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Memories of Chicago

I-Pristine Days

BY H. C. CHATFIELD-TAYLOR

o find my earliest recollection of Chicago concerned with the railway whose soot and screechings have marred, through the years, pleasing dreams of her would seem to be an irony of fate. Indeed, the love I bear for the city of my birth is inspired not by a material greatness in the achievement of which that railway has been, no doubt, a factor, but by a spirituality of whose very existence the world at large is still ignorant-seething Chicago, to those who know her least, being but a soulless place "where cattle are handled so swiftly that life itself becomes a raw material." Yet for the moment I am concerned not with her spiritual being, but with an attempt to trace my steps backward to the time when my feet being too little to take any steps at all, a nurse used to hold me in her arms before a window in order that I might see passing trains. Although I first saw the light of day within the vast division of Chicago where resides almost a half of the three million people the city now claims to possess, and where thirty foreign tongues are spoken, I left it when six months old in order to dwell for a time in Wabash Avenue. Having returned at the age of eighteen months to what is now chidingly called "The Great West Side," it would be impossible, I

am told, for me to recall anything happening previously to that time; and that which appears in the light of a reminiscence is only a subconscious recollection of something related to me during childhood. Nevertheless, I would take my oath that I remember seeing trains from my nursery window, at which I cried, "Cal ca!" in a vain attempt to articulate the word "car."

An early recollection less dubious than this is likewise of railway cars, but instead of rumbling beneath a window on an iron track they were brought down a chimney by "a jolly old elf with a little round belly," while eight tiny reindeer pranced and pawed in the new-fallen snow that lay upon a roof in West Washington Street.

It was my third Christmas morning on earth, and I was playing with a train of tin cars. My father, who was smoking a cigar, laid his paper aside, picked up the locomotive, filled its funnel with smoke from his lips and replaced it upon the carpet on which I sat before a crackling fire. He died when I was barely ten, and when I think of him it is with a twinkle in his eye and a loving smile on his lip, watching my childish delight at seeing real smoke curl upward from the toy locomotive Santa Claus had brought me in answer to my prayers.

But I have opened the book of memory at too intimate a page, I fear; therefore let me turn to one that presents a real engine hissing beneath the murky roof of a stone "dépot" at the foot of Randolph Street. Its smokestack, shaped like the half of an hourglass, was of a kind in use when wood was plentiful; its cylinders, its sandbox, its bell, and even the metal straps around its boiler were of shining brass. It had an ungainly cow-catcher before it, too, and the tender behind it was heaped high with logs for a journey to the Illinois town where dwelt the dear old grandmother of a little boy who was being reluctantly dragged past it by a ruthless mother because he would fain tarry to examine its every piston-rod and check-valve.

Although its destination lay barely more than a hundred miles away, the departure of this locomotive had been set for an hour so early that the boy's breakfast had been cruelly cut short in order that he might not arrive on a platform too late to find a seat in the day coach attached to the baggage- and smoking-car that was coupled behind it; for it had so little power that it would snort throughout an entire day before reaching its journey's end. It would stop, moreover, from time to time in order to drink from a tank or else to have its fuel replenished, a log at a time, from a wood-pile; and at the noon hour it would tarry to let the passengers it had been slowly dragging across a green prairie satisfy their hunger in a room overlooking a swiftrunning stream in which there was a mill-race, with a huge wheel turning round and round so to distract a child born and bred in a city that again a meal was curtailed, though not by a heartless mother, but by a friendly old

conductor, watch in hand, shouting, "All aboard!" To a little fellow hastening across a wooden platform toward a wooden car, this locomotive looked a veritable monster; yet were it placed beside the one I saw described to-day as being "seventy-two men long and three men high," it would be a puny thing indeed, the fat engineer who was pulling its bell-cord being almost as big and round as its boiler.

Instead of crossing all the prairies of a State, I meant to journey, in memory, only over some piles in a lake and gaze meanwhile across a stretch of smooth water at a row of new white houses that were called "The Marble Terrace" and were flanked by statelier mansions of brick or wood having greenswards before them and cupolas upon their roofs. Yes, and to look at steeples, too, that were taller than the tallest building and rose toward the skies above spreading shade-trees. Moreover, where now there is land I can see in memory sail-boats and rowboats a-many protected from whitecapped waves by the wooden piles over which a train was rumbling; and at a muddy river's mouth, instead of steamers built of steel, there was a little busybody tugboat dragging at her hawser's end a topsail schooner, with mainsail flapping in the wind as lusty sailors hauled it aloft; while far as childish eyes could look the blue horizon of a lake was dotted with white sails.

When the puffing locomotive with a clanging bell upon its brass-bound boiler rounded a curve, these pleasing sights were hidden by unlovely houses built of wood, each with a "week's wash" dangling from a clothes-line in its back yard. Soon tumble-down shanties came into view, with piles of

children before them playing in an unpaved street; while at each muddy crossing there were burly teamsters sitting, cud of tobacco in mouth and whip in hand, upon the lofty seats of drays, express-wagons, and twowheeled carts, all waiting for the train to pass; aye, and whiskered farmers, too, were to be seen perched high up on loads of hay, or, goad in hand, standing nigh to knee-deep in mud beside the cattle they are driving toward a slaughter-house.

rubbish behind them, and ragged ing horse-chestnut-trees. Here there were staid houses surrounded by green lawns, and blocks of "marble fronts," as they were called, on the "stoops" of which the occupants sat in the twilight, palm-leaf fan in hand, while a bishop drove by in a stylish carriage to set their tongues a-wagging; for the street was West Washington Street, and the bishop was Bishop Whitehouse of Anglican mien and manner, who gave distinction to a rough and ready city in the days of its youth. He gave it something to gossip about, too, his splendor being such as never before had been seen in it. In fact, he so set a modest neighborhood agog as to make it wonder whether to be flattered or shocked by his presence. Still, in looking back upon these primitive days, I feel him to have been a metropolitan in a dual sense, whose broadening influence was needed in a city that barely two score years before that time had been but a little frontier post from the stockaded fort of which Colonel Zachary Taylor and Lieutenant Jefferson Davis had sallied forth in pursuit of Black Hawk and his painted warriors.

Then the train from which the child had seen these sights suddenly came to a stop amid yellow lumber piled symmetrically upon the bank of a malodorous river, a little ball of warning having been hoisted upon the pinnacle of a bridge, and a brawny Irishman having begun to push a lever round and round slowly and perspiringly like a slave of old harnessed to a grist-mill. When a white schooner from Muskegon or Manistee, laden to her wales with fragrant pine, had been dragged by a snorting tug past a red turn-bridge, the waiting train patiently sped on, and soon was rumbling through the waving grass of a prairie where now are the humble homes of the thousands upon thousands of toiling human souls that have come to it from every land on earth. But there was scarcely a house upon it at the time I have in mind, and only a corduroy road or two across it, over the rough planks of which farmers in springless wagons drove their crops to market.

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Alas! I have wandered again beyond a youthful city's limits; therefore let me hasten to a pleasing street that was lined on both sides with spread

Tall, lanky, sallow Abe Lincoln, a river pilot out of a job down on the banks of the Sangamon, went forth to fight them, too; although, by his own confession, he did not know how to put the company of which he was elected captain endwise in order to get it through a gate. But with that genius for extricating himself from ticklish situations that was to stand him in good stead in later years, he gave in that perplexing moment the homely, yet comprehensible, command, "This company is dismissed for two minutes, when it will fall in on the other side of the fence."

A gawky captain of militia, even though he became one of the greatest of men, is a far cry, however, from the polished bishop who gave to West Washington Street in the days of my childhood not only an aristocratic standing in the community it has long since lost, but a bone of contention as well; for while the Episcopal cathedral over which he presided stood within its shaded precincts, the spires of other churches arose there, too, beneath which on the Sabbath worshipers sat to whom gaiters and shovel hats appeared in the light of popery. In fact, it was a street so puritanical that the toys of many of its children were put under lock and key on Saturday at supper-time, their hapless little owners being not only forbidden to play with them, but with one another until sundown on the following day, at which hour might be heard the small boy's whoop of unrestrained joy.

More than half a century has passed since those pristine days, yet I seem to hear through the shutters of a belfry the doleful clanging of a bell, and in a street where stately trees cast shadows on a pavement made of wooden blocks see rows of demure houses converging on a little park where there is an artificial lake with rowboats on its rippling waters, and a sunken pit in which a giant bear is pacing back and forth contentedly, while I, wretched boy, must go to church and listen to a minister in a white choker preach everlastingly upon hell and its everlasting fire. I see, in memory, too, the gates of picket fences swing open and hear the squeak of Sunday shoes upon the wooden sidewalks of a highly respectable street, as flounces, leghorn bonnets, and lace shawls folded crosswise mingle with flopping broadcloth coats and stove

pipe hats, the straight and circumscribed brims of which are typical of the ancestry of those who wear them, they being descended in great part from the austere men and women who, in the words of a recent historian of their rock-bound coast, "left an abiding stamp upon the New England consciousness."

That consciousness had been brought to Chicago by earnest pioneers who had trekked there in covered wagons or braved the storms of inland seas. And there it had been planted in a virgin soil beside a pioneer spirit less rigid, by far, yet fully as courageous— the spirit of the Old Dominion, I mean, which had blazed a trail across bold mountains to blue-grass plains, and thence had journeyed northward in the hearts of men at a time when the digging of a canal from lake to river transformed a little frontier post into a bustling city of a hundred thousand souls. Lest this picture of Chicago's inheritance appear to be overdrawn, its truth may be attested by Mr. Robert Shackleton, a writer who, being neither a native nor an adopted son of hers, should be free from the suspicion of having inherited a certain tendency for which, I fear, she is noted.

"Chicago's greatness," says he, "her unique qualities, her amazing rise and advance as a city, came from an unusual and balanced combination of the best blood of New England and of the South."

Yet in West Washington Street, in the days of long ago, I did not think either of the blood flowing in my own veins or in those of my strait-laced elders, but rather of the joyful fact that the Sabbath Day was over, and that on Monday morning, bright and early, Sam, an old negro coachman who had

"come up North befo' de war by de 'undergroun','" as he used to delight in telling, would drive me downtown behind a "span" of black horses with white fly-nets on their glossy backs.

Still, there was an ordeal to be endured upon that Monday morning almost as trying as going to church. I would go in spooky darkness through the new tunnel under the river and hear the steamboats tooting overhead; and I would pass a brownstone court house standing in the midst of a little park, and perhaps hear the big bell on its roof ring an alarm of fire. I might even, in case I were exceedingly lucky, see a red hose-cart drawn by a galloping horse, and a lumbering fire-engine belching sparks and smoke, and perhaps a hook-and-ladder, too, with firemen in shiny leather hats clinging to it: yet the sad fact remained that I must go downtown dressed up in a clean white frock with a blue sash across the shoulder, and stand perfectly still while young Mr. Pickering painted my portrait. There would n't be the slightest chance to skylark, either, since old Mr. Healy, with tousled hair, which looked as if it had never been brushed in all his life, would be painting my mother's portrait, too, in that same dingy room that smelt so horribly of paint, and had nothing in it to see but easels and palettes and the backs of half-finished pictures, with their faces turned to the wall.

Yes, my mother's eye, worse luck, would be upon me all the time. Ah, but if I were a good little boy and did not move or fret, perhaps she would let me ride on the iron lions in front of Gossage's store, when that tiresome old sitting was over, and she went shopping in State Street. Besides, that bitter business of having a portrait

painted could not last forever, and soon Forepaugh's Circus would be coming to town, with its red band in a gilded wagon drawn by six white horses, its cages filled with roaring lions and snarling tigers; its elephant with flapping ears and a trunk that looked like a big black-snake, reaching out for peanuts and candy; its funny clown in a donkey cart; and its pretty ladies and plumed cavaliers riding on piebald ponies, with shaggy manes and tails that swept the ground. And, joy of joys, it would pitch its tents in a vacant lot that stood "catty-corner" across the street from the house where I dwelt.

In case you should only know the grandeur of a "greatest show on earth,” with acrobats, bareback riders, girls on trapezes, Japs on slack wires, lions, stallions, and a troupe of silly clowns all performing in three rings at once, you will have no conception, I fear, of the intimate charm of the old-fashioned circus, with its single ring, its single clown (ah, but he was an artist, too), and its single ring-master, with waxed mustache and shiny boots, who was manager and proprietor, too, likely as not, as was Adam Forepaugh, whom I have in mind.

Oh, to sit once more upon a bending board, with legs dangling in air! Oh, to munch again sweet-smelling peanuts or drink pink lemonade and, at the same time, see a pretty rider with a red rose in her hair pirouetting in pink tights upon the back of a fat horse, while a courtly ring-master cracks his whip, and a white clown his jokes! What joy to sit so near a circus ring that you are actually spattered with sawdust! So near, in fact, that you can even whiff the musk perfume upon a gauze skirt when the dashing eques

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