A metropolis was doubtless predestined on or near the very site of Chicago by natural conditions and the peopling of the lands to the northwest; but Louis Joliet was its first prophet. The inscription on the tablet at the foot of the black cross recites that in crossing this site Joliet recommended it for its natural advantages and as a place of first settlement. And he first suggested the lakes-to-the-gulf waterway—a prospect of which La Salle speaks with disfavor but which over two hundred years later was in some measure realized.
The "Jesuit Relation" of August 1, 1674, reporting the conversation of Joliet, who had lost all his precious papers in the Lachine Rapids, makes this interesting prophecy: [Footnote: Thwaite's edition, 58:105.] "It would only be necessary to make a canal by cutting through half a league of prairie, to pass from the foot of the Lake of the Illinois [Michigan] to the River St. Louis [Mississippi]…. A bark [built on Lake Erie] would easily sail to the Gulf of Mexico. "The monument to him stands by the canal that has been cut through not merely a league but many leagues (thirty-eight miles) and lets the waters of Michigan flow southward to the Illinois. Of this site Joliet is quoted as saying, "The place at which we entered the lake is a harbor, very convenient for receiving vessels and sheltering them from the wind;" [Footnote: "Jesuit Relations" (Thwaites), 58:107.] and of the prairies back of the harbor: "At first when we were told of these treeless lands I imagined that it was a country ravaged by fire, where the soil was so poor that it could produce nothing. But we certainly observed the contrary, and no better soil can be found, either for corn, for vines, or for any fruit whatever…. A settler would not there spend ten years in cutting down and burning the trees; on the very day of his arrival he could put his plough into the ground, and if he had no oxen from France, he could use those of this country, or even the animals possessed by the western savages, on which they ride, as we do on horses. After sowing grain of all kinds, he might devote himself especially to planting the vine, and grafting fruit-trees, to dressing ox- hides, wherewith to make shoes; and with the wool of these oxen he could make cloth, much finer than most of that which we bring from France. Thus he could easily find in the country his food and clothing, and nothing would be wanting except salt; but, as he could make provision for it, it would not be difficult to remedy that inconvenience." [Footnote: "Jesuit Relations" (Thwaites), 58:107-9.] If Marquette was the first martyr of the Illinois, Joliet was the first prophet of that great city of the Illinois.
What he could not foresee was that Lake Michigan would make the Chicago of to-day not so much by giving it a waterway to the markets of the east and Europe as by standing as an obstacle in the way of a straight path to the sea from the northwest fields and so compelling those fertile lands to send all their riches around the southern end of Lake Michigan. He overestimated the economic importance, to be sure, of the buffalo. But if domesticated cattle be substituted for the wild species, he again showed remarkable prevision of the future of a city which has enjoyed a world fame by reason of its cattle-market—its stock-yards. [Footnote: Of the importance of the lakes-to-the-gulf waterway we have already spoken.]
Chicago is a city without a past, save for that glow of adventure which is almost as hazy as the myths or legends that lie back of Europe. It is just eighty-one years since it came into existence as a town, [Footnote: August 12, 1833.] and but twenty-eight voters voted for the first board of trustees of the town; its population was variously estimated at from above two hundred to three hundred and fifty. As a city, it is seventy-seven years old, [Footnote: Chartered March 4, 1837.] beginning its legal life as such with fewer than five thousand people. It was of its first mayor, William B. Ogden—though some years later than his administration—that Guizot, looking upon the portrait of his benevolent face, said: "That is the representative American, who is the benefactor of his country, especially the mighty West; he built Chicago." But the Chicago which he administered was but a small town in size. Its officials from treasurer to scavenger were appointed by the common council and obliged to serve or pay certain fines. Every male resident over twenty-one was obliged to work three days each year on the streets and alleys or pay one dollar for each day. Fire wardens had no compensation except release from jury or military service. There was at first meagre school provision, [Footnote: The money derived from the sale of school lands in 1833 was distributed among the existing private schools which thus became free common schools. Less than $40,000 was received for lands now worth much more than $100, 000,000.] no public sanitary provision, no considerable public service of any sort. It was a neighborly but unsocialized place, where the individual had little restraint save of his own limitations and his personal love of his neighbors. What social functions the city performed were self-protective and not self-improving in motive. For example, fire might not be carried in the street except in a fire-proof vessel. [Footnote: S. E. Sparling, "Municipal History and Present Organization of the City of Chicago," University of Wisconsin Bulletin, No. 23, 1898.] The aboriginal frog croaked on the very site of the place where grand opera is now sung.
The city's development was largely left to the haphazard, unrestrained, but whole-souled, big-hearted, self-confident individualism, such as has been potent in Pittsburgh. The restrictions were mainly those of the prohibitory Mosaic commandments. And so this city, increasing its population by a half-million in each of the last three decades, has come to stand next to Paris in population and first of all great American cities in the constructive activity of its civic consciousness and urban imagination. The city is still smoke-enwrapped (when the wind does not blow from the lake); its streets run out into prairie dust and mud; its harbor, of which Joliet spoke in praise, merits rather the disparagement of La Salle; there are offending smells and sights everywhere. But in the midst of it all and over it all is moving now, as a healing efficacy in troubled waters, a spirit of democratic aspiration. What Louis XIV or Napoleon I or Napoleon III, king and emperors, planned and did, compelling the co-operation of a people in making the city of Paris more beautiful, more habitable, that a people of millions out upon the prairies of Illinois are beginning to do out of their own desire and common treasury.
It is of interest that the sovereign of France who gave her empire of those great stretches of plain, gave to Paris "those vast reaches of avenue and boulevard which to-day are the crowning features of the most beautiful of cities." But it must quicken France's interest further to know that this first systematic planning for a city, as an organic whole, by Louis XIV and Colbert, Le Notre and Blondel is now being followed out on that plain by a self-governing people, who have been making cities for barely half a century, to bring order and form and beauty, and better condition of living out of that grimy collection of homes and shops and beginnings of civic enterprise and great private philanthropies. A great deal has been already accomplished, such as the widening of the leading avenue, the addition of acres upon acres to the park space on the lake shore, the establishment of an efficient small park system; but it is only the beginning of a scheme that thinks of Chicago as a city that will some day hold ten millions of people. The prophecy of one statistician (now of New York) predicts for Chicago a population of thirteen million two hundred and fifty thousand souls in 1952; [Footnote: Bion J. Arnold, "Report of the Engineering and Operating Features of the Chicago Transportation Problem," pp. 95, 96.] and the great railroad builder, James J. Hill, has estimated that "when the Pacific coast shall have a population of twenty millions, Chicago will be the largest city in the world."
The specific plans for its improvement have been developed by a small body of public-spirited citizens, but they are simply that great urban democracy thinking and speaking, trying to express itself. It has developed with less interference or compulsion on the part of the State than any other great city of America, and now it is moving voluntarily to the noblest as well as the most practical of improvements.
Under like leading it built the "White City," the ephemeral city of the World's Fair, in the celebration of the four-hundredth anniversary of the discovery of America, and that splendid achievement of the black, unkempt city back of it gave first hint, in the co-operation that made this possible, of what a community could do and at the same time gathered to it the teaching of the older cities of the earth from their long striving for the city beautiful.
The city provides its own water-supply, it lights its streets, it has recently acquired control of its street-car lines, and every passenger is notified as a shareholder that 55 per cent of the profits comes into the city treasury. And now under this inspiration and yet of its own will it has begun a transformation of itself into the likeness of what it dreamed in those evanescent buildings and courts and columns and statues and frescoes out by the opalescent waters of its sea. It saw the reflection of that "White City" in the lake and then the image of its own workaday face —and it has not forgotten what manner of city it was.
Remember again that what is and what is promised have come in a lifetime. Walking in the streets of that city early one morning a few years ago, as the trains were emptying the throngs who sleep outside along the lake and out on the prairie, into the canyons made by its tall buildings, I found myself immediately behind a robust old man, a civil engineer, who was born before Chicago had a hundred inhabitants. He was much older than the city whose buildings now reach out miles from the lake (one of its streets thirty-two miles long) and thirty and forty stories into the air. One hundred years ago it was the French wilderness untouched. Eighty years ago most of its citizens bore French names. The portage path has literally yielded a harvest of streets.