I.
Through piles of lumber, into back streets filled with liquor bars, “side shows,” and decorated with flaming posters, into fine, stately thoroughfares, crowded with people, past imposing buildings marked with architectural dignity, to the Grand Pacific Hotel.
“It is as if Manchester had given Greenwich Fair a blow in the face,” said Irving,—“that is my first impression of Chicago. ‘The Living Skeleton,’ ‘The Tattooed Man,’ ‘The Heaviest Woman in the World,’ ‘The Museum of Wonders,’ with the painted show-pictures of our youth; public houses, old-clothes shops, picturesque squalor. And then great warehouses, handsome shops, and magnificent civic buildings,—what a change! There is something of the ‘go’ of Liverpool and Manchester about it. If I was ever afraid of Chicago, I am afraid no longer. A people that have rebuilt this city within a comparatively few years must be great, broad-minded, and ready in appreciating what is good. We have something to show them in the way of dramatic art,—they will ‘catch on,’ as they say on this side of the Atlantic, I am sure of it.”
The city was more or less snow-bound. Little or no effort had been made to remove the white downfall, either from street or sidewalk. The sun was shining. The air was, nevertheless, very cold. Within a few days of our arrival the thermometer had fallen to twenty and thirty degrees below zero. We had selected for our visit to America what was destined to be the bitterest winter that had been known in the United States for over twenty years. There were storms on sea and land; storms of rain, and snow, and wind, followed by frosts that closed the great rivers, and made even Lake Michigan solid for ice-boats a dozen or twenty miles out. The South Jersey coast was strewn with wreckage. Railway tracks were swept away. At Cape May the principal pier was destroyed. The sea demolished the piles of Coney Island’s iron piers. At Long Branch cottages were undermined by the water, and their contents carried out to sea. The well-known dancing platform and piazza of the Grand Union Hotel, on Rockaway Beach, were washed away. Terrific winds blew over Boston and New England. A little fleet of schooners were driven ashore at Portland. Vessels broke from their moorings in the adjacent harbors. Atlantic City had boarding-houses, stores, and dwellings carried away by high tides.
The mails were delayed for hours, and in some cases for days, on the principal railroads. Where the obstacles were not rain and flood they were wind and snow. Lockport, New York, reported that the snow on that day was four feet on the level, and still falling. Bradford, telegraphing for Pennsylvania generally, announced that fourteen inches of snow had fallen within a few hours, the weight of it crushing in many roofs and awnings. “The narrow-gauge railways,” ran the despatch, “five in number, have been closed all day; the trains are stalled a few miles from the city.” Even at Louisville, in Kentucky, navigation was suspended, and floating ice-blocks were battering in the sides of steamers lying at the wharves of Baltimore. On the Rappahannock river, in Virginia, a ship laden with corn was cut down and sunk by floating ice. These and kindred incidents occurred on or about the day of our arrival in Chicago. The record of the few previous days, judged from the official reports of Washington, and the ordinary chronicles of the times, was a very remarkable one, even for the coldest States of America. In some places the weather had been the coldest known for more than fifty years. Canada had had the most extreme experiences in this respect. At Winnipeg, Manitoba, the thermometer had fallen as low as forty-five degrees below zero.
On the day we were travelling to the prairie city, while the thermometer was rising in that section of the country, it was falling in the eastern and southern States, registering thirty degrees below zero at Whitehall, New York. The Straits of Mackinaw, connecting Lake Michigan and Lake Huron, were navigable only on foot or runners. We arrived in Chicago on Monday, Jan. 7. On the 6th the thermometer registered twenty-two degrees below zero. Monday’s newspapers congratulated their readers that, “the wave had passed over.” Incidents of its severity were curious and numerous. Hundreds of hogs had been frozen to death on freight-trains. The Terre Haute express from Chicago was snowed up for thirty-one hours. At fires which had broken out, water from the engines froze as it fell, and covered the buildings with strange, fantastic shapes.
I had arranged to visit Gunnison (Colorado), and other mining cities, within a reasonable distance from Chicago and St. Louis; but was persuaded to postpone my trip by private and public reports of the storm in those regions. One day’s newspaper (the “Daily-News-Democrat,” of Gunnison) contained startling evidence of the difficulties I should have had to encounter. Within a few days twenty-seven men had been killed by snow-slides in the mountains between Ouray and Telluride. A local mail-carrier was among the victims. All the available snow-ploughs and engines of the various districts were at work on the tracks. Engines were helplessly stuck in the snow on the Rio Grande. “The miner,” remarked the “Daily News” editor, “who goes into the mountains at this season takes his life in his hands.” I remained in Chicago with Irving, and am spared to chronicle these things. The weather was sufficiently cold for both of us in Chicago. It varied, too, with a persistency of variation that is trying to the strongest constitution. One hour the thermometer would be fairly above zero, the next it would be far below it. Men went about the frozen streets in fur coats and caps, carefully protecting their ears and hands. Along the shores of Lake Michigan were barricades of ice; they looked like solid palisades of marble. Here and there, where tiny icebergs had been formed, the polar bear would not have looked out of place. It was strange to see the ice-boats, with their bending sails, literally flying along, while away out lay ships at anchor. Mr. Lyon took Miss Terry, Irving, and myself sleighing along the lake shore and upon the prairie beyond. My friends were delighted with the novel excursion, astonished at the fine boulevards through which we passed, amazed at the possibilities of Chicago, as they realized what had been done and what space had been laid out for the future. A forty-mile drive through great, wide boulevards designed to encompass the city, is the biggest of the city’s schemes, and it is in vigorous course of formation.
“One is forced to admire the pluck of Chicago,” said Irving, after our first drive. “Twice burnt down, twice built up, and laid out anew, on a plan that is magnificent. Some of the houses along Prairie and Michigan avenues are palaces.[37] The art revival in street architecture and house decoration is as actively rife here as in London. And what a superb stone they have for building purposes in their yellow cream-colored marble! It is marvellous to see how they have taken hold of the new ideas. The Calumet and the Chicago club-houses,—nothing could be more chaste than their decorations.”
One day we went to Pullman City, an industrial town, akin to Saltaire, near Bradford, in its scope and enterprise. We were invited and accompanied by Mr. and Mrs. Pullman, Miss Terry, Mr. and Mrs. Dexter, Mr. and Mrs. James Runnion, and several other ladies and gentlemen. Going out in Mr. Pullman’s private car, we lunched with him at the pretty hotel of the novel city, and afterwards inspected the workshops and principal buildings.
“The story of the conception and creation of this Pullman City,” said Irving, “interested me very much, though I confess the method of it all strikes me as somewhat like living by machinery: the private houses being massed, as it were, en bloc; the shops collected together like arcades; the whole place laid out with geometrical system; and yet one feels that there are fine principles underlying it; that the scheme is founded upon wise plans; and that, from a moral and sanitary stand-point, the city is an ideal combination of work and rest, of capital and labor. Pullman’s idea was a lofty one, and the result is very remarkable: a centre of industry that should give to labor its best chance, with capital taking its place on a platform as human as labor. That is the notion, as Pullman explained it to me. What a square, level head it is! Just the determined kind of man to be the author of a new city on new lines. He told me that Charles Reade’s novel, ‘Put Yourself in his Place,’ had influenced him greatly in his ambition to found this place; that it has affected all his relations towards the people under his direction. Politically, Pullman City is a paradox. A despotism, it still is very democratic. It owes its successful administration to what may be called a benevolent autocracy. The theatre, I am told, is more prosperous than the church proper, though religion is represented by several earnest communities. The idea of giving the people a chance to buy land and build cottage homes for themselves, at a reasonable distance beyond Pullman, appears to be a good one. Pullman himself may well be proud of his work. It is worthy of Chicago and the West.”