1871

by Peter J Spalding

  Title Page

  A Novel of the Great Chicago Fire

  By Peter J. Spalding

  Original edition copyright 2010 - Revised edition copyright 2014 - All rights reserved

  Map

  PART I: THE OLD CHICAGO

  Chapter One: Biggest Boomtown in the World

  “Go West, young man, and grow up with the country!”

  — Horace Greeley

  SIMON CALDWELL HAD ALWAYS WANTED ADVENTURE IN HIS LIFE. Anyone who knew him— and indeed anyone who ever met him— could immediately see what a restless person he was. He rarely sat down for more than a minute at a time, and he was almost never quiet. He invariably sought out new friends and new experiences; he jumped at every chance to make something of himself, and he was determined to live his life to the fullest.

  But when he headed out West in 1871, he had no idea— and really had no way of knowing— exactly what sort of adventure lay in store.

  Simon had had these yearnings for as long as he could remember. He had grown up in rural New York State in a very straight-laced family. He was the third of four children, and his father tended an inn while his mother took care of the home. They lived in the village of Rhinebeck, which was tucked away in the Hudson Valley where nothing of note seemed to happen. It was a nice place to live, but Simon had always found it excruciatingly dull, and he had spent years dreaming of an escape.

  Simon’s imagination, however, seemed to know no bounds. As a child, he had engrossed himself in folklore and myth, and he had learned all the stories of Hercules, Siegfried, and King Arthur. As he grew older, he discovered the works of Charles Dickens, James Fenimore Cooper, and Alexandre Dumas. Their tales helped Simon escape a mundane existence, or at least so he saw it.

  But that way of life would hardly last forever. Simon was fourteen years old when the South attacked Fort Sumter and the Civil War began. His older brother Gregory immediately volunteered to fight. The Caldwells were staunch Yankees, so they supported Gregory’s enlistment. With much pomp and circumstance, Gregory joined the New York Third Infantry and left Rhinebeck for good.

  Simon ached to join his brother, but to his chagrin, his parents wouldn’t allow it no matter what he said or did. His mother said he was young, and his father even said he was foolish. Simon fought with them bitterly, but his parents just shook their heads and said he’d understand when he was older. Simon thought that was ridiculous, because as far as he was concerned, his parents didn’t understand him at all.

  Soon after that, Simon’s sister Clara also managed to leave town. She had met a fledgling attorney named Henry DeWitt, and after a short courtship, they married and moved to New York City. One by one, all of Simon’s friends either moved or enlisted, and Simon was left with nearly no one to talk to. Before long, the only person left was his kid brother J.J., who was too young and callow to grasp what was happening.

  Since Simon wasn’t on the front lines, he was expected to help on the home front instead. He did it by working as a typesetter, so he had the task of publishing casualty lists. It turned out to be a horribly taxing job. The Battle of Shiloh caused more casualties than all of the nation’s previous wars combined; Simon had to print the names of more than thirteen thousand Union dead, wounded, and missing. The news only worsened from there. Barely five months later came the bloodiest day in American history, when the Battle of Antietam made Shiloh seem like a skirmish. But for Simon, the worst news of all came the following winter: his brother Gregory, whom he had adored, succumbed to scarlet fever in Fort Monroe, Virginia.

  His brother’s death forced Simon to rethink his life. He asked himself why Gregory had died, and what he had hoped to accomplish. Gregory had always been full of ideals— about duty and nobility and honor and the like— which took on whole new meanings with his death. Simon pretended that Gregory had died for his cause; he imagined him being heroic, falling in battle, and uttering poetic last words. But in truth, Gregory hadn’t died that way at all. He had contracted his illness for no apparent reason, and he had spent his last hours twitching and hyperventilating in bed. To Simon, that was hardly an honorable or meaningful death.

  In Simon’s quest for answers, he moved from printing to reporting, and he started writing for the Rhinebeck Gazette. He hoped that his new job would help him gain insight, so that he could understand the goals of the war and the reasons for the bloodshed. But in the end, he hardly learned a thing. The Gazette was too provincial a paper to send him near the front lines; in fact, it never sent him further than the nearby town of Poughkeepsie. And so, when the war ended, Simon remained as restless as ever.

  By then, Simon’s desire to leave Rhinebeck had turned into a need. Like many Americans, he had never been west of the Appalachians, so he had only heard stories of the vast lands beyond. But those stories had captured his imagination in a very significant way. He knew all the tales of Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, and the other frontiersmen from cowboys to gold diggers to everyone in between. He heard of all sorts of exciting adventures: the Folsom Expedition was venturing into Yellowstone, and rumors were spreading of the region’s breathtaking waterfalls, hot springs, and geysers; John Muir was setting out for Yosemite Valley; and the Powell Expedition was exploring the Grand Canyon. The West was quickly becoming known as a vast primeval expanse unlike any other place in the world.

  Simon also knew— perhaps all too well— that the days of the old West were numbered. As Easterners headed into the wild, they brought with them the trappings of industry and commerce. They forced Indian tribes off their lands, then harnessed the wilderness to serve their own ends. They killed thousands of buffalo and millions of passenger pigeons, decimating the animals’ once-plentiful numbers. They also ripped apart mountains to mine the minerals inside, and they felled countless acres of forest. Simon saw those changes and understood what they meant, but like most people, he was not the least bit concerned. He saw “progress” as inevitable, and if that meant taming the West— so he thought— then that was the way it was destined to be.

  By far the biggest sign of progress was the Transcontinental Railroad, the crowning engineering feat of the age. In the past, the West had been all but inaccessible, with no easy route across the mountains and deserts. The railroad cut nearly eighteen hundred miles through terrain that had been practically impassible before. It required the combined efforts of three Presidents, both parties in Congress, and the two largest corporations in America, not to mention tens of thousands of immigrant laborers. But in the end, all those efforts paid off. On May 10, 1869, the last spike was driven at Utah’s Promontory Summit, and the floodgates were opened to millions of settlers.

  By the end of 1870, an enormous human migration had begun. Millions of Americans were swarming in from the East, while immigrants were arriving from every corner of Europe. Huge swaths of the country seemed to be on the make: cities were springing up out of nowhere; prairies were giving way to farms and factories; rags were turning into riches— and Simon Caldwell, like so many others, was determined to be part of the excitement.

  It was then that Simon finally decided to leave. He recruited his kid brother J.J., who was making his own plans to get out of Rhinebeck. J.J. had become a local pariah, having fathered an illegitimate child, so he wanted to wipe the slate clean and start fresh somewhere else. J.J. brought along his son, and together the Caldwells set out on their trip, leaving every vestige of their old lives behind. They didn’t know what to expect, and they didn’t have the slightest idea if they’d ever come back— but they knew they were embarking on a journey they’d never forget.

  And that, ultimately, was where it all began.

  THE WIND WHIPPED ACROSS LAKE MICHIGAN and blew snowflakes through the air. The sky was gray and foreboding, and the waves broke into whitec
aps. Swells rolled southward for miles, until they rose up and crashed against the shore. A deluge sprayed across the rocks and lashed against the tracks of the Michigan Southern Railroad.

  Simon Caldwell watched silently from inside his train. He could see the storm gathering strength, but he paid it no mind. He just sat back, skimmed his newspaper, and watched the landscape go by. On his right, Lake Michigan stretched from one horizon to another. On his left was a perfectly flat prairie, interspersed with the occasional forest, inhabited only by raccoons, coyotes, and deer.

  At first glance, Simon seemed like an ordinary man: he had a slight build and unruly brown hair, and he was no more or less attractive than anyone else. But he did have one thing that made him stand out, and that was his gaze. Simon’s eyes were a piercing shade of blue, and anytime he squinted or glared, he could catch the attention of anyone in sight. Simon knew that, of course, and he was learning how to use it to his advantage: he was getting adept at wheeling and dealing, and he was developing a talent for getting his way.

  A waiter offered some tea, but Simon waved him away. He had no patience for tea or biscuits or any other such frivolities. He only cared about the train reaching its destination on time. Everything else, he felt, was a distraction.

  J.J. Caldwell did accept the waiter’s offer. He helped himself to a handful of biscuits, stuck one in his mouth, and offered another to three-year-old Tommy.

  Simon shook his head. “You oughtn’t do that,” he said. “You’ll likely spoil the child.”

  “Balderdash,” J.J. said. “He’s my boy, ain’t he? Not yours.”

  “Then how is he ever going to learn manners?” Simon asked.

  “Oh, relax,” J.J. said, “and take a load off your feet.”

  Simon rolled his eyes but didn’t say anything more. He had little patience for his brother’s reckless attitude. J.J. had never seemed to learn, even after Tommy’s birth, because he kept on carousing and making trouble as if there were no tomorrow. Simon had given up lecturing his brother. He just gritted his teeth and kept his comments to himself.

  The train was headed for Chicago, which was where the Caldwells were set to get off. They had a friend there, Fletcher Bingham, who had offered to put them up for a while. Simon knew Chicago’s reputation, and he was anxious to see the city for himself. It sounded like a boisterous, brawny, heady sort of town, where nearly anyone with ambition could make a quick buck— and he wanted to see how much of that reputation was true.

  Chicago was in many ways the trading post of the nation. Its original inhabitants had been Potowatomi Indians, who had named the area after its native chekougou skunkweed. French explorers first visited the region in 1674, when they traveled through a short swampy passage between the Des Plaines and Chicago Rivers. The French quickly recognized the portage’s potential. It was the only place where the Great Lakes and Mississippi watersheds met, allowing clear access to the North Atlantic, the Gulf of Mexico, and the vast inland West. No other place on the continent was so well suited for trade.

  Chicago’s first permanent settler was a black man, Jean Baptiste Point du Sable. He came during the American Revolution, and he helped the fledgling U.S. Army build an outpost near the lake. Fort Dearborn’s soldiers were allowed to bring their wives and children, and the fort soon resembled a little frontier village. But during the War of 1812, five hundred Potawatomi staged an ambush, killed half the settlers, and captured the rest; then they burned down the fort and left the bodies to rot. The attack became known as the Fort Dearborn Massacre, and the government responded by driving the Indians away. In 1816, the Council of Three Fires was forced to cede the surrounding lands, and in 1833, the Indians were pushed west of the Mississippi.

  That same year, Chicago was incorporated as a town. Construction soon began on the Illinois and Michigan Canal, which cut through the portage to allow a clear passage for shipping. As soon as the canal opened, settlers and capital came flooding into the city. Chicago attracted tens of thousands of new people per year, and it gobbled up the prairie at an unprecedented rate.

  By 1871, the city was home to three hundred thousand inhabitants, and there seemed to be no end in sight to that growth. Timber was coming in from Wisconsin to supply all the new construction. Hogs and cattle were being shipped in by the thousands, to be slaughtered and packaged and sold across the country. Corn, wheat, and barley were pouring in from the plains, turning Chicago into the world’s largest grain port. The city was also the hub for nearly every American railroad, which meant that thousands of people were being funneled through its depots each day. The downtown area, which had been a wide-open meadow a generation before, was quickly starting to resemble New York.

  Chicago was, in short, the biggest boomtown the world had ever seen.

  The city now took up six miles of lakeshore, from Lincoln Park in the north to the township of Hyde Park in the south. The downtown area was centered around the Chicago River’s mouth, while the river’s branches split the outlying areas into the North, South, and West divisions. The city’s elite lived along the lakeshore and parts of the North Side. The poor, who were mostly immigrants, lived in a patchwork of ethnic neighborhoods to the south and west of downtown.

  The city’s most prominent building was the Courthouse, with its white stone façade and its tall gleaming dome. The Courthouse was the centerpiece of Chicago’s government and commerce; it was surrounded by a large open square, which was the busiest and most popular meeting place in town.

  Another prominent structure was the Water Tower on the Near North Side. The tower was only two years old, but it had already become a local icon. The Illinois flatlands made aqueducts impossible, so the Water Works’ state-of-the-art engineering gave the city its water supply. The tower was built in a castellated Gothic style, with turrets, arrow slits, and other fortifications, as if it were holding some great danger at bay. To many, it symbolized Chicago’s battle against nature, as well as the city’s imminent victory.

  As the train continued northward, the streets started teeming with people. By Twelfth Street, the city was so crowded that the tracks had to run on a trestle over the lake. The waves kept pounding the trestle, which ran parallel to the shore. Simon’s eyes darted around as he took in the sights. The downtown area was off to his left; he saw hundreds of gleaming office buildings and new ostentatious homes. Factories and grain elevators were humming with activity, carriages were racing around corners, pigeons were swarming overhead, and pedestrians were running down the wooden plank sidewalks.

  The train sounded its whistle as it approached Union Depot. The station was America’s largest, located right on Michigan Avenue. The train rumbled across a series of switches, then passed through the depot’s giant triple archways. The locomotive’s brakes squealed along the tracks, and giant clouds of smoke puffed up toward the ceiling. The couplers creaked as the rail cars jostled around. Finally the train came to a halt, the boilers released their steam, and the redcaps ran up to assist.

  Simon was silent as he waited for the train doors to open. A part of him was nervous, but a bigger part was excited. He swallowed, clutched his suitcase, and tried to allay the adrenaline in his veins. Then, when the attendants opened the doors, he stepped onto the platform. He waited a moment for his brother and nephew, and then the Caldwells headed into the city.

  FLETCHER BINGHAM HADN’T SEEN SIMON OR J.J. IN YEARS, but he was still the same man they remembered. He remained as gangly as ever, with a scruffy beard that made his jaw seem to jut outward. He wore a perpetual scowl on his face, and a smoldering cigar still dangled from his mouth. Only one thing had changed since the men had seen each other last: Fletcher was wearing a nice new suit, a thick charcoal overcoat, and a spotless bowler hat.

  Simon shook Fletcher’s hand and patted him on the back. “It’s been far too long,” he said. “So how are you, my friend?”

  “In the pits, as usual,” Fletcher replied, then coughed up a cloud of smoke. “You?”

  Sim
on shrugged. “I’m fine, I suppose,” he replied.

  “Good for you,” Fletcher said. He flicked his ashes into the snow, then frowned at the child. “Who is this?”

  Tommy smiled and tried to hide behind his father’s leg. “That’s my boy,” J.J. said.

  “Is that so?” Fletcher asked. “Since when are you married?”

  “I’m not,” J.J. said.

  Simon cleared his throat and tried to take Fletcher aside. “So,” he said, “which way is your home?”

  Fletcher threw away his cigar butt. He shot Simon a look, then shook his head. “All right,” he said. “Follow me.”

  Simon nodded and followed suit.

  “So tell me,” Fletcher said, “how is the old burg nowadays?”

  “Well,” Simon replied, “I can’t say there’s been very much to report. The Beekman Arms is still there. Miss Mayfield is still snooping into everybody’s business— she’s gotten a bit older, but apart from that, she hasn’t changed a bit. Joseph remains madly in love with Miss Wood although no one has figured out why. Old Ronald is still sitting at his press, just as he’s been doing since Gutenberg printed the Bible— although he did move his shop to Market Street, if you can imagine that.”

  Fletcher scoffed. “How exciting,” he said.

  “Yes, well, that’s not the type of excitement I’m after.”

  “So I hear,” Fletcher said.

  J.J. didn’t much like Fletcher— nor did most people who knew him— but Simon found him amusing. Simon had always seen Fletcher as a mysterious soul, since Simon had known him for years but had never learned much about him. The two had met in an innocuous way, when Fletcher stayed at the Caldwell family inn. Fletcher had caught their attention by hesitating to give his name and refusing to divulge his hometown. Simon used his imagination to fill in the blanks. He imagined that Fletcher was running from something— whether from the law, or from a creditor, or from an angry jilted lover, Simon could not say. The two spent a great deal of time together, especially during a five-month period when they worked together at the printer’s. Simon spent those months trying to determine what Fletcher was about, but in the end, he didn’t learn much. Fletcher soon left Rhinebeck and bounced from place to place, although he and Simon did remain in touch. Simon had often encouraged Fletcher to make himself respectable; and from what Simon could now see, Fletcher had followed his advice.