They came in droves, by rail, by water, by bicycle, by wagon, by horse, by foot, as families, as couples, and as strangers. The train stations overflowed with passengers and piled-high baggage, the walls ricocheting with the shouts of those packing into the new modern city.
Lucille Rodney walked to the Chicago Fair. She departed Galveston, Texas, on May 16, and if she could reach the Columbian Exposition by August 1, $5,000 would be hers, the result of a wager with the Elite Athletic Club of Chicago. Her husband, G. B. Rodney, followed along as an escort in a horse and buggy.
She averaged twenty-three miles a day, forty in good weather. She wore out eight pairs of $5 English walking shoes and dropped twenty pounds in the first two weeks. Just twenty-eight years old, she followed the railroad trestles and registered at local train stations. Despite a broad-brim straw hat and her long black hair, the fair-skinned Lucille became deeply sunburned.
“Oh, the dreadful trestles. I don’t like them,” she told reporters in Dallas. “One lady on the way asked me if I crawled on them. I told her no, but I don’t like to cross them.” Once a dog bit her husband. She stopped at farmhouses for meals “because we can drop them a note by a passing freight train and when we get there they are fixed for us.”
A native of Manchester, Iowa, Mrs. Rodney announced at the halfway point that “if I am successful on this trip, I am going to walk from New York to San Francisco.” “If you do,” piped up Mr. Rodney, “you will go without me.”
She lost seven days to summer storms in Kansas. She slipped on a rock in Missouri and sprained her hip. Some rural hooligans tried to mug her, but she scared them off with a “small, trimmed and well-loaded revolver.” She bruised her hip again outside Decatur, Illinois.
Ten days later, on July 31, twenty-four hours ahead of time, Lucille Rodney entered Chicago in triumph. She marched straight to the pink granite and red brick Polk Street depot and slipped in under the twelve-story clock tower. Her feet had covered 1,346 miles, no small feat of endurance.
To savor the day, she skipped the world’s fair and instead hurried off to Buffalo Bill’s Wild West evening performance. In the stands, the weary walker conceded to reporters that she was tired and spent. “The heat was fearful,” she said, “and although the people along the road were as kind as they could be, the hardships I had to undergo were terrible.”
Dignitaries also flocked to Chicago from exotic points around the globe, among them the duke and duchess of Veragua, the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the raja of Kapurthala, and Prince Komatsu Yoharito of Japan. Most stunning of all was the Spanish infanta, Princess María Eulalia, escorted by beloved Chicago Mayor Carter Harrison along the grand colonnades and around the parks, the exhibit halls, the water fountains, the state pavilions, and the Midway Plaisance.
Washington lawmakers and the president of the United States were on hand for official duties. The governor and mayors presided over special Illinois State Day ceremonies. Journalists from the world over streamed into Chicago to profile the fair.
The fair had opened on May 1 after meat-packing executives pledged millions to cover the city’s expenses. It was designed to commemorate the four hundredth anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s New World landfall, and in 1891 Chicago had beat out New York, Washington, D.C., and St. Louis to host the extravaganza. In two years’ time, Jackson Park, on the edge of Lake Michigan, was transformed into a gleaming city, to the eye a floating palace, to the city a bridge to the future.
Part of it was sideshow: beer-drinking elephants and giant stuffed mastodons, Indian relics and curiosities from the past, much of it housed in the exhibit buildings that Mable Treseder loved touring. But beyond the sixty-five thousand displays in two hundred buildings, the fair offered the American public its first peek at the coming twentieth century, and that is what fascinated them most of all. Here they previewed how life in America would be lived.
Battery-run boats floated fairgoers around the lakes and lagoons, and a “movable sidewalk” transported them along portions of the fairgrounds. The fair’s railroad, the first to use high-speed electric engines, chugged in and out. Drinking fountains constructed with Pasteur filters offered oases from the blistering summer sun. Long-distance telephone calls could be made on the spot, Thomas Edison’s Kinetoscope peep shows flickered behind curtains, and a machine flashed images along telegraph wires strung around the fair.
In the Court of Honor’s Electricity Building, orchestra music was piped in from New York through a giant phone amplifier dangling from the ceiling. According to the fair’s chief electrician, John P. Barrett, “Light and power here reach their greatest development since the world began.”
Along with the German motorcycle, there were many prototypes of other modern conveniences to come, including the dishwasher and the fluorescent lightbulb. The first souvenir postcard was presented at the fair; so was a commemorative stamp; so were commemorative coins. The first box of Cream of Wheat debuted, as did the first stick of Juicy Fruit chewing gum. Pabst Blue Ribbon beer, voted “America’s Best” at the fair, was popped open and poured down. Legend has it that the fair introduced America to Cracker Jack.
Speed, above all, was the rage. Mulji Devji Vedant, a Brahmin writing in the Asiatic Quarterly Review, recalled spending hours marveling at new state-of-the-art motor engines for “carriages, ships, cycles, etc. etc.” One engine, he wrote, “is reported to be capable of running nearly a hundred miles per hour.”
The fair brought fresh hopes of money yet to be made. Richard Sears sketched out the copy for the cover and inside pages of his 1894 mail-order catalog while visiting the fair, inspired by all the splendor and profits pouring into Chicago. It would be his largest issue, a whopping 322 pages long. On the Midway, Scott Joplin played a new piano music called ragtime. In the corridors, pickpockets weaved in and out of the crowds tapping their feet.
There also lurked a dark side of the fair. As the cowboys raced to Chicago, the state’s newly elected governor, John Peter Altgeld, came under political fire for commuting the prison terms of three convicted anarchists in the Haymarket Square bombing. Talk of his impeachment intensified. In defending the pardons, the governor said that not only would the public weather the scandal, but that Chicago and Illinois would rise above it. “While our institutions are not free from injustice,” Altgeld argued, “they are still the best that have yet been devised.” He assumed the electorate would come to appreciate his grant of mercy, but in the end they chose otherwise. The governor did not stand for reelection. In 1899, he ran for mayor of Chicago and vaulted to the lead as the early favorite, yet he finally came in a humiliating third, with a mere 15 percent of the vote.
A serial killer was also loose that summer in Chicago, and two days before the fair closed, a disappointed office seeker murdered the immensely popular Mayor Harrison, gunning him down at his home after he had helped to spearhead the exposition. He was beginning his fifth term at city hall.
Outside the fair, evangelists such as Dwight Moody staged lakeside tabernacles and cashed in on the tourist dollars. Inside the city, “Chicago May” Churchill roamed the streets as a petty thief. At night, she and other prostitutes reaped a gold mine of business off fairgoers, laborers, the rich, and the not so rich. Born Mary Anne Duignan in Ireland, in Chicago she dubbed herself “the Queen of the Crooks.” But becoming a crook and prostitute first required some time spent learning the tricks and some firsthand schooling in the trenches. “The first big crooked job I did in Chi,” she later wrote, “was with Dora Donegan. It turned out to be a big one for me. I pulled a john into the Sherman House. After I got him there I didn’t know how to land him. Dora came to the rescue. She saw that I was too modest in handling the prey. I lacked brass. She bawled me out for ‘not playing square by the gentleman.’ ”
When the fair closed that autumn, it had proved the most successful endeavor of its kind. Its ambition and ingenuity were boundless. The new century would belong to America “by the right of might,” and the
re lay the theme of the World’s Columbian Exposition.
For academics, the fair provided a venue for six thousand lectures to nearly seven hundred thousand fairgoers. One of the most significant was presented offsite, not connected to the fair at all, and was delivered by a young Wisconsin university professor before a gathering of the American Historical Association.
Frederick Jackson Turner was a junior faculty member in Wisconsin, and three years earlier, in 1890, he had read with great interest a bulletin issued by the superintendent of the U.S. Census. It had concluded that the American Western frontier had been chopped into so many small settlements that a frontier line no longer existed. Therefore, the bulletin advised, “westward movement cannot any longer have a place in the Census reports.”
Many in Chicago considered Turner an upstart from a small Midwestern school. Just thirty-one, he was short, thin, and a mere 130 pounds, easy to pass unnoticed on a busy Chicago street or the fair’s parade grounds, and difficult to make out on an academic stage. He had been born during the first year of the Civil War in tree-lined Portage, Wisconsin, and grew to manhood watching most of his own hometown’s frontier wither away—the old immigrant covered wagons rolling through town, the Ho-Chunk and Winnebago peoples pushed aside by Army soldiers. The one time his hometown ever witnessed any real Wild West gunplay was when a pair of feuding Irish immigrants fired at each other on a startled street. The man who survived was hung.
The village of Portage, in the bower of the Wisconsin River Valley, served as the perfect laboratory for the young historian. He could stay home and fish in the marshy Fox River and still study the vanishing West. The evidence was unfolding all around him. Farmers and shop owners in Portage gradually took the place of old-time French fur trappers, explorers, and Indian traders. A third of the town came from somewhere else, usually from back east or preindustrial Germany or the highland tundra of Scotland and Wales. What he saw was a changing landscape, what he called “the rapid Americanization” of the country.
In the summer of 1893, Turner was to address the World’s Congress of Historians and Historical Students. A heat wave was smothering Chicago, up to 97 degrees all week, and two people collapsed and died from heat stroke. As he took the stage at the Art Institute, at the foot of Adams Street between the downtown Loop and the lake, the Chicago Times observed that “never in the city’s history was a day more insufferably hot and continuously scorching.”
His audience was tired, uncomfortable, and distracted. Many historians had attended an afternoon performance of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show, and that alone left them exhausted. They also were stunned to learn that more bodies had been discovered in a cold-storage plant, the latest work of the serial killer. Thus attendance for Turner’s address ran rather light, in fact “very light,” as the Chicago Herald reported.
Turner suffered his own misgivings and struggled with nerves and stage fright. He had arrived by train from Madison, Wisconsin, and took a room at a University of Chicago dormitory. There he walled out the world, writing and editing his essay, which was due to be presented in just two days. “I am in the final agonies of getting out a belated paper,” he lamented in a letter to a friend.
He missed the first addresses at the historical meetings, still adding and scratching out words, dropping lines, penciling over paragraphs from his essay. He briefly visited the opening session and then he rushed back to his dorm room and locked the door.
Turner’s turn would come on Wednesday evening, after he passed up the chance to join the others at the Wild West show. Before some of the nation’s most eminent historians, he rose and addressed the audience. He decided not to read all fifty pages of his paper; it was too hot, the room was stuffy, and everyone was far too tired. So he summarized in capsule form what would become known as his monumental “frontier thesis.”
The idea had been taking shape in his mind for several years: the concept that the frontier had developed an enduring American character, borne on the shoulders of pioneers and cowboys, and that it had created “a new product that is American” all unto itself. “Up to our own day American history has been in a large degree the history of the colonization of the Great West,” Turner said in his remarks. “The frontier is the outer edge of the wave—the meeting point between savagery and civilization.”
The settling of the frontier and the closing of the Wild West marked the first major turning point in American history, in his analysis. “Now, four centuries from the discovery of America, at the end of a hundred years of life under the Constitution, the frontier has gone. And with its going has closed the first period of American history.”
And as the West ended and the frontiersman and the cowboy were ushered out, Turner inscribed their epitaph: “To the frontier,” he said, “the American intellect owes its striking characteristics. That coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and inquisitiveness; that practical, inventive turn of mind, quick to find expedients; that masterful grasp of material things, lacking in the artistic but powerful to effect great ends; that restless, nervous energy; that dominant individualism, working for good and evil, and withal that buoyancy and exuberance which comes from freedom—these are the traits of the frontier.”
When he finished speaking, there was no discussion, no questions posed from the audience. He sat down in silence and watched the room empty, everyone heading for the exits and the last of a cool breeze off Lake Michigan.
But his idea soon spread, and “it remained the creed of nearly every American historian,” according to Turner’s biographer Ray Allen Billington. “The nation embraced the Frontier Thesis as the gospel, and rewrote its textbooks to glorify the pioneer above the industrialist or the immigrant.”
The frontier was finished, the wilderness tamed, the buffalo slaughtered, and the cattle drives no more. The Old West was gone, even as the leader of the Great Cowboy Race came roaring into Chicago.
The Finish Line
12
By 9:30 in the morning on June 27, Chicago had been awake for hours. In the stockyards, men poked and prodded the beef and hogs, the flies were getting to the cattle before the knives could, and the butchers’ aprons were running red. The smokestacks were stoked, the chimneys billowed, and the ash was drifting for miles over the lakefront. The shops in the Loop were open, and business was brisk. The Alley L was up and chugging, young boys chasing its shadow under the tracks. Hammers banged and pounded at the construction sites, more steel and brick going up, the hod carriers lifting their burdens skyward.
In his tent next to the fair, Buffalo Bill prepared for his matinee and evening performances, presented at 3 p.m. and then 8:30 p.m. as the summer sun sank: cowboys and Sioux warriors fighting it out, a stagecoach heist, twirling lariats, and above all the great Cody himself. Twice today, as on every day, he would fire at whirling clay pigeons and knock them out of the air.
Outside the tent, a group of Sioux Indians, Russian Cossacks, Arab Bedouins, and Uhlan lancers, part of the Wild West show’s colorful lineup, were startled to spot a small, lean rider nearly falling off his horse. His white shirt was pasted with brown blotches of sweat, his yellow trousers were heavy with muck, and his small hat was partly shredded.
Several of the Wild West actors tried to lower the man out of his light cow saddle, reaching for his shoulders and legs, struggling to get a hand underneath him. But the man pushed them away, his thin rain slicker and rawhide whip slipping out of his hands.
Buffalo Bill popped his head through the doorway and rushed outside. He cracked a big smile. Stretching a long arm out to welcome the rider, he tried to greet the man in what reporters racing to the scene called “a mighty hand grab.” The rider’s hand went limp. “Look after my horse, boys,” he whispered. “Please.” Then John Berry slumped out of the saddle and collapsed onto the hard ground marking the finish line of the cowboy race, crumpling at the feet of Buffalo Bill.
“Why,” exclaimed Cody, “he’s a little bit of a man!… You are the first m
an in,” he bellowed. “You are all right, John. You are all right.”
The finish line fell quiet. Some drew back to give the man air. But he did not speak or move or signal at all, and Cody leaned down to him. Should he congratulate the rider or praise his horse?
“I’m glad to see you!” Cody shouted. “How do you feel?”
Still the man said nothing, and two beefy roadies from the Wild West show carried him to the cool shade inside the mess tent. They laid him across Cody’s couch.
Cody tried to spark some life in the man. He poured him some port wine, and everyone hushed as the rider tipped it back and drained the glass. Cody poured him another, and the man downed that one, too.
“What can I do for you?” Cody asked.
“Nothing,” the man answered in a long, thin rasp. “Only look after my horse.”
The horse, Poison, was led to a Wild West show stable by two of Cody’s “bronco killers,” support staffers named Tony Esquival and Phil Smith, who specialized in calming ornery and tired horses. They rubbed, scrubbed, and sponged off the horse’s hide “in a fashion he had never encountered since the days he had to rustle a living off dry leaves on the Montana range,” one journalist wrote. They oiled the horse’s joints with liniment, flicking the tired, sore limbs and wiping out its parched mouth with a wet sponge and rag. They handled the horse with the care they would give a “sick infant,” one observer said. Someone else, seeing the horse bury its head in a clump of hay, thought it was like watching “an elephant” eat.
For Cody, the scene was picture perfect. His newspaper ads had been screaming: “Expected Tuesday, at Buffalo Bill’s Wild West. The contestants in the COWBOY 1,000-MILE RACE, an equine race, Humanely Run! Humanely Won! Under the Supervision of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. The Contestants and Steeds Will Be Introduced as They Arrive on Tuesday.”
And now, as Chicago awoke this morning, he had hit the big bonanza. His show was smashing box-office records, thanks in part to the long-distance Great Cowboy Race. And the first rider to reach Chicago had just landed on the ground at Buffalo Bill’s boots. After two weeks of protests, Cody needed a man on a broncho not ridden to death or otherwise terribly mistreated or abused. In this one brief moment on Tuesday, June 27, he had his man and his horse and, equally intact, his enormous American pride.
American Endurance Page 21