Chicago as It Was

Chicago, July 12, 1871

In fast and friendly Chicago, weeks go by like days, and days like hours, and life is almost too rapid to be chronicled. The "glorious Fourth" has already faded into the dim distance. I remember, however, that it was a perfect day, even in a pic-nickian sense. We spent it out of town, some eight miles to the westward, on the prairie, at a gentleman's pretty country seat,--feasting and disporting under noble ancestral trees, some of them as much as four years old! It was fine exercise dodging about under them to catch the flickering shade. But we were quite as jolly as we could have been under the olives of Albano, the cedars of Warwick, or the big pines of California. I have been from Chicago some four years, and in that time its growth and improvement have been absolutely marvellous. It grows on Independence days and Sabbath days and all days. It grows o' nights. Its enterprise, daring, and vigilance storm the land and fetter the sea, defy and override physical laws, and circumvent nature. A great part of the west side of the city seems to me to have been heaved up out of the mud by a benevolent earthquake. I see beautiful and stately marble buildings where four years ago were the humble little domiciles of the Germans, or the comfortless shanties of the Irish emigrants. What were then wastes of sand and rubbish and weeds are now lovely public squares or parks, with hard, smooth drives, ponds, rocks, hillocks, rustic bridges and seats, pretty vine-shaded arbors, and the usual park accompaniments of tame bears and caged eagles.

All this rapid change and progress is as mysterious as it is marvellous, till you know a regular, genuine Chicagoan, and see him go about his business with a drive, a devotion, a matchless economy of time and means, which stop just short of hurry and greed, -- of the desperate and the sordid. The very struggle which the men of Chicago have always waged against adverse natural conditions has been to a degree ennobling, and has lifted their lives above the commonplace. It is essentially heroic; it is something titanic; it is more creation than development. Foot by foot, inch by inch, they have gained on swampy flats, on oozing clay-banks, on treacherous sand-heaps. Every year has chronicled new enterprises, new triumphs. The sluggish, miasmatic waters, once all abroad, have been driven back, and headed off, and hemmed in, and at last brought to bay in the horrible little river that now creeps in a Stygian flood through the city it does its best to poison and pollute, while sullenly bearing back and forth rich burdens of commerce. But the hour has almost come when that ill-famed stream must take the back track,--double on itself,--actually run up its channel, and through the Illinois Canal into the Illinois River, and so down into the Mississippi. Then Lake Michigan, who does a great deal of mischief for lack of better employment, will have a heavier job to perform in the cleansing line than the rivers Peneus and Alpheus together accomplished for Augeas; and Hercules the canal-digger of Elis will be outdone by one Chesebrough [Ellis Chesbrough, the designer of the new water works].

But for a pleasanter theme. Lincoln Park, on the north side, is perhaps the most striking and apparently magical of all the enterprises and improvements of the city. It is already very beautiful, with a variety of surface and ornamentation most wonderful, when we remember that scarcely five years ago the spot was a dreary waste of drifting sand and unsightly weeds. The manner in which these elusive sands, full of the restlessness of the waves from which they have been rescued, are fixed and fettered is very curious. Boards, stones, sticks, leaves, weeds, are laid on them, then clay is added, and so soil enough created to be sown or planted. The modest elevations called "hills," by courtesy, are also, I am told, "fearfully and wonderfully made" out of the most unsightly refuse and rubbish; so that, if future savans, taking them for Indian mounds, shall ever excavate one, they may perhaps come upon distinct strata of oyster-shells, tin fruit-cans, old shoes, and broken crockery, with a substratum of hoop-skirts. No means, however humble, for breaking and elevating the surface are despised. I should not be surprised to hear that moles were protected by game-laws. To obtain water for ponds and fountains they have made a requisition on the secret reservoirs of Nature,-- on hidden streams that from unknown sources, perhaps as far away as the Rocky Mountains, have been for ages groping their way

          "Through caverns measureless to man,
          Down to a sunless sea."

They come forth into the light and the sweet, vital upper air, leaping and shouting, and make haste to join in the great, busy, restless life around them. Those artesian wells, with the lake-tunnels, will yet make Chicago more than the rival of Rome in fountains and baths, and in that cleanliness which is next to godliness. The great drive on the lake shore, from Chicago to Evanston, will be another wonder, only surpassed by the system of continuous boulevards and parks, a complete circumvallation of the city, which at no distant day will furnish one of the grandest drives in the world. Citizens of Atlantic cities say they miss their grand rocks and hills, and the sea, "that symbol of the infinite." But Lake Michigan is a respectable bit of water; and the prairie has a beauty and even a grandeur of its own. If a cornfield of several thousand acres is not "a symbol of the infinite," I should like to know what is. The present entrance to Lincoln Park is a little depressing, being through a cemetery, but those old settlers are fast being unsettled and re-established elsewhere. Even the dead must "move on" in Chicago. It were impossible for one to tell where in this vicinity he could take his last sleep. Chicago houses are all liable to be moved, even the "house of worship" and "the house appointed for all living." A moving building has ceased to be a moving sight here. Not only do small frame cottages, that a year or two ago were in quiet rural localities, take fright at the snort and the rush of advancing trade, and prance off to "fresh fields and pastures new," but substantial brick edifices sometimes migrate. A few years ago a Baptist church, on Wabash Avenue, saw fit to change sides, and came over -- in several pieces to be sure -- to the corner of Monroe and Morgan Streets, where it now stands, looking as decorous and settled and close-communion as ever.

The parks of the west side, patriotically and democratically named "Union" and "Jefferson," though reminding one somewhat, by their modest dimensions, ingenious contrivances, and artifices of rock and water and hillock and bridge (with a "real flag staff" and "real flag"), of the pious devices of John Wemmick for the amusement of "the aged," are yet sources of incalculable enjoyment and good for all who live in their pleasant vicinity. Wooden pavements, splendid macadamized roads, and the new boulevards are fast bringing the beautiful suburban settlements of Lake View, Kenwood, and Hyde Park into the municipal fold. The city is bearing down upon them at a tremendous rate, and the roar of traffic will soon drown for them through the day the deep sweet monotone of the lake. In the heart of the town Chicago is making worthy preparations to entertain the great floating population of the world setting westward. The work on the new Pacific Hotel goes bravely on. I do not quite like the location, and the court-yard seems to me too small for so immense a caravansery. I am sorry to hear that it is proposed to change its name in order to do honor to one of its most munificent proprietors. No man's name seems to me big enough for such a hotel,--not Montmorency, nor Metamora, nor Hohenzollern, nor Hole-in-the-Day, nor Frelinghuysen, nor Lippincott. The old court-house has taken to itself wings to meet the great rush of business in the murder and divorce line; and I hear much of Potter Palmer's new hotel, which is to be a monster affair, capable of accommodating an old-fashioned German principality, to say the least.

In short, all is astir here. There is no such thing as stagnation or rest. Lake-winds and prairie-winds keep the very air in commotion. You catch the contagion of activity and enterprise, and have wild dreams of beginning life again, and settling no, circulating, whirling -- in Chicago, the rapids and wild eddies of business have such a powerful fascination for one. Chicago postmen sometimes go their rounds on velocipedes. Chicago newsboys are preternaturally clever and wide-awake. I remember one of the most diminutive of the guild, coming on to the train as I was sorrowfully departing from the city one morning, in war time, and offering to sell me a copy of a leading daily, and that I said, speaking after the manner of a dark-complexioned Republican, "Why, my poor little fellow, where will you go to when you die, if you sell that naughty paper?" He turned his curly red head as he answered, "O, to the good place, I reckon, for I sell rather more Tribunes than Timeses."

I suppose I need hardly say that I like Chicago, -- like it in spite of lake- wind sharpness and prairie flatness, damp tunnels, swinging bridges, hard water, and easy divorces. With all the distinctive characteristics of a great city, it has preserved in a wonderful degree the provincial virtues of generous hospitality, cordiality, and neighborly kindness. A lady from the East lately said of it, very charmingly, "It is New York with the heart left in." I do not deny that the genuine Chicagoan has well learned the prayer of the worthy Scotchman, "Lord, gie us a guid conceit o' oursels!" and that the prayer has been abundantly answered; but I do not think that his self-satisfaction often amounts to arrogance, or inclines him to rest on his laurels or his oars. He well knows, I think, that there is small profit in gaining the whole world to lose his own soul, and beautiful churches and beneficent mission schools, quiet deeds of mercy and munificent charities, show that he finds ways of ascent into the higher life, even from the busy dock, the noisy factory, the grim foundry, and the tempestuous Exchange.

My memory of the journey from Washington, over the Northern Central and Pennsylvania Central, is a long panorama of surpassing summer beauty, though, like Pilgrim, after leaving the "Delectable Mountains," I had to pass through the "Valley of the Shadow of Death" at Pittsburg, and, unlike him, had a world of trouble about my baggage. But, dear me, it is so long ago, -- nearly four weeks! In that time Chicago, very likely, has opened a tunnel, and stolen an acre of land from the lake, and drilled an artesian well or two, and tossed up several good-sized hills in Lincoln Park.