Chicago by the Book

101 Publications that Shaped the City and its Image

The University of Chicago Press

Narrative of the Massacre at Chicago, August 15, 1812, and of Some Preceding Events

[Juliette A. Kinzie] * Chicago: Ellis & Fergus, 1844

Ann Durkin Keating

Juliette Augusta Magill (1806–70) was born in Middletown, Connecticut. At a young age she became enamored of the American West through the letters of an uncle, Dr. Alexander Wolcott, who served as the Indian agent in Chicago during the 1820s. In 1830 she married one of her uncle's western friends, John H. Kinzie. The couple lived first in Portage, Wisconsin, where John was an Indian agent. Juliette began to write about and draw the striking people and sights around her. After several years the couple settled permanently in Chicago, raising a large family and helping to establish St. James Episcopal Church and the Chicago Historical Society.

Juliette Kinzie became an author — albeit an anonymous one — in 1844 with Narrative of the Massacre at Chicago, a pamphlet published in Chicago by Ellis & Fergus. In five short chapters she wrote about the experiences of the Kinzie family just before, during, and after the August 15, 1812, battle that took place as Potawatomi warriors ambushed a United States Army contingent as it withdrew from Fort Dearborn (which Kinzie labeled the Massacre at Chicago). According to an advertisement at the front of the pamphlet, "This little record taken up many years since from the lips of those who had been eye-witnesses of the events described was not designed for publication. It was made simply for the purpose of preserving for the children of the writer, a faithful picture of the perilous scenes through which those near and dear to them had been called to pass." Included in the Narrative is a map drawn by the author that was the first printed in Chicago.

In 1856 Kinzie's Wau-Bun: The "Early Day" in the North-West was published by Derby & Jackson of New York and a year later was republished by D. B. Cooke of Chicago. It remains in print to this day. Kinzie's intention was to set out the early history of the region and to highlight the role of the Kinzie family in this process. At the core of Wau-Bun are the three chapters from the Narrative on the Battle of Fort Dearborn. Wau-Bun also includes an account of Kinzie's experiences in Wisconsin, a depiction of 1831 Chicago, and engravings of her drawings. With a strong and clear voice, she introduced people, places, and events that might otherwise have slipped from view.

Wau-Bun received attention from the press locally and nationally. On May 7, 1856, the Chicago Daily Tribune declared, "All classes of readers ... will greet warmly 'Wau-bun' and heartily thank Mrs. John H. Kinzie for giving it to the public ... [which] will be grateful to her for the glimpse of Pioneer life she has given us with so much delicacy of feeling and of spirit." On May 25 the New York Herald opined about the book, "As a faithful and well-drawn picture of the life of those pioneers of the American wilderness who have paved the way for civilization, it deserves to rank with the best sketches of the sort that have as yet been published."

Twentieth-century scholars were not so laudatory. Milo Quaife, a historian of the upper Midwest, opined that "Mrs. Kinzie had but the vaguest comprehension of the historian's calling." Therefore he suggested the work be used mostly as primary "source material." More recently social historians have expressed appreciation of Kinzie's focus on everyday life. She is remembered as one of the first female historians in the United States, as well as an early Illinois novelist.

"Zouave Cadets Quickstep Dedicated to the U.S. Zouave Cadets Governors Guard of Illinois"

A. J. Vaas, Conductor of the Light Guard Band * Chicago: Root & Cady, 1860

Alison Hinderliter

Some Civil War–era American soldiers, both Union and Confederate, dressed in flashy finery inspired by the French Army's Crimean War–era Zouave soldiers. The French in turn had borrowed their uniform fashion from the North African Zouaoua tribe of Berbers. The outfit included baggy breeches (sometimes decorated with braid), white leggings, open-collar jackets and vests, and occasionally brilliant red fezzes or turbans with tassels. Zouave soldiers were widely admired for their discipline and elite fighting skills.

Elmer E. Ellsworth (1837–61) moved to Chicago from New York State around 1856 to become a law clerk. In Chicago he befriended Charles A. DeVilliers, who had been a surgeon in the French Army in Algiers and who taught him sword-fighting and some Zouave drills. Ellsworth, an enthusiastic student, founded his own regiment of Zouave fighters in Chicago, creating a manual of arms for light infantry and enlisting hundreds of Chicago men. By the summer of 1859, Ellsworth's Zouave cadets were an established regiment and in constant demand to exhibit their skills. On one occasion, a competitive drill held on September 15, 1859, the cadets earned a top prize of $500 before an audience of seventy thousand. In January–February 1860, Ellsworth and some of his cadets went to train a group of Zouave soldiers in Springfield. There he met and impressed Abraham Lincoln. On January 23, 1860, Illinois governor William Henry Bissell appointed the US Zouave Cadets the Governor's Guard of Illinois.

The Chicago sheet-music publishing firm Root & Cady was eager to capitalize on the popularity of Ellsworth and his Zouaves. Root & Cady was founded in Chicago in 1858 as a music store by Ebenezer Towner Root (1822–96; his brother was the composer George Frederick Root) and Chauncey Marvin Cady (1824–89), a conductor and amateur singer. Within a year of its opening, Root & Cady was Chicago's largest music store, specializing in the sale and repair of a variety of musical instruments. The store then added to its offerings printed music, first imported from New York and Boston and then, beginning in September 1859 — less than one year after the company's establishment — published under the firm's own name. While there was a large and active community of sheetmusic firms in Chicago in the nineteenth century, Root & Cady not only became the city's most predominant but also rose to national prominence as a major publisher of pro-Union Civil War–era music.

Composer and bandleader A. J. Vaas (1820–?) had already written several polkas for Root & Cady; his work "Zouave Cadets Quickstep," the firm's fifteenth publication, was issued and entered into Library of Congress copyright on April 13, 1860. On August 20, 1860, the Chicago Daily Tribune reported that Root & Cady was receiving daily orders in the hundreds for this piece, which went on to be published in at least eleven editions. The beautiful cover, printed by Chicago's first lithographer, Edward Mendel (1827–84), was created for at least the sixth edition onward. The figure standing second from the right in the lithograph is thought to be Ellsworth. The piece gave Root & Cady its first nationwide success. How many copies were printed and sold in total is unknown because of the destruction of Root & Cady's company records in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871.

Chicago Illustrated 1830–1866

Literary description by James W. Sheahan esq. * Illustrations by The Chicago Lithographing Co. * Chicago: Jevne and Almini, 1866–67

David Buisseret

The publication of Chicago Illustrated in 1866–67 was an extraordinary act of faith in the emergent city. The work was planned for one hundred plates and eventually contained fifty-two. However, this was at a time when in North America only New York and San Francisco could boast a larger number of published lithographic views, eighty or so; towns such as Baltimore, Cincinnati, Montreal, Philadelphia, Quebec, and St. Louis could muster only twenty or so such views at that time. The publishers, Otto Jevne and Peter Almini, had come to Chicago from Norway and Sweden, respectively; before the publication of Chicago Illustrated they had been chiefly known as ornamental painters, a skill that they had learned in their homelands. After the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, they continued to follow their first profession.

For the images in their new publication, they called on a neighboring business, the Chicago Lithographing Company, which had been founded about 1865 by Louis Kurz (1833–1921) and three others. Kurz was responsible for drawing the images and played an important role in making the lithographic plates. An Austrian artist from Salzburg, he had immigrated to the United States in 1848, coming to Chicago in 1853. The Chicago Lithographing Company did not survive the Fire, but Kurz lived on for many years, undertaking numerous other lithographic projects; he became particularly famous for his (largely inaccurate) Civil War scenes.

The text for the images was provided by newspaperman J. W. Sheahan (1824–83). Born in Baltimore, he had come in 1854 to Chicago, where for six years he published the Chicago Times and then between 1860 and 1865 the Chicago Post. Sheahan was a very active journalist who, as early as January 1872, published an account of the Great Fire titled The Great Conflagration: Chicago, Its Past, Present and Future; the boosterism is manifest.

Sheahan's text for Chicago Illustrated was relatively pedestrian in comparison to the often very sprightly work of Kurz. Most of his images show buildings that would be consumed in the Fire. Constituting the best visual evidence of their appearance, the plates exude an almost palpable sense of the hustle and bustle of pre-Fire Chicago, as seen in a plate with a dramatic perspective view at State and Lake Streets of large buildings housing goods of all kinds for sale. At the end of Lake Street, which is filled with people, horse-drawn carriages, supply transports, and more, is the city's main train station, the Central Railroad Depot. The many church images in Chicago Illustrated remind us of the central importance to the city of the emerging parish structure (page 261). Two of the best-known plates show the giant water intake, or crib, far out in the lake, and the still-extant Water Tower (on Michigan Avenue) by which lake water could be distributed in the city. In the commentary Sheahan went out of his way to emphasize the skill of the engineers in constructing a large tunnel running for a mile under the lake to the crib; clearly he felt that the work of such men could bear comparison with the great bridges and other works then being undertaken in other cities throughout the Western world.

In general Chicago Illustrated is a paean to the new colossus rising alongside the lake. As the introductory essay breathlessly puts it, "These views ... will contain a comprehensive picture of this marvelous city," offering "striking evidence of the city's improvement and enterprise." So they did.

The Great Chicago Lake Tunnel

The Causes Which Led to Its Conception; the Great Undertaking; Obstacles Encountered; How the Work Was Performed; Launch of the Crib, Etc. Together with Sketches of the Visits of Several Illustrious Parties to the Works, and a Midnight Train of Cars Beneath Lake Michigan. Also the Successful Completion of the Great Enterprise. Illustrated

[John M. Wing] * Chicago: Published by Jack Wing, The Western News Company, Sole Agents, 1867

Carl Smith

This sixty-four-page booklet was prepared quickly to capitalize on interest in a major undertaking critical to Chicago's health and growth. When it went into service in March 1867, the tunnel under the bottom of Lake Michigan connected a wooden intake "crib" two miles from shore to the now-iconic limestone Gothic pumping station and water tower straddling Pine Street (subsequently Michigan Avenue) at Chicago Avenue. Situating the crib this far out would fail to end the potentially catastrophic hazard to the water supply posed by the appallingly polluted Chicago River, which flowed into the lake. It would take an even grander engineering achievement, the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal, which opened in 1900, to address the problem more effectively by reversing the direction of the river's current.

Of particular interest is the idiosyncratic career of the booklet's author-publisher, John Mansir Wing (1844–1917). He was among the legion of ambitious individuals drawn to booming Chicago. Arriving from Upstate New York in 1865, Wing became a reporter for a series of Chicago papers. He then struck out on his own, producing a booklet on another heroic piece of Chicago infrastructure, the Union Stock Yard, which opened late in 1865. Wing's was a one-man operation. He not only wrote the text but also drummed up advertising, supervised publication, and secured sales outlets.

The stockyard booklet inspired the one on the tunnel. Wing described his efforts in his diary, which provides much insight into this unconventional young man and single male life in the rising metropolis. The entries are both predictably self-absorbed and surprisingly candid, including accounts of Wing's carousing and his sexual encounters with men. They also reveal the challenges facing an independent entrepreneur trying to bring a work like this to press. Wing sometimes accepted goods, including a music box and a rifle, in lieu of cash as payment from advertisers. He agonized as he awaited the delayed delivery of illustrations he had purchased from Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, which had recently featured the tunnel. Once the booklet appeared, he turned his considerable energies to marketing it.

The Great Chicago Lake Tunnel sold for fifty cents. Wing charged distributors — the main one was John R. Walsh's Western News Company — half that price. Disappointment with Walsh led to Wing's breaking with Western News for the two editions that soon followed, which contain more ads. In 1874 Wing (now listed as J. M. rather than Jack) issued an expanded text (titled The Tunnels and Water System of Chicago) that covers the extension of the water system, the building of a second intake tunnel, and the recent construction of pedestrian and carriage tunnels under the Chicago River, one at Washington Street and the other at LaSalle Street.

By that time Wing was on his way to making his fortune as publisher of two leading trade magazines. The Land Owner chronicled Chicago's real estate market before and after the Great Fire, while the Western Brewer was devoted to the city's thriving beer industry. Wing retired a rich man in 1888, when he was still in his mid-forties. He became a serious if undistinguished book collector, immersing himself as well in the related hobby of extra illustration, which entails taking apart existing works, meticulously cutting in or inserting visual materials clipped from other sources, and then rebinding the resulting pages into new volumes. Like his diaries, these are in the collections of the Newberry Library, Chicago. But perhaps Wing's most significant contribution to the city's literary life is the generous endowment in his will of the Newberry's John M. Wing Foundation on the History of Printing, one of the most noted collections of its kind.

Chicago: Past, Present, Future

John S. Wright * Chicago: Sold by the Western News Company, and All Chicago Booksellers, 1868

Eric Slauter

The morning after the Great Fire of 1871, the printer of Chicago: Past, Present, Future hailed its author on the street. "Well, Wright, what do you think now of the future of Chicago?" An optimist and opportunist, John S. Wright (1815–74) had a vision: "Chicago will have more men, more money, more business within five years, than she would have had without this fire."

Wright's faith in his city survived his own "pecuniary reverses": he made and lost two fortunes before writing his book. Arriving in Chicago from Massachusetts in 1832, he speculated in real estate, paid for the first public school, and amassed $200,000 in property before defaulting in the panic of 1837. The inaugural issue of Chicago's first newspaper in 1839 promoted Wright's new commodities business, but that failed too.

Wright recovered. With no experience in farming or publishing, he founded the weekly newspaper Prairie Farmer in 1841 and encouraged growth of the grain trade. Two centuries later, the paper is still going. In 1850 he engineered a petition drive to secure a congressional land grant for the Illinois Central Railroad, furthering Chicago's development and its connections with the East and South.