Ill Chicago

Chicago's artistic and intellectual life is already as keen as that of any city in the United States. It has six famous libraries; its Art Institute is visited by a million people every year; its four chief universities in the city and suburbs enroll over 15,000 students; the Field Columbian Museum, housed in an $8,000,000 building on the lake front, is the best museum of anthropology, ethnology, and the industrial arts in the United States. Chicago is also the musical and artistic center of the West, with a symphony orchestra founded by Theodore Thomas, and a season of grand opera not surpassed in brilliancy anywhere in America. And this position Chicago has attained in the face of appalling obstacles. First, it had to pull itself out of the mud. Its marshy site was so unhealthful that in the '50's the death rate was high enough to wipe out the whole population in four decades. Chicago girded itself to the task and raised the level of the whole city between 12 and 14 feet, filling the marsh with limestone and sand and rubbish.

For the first time in history, jackscrews were used to lift 4-story buildings while business proceeded uninterrupted.

Then, in 1871, came the Great Fire, which wiped out $200,000,000 worth of property and left more than three square miles in ruins.

Within two years the whole area was rebuilt on a plan much finer than before. By the middle of the next decade the congestion in the business district had spurred Chicago archi tects to devise the steel-frame skyscraper, which has since revolutionized the building methods of the world (see Building Con struction.) The history of Chicago begins with 1777, when a San Domingo colored man built a hut on the Chicago River. This was the point where the Indians used to leave the lake to travel to the Mississippi by the route of the Chicago, Des Plaines, and Illinois rivers. In 1803 John Kinzie, the first white settler, bought the hut and conducted from it his trading with the Indians. The next year the United States built a stockade near by, known as Fort Dearborn. In 1812, during the war with Great Britain, General Hull, who was in command of the British forces at Detroit, ordered the fort to be evacuated. The little body of settlers set out with their women and children around the foot of the lake, but before they had gone more than three miles they were attacked by a band of Indians and the whole body captured or killed. After the war the settlement was soon rebuilt; and by 1837, when the city was incorporated, the popula tion had mounted past the 4,000 mark. The commercial importance of the city was assured in 1848, when the Illinois and Michigan Canal was built, making an all-water route to the Mississippi by way of the old Indian portage.