their power in the State if Douglas had not in 1854 sponsored the Kansas-Nebraska bill enabling settlers in the new territories to choose between free soil and slavery, with an amendment thereto repealing the Missouri Compromise of 1820 which had prohibited slavery forever in the Louisiana purchase above the line of 36° 30′.
From the opposition to this bill, in the form of a coalition of disapproving Democrats, Whigs, and Free Soilers, came the germ of the Republican Party in Illinois. After a mass meeting in Rockford on March 18, 1854, and another at Ottawa on August 1, a State Republican convention was held in Springfield on October 4 and 5. In the elections of 1854 the State was almost equally divided; the northern or Yankee half voted solidly anti-Nebraska, while the southern or downstate half voted with the solid South. Looking now toward the national elections, the Republican Party of Illinois was organized at a convention in Bloomington, May 29, 1856, with some leaders in the Democratic Party of the State taking active parts. The first Republican governor, William H. Bissell, was elected that year.
The Dred Scott decision hastened the coming of the Civil War. When the United States Supreme Court in 1857, held that the Missouri Compromise was unconstitutional, and that Congress had no power to pass a law forbidding a master from carrying slaves into the territories, it posed a serious question. Could slavery be excluded from the territories by any means? Douglas contended that it could, because the people could withhold the protective local legislation essential to its existence. Yet even this doctrine had its faults, for soon he found himself at odds with President Buchanan and the slavery Democrats over popular sovereignty as manifested in the case of Kansas, then seeking admission to the Union. At the same time Douglas was losing ground. The senatorial contest in 1858 between Lincoln and Douglas was fought on the issue of free soil or popular sovereignty.
On the evening of his nomination for the senatorship by the Republican convention, at Springfield, Lincoln declared: “A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure permanently, half slave and half free.” Forecasting another decision like that in the Dred Scott case, but applying to the States as well as territories, he said, “Such a decision is all that slavery now lacks of being alike lawful in all the states.” The famous LincolnDouglas debates at Ottawa, Freeport, Jonesboro, Charlestown, Galesburg, Quincy, and Alton carried on the controversy. In the last debate, at Alton, on October 15, 1858, Lincoln summed up his position in memorable words: “That is the issue . . . It is the eternal struggle between two principles–right and wrong–throughout the world. . . . The one is the common right of humanity, the other is the divine right of kings. It is the same principle in whatever shape it develops itself. It is the same spirit that says, ‘You toil and work and earn bread, and I’ll eat it.’” Douglas won the election in 1858; Lincoln won the presidency two years later.
With Lincoln in the White House and war declared, southern Illinois was spotted with sympathy for the Confederacy. At meetings such as that held at Marion in Williamson County, there was wild talk of setting up “Egypt” as a separate State aligned with the South. Douglas rushed back to Illinois from Washington to bring his followers to the support of the Government. But his strength sapped by years of political battles, he died on June 3, 1861, striving valiantly to turn back the flood he had helped to unloose. Discontent with Lincoln was soon manifest, and in the fall of 1861 at the elections to the constitutional convention, the Democrats outnumbered the Republicans more than two to one. The Emancipation Proclamation and the arbitrary arrests for disloyal utterances during the war were responsible for the existence of a strong party of protest. But on the whole loyalty to the Union was strong in all parts of the State. In four years Illinois contributed more than a quarter of a million men to the Union forces, and her soldiers died bravely on many battlefields. In 1864 Lincoln received a 30,736 majority vote in Illinois; and at his untimely death his most savage critics in the State paused to pay homage to him; the Chicago Times, suppressed once for disloyalty during the Civil War, declared that the public had come to “realize something of the magnitude of the concerns involved in his lease of existence.”
The war over, Illinois began to take stock: it had contributed heavily in money and men; 5,857 had been killed in action; 3,051 had died of wounds, and 19,934 of disease. Now, with its railroads and fertile farm lands, its factories and mines, its people from all over the world, the State settled down to the problem of construction. The Civil War had released the forces of industrialism and swung the balance away from agriculture throughout the Nation with the emancipation of slave labor, the beginnings of mechanization of farm work, and the gradual closing of the frontier.
The Constitution of 1848, designed for a rural State, had made no adequate provisions for this new industrialism, creating such problems as police and fire protection in congested areas, sanitation, metropolitan city governments, and a flexible judicial system. A constitutional convention had been called in the midst of the Civil War, but the proposed new constitution had been rejected by the people. Newspapers contnued to denounce the evils under the old constitution. The right of the legislature to pass private laws, said the Illinois State Register, was “a practice which invited corruption on the part of the members of the State legislature and instilled in the minds of the people a suspicion that state laws and bribery were intimately associated, if not inseparable.”
In I870another convention, almost equally divided between the Democratic downstate and the Republican north, submitted after long sessions a constitution which was ratified. It granted the franchise to Negroes, but not to women; one delegate remarked during the debate that the adherents of women suffrage were “long haired men and short-haired women.” It also provided that the Illinois and Michigan canal was never to be leased or sold without referendum, established a system o cumulative voting, (see Government and Education) for the State representatives, created enlarged courts in Cook County and necessary legal powers to govern metropolitan Chicago, and increased the responsibility of the State for the support of educational institutions.
The new industrialism brought a raw transition period in the life of the State. Newspapers cried out against the lawlessness that prevailed. It was said that in Cairo a man a week was killed, while Chicago was a haven for gamblers, “bunko ropers,” confidence men, and murderers. Springfield, declared the Illinois State Register, was infested with “an unwholesome debris of bullies, strumpets, vagrants, and sneak-thieves.” But by far the greatest calamity of the decade was the Chicago Fire of October 8-9, 1871 (see Chicago), as a result of which 250 people lost their lives, thousands were left homeless and destitute, and the financial loss was estimated at 200 million dollars. With the aid of other States and even foreign nations, the city was quickly rebuilt, but the terror and suffering were not soon forgotten.
Discontent was growing among the farmers. They objected strenuously to excessive charges by middlemen, exorbitant freight rates, and the high price of manufactured goods. Illinois was still a farm State, with six-sevenths of its 35 million acres under cultivation as late as 1880. The invention and manufacture of farm implements had made considerable progress (see Agriculture), and yet in 1873 the secretary of the Illinois State Farmers’ Association described the typical home of the Illinois farmer as “a bare black wretched abode, fit for nothing but the squalid and pigs.”
The farmers organized. The Order of Patrons of Husbandry, founded in 1868, was the forerunner of the Grange movement in Illinois. The original purpose of the Patrons–the purchasing of machinery for members at a discount–broadened in the early seventies when hundreds of new granges organized, with a peak of 761 in 1873 and 704 in 1874.
With the Grange movement came political pressure that forced the passage of the railroad acts of 1871, which stipulated that charges for long hauls were never to be less than for short hauls, that storage fees were to be uniform, and that no road was to charge a greater mileage rate on one section of its line than on any other. The second State railroad commission in the country was created, but the railroads refused to recognize the rates set. Farmers boarded the trains and offered the “legal fares,” with results such as these reported in the Prairie Farmer of February 15, 1873: “The railroads of the state, in some cases, carry passengers free who will only pay the legal fare. In other cases such passengers are ejected by force. At Rantoul, the other day, a whole carload of legal fare passengers were switched off on a side track and left, while the engine and the balance of the train went on.” In some instances hired thugs were employed by the railroads. When the railroad act was held unconstitutional by the State Supreme Court in 1873, the indignation of the farmers soon forced the passage of another act. The farmers were now a powerful political factor; to win an election, a politician had to entitle himself the “farmers’ candidate”; they carried the judicial elections of 1873, and in 1874 elected a State superintendent of public instruction.
The Chicago Tribune, an enemy of the movement, aptly summed up the issues in the Greenback fight of 1876: “The creditor East, having unloaded his sixty-cent dollar on the West, can hardly object to being paid in the same kind of currency, worth now, however, ninety-five cents on the dollar.” But Republicanism won both the 1876 and the 1880 elections after bitter campaigns, and the Greenback movement merged with the growing labor movement that developed rapidly after the great railroad strikes of 1877. The National Labor Union had been organized in 1866 and the Knights of Labor in 1869. The Workingmen’s Party of Illinois, with a platform advocating the prevention of monopolies, abolition of child labor, compulsory education of children under 14, public ownership of the means of transportation and communication, State management of banks, and a number of wage regulations was formed. Its program was branded by the Chicago Tribune as “socialistic heresies too far from our institutions to gain a foothold among us.” Social forces were at work that broke the hold of John A. Logan and his Republican political machine in 1892, the only time the Republicans in the State were defeated from the Civil War to 1912.
In thriving young cities diversified industries were springing up-machine shops, foundries, coal mines, steel plants, and stockyards. The number of wage earners in manufacturing grew from 11,559 in 1850, to 82,979 in 1870, and 312,198 in 1890. With this industrial growth came poverty and unemployment, disease and slums; people began to talk about “trusts and combinations.” Men and women who had deserted farms and towns for factories and cities were buffeted and beaten. To their aid came the labor organizations. Membership in the Knights of Labor grew rapidly; strikes became more numerous. Employers answered the growing protest of labor with the lock-out, the legal and political machinery, Pinkerton operatives, and strongarm men. In 1880 the Illinois State Register characterized workers locked out at the Chicago Stockyards as “traitors, not only to their wives and children, but to society and government. They are entitled to the severest penalty of the violated law, supplemented, if need be, by copious showers of shot and shell.”
The Knights of Labor met in Chicago in June 1884, and passed resolutions calling for the eight-hour day, the incorporation of labor unions, the prohibition of work by children under 14, an employers’ liability act, and a mechanic’s lien law. Sympathy with the labor program became so great that in the next two years politicians became “friends of labor,” as in the preceding decade of agrarian revolt they had been “friends of the farmer.”
The fight for the eight-hour day continued unabated; the Knights of Labor formed a hundred new lodges throughout the State each week early in 1886. Even the press began to favor the eight-hour day, saying it was theoretically sound, so long as labor asked only for eight hours’ pay, but warned against allowing the movement to “degenerate to a demand for the 8-hour day with 10-hour pay.” The fight would probably have been successful but for the unfortunate Haymarket bomb of May 4, 1886, and the subsequent hysteria. Every manifestation of sympathy with labor thereafter branded one as an anarchist, and strike after strike collapsed in June and July.
Despite the reaction, general restlessness continued. Farmers, harassed by the discriminatory protective tariff and the vexing currency problems, joined with the Illinois State Labor Association at Decatur in April 1888 to form the Illinois Labor Party, which disintegrated rapidly through lack of harmony. The Democratic nominee for governor, John M. Palmer, took a stand for labor, denouncing the Pinkerton corps of private detectives who, he said, had been hired by the industrialists to break the strikes of the preceding year. He was repudiated by the conservative voters and members of his own party.
But the road was paved for the farmer-labor-Democratic coalition, which in 1892 elected judge John P. Altgeld to the governorship. Altgeld personified the whole spirit of the revolt of the farmers and workers in the seventies and eighties. His enemies called him an anarchist, but the Illinois State Register, in answering the attack on Altgeld by the Journal in 1892, asked why it was strange “for a candidate for governor to notice the workingman, much less shake his soiled hands; it tries to cast ridicule on judge Altgeld for visiting railroad shops and mines to meet and become acquainted with intelligent and worthy toilers . . . it is not the custom of the fine haired Republican office-holders to do so.”
After the election Altgeld cleaned house. He appointed Florence Kelley, who had been associated with Jane Addams at Hull House, as factory inspector; he inaugurated the indeterminate sentence and the parole system, built hospitals for the insane at Bartonville and Peoria, improved the State school system, gave liberal grants to the University of Illinois, pardoned the three anarchists who had survived the Haymarket trial in a message that condemned the proceedings as unfair and illegal, and objected to the sending of Federal troops into the State by President Cleveland during the 1894 Pullman strike. Although he was not re-elected, and his acts brought him financial as well as political ruin, he had won for himself a lasting place in the history of the State; he is remembered as an uncompromising lover of justice and humanity, and as one of its greatest Governors. In Altgeld the hopes of farmers and workers were resurrected temporarily after two decades of crushing defeat.
In a far different sphere the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893, “the World’s Fair,” gave Illinois a chance to exhibit its development. Of it Henry B. Fuller wrote, “for the first time cosmopolitanism visited the western world, for the first time woman publicly came into her own, for the first time on a grand scale, art was made vitally manifest to the American consciousness.” Congresses on social reform, women’s progress, science and philosophy, literature, education, and commerce, were held. Said Theodore Dreiser:
All at once and out of nothing, in this dingy city of six or seven hundred thousand which but a few years before had been a wilderness of wet grass and mud flats, and by this lake which but a hundred years bef ore was a lone silent waste, had now been reared this vast and harmonious collection of perfectly constructed and showy buildings, containing in their delightful interiors, the artistic, mechanical and scientific achievements of the world.
While the Exposition was making cultural history, the University of Chicago was progressing through the efforts of President William Rainey Harper, formerly professor of Hebrew at Yale, aided by the gifts of John D. Rockefeller. With “metropolitan” dailies in Springfield, Peoria, Bloomington, Cairo, and Chicago; with baseball teams that toured the world; with an Art Institute housed in a “Palladian Palace” built in 1892; with the University of Chicago, the State university at Urbana, Northwestern University in Evanston, and many normal schools and colleges; Illinois by 1893 had accepted the culture and had become an opulent symbol of industrialism.
Elgin (717 alt., 94,487 pop.) , an industrial town in the midst of wide farmlands, lies on the gentle bluffs of the Fox River. Although only an hour’s ride from Chicago, Elgin is sufficiently self-contained so that only 2 per cent of her wage earners commute to Chicago, and yet her industrial plants are not of the sort that cluster in an industrial wasteland. A few blocks from Fountain Square–described by Elgin wits as a triangle without a fountain–rises the city’s major factory, while some of the finest houses are no greater distance down other radial streets. Concerned with more than industry, Elgin possesses an excellent art museum, a small zoo, and an extensive park system. “A midwest factory town,” remarked an anonymous Boston reporter, “is not the place where one would ordinarily look for such things.”
To Protestant ministers throughout the country, Elgin is the source of many of their Sunday School pamphlets; to Emerson Hough it is the city in which he wrote The Covered Wagon; to midwestern creameries it is the place their butter-tubs come from; but Elgin is known to the world at large as the manufacturer of the watches that bear the city’s name. The seven-story clock tower of the watch factory, visible for miles, rises high above the central section, and the factory with its related industries employs the major portion of the city’s workers.
The Black Hawk War was over when the first settlers, James and Hezekiah Gifford, came here from New York in 1835. An Indian ferried them over the Fox River on their way here, but by the following year northern Illinois was cleared of the red men, and the Giffords built up their little settlement without interference. Intent upon having the Chicago-Galena stage routed past his cabin, James Gifford laid out a road, with the assistance of Samuel Kimball, to Belvidere. “Anyone would think,” scoffed his wife, “that you expected this farm to become a city, with stagecoaches going through.” Within a year they were, twice weekly, with a great blare of horns.
Elgin’s industry from the first was bound to the river. Kimball and James Gifford co-operated again in 1837 in damming the river, and a sawmill was built on one side and a gristmill on the other. Hezekiah occupied himself running a tavern for the stagecoach passengers, who noted with “astonishment” that he ran it according to the newfangled temperance plan then gaining strength in the East.
In 1838 B. W. Raymond purchased a portion of Gifford’s tract and although he lived in Chicago and served as its third mayor, soon interested himself in the development of Elgin. Throughout the forties he invested in several local enterprises, and by 1847 Elgin was able to incorporate as a village. The following year Raymond, by pledging much of his property, had the Chicago and Galena Railroad routed into Elgin. For two years the village was the terminus of that road, and the great stream of west-bound pioneers here transferred to covered wagons. In 1854 Elgin was incorporated as a city.
Elgin began to ship milk to Chicago in 1852, and soon processed a growing surplus into cheese and butter. The city’s importance as a dairying center was greatly enhanced by Gail Borden. During his youth he had observed the difficulty encountered by Western travelers in transporting food and began experimenting with condensed foods. Following a stormy trans-Atlantic voyage, during which the ship’s cows refused to give milk, he concentrated on condensed milk, and soon had a successful plant running in Elgin. By 1875 it was using the milk from a thousand cows, and the product was being hawked from push-carts in New York and other metropolitan centers.
The watch industry came here in 1866, and by the application of new principles of manufacture soon rivaled dairying. Adopting much the same methods that Ford later used in the automobile industry, the Elgin plant standardized parts and introduced a modified assembly-line whereby craftsmen ceased to be watch-makers and became watchworkers. Low prices had widened the market, and the plant began to turn out thousands of watches monthly.The booming dairy trade resulted in the formation of a local Board of Trade, in 1872, and for forty years Elgin served as the Midwest marketing center.
The Board was an important factor in setting the national prices of butter and cheese; the Elgin Dairy Report bore the slogan “Elgin makes the price–We tell you what it is.” The peak year for cheese was 1883, when board members marketed 12,500,000 pounds; in 1911 they reached a high in butter sales with 57,000,000 pounds. During the World War I the Food Administration requested the Board to suspend operations, and after the Armistice it was not reorganized.
Evanston (601 alt., 74,239 pop.), fronting largely on Lake Michigan, and with an extension stretching westward at the northern edge of the city, is roughly L-shaped. It is the first of the North Shore suburbs, divided from Chicago only by Calvary Cemetery. Although its development hinged somewhat on the tremendous expansion of Chicago, Evanston retains a distinct individuality and runs a temperature at being referred to as an off-shoot of that city.
Aristocratic and self-sufficient, it considers its proximity to Chicago little more than a geographic accident. In appearance it is almost an Illinois anomaly, the dignity and spaciousness of its residential districts contrasting sharply with the noisy, virile metropolis on the south. Untouched by the peculiar tumult that Sandburg calls the “harr and boom” of the early 1900′s, Evanston felt no need to conform its city plan to the intense concentration of the new industrial age. The through traffic boulevard system that traverses Chicago’s lakeside parks stops short at the threshold of Evanston.
Here the lake front is given over to quiet streets that wind through small parks and past brick walls enclosing spacious city estates. Pere Marquette and his Indian companions landed in 1674 in the natural harbor formed by the 25-foot bluff now named Grosse Point. Marquette’s diary has an account of the incident and a sketch of his fleet of ten canoes drawn up on the sands. In pioneer days, as lake traffic increased, Grosse Point assumed some importance as a port, and a village grew up around it, settled by those who followed the inland seas. For some time a faint maritime atmosphere clung to the community; a number of families at the present time trace their descent from the early Great Lakes captains.
The first dwelling on the “Point” was built in 1826, but it was not until 1854, the year before Northwestern University opened, that the town was platted. At that time it was renamed Evanston, honoring John Evans, one of the university founders and a prominent early citizen. The subsequent blend of the maritime (enhanced by the Grosse Point lighthouse) and the academic, won Evanston the sobriquet of “the finest New England village in the Middlewest.”
In the year 1855 Northwestern University opened, after its founding fathers had considered Chicago sites and rejected them. Although it was under the control of the Methodist Episcopal Church, the school proclaimed that it was “not intended to be sectarian, but the minds committed to its care will be induced to the practice of virtue and religion.” In its second year the school charter was revised to prohibit the sale of liquor within four miles of the campus ( Evanston is still dry). Shortly afterward, in nice coincidence, Frances E. Willard came here with her family from Janesville, Wisconsin. In the following forty years she became Evanston’s most famous citizen, serving as Dean of Women and Professor of Æsthetics at Northwestern, and later organizing the World Women’s Christian Temperance Union. Among her many writings was a glowing tribute to Evanston, entitled The Classic Town.
Early Evanston was a tiny town concerned largely with its university. Twenty-five years after the school was founded Evanston’s population was only a scant four thousand, and not until 1892, when it annexed South Evanston, was it incorporated as a city. But after the turn of the century the city began to emerge as a suburb. Already cheap and efficient transportation had welded it economically to Chicago, and the booming of the metropolis could not help but be felt here. From twenty thousand in 1900, the population doubled in twenty years, and then almost doubled again in the decade ending in 1930.
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Through the gateway at Shawneetown, down the main highway of the Ohio River, settlers converged upon the young State from many directions–from North Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, Kentucky, Maryland, Pennsylvania, New York, and the New England States. In flatboats and keelboats loaded with horses, cattle, and furniture, they came. Some, too poor to pay for this kind of transportation, struck out across country and braved the wilderness.
“The eye sometimes surveys the green prairie without discovering on the illimitable plain a tree or bush, or any other object, save the wilderness of flowers and grass,” wrote an English traveler who crossed the State in the twenties. “On other occasions the view is enlivened by groves dispersed like islands on the plain, or by a solitary tree rising above the wilderness.”
Because of a widespread belief in the superior fertility of woodland, because of the toughness of the prairie sod and the pioneer’s constant need for timber, the first settlers built their cabins along the river bottoms and in the groves. But as population increased and desirable sites became scarce, hardy adventurers pushed out into the prairies, and thus discovered the almost limitless richness of the great treeless regions.
Despite hardships, they kept coming, first the advance guard of lone-wolf trappers and hunters, then the poor squatters, followed by farmers with stock and capital, and finally young men of education seeking their fortunes in land and trade. Socialistic and religious colonies organized elsewhere and migrated here: Birkbeck’s English colony at Albion ( 1818), the Quakers on the Fox River ( 1835), Swiss wine-grape growers along the Ohio, Bishop Chase and his jubilee College at Robin’s Nest ( 1839), later the Swedish Janssonists at Bishop Hill ( 1846), and the Mormons ( 1839) and Icarians ( 1850) at Nauvoo.
In Illinois As It Is, Fred Gerhard wrote in a chapter entitled “Hints To Immigrants”: “A pair of good horses, a wagon, a cow, a couple of pigs, several domestic fowl, two ploughs (one for breaking the prairie, and the other for tillage), together with a few other tools and implements, are all that is necessary for a beginning. A log house can soon be erected.”
The frontier towns were busy centers of trade; the produce of the land and the forest–furs, skins, honey, corn, whiskey, venison, beef, pork–could be bartered for goods and shipped down to New Orleans in flatboats. In these towns all elements rubbed elbows, “the young college graduate and the lone-wolf trapper, the fine lady and the squatter’s wife.”
But the great curse of the expanding frontier fell on these towns and farms: they lacked capital. The produce of the West poured down the Mississippi–only to accumulate on the wharves at New Orleans. The small sums of money that dribbled through to the West went directly back East to pay debts. The Federal banking system, inadequate in its credit mechanisms, and the State banks, unstable and uncontrolled, made merchants and farmers distrustful of all banking systems. The State banks at Edwardsville and Shawneetown failed in the early twenties, but in the late thirties a much more serious confusion occurred, in both Federal and State banking systems. Soon all bank notes were so suspect that barter of tangibles was quite commonly preferred to any kind of paper money. But there was only a small market for produce, and debt-ridden farmers, unable to dispose of their goods and too numerous to be dispossessed, filled the State.
Not far behind the first settlers came the frontier church. A Methodist circuit-rider, the Reverend Joseph Lillard, stopped at New Design in 1793. The first Baptist church was founded there three years later; the denomination was strengthened by the coming of John Mason Peck and his establishment, the Rock Spring Seminary, in 1827. The Methodists, with their circuit-riding preachers, began to arrive in 1801; they taught simplicity in dress and living, and sowed the beginnings of the anti-slavery movement in the State. In 1796 came the Presbyterians with the Reverend John Evans at their head; insisting on a learned clergy, they quickly established their denominational colleges. Despite its early missionary work and the adherence of the French settlers, the Catholic church grew more slowly; not until 1844 was the separate diocese of Chicago established.
The question of public education was debated bitterly. The largest part of the population had been drawn from the South, which had developed no public school systems. Those from the North thought that education was a function of the church. Finally, in 1825, a law allowing localities to levy school taxes was passed, only to be repealed soon afterwards; it was not until 1845, as the result of a campaign waged by the workers and farmers of the State, that a free education law was again passed, and even then years elapsed before many communities took advantage of it.
The population of the State grew from 55,211 in 1820 to 157,445 in 1830. With this growth came a tremendous shift in the distribution of population. Opened in 1825, the Erie Canal brought swarms of immigrants by way of the Great Lakes, repeating the process of settlement that had been occurring through the Ohio River Valley for half a century. Fort Dearborn, rebuilt in 1816, was the nucleus of a settlement incorporated as the town of Chicago in 1833, and as a city in 1837.
A feverish campaign for internal improvements spread in the thirties; by the end of the decade the movement had brought the State to the verge of bankruptcy under a staggering debt of $14,000,000. In 1837 a flood of measures had been passed by the legislature, providing for the building of railroads, canals, and turnpikes, and the improvement of rivers and harbors. A canal charter had been granted in 1825; in 1827 Congress had given 224,322 acres to the State. The Illinois and Michigan Canal was begun in 1836. The Wabash, Illinois, Kaskaskia and Rock Rivers were to be deepened and improved. A great Illinois Central Railroad from the western terminus of the canal at La Salle to the mouth of the Ohio River at Cairo was proposed, with two east-west lines, “the Southern Cross” from Alton to Mount Carmel, and “the Northern Cross” through Springfield and Quincy.
At the same time the question of removing the State capital from Vandalia arose; Alton, Jacksonville, Peoria, Springfield, and others, wished to succeed it. They also wanted the benefits of the internal improvements. Consequently, in the session of 1837, the Sangamon County delegates, called the “Long Nine,” because all its members-including Abraham Lincoln–were exceptionally tall men, arranged a trade. They voted internal improvements for these towns in return for votes for Springfield as the capital.
The hysteria of the internal improvement scheme was broken by the panic of 1837. For the enormous debt with which the State was burdened, it was able to show only one short railroad line, the Northern Cross from Springfield to Meredosia; built at a cost of $1,850,000, the road was sold at auction some years later for $21,000. The Illinois and Michigan Canal, begun in 1836, was not completed until 1848.
A tragic episode in the history of the State, the Black Hawk War of 1832, saw the passing of the Indian from Illinois forever. The Sauk and Fox once claimed all the land west of the Fox and the Illinois, and east of the Mississippi Rivers. In 1804, while five of their chiefs were in St. Louis arranging for the release of one of their tribesmen charged with murder, they were plied with drink. In return for an annuity of a thousand dollars a year, and the right to live and hunt in the area so long as it belonged to the Federal government, they deeded the land away.
In 1816, 1822, and 1825, the agreement was renewed, although how well the Indian chiefs understood the terms of these treaties will always remain a mystery. The tribes continued to live at their great villages, the Sauk on the north side of Rock River near the present city of Rock Island, and the Fox three miles away on the Mississippi. Miners heading for the newly discovered lead mines at Galena saw their fertile lands, and by 1825 white settlers began to move in upon them. Realizing the inevitability of a conflict, Keokuk, the peace-time chief of the tribes, decided to move Pcross the Mississippi into what is now Iowa.
But Black Hawk, a war chief less friendly to the settlers, persuaded by British and Indian friends that one thousand dollars a year was manifestly inadequate payment for this vast region, decided to remain on the land. The majority of the tribe left for Iowa, but friction soon developed between those who remained and the settlers; Black Hawk ordered the whites to stop plowing up the burial grounds of his ancestors and planting in the cornfields of the tribes. Governor Reynolds proclaimed Illinois in a “state of actual invasion” by the Indians and called for volunteers. When the volunteer army approached the Indian village on June 25, 1831, Black Hawk ordered the village abandoned, and under cover of night the Indians moved across the Mississippi into Iowa without a struggle.
In the spring of 1832, Black Hawk and four hundred braves, together with their women and children, crossed the Mississippi, apparently intending to go to the Winnebago in Wisconsin, and raise a corn crop with them. Their mission was misunderstood, and troops again took the field. Under Major Isaiah Stillman, they came upon the Indians encamped. Black Hawk sent three braves with white flags to explain that no hostilities were intended. In the excitement accompanying the negotiations, shooting began; three Indian tribesmen, including one of the truce-bearers, were killed. In the ensuing Battle of Stillman’s Run, the white men were ingloriously routed.
Guerrilla warfare began, with the Indians proving elusive in the forests. In July, his forces weakened by hunger, Black Hawk decided to surrender. He wanted to return his people to Iowa, but again his offer of truce went unheeded. Most of the warriors were killed at the Battle of Bad Axe, August 2, 1832, where the white men turned savage and committed indescribable acts of cruelty, even scalping the Indians. As women and children of the tribes tried to cross the Mississippi on rafts, a gunboat opened fire, killing or drowning most of them. Those who escaped the Battle of Bad Axe and managed to cross to the west side of the river were set upon by the Sioux, the traditional enemies of the Sauk and Fox. These events, together with the great peace pow-wow held in Chicago in 1833, in which the Potawatomi and their allies ceded all their land in Illinois and moved west of the Mississippi, removed the last of the Indians from the State.
A decade later came the Mormon wars. Driven from Missouri, the Mormons moved across the Mississippi to the town of Nauvoo in 1839. They received many concessions from the State legislature, and built a community that exceeded Chicago and Galena in population and industry. Then dissension developed; men who were excommunicated, turned on the colony with exposés, charging that the interests in the community of Joseph Smith, the leader, were financial and political rather than spiritual. Trouble with neighbors grew. In 1844 warrants were issued against Joseph Smith and his brother Hyrum for rioting and treason. They were arrested and incarcerated in the jail at Carthage. While the prisoners were awaiting trial, the jail was broken into by a mob on June 27, and the Smith brothers were murdered. Then began the acts of violence which, for two years, amounted almost to civil war, with Governor Ford marching and countermarching the militia across the State in an effort to preserve peace. The problem was finally solved after it had flared into open battle; the Mormons, yielding to superior force, left the State and migrated to Utah.
A new constitution was adopted in 1848. The population of the State increased from 157,445 in 1830 to 851,470 in 1850. The constitution of 1818 was obviously inadequate, and many reforms were needed. The new constitution provided for popular election of all State officials and popular referendum on questions of policy. As a compromise between the township system brought from the North, and that of counties from the South, the new constitution provided for both forms of local organization.
The Cities of the Calumet — Gary, Hammond, East Chicago, Whiting – have in little more than two decades become one of the world’s greatest industrial centers. Perhaps nowhere else in the Nation is there such concentration of diversified industry in an area of similar size (70 square miles).
Lying in the most northwesterly county of Indiana, the Calumet area follows the curve of Lake Michigan for 16 miles. Through the region flow two branches of a sluggish river that the French called Calumet. A profusion of reeds used by the Indians for pipestems grew along this river so that the name Calumet is thought to have originated from the French chalumeau (little reed). Through usage calumet came to mean ‘pipe with a reed stem.’
The romance of the growth of this region has been publicized the world over, and this amazing exhibition of modern industry at work attracts thousands of visitors annually. No writer concerned with the urban development of America has been able to omit Gary from his consideration. Whether his interest has been sociological, economic, or industrial, Gary, and in fact the entire Calumet region, has lain squarely across his path.
In 1905 the total population of the Calumet region was 19,000. Gary did not exist, Whiting and East Chicago were little more than villages, and Hammond, oldest of the group, had a population of 12,000. In 1905 more than half of this area was swamp, swale, and sand dunes, uninhabited and uninviting. Today it presents a massing of four modern cities with a multiplicity of industries, a maze of paved motorways, and a huge network of railroad tracks.
Industry dominates the entire region. There are 175 major and minor factories, including giant steel and rail mills, cement plants, one of the largest soap-manufacturing factories in the country, oil refineries, and enormous electric generating units.
This industrial panorama is striking by day and beautiful by night. Broken only by three small parks, the 16-mile crescent of the lake shore, from the Illinois Line on the west to the eastern edge of Gary, is a continuous array of manufacturing plants. In sections of Hammond and East Chicago, factories hug the water front and sprawl southward into these cities. Over the entire district are the smoke of the steel mill, the smell of the oil refinery, and the glow of the blast furnace. Always there is the clang of forge, the roar of wheels, and the thunder of dumping slag.
Column after column of stacks pour forth steamy white or heavy black smoke. Giant steel towers supporting high-tension cables stride over the region. Great gas reservoirs move imperceptibly up and down in huge steel frameworks. Cranes, oil distilleries, collieries, and giant factories stand silhouetted against the sky. Hundreds of oil tanks, silver gray or oyster gray, dot the area like mammoth mushrooms.
Barrack-like buildings of gray corrugated iron blend into the monochrome. Freight engines weave in and out with long strings of cars. Great banks of coal lie waiting for blazing furnaces. Bridges lift over the ship canal so that steamers and ore boats may pass. Everywhere in the composite of movement and noise thousands of workers hurry in and out. The only variations in the whole smoky, busy picture are occasional administrative, laboratory, or hospital buildings of brick, surrounded by small landscaped plots.
At night, myriads of lights outline shafts, tanks, and framework. Flames from open-hearth furnaces light the sky for miles. Black smoke gathers into clouds. It was of this picture that Carl Sandburg wrote in Smoke and Steel:
Ears and noses of fire, gibbering gorilla arms of fire, gold mud pies, gold bird wings, red jackets riding purple mules, scarlet autocrats tumbling from the humps of camels, assassinated czars straddling vermilion balloons;
I saw then the fires flash one by one: good-by: then smoke, smoke. . . .
Realizing that it is without the background of age, the Calumet region exploits its industrial pre-eminence. Visitors are told of the complete topographical transformation necessary before either house or factory could be built. Building was an engineering feat that involved all the new methods in wet excavation, drainage, building caissons and floating foundations, and ‘making land.’
Residents draw attention to the fact that this area was the birthplace of refrigeration for the transportation of dressed meat, of largescale utilization of by-products, and of the use of electricity as driving power in a large steel mill. They point to the crude oil pipe line from the mid-continental oil fields which has its northern terminal here. They tell visitors that some of the longest bridges in the world, steel rails, gasoline, oil, antifreeze compound, and steel frames and tops for automobiles are manufactured here as well as cement for the highways upon which automobiles are driven. The show places are the massive industrial plants. Instead of a museum the stranger is shown a bridge spanning 67 railroad tracks or an insect farm where bedbugs, flies, and roaches are bred scientifically to test the efficiency of insect sprays.
In development this region is only as old as its oldest industry, but for those who look beneath the surface of the present there is the echo of things past. Marquette and Louis Joliet passed through here in 1673 and for an unrecorded period it was a Potawatomi hunting ground. Later, the flags of France, Great Britain, and the United States waved in succession over these dunes and swamplands.
The Cities of the Calumet are an industrial and geographical unit. Their city limits are contiguous. Physically they merge so completely that those who have lived here for 30 years often do not know where the city limits are. Many of the industries are related and in some cases interdependent. Highway, park, and city planning is done in co-operation with the Chicago Regional Planning Commission. However, socially and municipally, the cities are separate, each with its own residential districts, schools, civic buildings, and park systems. Each is an administrative entity and each has a distinctive social structure.
The spring of 1815 brought peace to Michigan Territory. But peace spelled destitution. No longer supplied by the English, bands of hungry Indians swooped down on farmhouses of French settlers, their former friends, burning fences, stealing fruit from orchards, and killing cattle. At the same time the homeless and starving settlers of River Raisin hovered around Detroit, expecting the territorial officials to turn the stones in the streets into bread. Governor Cass distributed what little food remained in the territory, but starvation was so widespread that he had to petition the Federal Government for help. At President Madison’s request Congress voted the territory a special appropriation.
Lewis Cass, who had succeeded William Hull in 1813, worked diligently to alleviate the general suffering as quickly as possible. Though born and schooled in comfort at Exeter, New Hampshire, and though young in years–he was only thirty-two–he was a veteran in his knowledge of pioneer vicissitudes. When he was seventeen years old he journeyed on foot over the Allegheny Mountains to seek his fortune in the Great Lakes Frontier. In Marietta, Ohio, he studied law and at the age of twenty was admitted to the bar. Four years later he was elected to the legislature of Ohio, where he originated a bill that inaugurated the movement that led to the defeat of Burr’s conspiracy. In 1807 President Jefferson appointed him United States marshal of Ohio, a post which he held until the outbreak of the War of 1812. In appreciation of his brilliant record in that conflict, President Madison promoted him to civil governor of Michigan Territory.
With the assistance of the territorial secretary, William Woodbridge, a scholarly and retiring gentleman who, like Cass, had migrated to Ohio from New England, the governor undertook the great task of converting the lackadaisical French settlements to active American communities. He must make them prosperous and progressive in peace and able to defend themselves in case the British attacked them. He must advertise the strategic value and the physical charms of the territory; he must attract the tide of immigration until it carried “the schoolhouse and the newspaper into the farthest corner of the land, where the Jesuit had, a century before, planted his cross and sang his ave.”
In May, 1815, the War Department authorized Cass to distribute $1,500 among the poor of the territory. This was indeed a paltry sum; but at the end of the war the government was in no financial position to “do more than dribble out its dollars.” The money in the form of flour brought temporary relief to the settlers of River Raisin; it hardly ameliorated the condition of the territory. No occasional alms could bring prosperity to settlers who insisted on using primitive methods of farming. Those living in and around Detroit were better off and were content with their big orchards; but the poorer ones, relieved for the present from want, made no effort to clear the unbroken forest that hemmed them in to the riverbanks. Cass felt that American aggressiveness alone could cure Gallic lethargy.
Good old Yankee stock–from which he himself had sprung–that was the tonic Michigan needed to grow and prosper! He was amazed to discover that the French settlers were ignorant of the spinning wheel and the loom, that they drew their manure over the ice in the winter in order to dump it into the lake in the spring, that they threw away their sheep wool, and that they looked on soap-making as an experiment from which few cared to profit. The governor favored direct measures to change this situation, but he soon realized that indirect methods would be more efficacious. If he could offer Eastern farmers land for sale in unlimited quantity, if he could convince them of its value, would they not flock to the territory in large numbers? Would not the Americanization of Michigan then be assured? He bent all his efforts to obtaining the answers to these questions.
At the beginning of the war Congress had passed an act in which it offered volunteers two million acres of land in Michigan. To attract settlers to the territory as quickly as possible, Cass requested Edward Tiffin, Surveyor General of the United States, to have it platted. The surveyors duly appeared in early winter and began to work in the southeastern part of the territory, between the Mau-mee and the Raisin rivers. Cass had communicated with the Indians and had obtained from them a promise that the surveyors would not be molested. But the chain men and axmen soon returned home with a gloomy tale of the territory.
Either wet weather or hardships or fatigue or dread of attack had so perverted their judgment that they described the interior of Michigan to Tiffin as an endless swamp unworthy of their efforts. They may have been influenced by the unfavorable report which Monroe had made for President Jefferson before the Northwest Territory was organized. After reconnoitering in scattered sections of the territory, Monroe had written Jefferson that most of it was “miserably poor, especially that near the Lakes Michigan and Erie… The district, therefore, within which these fall will never contain a sufficient number of inhabitants to entitle them to membership in the confederacy.”
Tiffin swallowed the surveyors’ report wholesale and spewed it to Josiah Meigs, Superintendent of the General Land Office. At about the same time Tiffin declared in his official report to the Federal Government that the two million acres reserved for the volunteers “will not contain anything like one hundred part of that quantity or is worth the expense of surveying it.” He described Michigan as a territory of swamps and lakes with intermediate spaces of sandhills on which grew no vegetation save very small scrubby oaks. Meigs hastened to assure President Madison that scarcely one acre in a thousand was fit for cultivation. The president believed him and advised Congress in February 1816 that the quota of bounty lands assigned to Michigan should be transferred to Illinois and Missouri.
Cass read a copy of the official report with undisguised anger. His pen raced across the paper in a protest to Meigs: “The quality of the land in this Territory has been grossly misrepresented.” He added that Tiffin’s description was based on incorrect information; but the newspapers emphasized the doings of Congress and naturally accepted its version of the controversy. So did the geographer Jedediah Morse, who in his widely used Traveller’s Guide represented the sandhills of Michigan as “extending into the interior as far as the dividing ridge . . . some times crowned with a few stunted trees, and a scanty vegetation, but generally bare, and thrown by the wind into a thousand fantastic shapes.”
Cass lost a battle but he was determined to win the war. He began to bombard Meigs with long letters, reminding him that the surveyors had come to Michigan in the wettest season the territory had ever known and that they had run the line along a dividing ridge be- tween waters running east and waters running west. No wonder they got their feet wet! Furthermore, two of the surveyors had by no means agreed with the others in disparaging the territory; on the contrary, they had praised it in glowing terms! He continued this verbal siege for several months while he instructed Meigs on the proper method of conducting the surveys, boasted that he had many potential land buyers, and predicted that the territory would be quickly settled. At last Meigs surrendered. In the summer of 1816 he wrote Cass that he had instructed Tiffin to resume the surveys and that, as soon as they were completed, he would issue in Detroit a proclamation that the Michigan lands were open for sale. By the end of September Tiffin’s crew was at work in the Michigan woods.
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