American Endurance

by Richard A. Serrano

  At Byron, Gillespie promised he would overtake the front-runner. He no longer worried about the others; for him, Berry alone was the man to beat. “I will have John Berry in my hunting sack by tomorrow noon,” he promised.

  Gillespie already had passed Stephens somewhere after Dubuque, believing that Rattlesnake Pete was “riding his horse to death.” Said Old Joe to reporters, “He’ll never catch us. I flatter myself I know how to use a horse.” He was big and brawny, the toughest of them all. He napped briefly, then tossed down three sirloin steaks and a small loaf of bread.

  Before he dashed off, he sent a hastily worded telegram to C. H. Weller, a Sioux County, Nebraska, saloon keeper and horse-racing confidante. “Berry makes a hard fight for first money,” Gillespie fretted. “I say he is not in the race.” Gillespie was gone before Weller could reply. He would have advised his friend to ignore the disqualified railroad surveyor.

  When Rattlesnake Pete hit Freeport, he drew a crowd of reporters; they caught him hopping off General Grant and shaking “his serpentine hat band.” He described taking a short nap alongside the road. Just before falling asleep, his saddle under his head, he had heard a buckboard wagon passing by. Tucked low inside was John Berry, he claimed. A buggy clopped past him, too, Stephens said, carrying Gillespie.

  DeKalb, the last registering station on the cowboy race to Buffalo Bill’s tent ground, was just under seventy miles past Freeport, and Berry made the ride in twelve hours and twenty minutes. He arrived just short of ten at night, crumpling off his horse. He begged the crowds to stand back; he worried that someone might still poison Poison. He briefly rested near his horse, one watchful eye on Poison. Then he was up and gone an hour before midnight.

  Gillespie and Charley Smith rode into DeKalb together; they rested an hour and then hurried off after Berry. Stephens hit DeKalb next. He tried to sleep and rest General Grant. He hoped to be out by three in the morning. But when he tried to saddle and bridle his horse, General Grant would not budge. “He’s absolutely unable,” Stephens admitted to reporters. They would have to stay put a while in DeKalb. So he lowered his rattlesnake hat over his head and slept through the night in the barn with General Grant. In the morning, he would start for Chicago.

  From DeKalb, it was sixty-five miles to Chicago. There were two routes, which both led to Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show. The most direct was the township line to St. Charles, Illinois, and then the old St. Charles Road, which entered the big city at Lake Street. The other choice was to take the same path to St. Charles and then a cutoff on the Geneva road to Turner, then Wheaton, and then back to the old St. Charles Road.

  Some said the difference shaved off about five miles. Others said it saved only two miles. But in a long-distance race like this one, which was coming down to the wire, any last-minute shortcut could win or lose it. Chicago was that close.

  Chicago

  11

  In the summer of 1893, seventeen-year-old Mable L. Treseder and her mother arrived by train from Wisconsin for ten glorious days of shopping and dining in Chicago and to take in the World’s Columbian Exposition. From the Union Depot, they were driven by coach to a pleasant, two-story hotel off Michigan Avenue, where, she later wrote, “no street cars were allowed to run, and tall buildings were residences of wealthy people.” They climbed two flights of stairs, turned down a long hallway, and came to a small room with a bed, dresser, an assortment of chairs, and a large Brussels carpet.

  In the morning, they set out to discover the great city and the wonders of the Chicago fair, a magical achievement that heralded America’s future and with each sunset flared into a blazing city of white lights. “We were up early and anxious,” Mable remembered.

  Later, after returning home to Viola, Wisconsin, a rural community eighty miles from where the cowboys crossed the Mississippi, she began a travelogue. She bent over a table near a window with plenty of farm sunlight, writing thirty pages in all. But over the years the manuscript lay neglected on a shelf, gathering dust in the family home until 1943, when her son Sheldon T. Gardner rescued the memoir.

  By then the first page had been lost, so her story begins on page 2. Fifty years had passed since the Treseders had explored the fabulously big city. In that half century, one world war had come and gone and the nation was mired in another. A searing economic depression had devastated millions of families, and blowing, billowing dust had buried the Great Plains, even as unbelievable new inventions modernized American life. The Wild West had come to an end, and Mable, who had graduated college, taught, and married the school superintendent in Vernon County, Wisconsin, had died in 1934. She had titled her travelogue simply “A Visitor’s Trip to Chicago in 1893.”

  Page 2 begins with mother and daughter riding south in a jarring train car filled with all types of tourists bound that summer to enjoy Chicago, see the fair, and thrill at Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show. Declared Mable with the irrepressible spirit of youth: “We had a jolly time.”

  On their first morning in downtown Chicago, she and her mother were astonished by the clamoring, clanging, bustling, noisy, whirling metropolis. The devastating Great Chicago Fire lay a generation behind the city, twenty-two years back, and the old fur-trading post on Lake Michigan had grown into a grand crossroads about to top two million people. High-rise buildings scraped the sky, electric elevators replaced steep wooden stairwells, and streetcars scurried about, ferrying passengers no longer bothered by the smell, the labor, or the groaning of workhorses.

  In 1893, the old American West was dying, while Chicago was being reborn. Where the frontier was settled, Chicago was adding new factories, smokestacks, and the soot and slime of the slaughterhouses. While the Old West represented what the American frontier had been, Chicago was leading the nation forward. And while the West was past, Chicago was progress.

  “I hardly know what to say of the city,” wrote Mable, remembering how Chicago’s ambition had daunted her and her mother. “It was worse than the confusion of tongues at the Tower of Babel. Noise and confusion existed all day and all night long.” They visited the furniture and dry-goods stores in the center of the city: the Hub, the Boston Store, the Bee Hive, and Siegel and Cooper. They purchased two new dresses in Lloyd’s third-floor ladies’ fashions department, where everything was so hectic that “we found the store nearly as full as the Hub and the poor clerks looked as if they were ready to drop.”

  Here at the birthplace of the ascending American skyline, Mable and her mother crowded into the elevator at the Masonic Temple, at 302 feet high one of the world’s tallest commercial buildings. But they stopped at the seventeenth floor, three flights from the top, to “rest,” she recalled. Peering down on the streets below, they could make out “people as small as little children.” Mable’s mother became “so dizzy” she refused to ride the elevator another inch higher. So they stayed a while longer, “looking out over the city, and getting our brains a little more straightened we began our descent.” She wrote, “It was even worse than going up, and that anyone knows is bad enough. It seemed as if the floor of the elevator was drawn from under our feet and there we stood in midair. Then we had a falling sensation.”

  Shortly before 8 a.m. on another morning, they were off again, this time to visit the fair with eight companions. “After walking three blocks we took the elevated and after riding three miles, which took but a few minutes, we were left safely on the ground and our car started on its round after the many, many passengers it was yet to transport to the busy shuffling fairground.”

  They toured Louis Sullivan’s Transportation Building, examining everything from the smallest covered carriage hitched to a tiny stuffed colt to the largest locomotive engines in Europe or America. They viewed a Mexican cart, a Russian sleigh, and a Japanese sedan, along with a 2,400-ton steam hammer forged in South Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.

  Solon Spencer Beman’s Mining Building included a Utah boulder weighing three thousand pounds, bottles of water collected from the Great Salt Lake, and
“a Statue of Liberty carved from rock salt whose pure whiteness made it a beauty,” Mable wrote. They strolled past a miner’s cabin from New Mexico, gold nuggets from Washington State, some “bottled petroleum” dug out of Wyoming, and an 8,300-pound sheet of copper melted and pressed in Michigan.

  Phonographs in the hall delighted the crowds with New York band music and a chorus or two. One song especially charmed the Treseder party:

  I’ve got a cat and I’m glad of that

  But daddy won’t buy me a bow-wow.

  They ventured past mock Penobscot and other Indian villages and cave dwellings, and a sample of what the vast Chicago stockyards looked and smelled like. “Cattle were standing in an immense large shed or barn,” Mable wrote. “As we women folks were not interested here, we passed on.… But the men tarried.”

  The women glided through Machinery Hall, the Agricultural Building, and the Fisheries and Horticultural displays. But the Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building, designed by George B. Post, was what most dazzled Mable. Covering more than thirty-four acres, with a glass roof that mirrored the clouds, it “to me was the nicest building of all.” She ogled Japanese robes valued at $1,250 apiece, a parlor ceiling embroidered in silk in “a most beautiful room,” and a carved-soap replica of a ship that had sailed the Atlantic to Spain in fifty-seven days. Swiss lace covered the walls, and wood carvings were set out on shelves. Nearby were Chinese pottery, a brass bed post, and “one of the prettiest and queerest things” of all: a woman’s wrap sewn together with prairie chicken feathers.

  Mable discovered the “most laughable exhibit” in the U.S. Government Building. It was filled with leftovers from the U.S. Post Office’s dead letter section. Among the lost items were thimbles, snakes and a horned toad, love letters and pressed flowers, wedding cakes, dolls, false teeth, skulls, bones, butter bowls, and fish. Here too were housed a medallion worn by Benjamin Franklin’s daughter and a tree stump pocked with Civil War bullets from Virginia’s Spotsylvania County Courthouse.

  Separate buildings were dedicated to each of the forty-four states, and Illinois’s, as host to the great fair, seemed the grandest of all. Here was honored the country’s first “lonesome prairie,” Lincoln’s law office in the state capital in Springfield, and “a picture, statue or design of Illinois welcoming the nations of the earth,” as Mable put it.

  Chicago was, of course, the biggest star of all. Once a dreary collection of swamps and sluggish cabbage fields, Chicago by the summer of the Great Cowboy Race was creased with more than 76,000 miles of railroad tracks veering in from points west alone. Seven passenger depots handled thirty railway companies. The Chicago River roiled with lumber, grain, and shipping barges. On the South Side were hotels, stores, and public buildings. The North Side featured the Halsted Street shopping district. The West Side housed gritty manufacturing plants.

  Stitching these neighborhoods together were almost 400 miles of street, cable, electric, and elevated lines. The cable car speed limit was set at nine miles an hour, a dizzying thirteen in less populated areas, and its progress echoed down upon Chicago, wrote New York journalist Julian Ralph, with “such a racket of gong-ringing and such a grinding and whir of grip-wheels as to make a modern vestibuled train seem a waste of the opportunities for noise.” Ralph added, “The whole business of life is carried on at high pressure.” There were no red lights, green lights, or railroad signals, only the tinkle of a bell within the operator’s reach.

  The urban horse, used for ferrying passengers and goods, was fading away. Their numbers had dropped by 20 percent over the last two decades in Chicago. Not only was the horse no longer practical, it was too expensive—$1,900 a year to maintain a “motorized delivery wagon” compared to $3,000 to board and feed a horse. The open carriage may have delighted picnickers on a trot out to the country, but it clashed with the city’s cable-run trolleys, taxis, and buses. The automobile was still down the road in the future, but throngs at the fair were drawn to the display of a German petrol-powered motorcycle. It would replace the horse, too.

  The famous Chicago “L” had opened just a year earlier in 1892, and it chugged on steam from Twelfth Street to Jackson Park, the site of the fairgrounds. It was a short jog, and some scoffed at it as the “Alley L” because it carried passengers over some rugged back lots. But it stayed.

  The city’s population had soared past a million in 1890 and in twenty years hence would be more than twice that size. More than six million hogs were slaughtered and meat-wrapped each year, and the beef-packing lots were generating nearly $5 million in profits. The Chicago Board of Trade, the Masonic Temple, the Auditorium Building, and the Unity Building shot up as towering steel, iron, and brick giants hovering over the spreading city below.

  Urban renewal pushed Chicago in new directions. At Twelfth Street and Michigan Avenue had once stood the offices of John Alexander Dowie, a balding, long-whiskered Scottish preacher and faith healer, a curiosity of old Chicago. Now the elegant Hotel Imperial stood there, and gave its guests off to see the fair a commemorative ticket aboard the spinning Ferris wheel directly above a lush and crowded beer garden.

  Setting the Ferris wheel in motion was a feat in itself—two heavy piers were sunk in the ground, and the base supported three dozen cars sturdy enough to hold forty tourists apiece in midair above the city and the whitecaps of Lake Michigan. It was designed like a bicycle wheel, another sign that the horse was history in a city packed with wobbling bike riders—so many that for a while the city enforced a ban against bicycle races in Lincoln Park. By 1893, “wheelmen” were far more popular in Chicago than cowboys. “Wheel mania,” many called it.

  “During the lovely summer evenings,” recalled Edith Ogden Harrison, the mayor’s wife, “before every Astor Street home on our block, one could see the trim bicycles awaiting the cessation of an early dinner for the owners inside the houses, for it was a foregone conclusion that everyone took a ride after dinner in the cool of the evening.” Riders numbered in the hundreds at first and soon thousands, and private schools offered bicycle riding lessons. The fad became a hobby, then a sport, and finally sensible transportation.

  Equally crowded that summer were the grand palaces of the fair’s White City and its mile-long Midway Plaisance. Teams of construction workers and other blue-collar laborers built them by day, at night journeying home to the squalid tenement districts. The fair, the stockyards, and the booming construction industry provided jobs, which gave rise to local labor unions. Most of these workers were German and Irish immigrants, and most would never leave Chicago. In the downtown Loop, hotels and restaurants staffed up with young maids and waitresses. Just a month previously, in May 1893, four hundred women had joined in solidarity to form the Waiter Girl’s Union No. 1.

  The same laborers built the private palaces for those who now reigned over the new Chicago—from newspaper baron Joseph Medill to Potter Palmer, who plotted State Street and lived on Lake Shore Drive in a brown sandstone and gray granite mansion with a tower and turrets, which the poor called the “Palmer castle.”

  The twenty-two years between the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 and 1893’s Great Cowboy Race would be recalled as “the most crowded and dynamic” the city ever saw. The rise was nothing less than meteoric, a growth of nearly 268 percent in that two decades’ time, with 150 square miles added to the city’s territory and pushing it in every direction up, out, and past the lakefront. Beyond the central business district, the company town of Pullman, named after George Mortimer Pullman and his Pullman Palace Car Company, debuted as the swankiest, wealthiest sliver of Chicago, home to clergymen and company executives in red brick and terra-cotta homes.

  The great fire had leveled the city, but it also kindled the start of modern Chicago and the new America it helped invent. In October 1871, either an anxious cow or a gambler down in his poker chips knocked over a lantern in the O’Leary family’s barn off DeKoven Street; two thousand acres and eighteen thousand structures burned down. More than ninety th
ousand people were left homeless, and some three hundred lives were lost.

  An 1893 souvenir photo from the World’s Columbian Exposition. The fair highlighted the coming American century and discounted Buffalo Bill and his cowboys as relics of the past. (Library of Congress)

  “All gone but the wife and babies, and pluck,” is how the breadwinner of one family put it, determined to find work as a house and sign painter. Said the venerable Chicago Tribune in a down-but-defiant editorial: “CHICAGO SHALL RISE AGAIN.”

  And so it did. The 1893 Columbian Exposition and its bright White City would become the crown jewel of the new city and a model for the new century. “We shall be sending our youth by the hundred thousand to sojourn for a season within her borders,” Ohio evangelist Washington Gladden wrote of young tourists such as Mable Treseder flocking to Chicago. “Chicago is burning to show us her tall buildings and her big parks.”

  “If a thing of beauty is a joy forever,” wrote William T. Stead, a British editor, “then that vision of the White City by night, silent and desolate, was well worth crossing the Atlantic.” “In Chicago,” wrote Giuseppe Giacosa, an Italian playwright, “I knew that American life flourished abundantly: enormous factories, interminable streets, amazing shops, deafening sounds. And then there was the Exposition …”

  More than $14 million in gate receipts was collected at the fair. More than twenty-seven million people visited, by far the largest attendance of any international exposition up to that time. The Chicago fair was three times more popular than the 1876 fair held in Philadelphia to mark the centennial of American Independence. On one day alone, “Chicago Day,” October 9, near the end of the fair, more than 760,000 people shoved through the turnstiles.