Theodore Roosevelt and the Assassin by Gerard Helferich

Author:Gerard Helferich
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lyons Press
Published: 2013-10-08T00:00:00+00:00

For millennia, people had been drawn to Chicago—not as a home, but as a place to pass through on their way somewhere else. Native Americans had portaged their canoes over its mudflats, which separated the great river to the west with the great lakes to the north and east. In 1673, French explorer Louis Jolliet recognized the location’s strategic value as a link between Canada and New Orleans, but failed to interest the mother country. Then a century later, France lost its American colonies to Britain in the Seven Years’ War, and the area called Chicago (supposedly from the Miami-Illinois Shikaakwa, for “Wild Onions”) passed to the rival empire. In 1803 the newly independent United States built Fort Dearborn on the site, and within three decades the Native Americans had been expelled. By 1837, when Chicago received its charter as a city, the population had grown to four thousand. Eleven years later, a canal was opened over the old Indian portage, connecting the East Coast with New Orleans and the West, and finally realizing the potential that Jolliet had seen nearly two centuries before.

The railroads were quicker to grasp the value of Chicago’s location. The first train came in 1848, and seven scant years later, the city was served by seventeen different lines and recognized as the crossroads of the nation. Thanks to the railroads, it had also grown into the greatest grain and livestock markets, slaughterhouse, and lumberyard in the world. In the decade before the Civil War, Chicago boomed with foundries, machine shops, steel mills, breweries, and dozens of other industries. During the war it thrived by supplying the Union army, and afterward by shipping material to rebuild the South. By 1870, Chicago’s population had reached nearly three hundred thousand, and it had become famous for its fast-moving pedestrians, its slow-flowing traffic, its coal-polluted air, and its staggering murder rate. Rival metropolises took to calling it “the Windy City,” not for the breezes off Lake Michigan but for its insufferable bluster.

In 1871, Chicago was devastated by fire, which destroyed seventeen thousand buildings, claimed some three hundred lives, and left a hundred thousand people homeless. But Chicagoans began a breakneck campaign to rebuild their city—bigger, better, more modern than before, and not of wood but of brick and stone. Many of the new buildings were skyscrapers, soaring more than ten stories tall. Industry flourished in Chicago, but as the disparity grew between rich and poor, labor peace proved tenuous. On May 4, 1886, erupted the notorious Haymarket Riot, in which half a dozen policemen and at least four protestors died after a bomb was hurled during a workers’ demonstration. Though the perpetrator was never identified, four anarchists were hanged on flimsy evidence, and several others were sentenced to prison. A series of sometime-violent strikes—of meatpackers, teamsters, railroad workers—also shook Chicago, culminating in the Pullman walkout in 1894, which was quelled by federal troops (and for his role in which Eugene Debs was sent to the penitentiary).

It was raining when John Schrank reached Chicago.

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