I’d have painted a hell of a Dome.”
The result was that everyone started to imitate him, and we had over a hundred humorous drawings. I remember one of Proctor, the sculptor, sitting on a dead grizzly with the caption, “He shoots ’em, he eats ’em, he models ’em.” A wealthy man, whose name I shall not mention, offered to buy the whole collection. We told him they were not for sale, but that we would give them to him for the drinks and smokes, promptly bundling up the whole lot and sending them to him. But we reckoned without our donor’s Scotch blood, and the forty or fifty of us were presented with two bottles of rye whisky and one box of poor cigars! Not to be outdone, we set to work and made a far better set of drawings, giving them to Daniel Burnham. The millionaire felt greatly outraged.
One visitor to Cockroach Ranch whom I remember very well was Eugene Field, the writer. I first met him in a Chicago club, and upon presentation he greeted me with these words:
“You get out of this town; you are spoiling my game. Everywhere I go, I am taken for you.”
He was slightly shorter than I, and bald-headed, so that I could not see the resemblance. But as I have been mistaken at various times for Sol Smith Russell, Forbes-Robertson, Maffit the clown, and William Gillette, nothing surprises me. I once told Gillette about some one taking me for him in London. He said:
“That is not the worst of it. By God! I have been mistaken for you!”
The truth is that I am a perfect Yankee type and might have posed for the original Uncle Sam. When Robert Reid was painting his decoration for the Boston State House, he had a portrait of each one of the judges to put in it, and I could have posed for any one of them.
The army officers who were stationed at one place or another about the fair grounds or who came to Chicago as visitors always managed to drift in with us artists. They were a jolly crowd, and there was one or more in at every one of our frivolities. There was one colonel—I cannot think of him by name, but as the man who always began a story or an address with, “As I was about to remark when rudely interrupted by the gentleman on my left....” We had a joke which we tried on each newcomer—namely, that of seizing our chairs, straddling them, and running madly around the table striving to ride him down. We tried it on the colonel only once. He immediately grabbed his chair, did not join us, but jumped with it upon the table, riding down the middle and smashing everything as he went.
One officer, an impulsive, big creature, had been colonel of an Indian regiment, and another was the commander of the Buffaloes. I asked them to compare the character of the two races as soldiers. I was told that the negro was perfect, if led by a white man, but an officer could never make an intimate friend of one. On the contrary, the Indian was not perfect until he was in a fight, and then the white man must know enough to let him alone. An officer always made intimate friends among them, and he could eat and sleep with them as he would with his brother. The Indian is an inbred man and can be the friend of any other inbred man (aristocrat).
One night I went with Captain Maney to the Electrical Building; he had charge of the comfort of the ten thousand troops quartered there. As we entered, three noncommissioned officers came up, saluting, to ask for instructions. One was an Irishman—an alien; one was a negro—a freed slave; and the third was an Indian—an aborigine. The colonel himself had been an officer of the South in the Civil War and was a pardoned rebel. This could never have happened in any other army in the history of the world, unless perhaps in ancient Rome. They might have had the freed slave, the alien, and Cataline (the rebel), but I don’t think they could have produced an aborigine soldier.