City of the Century: The Epic of Chicago and the Making of America
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City of the Century: The Epic of Chicago and the Making of America
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Overview
Depicting its turbulent beginnings to its current status as one of the world’s most dynamic cities, City of the Century tells the story of Chicago—and the story of America, writ small. From its many natural disasters, including the Great Fire of 1871 and several cholera epidemics, to its winner-take-all politics, dynamic business empires, breathtaking architecture, its diverse cultures, and its multitude of writers, journalists, and artists, Chicago’s story is violent, inspiring, passionate, and fascinating from the first page to the last.
The winner of the prestigious Great Lakes Book Award, given to the year’s most outstanding books highlighting the American heartland, City of the Century has received consistent rave reviews since its publication in 1996, and was made into a six-hour film airing on PBS’s American Experience series. Written with energetic prose and exacting detail, it brings Chicago’s history to vivid life.
“With City of the Century, Miller has written what will be judged as the great Chicago history.” —John Barron, Chicago Sun-Times
“Brims with life, with people, surprise, and with stories.” —David McCullough, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of John Adams and Truman
“An invaluable companion in my journey through Old Chicago.” —Erik Larson, New York Times–bestselling author of The Devil in the White City
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780795339851 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | RosettaBooks |
| Publication date: | 09/01/2018 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 684 |
| Sales rank: | 525,202 |
| File size: | 8 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Discovery
1. The Priest and the Explorer
The voyage that brought them to the site of Chicago had its origins in a spectacular pageant of possession in the wilderness of the northern lakes. It was called in 1670 by the intendant of New France, Jean Talon, to establish France's claim to the entire mid- continent, an unmapped territory of unknown extent, rich in minerals and fur-bearing animals and of tremendous strategic importance. Talon had been sent to the struggling colony by Louis XIV's chief minister, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, to begin a program of economic upbuilding, part of the young Sun King's design for a French imperium. When Talon arrived in Quebec, the territory of New France extended just a few miles beyond the junction of the Ottawa and St. Lawrence Rivers, west of Montreal; and he came with orders from Colbert to strengthen the foundations of the central colony before launching any precipitous campaigns of territorial expansion. But Talon was an eager imperialist, anxious to claim for France the interior of the continent, hemming in the English on the Atlantic seaboard and challenging Spain's claims to the American Southwest. All the while, in a more contested theater of expansion, his king prepared to war on the Dutch and the Spanish in an effort to push back France's borders to the Rhine and the Alps, inaugurating an age of French dominance in world affairs.
Since the interior of the continent was still an unknown world, Talon, with no army to speak of, had to rely on French-Canadian fur traders and explorers, like Joliet, and Jesuit missionaries, like Marquette, to carry out his design. The Jesuits had already pushed across the continent to the southern shore of Lake Superior, where Marquette had a mission on remote Chequamegon Bay; and the traders had built a network of alliances with the tribes of the western lakes, who coveted glass beads, iron tools, tobacco, and if they could get it from unscrupulous traders, brandy and whiskey. Now Talon moved to consolidate these gains and establish French influence over the lands and native peoples to the south of the lakes, as far as Florida and Mexico. When he accomplished this, he intended to send an expedition in search of the mysterious river the Indians called Messipi, the Great Water. If it flowed into the California Sea, as some guessed it did, his explorers would be the discoverers of the long-sought western waterway to Cathay.
In 1670, Talon sent out messengers to the chiefs and captains of the tribes of the North to gather that following spring at Sault Ste. Marie for a council with an ambassador from the king. Talon chose a commanding and symbolic site for the occasion. Located at the head of the Great Lakes, on the explosive rapids that carried the waters of Lake Superior into Lake Huron, the sault was the nerve center of French fur trading and missionary enterprise in the Northwest. As the grand monarque's envoy, Talon named Jean-Baptiste de Saint Lusson, a nobleman and soldier of fortune whose only claim to a place in history was his command of this expedition into "that far-away corner of the world."
Waiting for him at the sault were representatives of fourteen tribes. They had come, in part, out of curiosity — to see the man Talon had promised to send, "the voice" of the "captain of the greatest captains," whose "house," they had been told by the traders and fathers, contained "more families" than the largest of their villages. But they were there mainly to cement trade ties with the French, a trade the Indian tribes were becoming utterly dependent upon, to their ultimate disadvantage.
On the morning of June 14, 1671, the missionaries assembled the tribal chiefs on a hill overlooking the village, the mission, and the falls of Ste. Marie, with the pine-scented forest in the background. It was a time of great beauty in the northern woods, and the tribal delegates were greased and perfumed for what they had been told would be "the most solemn ceremony ever observed in these regions." On the ground just in front of them, at the highest point on the hill, lay a large wooden cross of fresh-cut timber and a cedar pole with some kind of plate on it.
The Indians watched in silence as the gate of the mission stockade swung open and a procession wound its way to the place where they were waiting. At its head were the "black robes," holding crucifixes in front of them and chanting a Latin hymn. Then came the traders dressed in buckskin, among them Louis Joliet, who had a thriving fur business at the sault, and a French- Canadian voyageur, or river man, who would accompany Joliet and Marquette on their journey to the Mississippi. Finally, Saint Lusson came into the Indians' sight, magnificent in his crimson uniform and glistening helmet, a ceremonial sword in his right hand.
After the cross was blessed and planted in the ground, the cedar post bearing the royal arms of France on an escutcheon was placed beside it, while the priests chanted the twentieth psalm. At this point, Saint Lusson stepped forward and in a loud voice took possession for his monarch "of Lakes Huron and Superior ... and of all other countries, rivers, lakes and tributaries, contiguous and adjacent thereunto, as well discovered as to be discovered, which are bounded on the one side by the Northern and Western Seas and on the other side by the South Sea including all its length and breadth." Then Father Claude Allouez, the most revered missionary in New France, called the chiefs close to him and spoke to them in their tongue of what sort of a mighty man "he was whose standard they beheld, and to whose sovereignty they were that day submitting."
When members of Saint Lusson's cortege left the sault, one of them slipped a copy of the report of the annexation behind the escutcheon. After they were gone, the Indians removed it and burned it, fearing that the paper was a spell that would cause the death of all the tribes that had sent representatives to the sault. Then they returned to their people. They were not sure exactly what they had witnessed or what it portended. There was no misunderstanding in Quebec, however.
Talon saw the ceremony at the sault as a prophecy to be swiftly fulfilled. France had laid claim to the largest colonial possession in the world; now she must occupy and hold it. At the pageant there had been more talk, which reached Talon, of the river the Indians said rose in the north and flowed south to a place they had not reached in their longest journeys. No Frenchman had any idea that this was the river Hernando de Soto had crossed and claimed for Spain a century before. The memory of that find had dimmed with time and Spain's falling fortunes in Europe, and those few cartographers who knew of de Soto's river speculated that it was but one of many that flowed north to south through the continent. Without orders from Colbert, Talon formed a party of exploration and named Joliet, at age twenty-seven the colony's most accomplished explorer and mapmaker, to head it. Joliet's orders were to find the Mississippi and follow it to where it entered the sea.
Son of a wheelwright, the Canadian-born Joliet was educated by the Jesuits in Quebec, intending to enter the order until the lure of the wilderness claimed him. He had spent some time with Marquette at the mission station at the sault, where they had talked of making a voyage together to the river that several Illinois Indians had described to the priest. Marquette had promised that he would carry the gospel to their lands, which bordered the Mississippi, so he was the logical choice of Claude Dablon, his superior, to be chaplain of the expedition. Some Jesuits thought that the more experienced Allouez should be the first apostle to the Illinois, but Marquette was younger — in his mid-thirties — had skills as a geographer and cartographer, and had mastered six Indian languages since his arrival in Canada in 1666, immediately after his ordination.
Marquette had the blazing zeal of the Jesuit martyrs of the Iroquois massacres he had read about back in his native Laon. He "seems," Francis Parkman wrote of him, "a figure evoked from some dim legend of medieval saintship." But in addition to being apostles, Marquette's generation of Jesuit missionaries were explorers and men of science, eager to travel to unknown lands and send back fact-filled accounts of climate, geography, soil conditions, plant and animal life, river currents and lake tides, and the habits and customs of the native peoples they encountered. On his and Joliet's journey, which took them north, west, and south of the future site of Chicago, Marquette kept an accurate journal of the places they passed through and, with the help of nothing more than a compass and an astrolabe, drew the first reliable map of this part of the world. Joliet also kept generous records — which have been lost — gave a full account of the journey to his superiors, and made a better map than Marquette's. These records and recollections form the first picture we have of the bounteous forests and flatlands — the far-spreading hinterland — that would give rise eventually to a major market and transporting center at the site of Louis Sullivan's "historic portage." They are the first "natural history" of the Chicago region. Reading them today we understand why there became a Chicago. They are, as well, a thrilling tale of origins and adventure, a Chicago Aeneid.
* * *
They left for Illinois country on May 17, 1673 — five voyageurs, the priest, and the explorer — in two birchbark canoes. Their jumping off point was the mission of St. Ignace that Marquette had founded in 1671 on the Straits of Mackinac, at the far northeastern edge of Lake Michigan. Their outfit was light for so long a journey: a supply of smoked meat and Indian corn, a package of trading trinkets, powder, balls and muskets, paper and bottles of ink for taking notes, and Marquette's storage box filled with vestments, altar wine, a supply of Communion hosts, and his breviary. The first leg of their journey took them through territory already mapped and explored: across the northern rim of Lake Michigan and south to the bottom of sheltered Green Bay, where Allouez had established the mission of St. Francis Xavier, and from there up the Fox River, through its treacherous rapids and falls, to an Indian village deep in the hardwood forests that would help feed nineteenth-century Chicago's insatiable hunger for lumber. When they arrived at the settlement of the friendly Mascoutins and Miamis, twenty-two days from St. Ignace, they reached the farthest limit of French penetration into the continent. There they called a council of the elders and asked for guides to show them upriver to the portage that they were certain, from Indian reports, would take them to a western river that discharged into the Mississippi.
Their hosts had a great fear of these interior lands, the country of the hostile Sioux — "the Iroquois of the West," as the French called them — and they tried to persuade Marquette and Joliet to proceed no farther. The "Big Water" they hoped to reach was filled with "horrible monsters which devoured men and canoes together," these Indians and others they had met farther north told them, and its banks were home to bands of warriors who would "break their heads without any cause;" while to the south, if they made it that far, they would run into searing heat, which would wilt them, turn them black, and eventually kill them. "I thanked them for the good advice ...," Marquette records, "but told them that I could not follow it, because the salvation of souls was at stake, for which I would be delighted to give my life." On the tenth of June, with two Miami guides, they left "in the sight of a great crowd, who could not sufficiently express their astonishment," Marquette writes, "at the sight of seven frenchmen [sic] alone and in two Canoes, daring to undertake so extraordinary and so hazardous an Expedition."
They paddled up a sluggish stream broken by a maze of swamps and stagnant lakes, and when they reached the portage, the Miamis left them. They were alone now, "in the hands of providence," cut off from lands and people in any way familiar to them. Before boarding their canoes, Marquette called them together, and they knelt on the forest floor for a prayer to his patroness, the Virgin Mary. They then paddled down the broad and beautiful Wisconsin River, the voyageurs timing their river songs to the strokes of the paddles. On the seventeenth of June they entered the Mississippi "with a Joy," Marquette wrote in his journal, "that I cannot Express."
"Here ... on this so renowned river," Marquette and Joliet began to take more careful notes — on the current and depth of the river, on the variety of fish and game along its course, on everything that excited their curiosity. They saw wildcats, what they described as "Swans without wings," and "monstrous fish" (probably catfish), but it was the bison, or "wild cattle," as Marquette called them, that most interested them. Huge herds of them blackened the prairies, and they were the first Europeans to give eyewitness accounts of them. When one of their men killed a bison, Joliet and Marquette examined it like eager surgical students and jotted down detailed anatomic notes. From this point on, the flesh and fat of the bison was "the best dish at [their] feasts."
In this country where "we knew not whither we were going," they proceeded with great caution, on the lookout for hostile Indians. Toward evening, they made only small fires on the riverbank to cook their meals, and after supper they slept in their canoes, which they anchored in midstream, posting an armed sentinel "for fear of surprise." They traveled down the meandering Mississippi almost 200 miles without seeing a trace of a human being, the only sound on the river the splash of their paddles in the current. Then, on the twenty-fifth of June, they saw through the morning mist footprints on the west bank of the river and a path leading into a spacious prairie. Thinking it would take them to an Indian settlement, Joliet and Marquette decided to follow it, unarmed, leaving the voyageurs behind to guard the canoes. Both of them had "the courage," Dablon would write, "to dread nothing where everything is to be feared."
After walking almost six miles, they spotted a village on the bank of a river and two other settlements on a hill in the distance. They approached so near that they could hear conversation and laughter. Saying a prayer together to summon up their courage, they decided to reveal themselves by standing in the open and shouting "with all Our energy." Their yells set off alarm in the village, and the Indians came streaming from their wigwams to gather around their chiefs. Seeing Marquette's black gown, some who traded in the North probably recognized them as Frenchmen, and four elders were sent out to greet them, two of them bearing calumets, sacred smoking pipes elaborately decorated, which were a sign of peace. They walked slowly and silently toward the Frenchmen, raising the pipes toward the sun.
Marquette spoke first, asking them if they were Illinois. They said they were and escorted them to the village of their chief, where gifts were exchanged and Joliet explained the purpose of their presence on the river. A great feast followed, with the "Master of Ceremonies," as Marquette quaintly called him, feeding his guests from a spoon as if they were children. That night they slept in the cabin of the chief, and the next day six hundred Indians accompanied them to their canoes. As they pushed off, Marquette began making notes of "their customs and usages." On his lap, as he wrote, was a calumet the chief had given them. It was to be displayed, they were told, whenever they confronted danger, for even "in the hottest of the fight" warriors would "lay down their arms when it is shown." In the canoe ahead of Marquette, curled up behind Joliet, was the chief's ten-year-old son, whom he had given to them, he said, to show them his heart.
Drifting downriver at a rate of forty miles a day, they passed, a week later, a tremendous stone cliff painted with the lurid images of two monsters "which at first made Us afraid, and upon which the boldest savages dare not Long rest their eyes." They were so vividly depicted, Marquette says, that "good painters in france [sic] would find it difficult to paint so well." No savage, he thought, could be "their author." Was the devil in these lands? Or perhaps the Spanish? Marquette made a drawing of the monsters, and as the Frenchmen pulled their canoes together to speculate about their meaning, remembering, perhaps, Indian warnings about man-eating river creatures, they ran into real trouble.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "City of the Century"
by .
Copyright © 2014 Donald L. Miller.
Excerpted by permission of RosettaBooks.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Preface,
I,
Introduction: City of Dreamers and Doers,
1 Discovery,
2 "Didn't Expect No Town",
3 Ogden's Chicago,
4 The Great Chicago Exchange Engine,
5 Empire City of the West,
6 My Lost City,
II,
Introduction: Let Us Build Ourselves a City,
7 That Astonishing Chicago,
8 The Chicago Machine,
9 The Streetcar City,
10 Stories in Stone and Steel,
11 Sullivan and Civic Renewal,
12 The New Chicago,
13 The Battle for Chicago,
14 1893,
15 After the Fair,
Abbreviations Used in Notes and Bibliography,
Notes,
Bibliography,
Illustrations,
Endnotes,
Acknowledgments,
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