Chicago and the Railroad
In 1847, Chicago didn't have a single mile of railroad. Ten years later, it was
the rail center of America, and Ogden was a Railroad King of the West. By the
opening of the Civil War, more railroads met at Chicago than at any other spot
St. Louis, Chicago's chief urban rival, had built a thriving commerce with New
Orleans, using steam-powered riverboats. But by the time of the Civil War,
Chicago had displaced St. Louis, which remained tied to the river, as the
region's major trade center. The railroad tied the lower Midwest to the
Northeast, and insured that this section didn't split off and become part of
the Confederacy in 1861, when the lower Mississippi became a Rebel River.
Chicago rose to regional prominence by becoming not a manufacturing center at
first, but a trade center, a giant Exchange Engine. Here's how the system
worked for two commodities: lumber and wheat. Chicago sat between two
different ecosystems, the timber-rich lands of upper Wisconsin and Michigan,
and the treeless prairie. It was built on Lake Michigan, a water corridor that
Ogden and other Chicago capitalists purchased entire forests in the North and
sent lumber by lake boats down to Chicago, where it was processed, and then
sent out by canal and rail to prairie farmers. Chicago's lumber mills made
cottages, schoolhouses, stores, taverns, and churches. Out on the prairie, it
wasn't uncommon for entire groups of homesteaders to gather together at a
desolate depot to await the arrival from Chicago of their entire ready-made
The wheat trade was a more symbiotic relationship, and the land wasn't the
loser. Reapers made at Cyrus McCormick's steam-driven Chicago factory allowed
farmers to cut the wheat that Chicago shipped to the rest of the world. Farmers
made money; Chicago merchants made money; and the key to it all was the
Railroads were prohibited from entering the congested heart of Manhattan. But
in freewheeling Chicago, where money-making was unimpeded by government
restraints, the railroads steamed right into the center of town, creating
tremendous smoke and noise and killing or mangling two persons a day at
unprotected rail crossings. As one foreign visitor said: "It's cheaper to kill
people than to elevate the railroads, and human life in Chicago is nothing
compared with money."
Chicago was the American Manchester, the place people visited to see the new
economic order. While not yet as rich or as wretchedly poor as Manchester, it
was a place of even greater economic creativity and chaos. A commercial
powerhouse, it was one of the ugliest cities in America, and the most
unhealthy, as well.
Cleaning Up Chicago
In the 1850s, cholera, a water-borne disease, hit the city with devastating
force, killing in one year almost six percent of its population. In that
decade, Chicago had the highest death rate of any American city. The problem
was that Chicagoans were drinking their own sewage. Both garbage and raw sewage
were dumped into the Chicago River, along with the blood and remains of animals
slaughtered at the city's meat packing plants.
On some days, the river was blood red. This river water, in turn, flowed into
Lake Michigan, the source of the city's water supply. Even small fish got into
the water supply, and would come shooting out of spigots in sinks. "When you
turned on the hot water," as one Chicagoan joked, "you got chowder."
There was no joking, though, about cholera, which struck people with terrible
suddenness and killed them in a day. Finally, public fear and outrage forced
the city to act, to save itself. Ogden and other city officials hired a Boston
engineer, Ellis Chesbrough, to build a modern water supply and sewage system.
Intake tunnels were driven far out into Lake Michigan. And the Chicago River
was reversed by a process of dredging and pumping. Now it carried Chicago's
waste away from the city, into the Illinois and Michigan Canal, past
complaining but less powerful canal towns.
Chesbrough also lifted Chicago out of the mud and swampy soil that were
breeding places for cholera. He raised up the entire downtown by as much as 10
feet, jacking up entire rows of buildings, with the people right in them, and
placing dredged soil from the river bottom under them. The raising of the city
and the reversal of the river were two of the most stupendous engineering
projects of the age, and they gave Chicago a reputation as a city that could
accomplish almost anything.
Raw, wildly growing Chicago illustrated better than any other place America's
faith in technology and unfettered capitalism, forces that were conquering the
frontier and raising America to greatness. The Chicago story is a cautionary
tale. Self-interest doesn't always lead in the benign direction Adam Smith
hoped it would. These same forces of capitalism and technology would shape the
country even more emphatically after the Civil War, making America -- and
Chicago -- great opportunity centers; but also scenes of economic excess,
injustice, and unrest.