Are some people "born for luck?" as the saying is. If so, surely John Gaynor was. He had sold his summer crops and a good part of his corn, and the day the money was paid him turned it over on a new purchase of prairie land he had made. If it had been in the bank it would have gone to feed the flames.
"I told you land wouldn't burn up," he said. "We have the sure promise until the last great conflagration."
But my row of stores and buildings were gone. I was a poor man and must begin the struggle with business again, if one could find anything to do in such devastation. Homer had fared better. Mother and Ruth and the children accepted their hospitality for the winter.
John Gaynor was near seventy, but brisk and hearty and helpful, hopeful, too, I ought to say. He would have enough to start the four children in life. Why should I worry about them?
How Chicago arose from its ashes, stronger, more magnificent, more durable, and still kept stretching out its thews and sinews in every direction is a matter long since gone into history. Banks, hotels, public buildings and stores could be restored in a more durable manner, streets widened and improved, parks and squares added, but many things could not be replaced. The grand collection of the Historical Society, and the great Emancipation Proclamation, next to the Declaration of Independence, the Chicago Library, with books and archives, and engravings of old houses and old streets, even then forgotten by many, with other valuable articles that could not be duplicated. Truly, Old Chicago had been swept away.
Did we sit down and weep over the vast ruin such as had never befallen any city? There were starving women and children to have food and shelter, and those who had shared joyfully with these. All that was best and noblest and broadest in humanity came out then. The kindliness, the pluck and the courage was something wonderful amid all that destitution and desolation.
Like a romance Chicago rose from her ruins and ashes to be grander than any one had dreamed, and her men again worked their way up to prosperity with indomitable energy. Homer lost less than I, but it was enough to make us poor men. John Gaynor started in afresh with his paper with cheery Yankee spirit. Ben's stock was largely ambitions, and he lived to realize upon them.
I prospered to some extent afterward and we had a happy time. We went out of our own city by railroad to San Francisco. We went up to Oregon, south to famous cities. We were the centre of the country, we were the granary of the West, the East. We helped to feed the starving nations of Europe, that less than sixty years before had believed us an uncouth, half-Indian people and doubted if any good could come out of Nazareth. It was done by persevering industry, by largeness of aim, by sterling integrity, by the great love of every citizen for his native city, and the desire to see her stand in the front rank.
We built our new house near the lake front again. Little Ruth married when she was barely seventeen, and John Gaynor lived to hold his great-grandson in his arms. A cheerful, happy man, going down the great decline peaceful and content, followed not long after by mother, who was sometimes afraid she had had too many of the good things in this life, but she had always been pitiful to the Lazarus at the gate and not left him to be nursed by dogs.
When Chicago reared the magnificent White City, the like of which no one had yet attempted, we were in the older generation with our grandchildren about us. They never tire of hearing how grandmamma travelled from Massachusetts in a big country wagon, with all the household goods they could carry, crossing New York and Ohio, stopping by the way to catch fish or shoot game and cooking by the wayside in a stone fireplace, sleeping in the wagon, sometimes roused by wild animals, occasionally meeting Indians, and at last reaching Chicago and grandpapa. It is better than the best of their gilded and engraved fairy books.