The Windy City

I have struck a city – a real city – and they call it Chicago… I urgently desire never to see it again. It is inhabited by savages.

~ Rudyard Kipling

A bit of History:

• Began as a campground to the Potawatomi Indians
• French and American Fur traders settled the site in 1783
• Fort Dearborn was built by US Army in 1803.
• 1812 Potawatomi came back and burned the Fort down and massacred its inhabitants
• 1833 the whites returned and rebuilt the settlement and Fort
• Industry bloom between 1833 and the War between the States.
• Chicago was the center of rail and canal traffic through the whole region; pop. 100,000
• Traded grain, milled steel, and slaughtered cattle and hogs.
• The War drove expansion of all those industries and added manufacturing of guns, clothing, plows, rail cars, engines, and reapers to the city's domain
• 1871 Great Fire struck most of the city destroyed
• Chicago rose from ashes and embraced new technologies: steel-framed skyscrapers, ghost rock refineries, electrical wires, telephones, and every modern convenience.
• 1893 Colombian Exposition(World's Fair) showed Chicago off as a model city for the world.
• 1909 the population reached 2.2 million of ALL nationalities (Irish, Germans, Chinese, Scandinavians, Italians, Hungarians, Poles, Jews, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, Czechs, Croatians, and Greeks)
• Growth problems: Urban poverty, infant mortality skyrocketed, Offal and chemicals turned the Chicago River into a fizzy murk; coal smoke air. Labor Unions marched for 8 hour work days, fiery preachers called for reform and socialism, gangs warred over turf and protection, assassinated Pinkertons, and the big bosses cracked everyone's heads in riot after riot.
• Chicago became a magnet for the black population in the Confederacy. Black sharecroppers poured North during Confederate President Wilson's brief "New Opening" policy, seeking better jobs during the war, and better race relations. They called the "Great Migration".
• 1919 Prohibition Starts in the North. It still goes on today making bootlegging the number one criminal business in the north. The South and Canada profit off of the Norths Prohibition.