The elasticity of the new States is wonderful. Wisconsin and Illinois had lost about ten millions of dollars through the depreciation of their currency within a few months. It caused embarrassment and stringency, but no wreck or ruin.
Reminiscences of the financial chaos were entertaining. New York exchange once reached thirty per cent. The Illinois Central Railroad Company paid twenty-two thousand five hundred dollars premium on a single draft. For a few weeks before the crash, everybody was afraid of the currency, and yet everybody received it. People were seized with a sudden desire to pay up. The course of nature was reversed; debtors absolutely pursued their creditors, and creditors dodged them as swindlers dodge the sheriff. Parsimonious husbands supplied their wives bounteously with means to do family shopping for months ahead. There was a "run" upon those feminine paradises, the dry-goods stores, while the merchants were by no means anxious to sell.
Suddenly prices went up, as if by magic. Then came a grand crisis. Currency dropped fifty per cent., and one morning the city woke up to find itself poorer by just half than it was the night before. The banks, with their usual feline sagacity, alighted upon their feet, while depositors had to stand the loss.
Curious Reminiscences of Chicago.
Persons who settled in Chicago when it was only a military post, many hundred miles in the Indian country, relate stories of the days when they sometimes spent three months on schooners coming from Buffalo. Later settlers, too, offer curious reminiscences. In 1855, a merchant purchased a tract of unimproved land near the lake, outside the city limits, for twelve hundred dollars, one-fourth in cash. Before his next payment, a railroad traversed one sandy worthless corner of it, and the company paid him damages to the amount of eleven hundred dollars. Before the end of the third year, when his last installment of three hundred dollars became due, he sold the land to a company of speculators for twenty-one thousand five hundred dollars. It is now assessed at something over one hundred thousand.
Visit to the Grave of Douglas.
On a July day, so cold that fires were comforting within doors, and overcoats and buffalo robes requisite without, I visited the grave of Senator Douglas, unmarked as yet by monumental stone. He rests near his old home, and a few yards from the lake, which was sobbing and moaning in stormy passion as the great, white-fringed waves chased each other upon the sandy shore.
With the arrival of each railway train from the east, long files of immigrants from Norway and northern Germany come pouring up Dearborn street, gazing curiously and hopefully at their new Land of Promise. One of the many railroad lines had brought twenty-five hundred within two weeks. There were gray-haired men and young children. All were attired neatly, especially the women, with snow-white kerchiefs about their heads.
They were bound, mainly, for Wisconsin and Minnesota. Men and women are the best wealth of a new country. Though nearly all poor, these brought, with the fair hair and blue eyes of their fatherland, honesty, frugality, and industry, as their contribution to that great crucible which, after all its strange elements are fused, shall pour forth the pure and shining metal of American Character.
Social Habits of the Germans.