The History of the First Chicago Stockyard; the Bull's Head Market.

In 1827, Archibald Clybourn built a log slaughterhouse on the north branch of the Chicago River and supplied meat to the garrison of Fort Dearborn, six years before Chicago became incorporated as a town.

Soon, other packers set up slaughterhouses and butcher the animals that farmers drove in from the surrounding prairies. To accommodate the ranchers, grocery keepers opened inns and provided fenced-in pens and pastures for the livestock to attract more business and add another revenue stream.

Matthew Laflin bought land at the southeastern corner of Madison Street and the Southwestern Plank Road (Ogden Avenue) and built Chicago's first privately owned stockyard called the "Bull's Head Market." It opened in 1848 and served the public.

Bull's Head Market on Madison Street and the Southwest Plank Road (Ogden Avenue). Surveyed by Henry Hart in 1853.

Laflin also built the Bull's Head Tavern and Hotel (1848-1875) for the convenience of the cattlemen arriving with their herds. It was the first hotel in the original Stockyard district.

The Three-Story Bull’s Head Tavern. Circa 1850s

In 1855, John Sherman leased the yard, and the following year he also leased the Merrick Yards at 29th Street and Cottage Grove Avenue.

Chicago Tribune "The  Fire on Sunday, March 14, 1857, Morning:"

The barn that burned near the Bull's Head Tavern was owned by Laflin & Loomis and was entirely destroyed. The loss of $250 was not insured. It was situated on the corner of Harrison and Laflin Streets.

The Union Stock Yard & Transit Company (1865-1971) opened in Chicago's meatpacking district at the end of the Civil War in 1865. Until the end of the 1920s and peaking in 1924, more meat was processed in Chicago than in any other place in the world.

Compiled by Dr. Neil Gale, Ph.D.

Plank Road History in the Chicago area.

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In historical writing and analysis, PRESENTISM introduces present-day ideas and perspectives into depictions or interpretations of the past. Presentism is a form of cultural bias that creates a distorted understanding of the subject matter. Reading modern notions of morality into the past is committing the error of presentism. Historical accounts are written by people and can be slanted, so I try my hardest to present fact-based and well-researched articles.

Facts don't require one's approval or acceptance.

I present [PG-13] articles without regard to race, color, political party, or religious beliefs, including Atheism, national origin, citizenship status, gender, LGBTQ+ status, disability, military status, or educational level. What I present are facts — NOT Alternative Facts — about the subject. You won't find articles or readers' comments that spread rumors, lies, hateful statements, and people instigating arguments or fights.

FOR HISTORICAL CLARITY

When I write about the INDIGENOUS PEOPLE, I follow this historical terminology:

• The use of old commonly used terms, disrespectful today, i.e., REDMAN or REDMEN, SAVAGES, and HALF-BREED are explained in this article.

Writing about AFRICAN-AMERICAN history, I follow these race terms:

• "NEGRO" was the term used until the mid-1960s.
• "BLACK" started being used in the mid-1960s.
• "AFRICAN-AMERICAN" [Afro-American] began usage in the late 1980s.

— PLEASE PRACTICE HISTORICISM —

THE INTERPRETATION OF THE PAST IN ITS OWN CONTEXT.

 

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Like taxes and death, the demand for better highways is omnipresent. Leaving the Indians out of this account began with the advent of the first settler in the wilderness and has continued to the present. Nor is it to be expected that the completion of any highway program now under contemplation will permanently solve the problem, for in any progressive society, the existing standard of highway achievement will ever be the starting point from which to measure new advances.

This map is presented as a visual aid. © 2020 Dr. Neil Gale

The first step in establishing any new community in the western wilderness was usually laying a road. Indeed, the road usually preceded the settler. But when speaking of pioneer roads, the modern reader should carefully free their mind from its accumulated conceptions of today's highways. The pioneer settler of Illinois could no more have imagined the splendid thoroughfares of concrete that crisscross the state than could 19th-century people conceived the space flight. To the pioneer, a road was any track leading to a designated point. It was often not even a track, so the route would be identified by a trampled prehistoric animal migration path.

However, with the progress of settlement, the demand for improvement of these paths connected the outside world. The streams would be bridged, the swamps corduroyed, while trees and even stumps would be removed from the path in timbered sections. Spurred on by the commercial rivalry between different settlements, the pioneer would even occasionally undertake to improve the road by making it a toll road; it must be admitted, however, that in the early period, this last improvement was seldom encountered. 

However, the cleared roads did not suffice to meet the country's insistent transportation needs. The soil of pioneer Illinois was as rich and black — its mud as deep and clinging — as today, while it was saturated with moisture to a degree entirely unknown to the present generation. It followed that during much of the year, the highways were impassable, while most of the remaining time, they could be traversed only at an enormous expenditure of time and effort. A story told by Robert Dale Owen of New Harmony, Indiana, in his treatise (a written work dealing formally and systematically with a subject) on the construction of plank roads aptly illustrates the situation. He had traveled by stage to Mount Vernon on the Ohio River with one companion. It required four active horses to transport them, with two small trunks, a distance of fifteen miles; the fare was three dollars per person, and the charge, at this, was moderate, for the horses "sunk literally to their girths" in the frequent mud holes. The round trip of thirty miles was a hard two-day job for a four-horse stagecoach.

In the same discussion, Owen tells another illustration of the excessive tax imposed upon a community by the poor roads of the pioneer era. "Last winter," he says, "the inhabitants of McLeansboro, a small town in southern Illinois, some forty or fifty miles northwest of Shawneetown, found themselves, in consequence of the miserable condition of the roads around them, cut off from all supplies, and thus deprived of coffee, sugar, and other necessities of life. Tempting offers were made to several teamsters, but none of them would stir from home. At last, a neighborhood farmer declared that he had a team of four horses that no road could daunt and would risk a trip to Shawneetown and bring back the necessary supplies. Ten days elapsed, and his empty wagon was slowly and painfully dragged into town by two drooping and jaded horses scarcely to be recognized as part of the fresh and spirited team that started on this expedition. After a grueling journey, their owner finally reached Shawneetown, where he managed to secure about half a load. Two of his horses were killed in the attempt to return; his load was left on the road, and the surviving horses so worn down by the trip as to be unfit for use the rest of the winter." "The tax, in this case," concludes Owen, "was a severe one, considerably exceeding a hundred dollars for the trip." In 1850, southeastern Illinois had been settled for a generation, during which time Shawneetown had been its principal commercial center of trade and commerce.

However, such transportation stoppages affected the city merchants no less disastrously than the farmers. "Now that the trade of the city is completely prostrated by the late unfavorable weather," said the editor of the Chicago Democrat in December of 1850, "does not the fact of the want of facilities of communication with the country strike everyone most forcibly. The city is completely dependent upon and, in fact, a mere agency of the surrounding country. It derives every pulsation of its life and every breath from the agricultural region of which it is the depot."

The citizens of early Chicago had long been aware of the importance of improved highways leading into the interior. Without them, the city could not prosper; with them, there seemed no limit to its growth. The road-building problem was common to all new communities, and its burden was appalling enough. But the task that Chicago faced in this connection was, in one respect, unique, for around it, as we have seen, stretched for many miles a prairie so low and marshy as to reduce the roads across it to a condition peculiarly villainous.

"The Whiskey Point Road," says Edwin Oscar Gale in his book, "Reminiscences of Early Chicago," over which I traveled so much, was a fair sample of them all. When the summer birds were singing in southern skies, when the frosts had come, and the flowers were gone, when the rains had filled the ground with moisture and the waters covered the face of the earth, making every depression a slough, without a ditch anywhere to carry off the accumulated floods; then the wheels sank to the hubs, and the hearts of the drivers sank accordingly; then blows and coaxing were alike unavailing to start the tired teams and the settling loads.

"The spring was worse, if possible, than the fall. The snow was deep, and the ground was frozen, and during that time, as far as the eye could see, the whole outlook was a shallow, dismal, cheerless lake, without a house from the ridge to the engulfed city and from Whiskey Point Road (originally a muddy Indian trail, today's Grand Avenue got its current name from the first President of Chicago, Thomas Jefferson Vance Owen who declared that Chicago was a "grand place to live.”)

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Widow Barry's Point was located near the present-day town of Lyons. It was a stopover point for travelers on the road between Chicago and Joliet. The Widow Barry, whose name was Mary Barry, ran an inn and tavern at the point. The point was named for her after her husband, who ran an inn and tavern there, William Barry died in 1833. The exact location of Widow Barry's Point is uncertain, but it was likely on the banks of the Des Plaines River, near the intersection of present-day 5th Avenue and Barry Point Road. The point was eventually engulfed by Lake Michigan, and no trace of it remains today.

Although the road to Barry's Point was the one great thoroughfare from Chicago to the southwest, it remained for several years but a track across the prairie, the passage of which called for special preparations on the part of stage proprietors. This is well set forth by the English traveler, J. S. Buckingham, who published at London in 1842 a three-volume journal of his tour in America. In June 1840, his party ascended the Illinois River by steamer to Peru, from which point they took the stage for Chicago. After numerous changes, including all-night detention on the prairie through the foundering of the coach in a slough, they arrived at midnight at Barry's Point, the last stage station, before reaching their destination. Here, the travelers found the horses and the coach to be changed.

"The object," says the writer, "was to give us a much heavier vehicle with broad wheels like a wagon, as the road was said to be so much worse between this [Barry's Point] and Chicago than on any other part of the route, that a narrow wheel would sink up beyond the axle, and only very wide wheels could sustain us.

Note the heavy frame and broad wheels on this time-period stagecoach. You can tell it is an early coach because there are no leaf-spring shock absorbers.

While this change of coaches was in the making, we had to wait in the bar room of one of the most filthy and wretched houses we had yet seen, in which the smell of rum and tobacco, mingled with other powerfully disagreeable odors, was most offensive; the hideous-looking bar-keeper appeared like a man who never washed or combed [his hair], and none of whose garments had ever been changed since he had first put them on; altogether, nothing could be more revolting. At length, the broad-wheeled and lumbering coach being ready, we all seated ourselves and, at a creeping pace, left this last stage, the horses strolling all the way, at the rate of about two miles an hour, with baitings at every pit [stop] and slough to survey the road, before crossing it, and with the wheels scarcely ever less than six inches, and often a foot deep in mud and water. Altogether, this last night was by far the most disagreeable we had ever spent journeying through the United States. We had all the evils of bad roads, thick darkness, suffocating heat, a crowded stage, disagreeable companions, filthy stage houses, venomous mosquitoes, and continual apprehensions of being upset in the mire (an area of the wet, swampy ground, marsh). Then we left to grope our way to the nearest house for shelter. When daylight opened upon us, we obtained a distant sight of the white houses of Chicago a long way off on the plain; but, distant as they still seemed, never did weary mariner hail the first opening of the harbor, into which he was running to escape shipwreck or storm, with more joy than did we welcome these first tokens of our approach to a place of rest. It was past sunrise before we reached the town, having been six hours coming the last twelve miles and forty hours performing the journey of ninety-six miles."

A determined effort to secure relief from these intolerable conditions was now about to be made. In June of 1840, the same month of Buckingham's harrowing experience with the Barry Point Road, the citizens of Cook County and adjoining counties assembled in Chicago to consider measures or the improvement of the thoroughfare to the southwest. The Chicago Daily American accompanied the printed notice of the meeting with a vigorous editorial entitled "The Nine Mile Swamp," whose spirit is strangely reminiscent of present-day fulminations on the local transportation system. The "dismal swamp" stretching from Chicago to Barry's Point was viewed as a "great impediment" to the prosperity of Chicago, and the urgent need for a turnpike "passable at all seasons" was forcefully presented. "So far as our experience has extended," continues the editor, "we have never seen worse roads than that to Barry's Point and five miles west to Doty's on the Naperville Road. Such obstacles to commerce and inland trade should be removed in an enterprising community like ours. If our citizens and the surrounding inhabitants understand their true interests, they will be removed. If individuals cannot do the work, let them instruct the County Commissioners to do it. If the Commissioners of this county will not do it, let them authorize the city to make the road. But in any event, let the road be made. Public convenience and public prosperity demand it."

Construction of a Plank Road.

The meeting was held, and a committee of three was appointed to consider ways and means and report to an adjourned meeting of the citizenry, appointed for June 15, 1840, "the best mode of construction of the road from this city to the sand ridge, the probable expense, the mode of construction with the probable amount that could be raised by subscription for the construction of said road, and all other necessary information that may be required to carry into operation this most important improvement." 

Despite a temporary setback, the project briefly stalled due to a lack of public funding. Ten days later, the Chicago Daily American editorial called for the road's construction and suggested calling a public meeting to rally support for a fresh start.

The result is revealed in a report by the "Executive Committee on the Road between Chicago and the Sand Ridge." The Committee had taken popular subscriptions to $2,480 and had contracts amounting to $2,750. In addition, a ditch was to be constructed, which would increase the deficit to $500. "One-half mile of the road is finished," the report continues, "and all but about a mile and a half in the wettest part of the route through the swamp were progressing slowly but surely. This section of very wet road had to be re-let at an additional cost of about 32¢ per rod (1 rod = 16.5 feet). The road will be elevated about 2½ feet above the natural surface of the ground and five feet above the ditch. The Committee feels that the road will surpass all the expectations that have been formed of it in usefulness." Almost two years later, in September of 1842, the Chicago Daily American announced the completion of the turnpike to Barry's Point. But "All of the subscription money could not be collected, and it is asked that the subscribers step forward and keep their word so that the contractors, who have done such good work, may be paid."

The new turnpike improved the natural swamp through which it ran. Still, unless the "expectations" the townsmen had formed concerning the improvement were exceedingly modest, they were doomed to disappointment. A turnpike made of the rich black soil of Illinois may be an excellent highway in dry weather, but at such times was the natural prairie. Its condition in wet weather requires little description to anyone who has ever undertaken to drive a farm wagon over the dirt roads of Illinois after heavy rain. "The turnpike," writes Gale in his reminiscences, "was never a success. The mud seemed several feet deeper than on the prairie in its normal, plastic condition. The clay is composed of appeared to have a grudge against every living thing, horse, ox, or man and threw its tenacious tentacles around all things to draw them down to its infernal level. Human ingenuity could invent no rougher or more detestable roads to travel over than the pike at such times. Once on it, there was no escape to the side, save at the peril of your life.

"Even when some of our courageous citizens tried in their desperate moments to improve it and made a toll road, they found the task too much for them; the ruts were too deep, the mud too bottomless. Huge stones were hauled, from year to year, at a great expense to the disgruntled taxpayers, and it was hoped that these would form a good foundation for the improvement. But they only stuck out at every point, sad monoliths of the little ones buried among the broken wheels and axles of defunct wagons. There, they stood in stubborn stateliness, while the largest of them defied the best efforts of the corporation to reduce them to cobbles. The curses heaped upon the pike for so many years, and which the brute seemed to enjoy, were now divided between the road and the citizens who had the preposterous audacity to try to reform that which was not meant to be reformed. The band of presumptuous men were finally glad to relinquish their hopeless charge to the anathemas of the teamsters and the public, who had no alternative but to continue to drive their sad, sore, prematurely old, broken-down teams over its ever-changing surface."

Canada came at length from the land of distant Russia by way of backwoods to solve Chicago's problem of bridging the troublesome situation that nature had thrown around her. After many years of residence in Russia, an English official, Lord Sydenham, became familiar with building plank roads to create an outlet across the marshy ground to produce certain mines. Later, on becoming governor-general of Canada, he persuaded the inhabitants of the utility to adapt the Russian device to their own particular situation. Beginning in 1839, when the first Canadian plank road was built, the idea spread rapidly until, within a decade, upwards of 500 miles had been constructed.

From Canada, the plank-road idea spread after considerable enthusiasm with which communities seized upon it was pretty astounding. New York took the lead, the first plank road company to receive a charter in this country, one from Central Square to Saline, opened for traffic in July of 1846. Its success was immediate, and the flood of applications to the state legislature for charters for similar companies became so great as to threaten to monopolize the entire attention of that body. To remedy this, a general law was passed in 1847 governing the incorporation of plank road companies, being the first of its kind in the United States.

From New York, the plank road furor swept westward. An exhaustive report on the subject in the Wisconsin legislature of 1848 concluded that not only was it good policy but "an incumbent duty'* for the legislature to "encourage the construction of this class of public thoroughfares throughout the length and breadth of Wisconsin." Illinois and Indiana followed suit by enacting the following year's general laws incorporating plank roads.

As the Barry Point road was the first highway out of Chicago on which any genuine attempt at road building was ever made, it became the route of the city's first plank road. The contract for the initial section from Chicago to Doty's Tavern at Riverside, ten miles in length, began on January 20, 1848, and the road was opened to traffic early in September. It consisted of a single track, eight feet wide, made by laying down two stringers and covering them with a three-inch plank, the stringers being bedded in the earth so that the weight of the plank rested directly upon it.

A Toll Plank Road.

Financially, this first plank road out of Chicago was a great and immediate success. The cost of construction was approximately $16,000 ($469,275 today). A four-horse vehicle paid 37½¢ toll for the privilege of traversing the ten-mile highway; a single team paid 25¢ and a horse and rider paid 12½¢ (equals 1 "bit"). Even though the short length of the highway and bad roads at either end combined with handicap traffic, the receipts from the first month's operation amounted to $1,500 ($44,000 today). In the Chicago Democrat of October 9, one observer reported that 96 persons had passed through the toll gates in a single hour, "and this, we are told, is no ordinary spectacle." The enthusiastic reporter calculated that this meant a $24 per hour return on the road costing $16,000."

To draw any general deduction from a single observation would be, of course, absurd. Still, the fact is clear that for a time, the road returned to the stockholders a profit on their investment, which could not fail to stimulate the desire of outsiders to put their money into similar projects. In the illustration which has already been cited, Robert Dale Owen demonstrates that one dollar would have been a fair charge for his fifteen-mile stagecoach journey if made over a good road; the remaining two dollars was the tax paid "for the privilege of wading, at the rate of three miles an hour, through mud under which our wheel-hubs were continually disappearing."

The Southwestern Plank Road bridged the ancient "nine-mile swamp" between Riverside and Chicago, and the farmer gladly paid the toll of 25¢ exacted for the privilege of using it, avoiding thereby the far heavier tax In time and labor which hauling his load through the marshy ground entailed. "The rate of toll allowed by law is 2½¢ per mile," wrote the editor of the Prairie Farmer in March of 1849 to an inquiring Iowa subscriber, "and the whole amount is charged hitherto (up to this time), but it is far too high and will be reduced. The public does not complain because they are glad to have a road, at any rate." Two years later, the editor of the Chicago Democrat was "credibly informed that some of the plank roads from the city are paying from 30% to 40%." Little wonder he closes with the succinct comment, "The best investment afloat."

Within the next few years after building the road to Barry's Point, the citizens of Chicago and the adjoining country had constructed a network of plank roads radiating out from the city like spokes from the center of a wheel. The Southwestern Road, whose beginnings we have already noted, was completed as far as Brush Hill, a distance of sixteen miles, early in 1850. By the close of 1851, it extended to Naperville, where it connected with a road under construction to Oswego. Three miles east of Naperville, it also connected with St. Charles and Warrenville Plank Road, two and one-half miles of which were completed in 1851. Still, other roads were built from Naperville to Sycamore and from Oswego to Little Rock so that the Southwestern Road, with its connections, constituted a network of improved roads throughout the rich country to the southwest of Chicago.

Similarly, the Northwestern Plank Road connected the city with the upper Des Plaines Valley. It left the city on Milwaukee Avenue, the line of the old Milwaukee Road, with Wheeling as the ultimate destination. Begun in 1849, the Chicago Democrat of September 4 reported that plank had been laid as far as Oak Ridge, eight miles out. During the next two years, the mainline was run three miles beyond Dutchman's Point (Niles, Ill.) toward Wheeling, with two shorter feeders thrown out to the Des Plaines River. The cost of the twenty-three miles of the road built, together with toll houses, gates, and one bridge, was reported to be $51,000 ($1,554,875 today). From the Northwestern Road at Oak Ridge, the Western Plank Road ran west to the boundary of Du Page County, where it connected with the Elgin and Genoa Plank Road, which ran through Elgin to Genoa in Kendall County, fifty miles from Chicago.

Less important than the preceding were the Northern and Southern plank roads. The Southern plank road had been planned to run as far as Middleport in Iroquois County, a distance of seventy-five miles. It was constructed by way of State Street and Vincennes Avenue line as far as Kyle's Tavern, ten miles out, in 1851, for $21,000 ($640,250 today). Here, the shadow of the future fell across the enterprise, for the location of the projected Chicago branch of the Illinois Central Railroad led the promoters of the plank road to abandon all thought of extending it farther. Yet even the short fragment built proved immediately remunerative, for at the close of 1851, the directors could declare a 14% dividend from the results of the first year of operation. 

In 1854, landowners organized to make their land more attractive and valuable by constructing Lake Shore Plank Road, which became Evanston Avenue and was renamed Broadway in 1913. Lake Shore Plank Road was the last wooden plank road built in Chicago. From the junction of Clark Street with North Avenue, at the time, the city limits, the Lake Shore Plank Road ran parallel with the lakeshore to Hood's Tavern on the Green Bay Trail, a distance of about five miles. The length and amount of traffic on Lake Shore Plank Road made this the least important member of Chicago's plank road system.

It remains to be spoken of the Blue Island Avenue  Plank Road, the last addition to the plank road system built in Chicago. It ran from Blue Island due north on the line of Western Avenue to its junction with 26th Street and Blue Island Avenue, which, in 1854, the year of the road's construction, was the city's southwest border. Turning northeast at this point, it followed Blue Island Avenue into the heart of Chicago. The length of the road was thirteen miles, and its strategic importance consisted in the fact that it afforded a direct route to the city for the heavy travel from the south, which concentrated at Blue Island. In the annual review of Chicago's commerce published by Governor Bross in 1854, the Blue Island Road, then under construction, is spoken of in glowing terms. The earth excavated from the large ditches cut by the drainage commissioners along the road made a high and splendid grade, while the ditches themselves rendered the adjoining land dry and arable at all times. The Avenue across the prairie, 120 feet in width, was to be lined with trees on either side; moreover, "as by this road cattle could be driven to the city without danger of fright from locomotives, and as two of the principal roads entering the city meet at Brighton (modern Archer and Western Avenues), with abundant water at all times, and pasture and meadowlands in almost unlimited quantities beyond, no one can doubt its favorable position for becoming the principal cattle market of Chicago." 

Thus did the intelligent editor of the Chicago Tribune essay on the role of the prophet less than seventy years ago. Today, the "town of Brighton" exists but in memory, while for miles beyond its ancient site, the "pasture and meadowlands" of old have been metamorphosed into city streets and squares. Two miles to the eastward lies the "principal cattle market," called the "Bulls Head Market," which opened to the public at Madison Street and Ogden Avenue in 1848, not only of Chicago but of all the earth. But instead of plodding along a tree-bordered country road as of old, unvexed by the sight of the puffing locomotive, the patient cattle from a thousand miles around the ride to their doom in "palace" cars drawn over roads of steel by the iron horse itself. 

The decline of the plank roads was almost as rapid as their rise, and that generation had lost all knowledge of this "improvement," which to the men and women of 1850 seemed nothing short of revolutionary. To understand the change which led so quickly to their abandonment, it is necessary to take some note of the manner of construction and the problems encountered in operating them. As commonly constructed, a roadway sixteen feet in width was graded; on this, eight-foot planks were laid crosswise. This was deemed sufficient for a single-track road, the remaining portion of the grade being available for teams to turn out in passing. Lengthwise of the road, two rows of girders, sometimes as small as two by four inches, were laid, embedded in the earth in such fashion that the planks rested directly upon it. The planks were not nailed to the girders, nor were the latter intended to support their weight. Their primary function was to prevent the tendency of the planks, mainly when the roadbed was new and soft, to tilt or turn when struck by the heavy wheels. From the supporting roadbed, all water was to be excluded, and the planks, resting directly on the compact earth, were expected to afford unyielding support for whatever burden might be brought upon them.

The kind of timber employed and the cost of constructing such a road varied with local conditions. The two chief cost factors were the lumber and the labor of grading. Pine and hemlock were sometimes used for planking, but oak and black walnut quickly demonstrated their superiority. The Southwestern Plank Road was first planked with pine, but within a year or two, the planks began to give out, and after that, around Chicago, oak seems to have been exclusively employed.

The roads were constructed by private corporations and had, therefore, aside from their public function, a private commercial aspect. As worked out in Chicago, the construction cost was about $2,000 per mile. The toll rates were prescribed by law, and collections were made by the keepers of toll-gate houses scattered at intervals of five or six miles along the line. The law in Illinois copied closely the features of the New York law, but the tolls the company was permitted to charge were considerably higher in the newer western states than in New York. What rates were charged on the first Chicago road we have already seen. According to the editor of the Prairie Farmer, the public was "glad to get the road at any rate," but this Arcadian state of mind did not long persist.

With a satisfied public and stockholders receiving dividends running as high as thirty or forty percent, one might suppose the solution to Chicago's transportation problem had been attained. To some degree, it had, for there can be no doubt that the plank roads were a marked improvement over anything known. But actual experience revealed many drawbacks which the rosy imaginations of the promoters had not foreseen or painted, and these, combined with a fantastic degree of shortsightedness on the part of the operating companies before long, caused the public to utterly abominate the very name of plank roads.

Chiefly, the difficulties encountered concern the maintenance of the roadway. In theory, the planks were to rest on a hard roadbed, from which all water, and even space for air, was to be rigorously excluded. Thus situated, the planks were expected to remain sound for a considerable period of years; in time, of course, the impact of traffic would wear them out, but the means for renewing them would be greater with the heavier traffic volume. But experience quickly demonstrated that the roadbed could not be kept free from water over an Illinois prairie. To facilitate this, the builders had dug ditches on each side of the road, but to what avail were the ditches when they were full? "They are improving the Southwestern Plank Road on the low prairie," notes the Chicago Journal less than a year after constructing that thoroughfare, "transforming what has sometimes been a raft into a road." In contrast, a letter from Belleville a year or two later anxiously urges that some method be devised for fastening the planks to the earth. A flood there had floated off many, while more had been taken up and stacked in piles to avert this catastrophe.

A Planked Toll Road near Belleville, in St. Clair County, Illinois.

With water under the planks, the impact upon loaded vehicles caused them to slip, and a cavity soon developed. In addition to the extra strain and wear resulting from this condition, the air caused the planks to decay on the underside. In the first enthusiasm of plank road construction, it had been assumed that a three-inch white oak plank would last twelve to fifteen years before renewal became necessary and that the annual cost for repairs would not exceed ten dollars per mile. This estimate proved ridiculously incorrect, but under its influence, the companies paid out in dividends the significant income received during the first few years, and no adequate sum was set aside for maintenance or reserve built up for renewal of the planking when this should become necessary. 

The consequences of such a course are fairly obvious. Before many years, roads became more a source of discomfort and danger than an advantage to travelers. Under such conditions, the public objected to paying the exact tolls or even using the road at all. The decay of one link in the Chicago system, the road from St. Charles to Sycamore, is thus described by the historian of DeKalb County: "For about one season, the road was a decided convenience, but soon the hardwood plank became warped by the sun; the road was as rough as the old-fashioned corduroy; no one used it when they could avoid it; the neighboring inhabitants finally confiscated the plank and the road was abandoned." The historian of Lake County records that in the early 1860s, he drove almost daily over the Lake Shore Plank Road; "it was an even choice between jouncing over a causeway with every other plank gone, or taking the deep sand on either side." A decade had sufficed to span the rise and fall of the plank-road system. "God bless the man who invented the plank roads," wrote "Philanthropist" to the Peoria Press in 1853; his feeling on the subject ten years later could not have been permitted expression in public print.

Compiled by Dr. Neil Gale, Ph.D.

Article: Rudimentary Road Construction History in Early Chicago and the Eastern United States.

An Examination of the Birth of Chicago.

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In historical writing and analysis, PRESENTISM introduces present-day ideas and perspectives into depictions or interpretations of the past. Presentism is a form of cultural bias that creates a distorted understanding of the subject matter. Reading modern notions of morality into the past is committing the error of presentism. Historical accounts are written by people and can be slanted, so I try my hardest to present fact-based and well-researched articles.

Facts don't require one's approval or acceptance.

I present [PG-13] articles without regard to race, color, political party, or religious beliefs, including Atheism, national origin, citizenship status, gender, LGBTQ+ status, disability, military status, or educational level. What I present are facts — NOT Alternative Facts — about the subject. You won't find articles or readers' comments that spread rumors, lies, hateful statements, and people instigating arguments or fights.

FOR HISTORICAL CLARITY

When I write about the INDIGENOUS PEOPLE, I follow this historical terminology:

• The use of old commonly used terms, disrespectful today, i.e., REDMAN or REDMEN, SAVAGES, and HALF-BREED are explained in this article.

Writing about AFRICAN-AMERICAN history, I follow these race terms:

• "NEGRO" was the term used until the mid-1960s.
• "BLACK" started being used in the mid-1960s.
• "AFRICAN-AMERICAN" [Afro-American] began usage in the late 1980s.

— PLEASE PRACTICE HISTORICISM —

THE INTERPRETATION OF THE PAST IN ITS OWN CONTEXT.

 

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The growth of modern (Chicagoua) Chicago since its first beginnings has resulted in much bewilderment over the decades. Seldom has a great city arisen amid natural surroundings more unpromising than those afforded by the site of primitive Chicago.

The sluggish river slipped into the lake over a sandbar that effectually blocked the vessel entrance, and nowhere within a hundred miles could shipping find shelter from the storms, which raged with peculiar violence at this end of Lake Michigan. A few miles to the west ran a continental watershed but only a few feet in depth. The river itself commonly ran with no perceptible current, and to the horizon limit, the landscape stretched in one monotonous level of flat uniformity. The prairie at certain seasons of the year was entrancing, but the melting snows of spring or heavy rain at any time transformed it into a vast, shallow lake, over which the canoe of the Indian or the occasional bateau of the fur-trader plied its way regardless of the course of the river.

The consequences of such an environment from the viewpoint of human occupation are sufficiently obvious. During much of the year, early Chicago presented all of the attributes of a first-class marsh. Nothing was done about drainage until the townsmen in 1858, by a magnificent exercise of willpower and energy, raised Chicago out of the mud from the morass it had been built up to its present level. As for highways, during the dry periods in summer, one might travel anywhere over the prairie sod, which afforded an excellent footing for horses. In spring and autumn, however, and after rain, at any time, the road quickly turned to a bottomless sea of mud, the despair of all who were compelled to traverse it. It's no wonder that pioneers were fond of recalling that they had come through Chicago on their journey west and that they "wouldn't take a quarter section there as a gift."

From his particular point of view, the pioneer farmer was correct in his judgment, yet a wider knowledge would have shown him that nature had marked the site of early Chicago as the spot where a great city should arise. Cities are the offspring of commerce, and they commonly develop at points on the highways of traffic where a break in transportation occurs. Even a slight familiarity with the physiography of the continent's interior, combined with a knowledge of the workings of economic law, would have sufficed to assure the observer of the future destiny of Chicago. How the matter presented itself to the minds of far-sighted contemporary observers is revealed in the story of Arthur Bronson and Charles Butler, who first visited the place in the summer of 1833.

Chicago in 1833
CLICK TO VIEW A FULL-SIZE MAP

Bronson and Butler were two shrewd businessmen from New York whose attention had been directed to the Western country by the events of the Black Hawk War. They concluded to investigate the situation with a view to possible investments, and their attention was directed to Chicago by no less than General Winfield Scott [1], whose unhappy experiences there the preceding summer had not blinded him to the future promise of the place. On their arrival in August of 1833, they found a village of about two hundred people in the early flush of its first real boom, "infested" by thousands of Indians gathered for the impending council of peace with the Great Father (President of the United States). 

To the northeast lay the territory of Michigan, with a population of 20,000 souls, most of whom gathered near Detroit. The northern half of Indiana contained only a few scattered settlers, while between Lake Michigan and the Mississippi stretched a vast unoccupied expanse of land, covered with luxurious vegetation, beautiful to look at in its virgin State, and ready for the farmer's plow. "One could not fail," wrote Butler at a later time, "to be greatly impressed with this scene, so new and extraordinary, and to see there the potential of that future when these vast plains would be occupied and cultivated, yielding their abundant products of human food, and sustaining millions of population. Lake Michigan lay there, 420 miles in length, north to south. It was clear to my mind that the productions of that vast country lying west and Northwest of it on their way to the eastern market, the great Atlantic seaboard, would necessarily be tributary to Chicago, in the site of which even at this early day the experienced observer saw the possibility of a city destined from its position near the head of the lake and its great harbor formed by the river, to become the largest commercial emporium of the United States." 

The foresight of these men found an adequate reward, both of them reaping fortunes within a few years from their investments in Chicago real estate. Since the world had as yet no comprehension of the astonishing era of iron-horse (railroad) development that lay immediately at hand, this early forecast of Chicago's future was uninfluenced by any knowledge of the factor that has contributed most to the city's greatness. They were aware, however, of that other factor so potent in the upbuilding of Chicago, its location on nature's great central thoroughfare between the waters of the Great Lakes and those of the Mississippi River system.

Chicago's prosperity and possibilities of future growth have been conditioned by the character and extent of her highway systems at every period of her existence as a city. These have been threefold, comprising waterways, country thoroughfares, and railroads. The channels come first in point of time, if not of present importance, and some consideration of them necessarily enters into every discussion of the origin of Chicago.

Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that Chicago owes its very existence to its strategic location on one of North America's most critical water routes. It was no mere chance that led the first white man who ever explored the upper Mississippi Valley to the site of the future Chicago. In the primitive State of the country, the waterways possessed importance unknown to the present generation. The Chicago-Illinois River route constituted one of the natural thoroughfares leading from the St. Lawrence River system to the Mississippi, and the Chicago Portage was one of the five great "keys of the continent." So low is the continental divide at this point that in times of spring floods or heavy rains, it was frequently covered with water, and the Des Plaines River at such times discharged through the south branch of the Chicago River into Lake Michigan, as well as down its normal channel. This was rectified in 1887, a novel in human history, by reversing the flow of the Chicago River, thereby sending the city's sewage down the Illinois River instead of into Lake Michigan, where its water supply is drawn.

Under such physiographical conditions, it is not surprising that the first explorer who ever visited this region conceived the idea of connecting Lake Michigan with the navigable waters of the Illinois River. With statesmanly precision, Louis Jolliet, in 1673, called his government's attention to the advantages of cutting a canal across the Chicago Portage. His hasty tour of observation afforded him no adequate conception of the difficulty and magnitude of the improvement proposed. Still, his vision was transmitted to posterity and almost two centuries later found realization.

From the first entrance of the American government into the Northwest, its officials understood the strategic importance of the Chicago-Illinois waterway. When in 1794, Anthony Wayne broke the power of the northwestern tribesmen in the battle of Fallen Timbers, a portion of the price of victory extorted from them in the ensuing treaty of Greenville was the unrestricted use of this highway and the cession of reservations at Chicago, Peoria, and the mouth of the Illinois River on which forts might be erected to safeguard it.

A beginning was made to this end with Fort Dearborn's construction at the Chicago River's mouth in 1803. The purchase of Louisiana from France in the same year gave the Illinois River route added importance for the United States. Down it in the spring of 1805 came Colonel Kingsbury with a company of troops from distant Mackinac to establish Fort Bellefontaine opposite the mouth of the Illinois River, and Fort Dearborn thereupon became a link in a chain of outposts set to guard the frontier against Mackinac to the Gulf of Mexico.

The Illinois and Michigan Canal is peculiar among the improvements of this character. In the fact that during the early years of agitation of the project, no local constituency was concerned with it. On the contrary, it was visioned as a work of national interest and importance long before the territory of Illinois had acquired a corporate existence. The exertions made by General Wayne during Washington's administration to acquire control of the Illinois waterway have already been noted. Following the acquisition of Louisiana in 1803, the vision gradually dawned upon the country of connecting New York with New Orleans by one grand continuous internal waterway. To do this, the Hudson must be connected with Lake Erie and Lake Michigan with the Illinois River.

The commercial demand for such a work was slight. The disasters on land encountered in the War of 1812 served to emphasize anew the military importance of a safe and practicable highway from the Great Lakes to the Mississippi River. In concluding treaties of peace with the Northwestern tribes at the close of the war with England, the opportunity was improved to secure for the United States a strip of land between Lake Michigan and the Illinois River through which the future canal must be built. Investigations of the route by army engineers quickly followed. In January of 1819, John C. Calhoun, as secretary of war, submitted a report to Congress urging the construction of a canal across the Chicago Portage.

Meanwhile, Illinois had been admitted to statehood in 1818. Contrary to the evident design of the framers of the Ordinance of 1787, its northern boundary had been advanced from the "southerly bend" of Lake Michigan to the line of 42° 30', with the avowed purpose of giving the new State a northern trend through the possession of a commercial outlet on Lake Michigan. Through this maneuver, local interest in forwarding the construction of the canal was created, and from this time forward until success crowned the enterprise thirty years later, local zeal and enthusiasm for the work took precedence over national interests. 

To the canal project, the birth of Chicago as a corporate entity was directly due. In 1827 Congress granted to the State the alternate sections of land in a five-mile strip along either side of the canal for the purpose of aiding its construction. After some delay, the state legislature in 1829 made provision for a canal commission of three members, with powers appropriate for the work in view. This commission proceeded to lay out the towns of Chicago and Ottawa at either end of the proposed route, and in the summer of 1830, the lots at Chicago were offered at auction to the public.

Under the sheltering walls of Fort Dearborn, a tiny settlement had gradually developed composed of civilian government employees, the families of discharged soldiers, and the establishments of the fur traders. Many of the settlers were Frenchmen who had taken married Indian wives or were themselves the offspring of such alliances on the part of an earlier generation. It is impossible to determine this civilian community's precise population at any given time, but its approximate size and importance are clear. As early as the spring of 1812, when the Indians murdered two of its members on the South Branch of the Chicago River, Captain Heald was able to enroll a force of "Chicago militia" fifteen in number from the residents of the settlement without the fort. A fate as tragic as any in our military annals shortly befell this pioneering body of Chicago's soldiery. Three of them deserted to the Indians, indicating their greater affiliation with that race by this act, while the loyal twelve remaining perished in the Fort Dearborn Massacre of August 15, 1812.

A new Fort Dearborn arose from the ashes of the old in the summer of 1816, and contemporaneously therewith, a second civilian settlement began to develop outside the fort. At the time of the Winnebago trouble in 1827, a second Chicago militia company was mustered, but its history, unlike that of its predecessor, is wholly comic. The fire that destroyed the Fort Dearborn barracks at this time is said by a contemporary to have been witnessed by about forty spectators; their number Included every person then present in the community. By 1830 the population was probably upwards of three or four scores (a score equals 20).

The habitations of the settlement had been built at the forks of the river and along the mainstream running eastward to the military reservation and into Lake Michigan. This territory was part of Section Nine of the United States land survey, one of the alternate sections that had fallen to the Canal Commission by a congressional grant. In modern terminology, this section extended from State Street West to Halsted and from Madison North to Chicago Avenue. On it, the surveyor employed by the commission, James Thompson, proceeded to lay out the town plat. Still, since considerably more than half of the section lies north of the river, he chose to play only that portion of it extending northward from Madison to Kinzie streets and westward from State to Des Plaines. Within this area of about three-eighths of a square mile, forty-eight blocks and fractional blocks were laid out on the familiar checkerboard plan with parallel streets running north and south and east and west, the only irregularities being such as were rendered unavoidable by the course of the river. East of the town plat, between State Street and the lake, south of the river, lay the Fort Dearborn reservation and north of it a fractional quarter-section which was entered the next year by Robert Kinzie on behalf of the heirs of his father, John Kinzie, the old Chicago trader. With the exception of Canal, Market, and Lake, and the several Water streets, the derivation of which is sufficiently obvious, Surveyor Thompson named his streets in honor of national or local characters. Washington, Randolph, Lake, South Water, Carroll, and Kinzie ran east and west. North and south streets were Dearborn, Clark, Market, East Water, West Water, Canal, Clinton, and Jefferson.

The survey was completed, and the town plat was filed for record on August 4, 1830, which may be taken as the first definite date in Chicago's corporate history. The public land sale held the following month developed only moderate enthusiasm on the part of bidders over the question of real estate values. For 126 lots, an average price of $35 was bid, while two eighty-acre tracts lying just beyond the limits of the town plat went for $1.25 ($59.50 today) an acre, and another similar tract for a few cents more. Many of the purchasers were residents of the place who were simply buying in their homes, which had been built on land to which they had no legal title. Aside from these, the purchasers, whether residents or outsiders, were evidently actuated by speculative considerations.

There is little to indicate that those most familiar with Chicago had any inkling of the revolution in real estate values that was soon to be witnessed here. A delightful story in this connection is preserved by Mrs. Juliette Augusta Magill Kinzie. [John H. Kinzie's wife]. A few months after the land sale of 1830, roused by such developments as had already taken place, Robert Allen Kinzie (1810-1873) journeyed to the land office at Palestine in Crawford County, Illinois. On behalf of the Kinzie family, they entered the fractional quarter-section lying north of the Chicago River and east of State Street, which included the old Kinzie home.

The Kinzie Mansion. The House in the background is that of Antoine Ouilmette. Illustration from 1827.

Successive owners and occupants of the Kinzie Mansion:

• Jean Baptiste Pointe de Sable: circa 1796, fur trader/farmer. Moved from his 1790 farm on the Guarie River [1] (the north branch of the Chicago River). He departs Chicago in 1800.
• Jean Baptiste La Lime: 1800-1803, owner {{a careful reading of the Pointe de Sable-La Lime sales contract indicates that William Burnett was not just signing as a witness, but also financed 100% of the transaction, therefore being the owner}}.
• Dr. William C. Smith with Jean Baptiste La Lime: 1803. (Kinzie forced Métis[2] Jean La Lime to relinquish De Sable's large house, which he then occupied with his family. When La Lime protested the loss of his property, Kinzie first quarreled with the man and then killed La Lime.)
• John Kinzie's Family: 1804-1828 (except during 1812-1816).
• Widow Leigh & Mr. Des Pins: 1812-1816.
• Anson Taylor: 1829-1831 (residence and store).
• Dr. E.D. Harmon: 1831 (residence & medical practice).
• Jonathan N. Bailey: 1831 (residence/post office).
• Mark Noble, Sr.: 1831-1832.
• Judge Richard Young: 1832 (circuit court sessions).
• Unoccupied and decaying in 1832.
• Nonexistent by 1835.

The tract, lying in the angle formed by the river and the lake, comprised but 102 acres instead of the full quarter-section which a claimant was entitled to enter. Kinzie, who might have entered 58 additional acres elsewhere, returned home without troubling himself to do so. On learning of this, his mother urged him to claim the cornfield at the river forks. Although Kinzie was a businessman, his response to her argument was a hearty laugh. "Hear mother," he said, "we have just got 102 acres, more than we should ever want or know what to do with, and now she would have me go and claim 58 acres more!"

The additional acreage was not claimed because, in the judgment of this man, who had spent his entire life at Chicago, it would be a mere waste of effort to do so. That he was not alone in his inability to see the future that Chicago held in-store may be seen from a comparison of the prices paid at the sale of 1830 for certain tracts of land with the value of the same tracts twenty-three years later. Thus, the eighty acres that Thomas Hartzell acquired for $124 in 1830 might have been sold for $800,000 in 1853. James Kinzie's (son of John Kinzie and his first wife Margaret McKenzie) eighty acres, purchased for $140, were valued at $600,000 at a later date. The lot for which William Jewett, in his excitement, parted with $21 at the land sale of 1830, if retained until 1853, would have netted him $17,000, while John H. Kinzie's (eldest son of John and Eleanor Kinzie) larger investment of $119 multiplied itself in the same period to $163,000.

These figures imply a great growth spurt in population and a corresponding increase in commercial importance. For the first few years, however, the growth was exceedingly slow, and the speculators of 1830 may well have bemoaned, during this period, their recklessness in parting with good money in return for titles to town lots in the wilderness.

The season of 1831 witnessed little outward change at Chicago, which continued to present the aspect of a village of log huts, with not a single frame structure in the place. Yet the season was marked by two occurrences significant to the trend of future events. Several settlers passed through the town, intent on finding homes in the valleys of the Des Plaines River and the DuPage River; Cook County was created by legislative enactment, and Chicago became the county seat.

The season of 1832 was in every way abnormal. With the spring came the panic occasioned by the incursion of Black Hawk's warriors into Illinois. Fort Dearborn had been without a garrison since May of 1831, but its walls afforded the only shelter available to the Des Plaines River and DuPage River settlers, and to Chicago, they fled in wildest terror. The normal population of perhaps 100 persons was quickly swelled to five times this number, and the confusion and crowding were intensified by the arrival of detachments of Michigan militia and regular soldiers. Housing accommodations were strained to the utmost in the effort to shelter the fugitives, and even the food supply soon became inadequate for the sustenance of the multitude that had so suddenly assembled.

In July of 1832 came General Winfield Scott, bringing several hundred soldiers from the East to the scene of the Indian War. With Scott came Asiatic cholera, and at the news of its approach, the Indian peril was forgotten. Townsmen and settlers alike took sudden flight before the dread presence, and overnight, as it were, Chicago was emptied of its civilian population. Only those remained who were compelled by the stern demands of duty. For weeks, the place was but a military lazaret (a building set apart for quarantine purposes) whose occupants were engaged in fighting the plague and giving hasty burials in the Cholera Cemetery, also known as the Lake and Wabash burial site to those who died from it. 

Before autumn, war and cholera had alike departed. The townsmen returned to their abandoned homes, and life at Chicago resumed once more. Meanwhile, far away from the tiny Fort Dearborn, community events had been prepared, which were shortly to terminate, rudely and forever, Chicago's long slumber. By Wilderness Trails and the National Road, settlers had been pouring over the mountains and down the Ohio River into the Lower West for a generation. The opening of the Erie Canal in 1825 afforded for the first time a practicable highway connecting the settled East with the Great Lakes. Along these trails, it streamed an ever-increasing number of settlers in the ensuing years, taking possession of western New York and northern Ohio and pouring on into the wilderness of southern Michigan and northern Indiana. 

For Chicago, the Indian War had two results exceeding the consequences. It brought about the extinction of the Indian title to the land between Lake Michigan and the Mississippi and the removal of the  Indians farther west. Of equal significance, perhaps, it caused hundreds of men to be taken upon an enforced excursion through the entrancing wilderness of northern Illinois and southern Wisconsin. We have already seen the effect produced upon their minds illustrated in the case of their commander, General Winfield Scott. They returned to their homes carrying marvelous tales of the country's surpassing beauty and of the wealth in forests, mill sites, and farms that awaited the coming of the settler. In hundreds of eastern communities, these reports were absorbed with the keenest interest, and the ambition was kindled in the breasts of the hearers to become sojourners in this new land of promise.

The first wave of the tide of migration into the new Northwest reached Chicago in the spring of 1833. Most of the home seekers passed through the place to find locations farther on. Some, however, attracted by the commercial promise of Chicago, ended their journey here. In either event, they made their contribution to the city's upbuilding, for its growth depended upon the development of its backcountry, and every homestead established in the wilderness west of Lake Michigan involved the addition of another source of tribute to Chicago's permanent prosperity.

At the beginning of 1833, the place was still a village of log huts, the only frame building being the warehouse of businessman George W. Dole, which had been erected the summer before. The season was one of feverish activity, however, and at its close, dozens of new frame buildings might be seen where but one had stood before. To be sure, they were of flimsy construction, hastily thrown together in the cheapest and rudest manner. Still, their presence afforded convincing evidence that a vigorous, throbbing life had replaced the laid-back atmosphere of old at the forks of the Chicago River. 

Building developments aside, the season was marked by two other occurrences of note. A canal implied a harbor for shipping at Chicago. Congress had long since lent its countenance to the canal project, but as yet, there was no harbor because of the sandbar blocking the mouth of the river. In March of 1833, Congress voted $25,000 ($656,350 today) for a harbor at Chicago, and on July 1st, construction began. The river was afforded a direct outlet to the lake by cutting a channel through the sandbar. The work by the army engineers was completed in the spring of 1834 by the Des Plaines River, which sent its spring flood down the Chicago River with such force as to dredge the channel deep enough to permit the entrance of the heaviest vessels. Piers to the north and south of the new river mouth, extending five hundred feet into the lake, completed the work of the engineers, and for the first time, shipping found a safe and adequate harbor at the south end of Lake Michigan.

The other event of importance in the expanding annals of Chicago was its incorporation as a town on August 12, 1833. At a preliminary election held on August 5th to elicit the will of the townsmen on the question, twelve votes had been cast in favor of the measure and only one in opposition. The negative vote was given by a man who lived down the South Branch, several miles away; on what theory he was permitted to participate in the election, contemporaries have neglected to enlighten us. Evidently, the result of the preliminary election was a foregone conclusion, over which the majority of the electorate abstained from wasting valuable time. Far different was it in the election for town trustees, held five days later. The entire electorate, twenty-eight in number, came to the polls, and thirteen of them consented to appear in the role of candidates for office. The state law required at least 150 persons to form a corporate town, and it seems evident from this first election that Chicago's population was dangerously close to the minimum. The arrivals of 1833, however, were probably not eligible to vote.

The council and treaty held with the Potawatomi in the early autumn, one of the most picturesque events in Chicago's annals, brought together, in addition to several thousand  Indians, a motley throng of white men, government officials, fur traders, claimants, speculators, and rogues of varying degree. In October, the sale at auction of the "school section," lying immediately south of the town plat and embracing the land between State and Halsted streets, extending southward from Madison to Roosevelt Road. This area embraces today the greater portion of Chicago's Loop. The intersection of State and Madison streets at its northeast corner is popularly supposed to be the busiest street corner on earth. The land had been subdivided into 144 blocks of approximately four acres each, and these were sold, mostly on credit, at an average price of $6.72 per acre. 

The per-acre price is said by one chronicler to have been "beyond expectations." Although the price paid marks a considerable advance over the $1.25 an acre paid at the land sale of 1830, it is evident that "expectations" were still far from extravagant with respect to Chicago's real estate values. The blocks of the school section were cut up into lots afforded, together with the canal lots in Section 9, the lots on which the speculative craze of 1835 and 1836 originally fed. As the mania grew, however, fresh "additions" were hastily platted and thrown on the market to feed the flame.

A professional economist's task is to expound upon the forces which lead men to embark upon an era of hopeful speculation with its inevitable aftermath of financial stagnation and despondency. Here, it will suffice to note that the middle 1830s saw the development of the wildest land craze the country has ever undergone. At the same time, 1837 ushered in perhaps its severest period of financial depression, commonly known as the Panic of 1837 [2].

At Chicago, the focal point of the Western migration, the speculative mania raged with a peculiar intensity. Throughout 1834, the tide of settlers thronged the town, and under this stimulating influence, signs of a real estate boom became evident. Confined within reasonable bounds, such a movement would have been justified by the substantial facts of the country's economic situation. But with the passing months, legitimate business transactions gave place to frenzied speculation for its own sake. Numerous tales of individual experiences have been handed down to us by contemporaries. Still, the underlying spirit of the time is perhaps best illustrated by the story, reported in the first issue of Milwaukee's first newspaper, of this conversation between two Chicagoans:

"I say," inquired one of the gentlemen, "what did you give for your portrait?" "Twenty-five dollars," was the reply, "and I have been offered fifty for it."

Nor was the speculative mania confined to Chicago real estate. All around the shores of Lake Michigan, on every inlet and creek, and for scores of miles inland, town sites were platted with enthusiastic zeal, and lots in them were bartered with eager abandon at ever-mounting prices. The pioneer historian of La Salle County relates that he set out some small apple trees on his farm and stuck a stake in the ground by each tree to mark the location. A passing stranger soon stopped to inquire about the name of the town he had laid out. On another occasion, he called at a log cabin where half a dozen farmers were assembled. They had evidently been engaged in high speculation throughout the day, for one of them, addressing the newcomer, said with a complacent slap of the thigh, "I have made $10,000 today, and I will make twice as much tomorrow." From further conversation, it developed that he had been the least successful in the entire company.

The pretentious scale of these paper towns may be illustrated in the case of Kankakee City, at the junction of the Des Plaines and Kankakee Rivers. In its prosperous days, this city never contained more than seventy inhabitants. Yet, its promoters had provided ten public squares, with parks and avenues enough to have a fair nucleus for another New York City. The plat, with its many "additions," covered 2,000 acres. In all the prominent centers of real estate speculation, highly ornamented engravings of this city, beautiful with magnificent buildings and busy with the traffic of capacious warehouses and crowded wharves, were on display.

When, in 1837, the bubble burst, it brought ruin to most of those who, for a season, had been reveling in paper fortunes. For many, this meant little loss of real wealth but merely a return to their previous status. An illustration may be seen in the case of John S. Wright, long a useful citizen of Chicago. He first landed here, a penniless boy of nearly seventeen in 1832. Four years later, still a minor, he was worth $200,000. The panic ensued. Wright was unable to meet his extended obligations, and he became penniless in 1832. Some, shrewder or more fortunate than the majority, turned their profits into cash in advance of the collapse. Thus, Arthur Bronson, of whose arrival to Chicago we have already discussed, in the autumn of 1834, bought a tract owned by Captain (afterward General) David Hunter for $20,000. In the spring of 1835, he resold it to his friend, Charles Butler, for $100,000. Butler caused the tract to be subdivided, and by offering it for sale within a month, the entire purchase price was realized from one-third of the lots.

Although the panic brought ruin to numerous individuals and stunted the growth of Chicago for a season, it was of no significance in the tale of the city's ultimate growth. The conditions determining growth cannot be better stated than in Charles Butler's account of the impressions he formed in 1833 concerning the city's destiny. With paper fortunes vanishing like the morning mist, men realized that something more than the art of the lithographer is requisite to the building of a city. After a season of stagnation, they focused anew on the task.

The span of Chicago's existence as a village was four years, from the summer of 1833 to the spring of 1837. In this period, the population increased from about 150 to 4,170. The village fathers entered upon their duties. One of their first public acts was the establishment of a free ferry across the river at Dearborn Street. A donation had been made by the State of certain lots in Section Nine to aid the new town, and a portion of these, set apart for a public square, still remains the seat of county and city government. On this square, the first prison, a log structure, was erected the first autumn, and on August 12, 1833, a code of ordinances for the government of the affairs of the town was adopted. The first financial obligation was incurred in October of 1834 when the sum of sixty dollars was borrowed to drain and otherwise improve State Street. In the autumn of 1836, under the influence of the expansive ideas of the period, a movement was begun to secure from the legislature a charter for a city. It was successful, and on March 4, 1837, the change to the new form of government was made. Although the population was little over 4,000, the corporate limits of the new city were drawn to embrace substantially all of the territories between Twenty-second Street (2200S) and North Avenue (1600N), extending westward from the lake to Wood Street (1800W), an area of ten square miles.

For three years after its incorporation, the city stagnated. Vivid are the recollections that contemporaries have put on record concerning this trying period. Of similar tenor is the evidence afforded by the census statistics of 1840. Only 300 residents had been added to the population in the three-year period. The city now resumed its onward march, and in 1843 the census revealed a population of 7,580, an increase in three years of 3,100, or almost 70%. Three more years saw the population of 1843 practically double, and in the ensuing four years, it doubled again. The census figure of 1850 was 28,269. By 1853, this figure had considerably more than doubled, the three-year increase amounting to 32,400. The next four years saw approximately the same increase, and by 1857, the closing year of the period under review, Chicago had become a city of 93,000 persons.

This figure does not seem particularly impressive in light of recent developments. Yet all human values are relative in their importance, and the significance of the achievement of these two decades in increasing twenty-threefold the population with which the city had started out in 1837 can scarcely be over-emphasized. Thereby, Chicago had become the giant of the Northwest and had stamped the country west of Lake Michigan with the seal of her commercial supremacy.

The explanation of this achievement is not obscure or difficult. Commerce is the lifeblood of an industrial city like Chicago, and the city's highways are the arterial system through which it circulates. Eastward from Chicago stretched the waters of Lake Michigan, affording nine months of the year a natural highway of unlimited capacity. Westward, in the beginning, the highways remained to be created, and it was apparent to all that the city's future depended upon her success in connecting with the backcountry. The work of establishing this connection was begun within a few months after the laying out of the townsite by Surveyor Thompson in 1830. It continued throughout the ensuing years until, in time, a series of radial highways stretched out from the city in all directions, connecting all points that lay within a practicable distance of Chicago. 

To trace in detail the evolution of these highways and describe the life that passed to and fro upon them is covered in my articles: The Green Bay Trail, aka "Old Jambeau Trail," and The Vincennes Trace.

The modern physician places a drop of blood under the microscope and, from the examination of it derives important information with respect to his patient's welfare. Along Chicago's historic highways pulsated the commerce of the time, and from an examination of this traffic, we may draw a remarkably vivid conception of the life of that bygone period. 

Compiled by Dr. Neil Gale, Ph.D.

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[1] In 1832, President Andrew Jackson ordered Winfield Scott to Illinois to take command of the Black Hawk War conflict. General Winfield Scott led 1,000 troops to Fort Armstrong to assist the U.S. Army garrison and militia volunteers stationed there. While General Scott's army was en route along the Great Lakes, his troops contracted Asiatic cholera before they left New York; it killed most of his 1,000 soldiers. Only 220 U.S. Army regulars from the original force marched from Fort Dearborn in Chicago to Rock Island, Illinois. Winfield Scott and his troops likely carried the highly contagious disease with them; soon after their arrival at Rock Island, a local cholera epidemic broke out among the whites and Indians around the area of Fort Armstrong. Cholera microbes were spread through sewer-type, contaminated water, which mixed with clean drinking water, brought on by poor sanitation practices of the day. Within eight days, 189 people died and were buried on the island. 

By the time Scott arrived in Illinois, the conflict had come to a close with the army's victory at the Battle of Bad Axe. Also known as the Bad Axe Massacre it was a battle between Sauk (Sac) and Meskwaki (Fox) Indians and United States Army regulars and militia that occurred on August 1st and 2nd of 1832. This final Black Hawk War battle occurred near present-day Victory, Wisconsin.

[2] The Panic of 1837 was a financial crisis or market correction built on a speculative fever in the United States. The end of the Second Bank of the United States had produced a period of runaway inflation. On May 10, 1837, in New York City, every bank began to accept payment only in specie (gold and silver coinage), forcing a dramatic, deflationary backlash. This was based on the assumption by the former president, Andrew Jackson, that the government was selling land for state banknotes of questionable value. The Panic was followed by a seven-year depression, with the failure of banks and then-record-high unemployment levels.