Part II

An Awful Fight

Chicago, 1891—93

    Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building, after the storm of June 13, 1892.

Convocation

    ON TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 24, 1891, Burnham, Olmsted, Hunt, and the other architects gathered in the library on the top floor of the Rookery to present drawings of the fair’s main structures to the Grounds and Buildings Committee. The architects met by themselves throughout the morning, with Hunt serving as chairman. His gout forced him to keep one leg on the table. Olmsted looked worn and gray, except for his eyes, which gleamed beneath his bald skull like marbles of lapis. A new man had joined the group, Augustus St. Gaudens, one of America’s best-known sculptors, whom Charles McKim had invited to help evaluate the designs. The members of the Grounds and Buildings Committee arrived at two o’clock and filled the library with the scent of cigars and frosted wool.

    The light in the room was sallow, the sun already well into its descent. Wind thumped the windows. In the hearth at the north wall a large fire cracked and lisped, flushing the room with a dry sirocco that caused frozen skin to tingle.

    At Hunt’s brusque prodding the architects got to work.

    One by one they walked to the front of the room, unrolled their drawings, and displayed them upon the wall. Something had happened among the architects, and it became evident immediately, as though a new force had entered the room. They spoke, Burnham said, “almost in whispers.”

    Each building was more lovely, more elaborate than the last, and all were immense—fantastic things on a scale never before attempted.

    Hunt hobbled to the front and displayed his Administration Building, intended to be the most important at the fair and the portal through which most visitors would enter. Its center was an octagon topped by a dome that rose 275 feet from floor to peak, higher than the dome of the U.S. Capitol.

    The next structure presented was even bigger. If successfully erected, George B. Post’s Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building would be the largest building ever constructed and consume enough steel to build two Brooklyn Bridges. All that space, moreover, was to be lit inside and out with electric lamps. Twelve electric elevators would carry visitors to the building’s upper reaches. Four would rise through a central tower to an interior bridge 220 feet above the floor, which in turn would lead to an exterior promenade offering foot-tingling views of the distant Michigan shore, “a panorama,” as one guidebook later put it, “such as never before has been accorded to mortals.”

    Post proposed to top his building with a dome 450 feet high, which would have made the building not only the biggest in the world but also the tallest. As Post looked around the room, he saw in the eyes of his peers great admiration but also something else. A murmur passed among them. Such was this new level of cohesion among the architects that Post understood at once. The dome was too much—not too tall to be built, simply too proud for its context. It would diminish Hunt’s building and in so doing diminish Hunt and disrupt the harmony of the other structures on the Grand Court. Without prodding, Post said quietly, “I don’t think I shall advocate that dome; probably I shall modify the building.” There was unspoken but unanimous approval.

    Sullivan had already modified his own building, at Burnham’s suggestion. Originally Burnham wanted Adler & Sullivan to design the fair’s Music Hall, but partly out of a continued sense of having been wronged by Burnham, the partners had turned the project down. Burnham later offered them the Transportation Building, which they accepted. Two weeks before the meeting Burnham wrote to Sullivan and urged him to modify his design to create “one grand entrance toward the east and make this much richer than either of the others you had proposed… Am sure that the effect of your building will be much finer than by the old method of two entrances on this side, neither of which could be so fine and effective as the one central feature.” Sullivan took the suggestion but never acknowledged its provenance, even though that one great entrance eventually became the talk of the fair.

    All the architects, including Sullivan, seemed to have been captured by the same spell, although Sullivan later would disavow the moment. As each architect unrolled his drawings, “the tension of feeling was almost painful,” Burnham said. St. Gaudens, tall and lean and wearing a goatee, sat in a corner very still, like a figure sculpted from wax. On every face Burnham saw a “quiet intentness.” It was clear to him that now, finally, the architects understood that Chicago had been serious about its elaborate plans for the fair. “Drawing after drawing was unrolled,” Burnham said, “and as the day passed it was apparent that a picture had been forming in the minds of those present—a vision far more grand and beautiful than hitherto presented by the richest imagination.”

    As the light began to fade, the architects lit the library’s gas jets, which hissed like mildly perturbed cats. From the street below, the top floor of the Rookery seemed aflame with the shifting light of the jets and the fire in the great hearth. “The room was still as death,” Burnham said, “save for the low voice of the speaker commenting on his design. It seemed as if a great magnet held everyone in its grasp.”

    The last drawing went up. For a few moments afterward the silence continued.

    Lyman Gage, still president of the exposition, was first to move. He was a banker, tall, straight-backed, conservative in demeanor and dress, but he rose suddenly and walked to a window, trembling with emotion. “You are dreaming, gentlemen, dreaming,” he whispered. “I only hope that half the vision may be realized.”

    Now St. Gaudens rose. He had been quiet all day. He rushed to Burnham and took his hands in his own. “I never expected to see such a moment,” he said. “Look here, old fellow, do you realize this has been the greatest meeting of artists since the fifteenth century?”

    Olmsted too sensed that something extraordinary had occurred, but the meeting also troubled him. First, it confirmed his growing concern that the architects were losing sight of the nature of the thing they were proposing to build. The shared vision expressed in their drawings struck him as being too sober and monumental. After all, this was a world’s fair, and fairs should be fun. Aware of the architects’ increasing emphasis on size, Olmsted shortly before the meeting had written to Burnham suggesting ways to enliven the grounds. He wanted the lagoons and canals strewn with waterfowl of all kinds and colors and traversed continually by small boats. Not just any boats, however: becoming boats. The subject became an obsession for him. His broad view of what constituted landscape architecture included anything that grew, flew, floated, or otherwise entered the scenery he created. Roses produced dabs of red; boats added intricacy and life. But it was crucial to choose the right kind of boat. He dreaded what would happen if the decision were left to one of the fair’s many committees. He wanted Burnham to know his views from the start.

    “We should try to make the boating feature of the exposition a gay and lively one,” he wrote. He loathed the clatter and smoke of steam launches; he wanted electric boats designed specifically for the park, with emphasis on graceful lines and silent operation. It was most important that these boats be constantly but quietly in motion, to provide diversion for the eye, peace for the ear. “What we shall want is a regular service of boats like that of an omnibus line in a city street,” he wrote. He also envisioned a fleet of large birchbark canoes paddled by Indians in deerskin and feathers and recommended that various foreign watercraft be moored in the fair’s harbor. “I mean such as Malay proas, catamarans, Arab dhows, Chinese sanpans, Japanese pilot boats, Turkish caiques, Esquimaux kiacks, Alaskan war canoes, the hooded boats of the Swiss Lakes, and so on.”

    A far more important outcome of the Rookery meeting, however, was Olmsted’s recognition that the architects’ noble dreams magnified and complicated the already-daunting challenge that faced him in Jackson Park. When he and Calvert Vaux had designed Central Park in New York, they had planned for visual effects that would not be achieved for decades; here he would have just twenty-six months to reshape the desolation of the park into a prairie Venice and plant its shores, islands, terraces, and walks with whatever it took to produce a landscape rich enough to satisfy his vision. What the architects’ drawings had shown him, however, was that in reality he would have far fewer than twenty-six months. The portion of his work that would most shape how visitors appraised his landscape—the planting and grooming of the grounds immediately surrounding each building—could only be done after the major structures were completed and the grounds cleared of construction equipment, temporary tracks and roads, and other aesthetic impedimenta. Yet the palaces unveiled in the Rookery were so immense, so detailed, that their construction was likely to consume nearly all the remaining time, leaving little for him.

    Soon after the meeting Olmsted composed a strategy for the transformation of Jackson Park. His ten-page memorandum captured the essence of all he had come to believe about the art of landscape architecture and how it should strive to conjure effects greater than the mere sum of petals and leaves.

    He concentrated on the fair’s central lagoon, which his dredges soon would begin carving from the Jackson Park shore. The dredges would leave an island at the center of the lagoon, to be called, simply, the Wooded Island. The fair’s main buildings would rise along the lagoon’s outer banks. Olmsted saw this lagoon district as the most challenging portion of the fair. Just as the Grand Court was to be the architectural heart of the fair, so the central lagoon and Wooded Island were to constitute its landscape centerpiece.

    Above all he wanted the exposition landscape to produce an aura of “mysterious poetic effect.” Flowers were not to be used as an ordinary gardener would use them. Rather, every flower, shrub, and tree was to be deployed with an eye to how each would act upon the imagination. This was to be accomplished, Olmsted wrote, “through the mingling intricately together of many forms of foliage, the alternation and complicated crossing of salient leaves and stalks of varying green tints in high lights with other leaves and stalks, behind and under them, and therefore less defined and more shaded, yet partly illumined by light reflected from the water.”

    He hoped to provide visitors with a banquet of glimpses—the undersides of leaves sparkling with reflected light; flashes of brilliant color between fronds of tall grass waving in the breeze. Nowhere, he wrote, should there be “a display of flowers demanding attention as such. Rather, the flowers to be used for the purpose should have the effect of flecks and glimmers of bright color imperfectly breaking through the general greenery. Anything approaching a gorgeous, garish or gaudy display of flowers is to be avoided.”

    Sedges and ferns and graceful bulrush would be planted on the banks of the Wooded Island to conjure density and intricacy and “to slightly screen, without hiding, flowers otherwise likely to be too obtrusive.” He envisioned large patches of cattails broken by bulrush, iris, and flag and pocketed with blooming plants, such as flame-red cardinal flower and yellow creeping buttercup—planted, if necessary, on slightly raised mounds so as to be just visible among the swaying green spires in the foreground.

    On the far shore, below the formal terraces of the buildings, he planned to position fragrant plants such as honeysuckle and summersweet, so that their perfume would rise into the nostrils of visitors pausing on the terraces to view the island and the lagoon.

    The overall effect, he wrote, “is thus to be in some degree of the character of a theatrical scene, to occupy the Exposition stage for a single summer.”

    It was one thing to visualize all this on paper, another to execute it. Olmsted was nearly seventy, his mouth aflame, his head roaring, each night a desert of wakefulness. Even without the fair he faced an intimidating portfolio of works in progress, chief among them the grounds of Biltmore, the Vanderbilt estate in North Carolina. If everything went perfectly—if his health did not degrade any further, if the weather held, if Burnham completed the other buildings on time, if strikes did not destroy the fair, if the many committees and directors, which Olmsted called “that army our hundreds of masters,” learned to leave Burnham alone—Olmsted might be able to complete his task on time.

    A writer for Engineering Magazine asked the question no one had raised at the Rookery: “How is it possible that this vast amount of construction, greatly exceeding that of the Paris Exhibition of 1889, will be ready in two years?”

    For Burnham, too, the meeting in the Rookery had produced a heightened awareness of how little time remained. Everything seemed to take longer than it should, and nothing went smoothly. The first real work in Jackson Park began on February 11, when fifty Italian immigrants employed by McArthur Brothers, a Chicago company, began digging a drainage ditch. It was nothing, routine. But word of the work spread, and five hundred union men stormed the park and drove the workers off. Two days later, Friday the thirteenth, six hundred men gathered at the park to protest McArthur’s use of what they alleged were “imported” workers. The next day two thousand men, many armed with sharpened sticks, advanced on McArthur’s workers, seized two, and began beating them. Police arrived. The crowd backed off. McArthur asked Mayor Cregier for protection; Cregier assigned the city’s corporation counsel, a young lawyer named Clarence Darrow, to look into it. Two nights later the city’s unions met with officers of the fair to demand that they limit the workday to eight hours, pay union-scale wages, and hire union workers before all others. After two weeks of deliberation the fair’s directors accepted the eight-hour day but said they’d think about the rest.

    There was conflict, too, among the fair’s overseers. The National Commission, made up of politicians and headed by Director-General George Davis, wanted financial control; the Exposition Company, run by Chicago’s leading businessmen and headed by President Lyman Gage, refused: The company had raised the money, and by God the company would spend it, in whatever way it chose.

    Committees ruled everything. In his private practice Burnham was accustomed to having complete control over expenditures needed to build his skyscrapers. Now he needed to seek approval from the Exposition Company’s executive committee at every step, even to buy drafting boards. It was all immensely frustrating. “We must push this now,” Burnham said. “The delays have seemed interminable.”

    But he did make progress. For example, he directed a contest to choose a female architect to design the Woman’s Building for the fair. Sophia Hayden of Boston won. She was twenty-one years old. Her fee was the prize money: a thousand dollars. The male architects each got ten thousand. There had been skepticism that a mere woman would be able to conceive such an important building on her own. “Examination of the facts show[s] that this woman had no help whatever in working up the designs,” Burnham wrote. “It was done by herself in her home.”

    In March, however, all the architects acknowledged that things were proceeding far too slowly—that if they built their structures as originally planned out of stone, steel, and brick, the buildings could not possibly be finished by Opening Day. They voted instead to clad their buildings in “staff,” a resilient mixture of plaster and jute that could be molded into columns and statuary and spread over wood frames to provide the illusion of stone. “There will not be a brick on the grounds,” Burnham said.

    In the midst of all this, as the workload increased, Burnham realized he could put off no longer the hiring of a designer to replace his beloved John Root. He needed someone to manage his firm’s ongoing work while he tended to the exposition. A friend recommended Charles B. Atwood of New York. McKim shook his head. There were stories about Atwood, and questions of dependability. Nonetheless, Burnham arranged to meet Atwood in New York, at the Brunswick Hotel.

    Atwood stood him up. Burnham waited an hour, then left to catch his train. As he was crossing the street, a handsome man in a black bowler and cape with black gun-muzzle eyes approached him and asked if he was Mr. Burnham.

    “I am,” Burnham said.

    “I’m Charles Atwood. Did you want to see me?”

    Burnham glared. “I am going back to Chicago; I’ll think it over and let you know.” Burnham caught his train. Once back in Chicago he went directly to his office. A few hours later Atwood walked in. He had followed Burnham from New York.

    Burnham gave him the job.

    Atwood had a secret, as it happens. He was an opium addict. It explained those eyes and his erratic behavior. But Burnham thought him a genius.

    As a reminder to himself and anyone who visited his office in the shanty, Burnham posted a sign over his desk bearing a single word: RUSH.

    Time was so short, the Executive Committee began planning exhibits and appointing world’s fair commissioners to secure them. In February the committee voted to dispatch a young army officer, Lieutenant Mason A. Schufeldt, to Zanzibar to begin a journey to locate a tribe of Pygmies only recently revealed to exist by explorer Henry Stanley, and to bring to the fair “a family of twelve or fourteen of the fierce little midgets.”

    The committee gave Lieutenant Schufeldt two and a half years to complete his mission.

    Beyond the fairgrounds’ new fence, turmoil and grief engulfed Chicago. Union leaders threatened to organize unions worldwide to oppose the fair. The Inland Architect, a prominent Chicago journal, reported: “That un-American institution, the trades union, has developed its un-American principle of curtailing or abolishing the personal freedom of the individual in a new direction, that of seeking, as far as possible, to cripple the World’s Fair.” Such behavior, the journal said, “would be called treason in countries less enlightened and more arbitrary than ours.” The nation’s financial condition worsened. Offices in the newest of Chicago’s skyscrapers remained vacant. Just blocks from the Rookery, Burnham & Root’s Temperance Building stood huge and black and largely empty. Twenty-five thousand unemployed workers roamed the city. At night they slept in police stations and in the basement of City Hall. The unions grew stronger.

    The old world was passing. P. T. Barnum died; grave-robbers attempted to steal his corpse. William Tecumseh Sherman died, too. Atlanta cheered. Reports from abroad asserted, erroneously, that Jack the Ripper had returned. Closer at hand, a gory killing in New York suggested he might have migrated to America.

    In Chicago the former warden of the Illinois State Penitentiary at Joliet, Major R. W. McClaughry, began readying the city for the surge in crime that everyone expected the fair to produce, establishing an office in the Auditorium to receive and distribute Bertillon identifications of known criminals. Devised by French criminologist Alphonse Bertillon, the system required police to make a precise survey of the dimensions and physical peculiarities of suspects. Bertillon believed that each man’s measurements were unique and thus could be used to penetrate the aliases that criminals deployed in moving from city to city. In theory, a detective in Cincinnati could telegraph a few distinctive numbers to investigators in New York with the expectation that if a match existed, New York would find it.

    A reporter asked Major McClaughry whether the fair really would attract the criminal element. He paused a moment, then said, “I think it quite necessary that the authorities here should be prepared to meet and deal with the greatest congregation of criminals that ever yet met in this country.”

Cuckoldry

    AT THE HOLMES BUILDING at Sixty-third and Wallace, now known widely in the neighborhood as “the castle,” the Conner family was in turmoil. Lovely, dark Gertrude—Ned’s sister—one day came to Ned in tears and told him she could not stay in the house another moment. She vowed to catch the first train back to Muscatine, Iowa. Ned begged her to tell him what had occurred, but she refused.

    Ned knew that she and a young man had begun courting, and he believed her tears must have resulted from something he had said or done. Possibly the two had been “indiscreet,” although he did not think Gertrude capable of so drastic a moral lapse. The more he pressed her for an explanation, the more troubled and adamant she became. She wished she had never come to Chicago. It was a blighted, hellish place full of noise and dust and smoke and inhuman towers that blocked the sun, and she hated it—hated especially this gloomy building and the ceaseless clamor of construction.

    When Holmes came by, she would not look at him. Her color rose. Ned did not notice.

    Ned hired an express company to collect her trunk and saw her to the station. Still she would not explain. Through tears, she said good-bye. The train huffed from the station.

    In Iowa—in safe, bland Muscatine—Gertrude fell ill, an accident of nature. The disease proved fatal. Holmes told Ned how sorry he was to hear of her passing, but in his eyes there was only a flat blue calm, like the lake on a still August morning.

    With Gertrude gone, the tension between Ned and Julia increased. Their marriage never had been tranquil. Back in Iowa they had come close to separating. Now, again, their relationship was crumbling. Their daughter, Pearl, became commensurately more difficult to manage, her behavior marked by periods of sullen withdrawal and eruptions of anger. Ned understood none of it. He was “of an easy-going innocent nature,” a reporter later observed, “he mistrusted nothing.” He did not see what even his friends and regular customers saw. “Some of my friends told me there was something between Holmes and my wife,” he said later. “At first I did not believe it.”

    Despite the warnings and his own mounting uneasiness, Ned admired Holmes. While he, Ned, was but a jeweler in someone else’s store, Holmes controlled a small empire—and had yet to turn thirty years old. Holmes’s energy and success made Ned feel even smaller than he already was inclined to feel, especially now that Julia had begun looking at him as if he had just emerged from a rendering vat at the stockyards.

    Thus Ned was particularly susceptible to an offer from Holmes that seemed likely to increase his own stature in Julia’s eyes. Holmes proposed to sell Ned the entire pharmacy, under terms that Ned—naďve Ned—found generous beyond all expectation. Holmes would increase his salary from twelve to eighteen dollars a week, so that Ned could pay Holmes six dollars a week to cover the purchase. Ned wouldn’t even have to worry about handling the six dollars—Holmes would deduct it from the new eighteen-dollar salary each week, automatically. Holmes promised also to take care of all the legal details and to record the transfer with city officials. Ned would get his twelve dollars a week just as always, but now he would be the owner of a fine store in a prosperous neighborhood destined to become even wealthier once the world’s fair began operation.

    Ned accepted, giving no thought to why Holmes would wish to shed such a healthy business. The offer eased his concerns about Holmes and Julia. If Holmes and she were involved in an indiscreet liaison, would he offer Ned the jewel of his Englewood empire?

    To Ned’s sorrow, he soon found that his new status did nothing to ease the tension between himself and Julia. The ferocity of their arguments only increased, as did the length of the cold silences that filled whatever other time they spent together. Holmes was sympathetic. He bought Ned lunch at the first-floor restaurant and told Ned how certain he was that the marriage would be salvaged. Julia was an ambitious woman and clearly a very beautiful one, but she would come to her senses in short order.

    Holmes’s sympathy was disarming. The idea that Holmes might be the cause of Julia’s discontent seemed more and more improbable. Holmes even wanted Ned to buy life insurance, for surely once his marital strife subsided, he would want to protect Julia and Pearl from destitution in the event of his death. He recommended that Ned also consider insuring Pearl’s life and offered to pay the initial premiums. He brought an insurance man, C. W. Arnold, to meet with Ned.

    Arnold explained that he was building a new agency and wanted to sell as many policies as possible in order to attract the attention of the biggest insurance companies. To secure a policy, all Ned had to pay was a dollar, Arnold said—just one dollar to begin protecting his family forever.

    But Ned did not want a policy. Arnold tried to change his mind. Ned refused and refused and finally told Arnold that if he really needed a dollar, Ned would simply give him one.

    Arnold and Holmes looked at each other, their eyes empty of all expression.

    Soon creditors began appearing at the pharmacy demanding repayment of mortgages secured by the store’s furnishings and its stock of salves and ointments and other goods. Ned was unaware of the existence of these debts and believed the creditors were trying to defraud him—until they presented documents signed by the previous owner, H. H. Holmes. Convinced now that these were bona-fide debts, Ned promised to pay them as soon as he was able.

    Here too Holmes was sympathetic, but there was nothing he could do. Any thriving venture accumulated debts. He had assumed that Ned understood at least that much about business. At any rate it was something to which Ned would now have to become accustomed. The sale, he reminded Ned, was final.

    This latest disappointment rekindled Ned’s uneasiness about Holmes and Julia. He began to suspect that his friends might indeed be correct in believing that Holmes and Julia were engaged in an illicit affair. It would explain the change in Julia, certainly, and might even explain Holmes’s sale of the pharmacy—an unstated trade: the store in exchange for Julia.

    Ned did not yet confront Julia with his suspicions. He told her simply that if her behavior toward him did not change, if her coldness and hostility continued, he and she would have to separate.

    She snapped, “Separation couldn’t come too soon to suit me.”

    But they remained together a short while longer. Their battles became more frequent. Finally Ned shouted that he was done, the marriage was over. He spent the night in the barbershop on the first floor, directly below their apartment. He heard her footsteps as she moved about on the floor above.

    The next morning he told Holmes he was leaving and would abandon his interest in the store. When Holmes urged him to reconsider, Ned merely laughed. He moved out and took a new job with a jewelry store in downtown Chicago, H. Purdy & Co. Pearl remained with Julia and Holmes.

    Ned made one more attempt to win back his wife. “I told her after I left the building that if she would return to me and stop her quarreling we would live together again, but she refused to come back.”

    Ned vowed that one day he would return for Pearl. Soon he left Chicago and moved to Gilman, Illinois, where he met a young woman and began a formal courtship, which compelled him to visit Holmes’s building one more time, to seek a divorce decree. He got it but failed to gain custody of Pearl.

    With Ned gone and the divorce final, Holmes’s interest in Julia began to dissipate. He had promised her repeatedly that he would marry her once the decree was confirmed, but now he found the prospect repulsive. Pearl’s sullen, accusing presence had become especially unappealing.

    At night, after the first-floor stores had closed and Julia and Pearl and the building’s other tenants were asleep, he sometimes would descend to the basement, careful to lock the door behind him, and there ignite the flames of his kiln and marvel at its extraordinary heat.

Vexed

    BURNHAM SAW HIS FAMILY RARELY now. By the spring of 1891 he was living full time in the shanty at Jackson Park; Margaret stayed in Evanston with a few servants who helped her care for their five children. Only a modest train ride separated the Burnhams, but the mounting demands of the fair made that distance as difficult to span as the Isthmus of Panama. Burnham could send telegrams, but they forced a cold and clumsy brevity and afforded little privacy. So Burnham wrote letters, and wrote them often. “You must not think this hurry of my life will last forever,” he wrote in one letter. “I shall stop after the World’s Fair. I have made up my mind to this.” The exposition had become a “hurricane,” he said. “To be done with this flurry is my strongest wish.”

    Every dawn he left his quarters and inspected the grounds. Six steam-powered dredges the size of floating barns gnawed at the lakeshore, as five thousand men with shovels and wheelbarrows and horse-drawn graders slowly scraped the landscape raw, many of the men wearing bowlers and suitcoats as if they just happened to be passing by and on impulse chose to pitch in. Despite the presence of so many workers, there was a maddening lack of noise and bustle. The park was too big, the men too spread out, to deliver any immediate sense of work being done. The only reliable signs were the black plumes of smoke from the dredges and the ever-present scent of burning leaves from slash piles set aflame by workers. The brilliant white stakes that marked the perimeters of buildings imparted to the land the look of a Civil War burial ground. Burnham did find beauty in the rawness—“Among the trees of the Wooded Island the long white tents of the contractor’s camp gleamed in the sun, a soft, white note in the dun-colored landscape, and the pure blue line of the lake horizon made a cheerful contrast to the rugged and barren foreground”—but he also found deep frustration.

    The work advanced slowly, impeded by the worsening relationship between the fair’s two ruling bodies, the National Commission and the Exposition Company, and by the architects’ failure to get their drawings to Chicago on time. All the drawings were late. Equally aggravating was the fact that there still was no Eiffel challenger. Moreover, the exposition had entered that precarious early phase common to every great construction project when unexpected obstacles suddenly emerge.

    Burnham knew how to deal with Chicago’s notoriously flimsy soil, but Jackson Park surprised even him.

    Initially the bearing capacity of its ground was “practically an unknown quality,” as one engineer put it. In March 1891 Burnham ordered tests to gauge how well the soil would support the grand palaces then on the architects’ drafting tables. Of special concern was the fact that the buildings would be sited adjacent to newly dug canals and lagoons. As any engineer knew, soil under pressure tended to shift to fill adjacent excavations. The fair’s engineers conducted the first test twelve feet from the lagoon on ground intended to support the northeast corner of the Electricity Building. They laid a platform four feet square and loaded it with iron to a pressure of 2,750 pounds per square foot, twenty-two tons in all. They left it in place for fifteen days and found that it settled only one-quarter of an inch. Next they dug a deep trench four feet from the platform. Over the next two days the platform sank another eighth of an inch but no farther. This was good news. It meant that Burnham could use Root’s floating grillage for foundations without having to worry about catastrophic settlement.

    To make sure these properties were constant throughout the park, Burnham had his chief engineer, Abraham Gottlieb, test locations earmarked for other buildings. The tests yielded similar results—until Gottlieb’s men came to the site intended for George Post’s gigantic Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building. The soil destined to support the northern half of the building showed total settlement of less than one inch, consistent with the rest of the park. At the southern end of the site, however, the men made a disheartening discovery. Even as workers loaded the platform, it sank eight inches. Over the next four days it settled thirty inches more, and would have continued sinking if the engineers had not simply called off the test.

    Of course: Nearly all the soil of Jackson Park was competent to support floating foundations except the one portion destined to bear the fair’s biggest and heaviest building. Here, Burnham realized, contractors would have to drive piles at least down to hard-pan, an expensive complication and a source of additional delay.

    The problems with this building, however, had only just begun.

    In April 1891 Chicago learned the results of the latest mayoral election. In the city’s richest clubs, industrialists gathered to toast the fact that Carter Henry Harrison, whom they viewed as overly sympathetic to organized labor, had lost to Hempstead Washburne, a Republican. Burnham, too, allowed himself a moment of celebration. To him, Harrison represented the old Chicago of filth, smoke, and vice, everything the fair was designed to repudiate.

    The celebrations were tempered, however, by the fact that Harrison had lost by the narrowest of margins, fewer than four thousand votes. What’s more, he had achieved this near-victory without the support of a major party. Shunned by the Democrats, he had run as an independent.

    Elsewhere in the city, Patrick Prendergast grieved. Harrison was his hero, his hope. The margin was so narrow, however, that he believed that if Harrison ran again, he would win. Prendergast resolved to double his own efforts to help Harrison succeed.

    In Jackson Park Burnham faced repeated interruptions stemming from his de facto role as ambassador to the outside world, charged with cultivating goodwill and future attendance. Mostly these banquets, talks, and tours were time-squandering annoyances, as in June 1891 when, at the request of Director-General Davis, Burnham hosted a visit to Jackson Park by a battalion of foreign dignitaries that consumed two full days. Others were purely a pleasure. A few weeks earlier Thomas Edison, known widely as “the Wizard of Menlo Park,” had paid a visit to Burnham’s shanty. Burnham showed him around. Edison suggested the exposition use incandescent bulbs rather than arc lights, because the incandescent variety produced a softer light. Where arc lights could not be avoided, he said, they should be covered with white globes. And of course Edison urged the fair to use direct current, DC, the prevailing standard.

    The civility of this encounter belied a caustic battle being waged outside Jackson Park for the rights to illuminate the exposition. On one side was General Electric Company, which had been created when J. P. Morgan took over Edison’s company and merged it with several others and which now proposed to install a direct current system to light the fair. On the other side was Westinghouse Electric Company, with a bid to wire Jackson Park for alternating current, using patents that its founder, George Westinghouse, had acquired a few years earlier from Nikola Tesla.

    General Electric offered to do the job for $1.8 million, insisting the deal would not earn a penny’s profit. A number of exposition directors held General Electric stock and urged William Baker, president of the fair since Lyman Gage’s April retirement, to accept the bid. Baker refused, calling it “extortionate.” General Electric rather miraculously came back with a bid of $554,000. But Westinghouse, whose AC system was inherently cheaper and more efficient, bid $399,000. The exposition went with Westinghouse, and helped change the history of electricity.

    The source of Burnham’s greatest dismay was the failure of the architects to finish their drawings on schedule.

    If he had once been obsequious to Richard Hunt and the eastern men, he was not now. In a June 2, 1891, letter to Hunt, he wrote, “We are at a dead standstill waiting for your scale drawings. Can’t we have them as they are, and finish here?”

    Four days later he again prodded Hunt: “The delay you are causing us by not forwarding scale drawings is embarrassing in the extreme.”

    That same month a serious if unavoidable interruption hobbled the Landscape Department. Olmsted became ill—severely so. He attributed his condition to poisoning from an arsenic-based pigment called Turkey Red in the wallpaper of his Brookline home. It may, however, simply have been another bout of deep blue melancholia, the kind that had assailed him off and on for years.

    During his recuperation Olmsted ordered bulbs and plants for cultivation in two large nurseries established on the fairgrounds. He ordered Dusty Miller, Carpet Bugle, President Garfield heliotrope, Speedwell, Pennyroyal, English and Algerian ivies, verbena, vinca, and a rich palette of geraniums, among them Black Prince, Christopher Columbus, Mrs. Turner, Crystal Palace, Happy Thought, and Jeanne d’Arc. He dispatched an army of collectors to the shores of Lake Calumet, where they gathered twenty-seven traincar loads of iris, sedge, bulrush, and other semiaquatic plants and grasses. They collected an additional four thousand crates of pond lily roots, which Olmsted’s men quickly planted, only to watch most of the roots succumb to the ever-changing levels of the lake.

    In contrast to the lush growth within the nurseries, the grounds of the park had been scraped free of all vegetation. Workers enriched the soil with one thousand carloads of manure shipped from the Union Stock Yards and another two thousand collected from the horses working in Jackson Park. The presence of so much exposed earth and manure became a problem. “It was bad enough during the hot weather, when a south wind could blind the eyes of man and beast,” wrote Rudolf Ulrich, Olmsted’s landscape superintendent at the park, “but still worse during wet weather, the newly filled ground, which was still undrained, becoming soaked with water.”

    Horses sank to their bellies.

    It was midsummer 1891 by the time the last of the architects’ drawings were completed. As each set came in, Burnham advertised for bids. Recognizing that the architects’ delays had put everything behind schedule, he inserted into the construction contracts clauses that made him a “czar,” as the Chicago Tribune put it. Each contract contained a tight deadline for completion, with a financial penalty for every day beyond. Burnham had advertised the first contract on May 14, this for the Mines Building. He wanted it finished by the end of the year. That left at best about seven months for construction (roughly the amount of time a twenty-first-century homeowner would need to build a new garage). “He is the arbiter of all disputes and no provision is made for an appeal from his decision,” the Tribune reported. “If in the opinion of Mr. Burnham the builder is not employing a sufficient force of men to complete the work on time, Mr. Burnham is authorized to engage men himself and charge the cost to the builder.” The Mines Building was the first of the main exposition buildings to begin construction, but the work did not start until July 3, 1891, with less than sixteen months remaining until Dedication Day.

    As construction of the buildings at last got under way, anticipation outside the park began to increase. Colonel William Cody—Buffalo Bill—sought a concession for his Wild West show, newly returned from a hugely successful tour of Europe, but the fair’s Committee on Ways and Means turned him down on grounds of “incongruity.” Undeterred, Cody secured rights to a large parcel of land adjacent to the park. In San Francisco a twenty-one-year-old entrepreneur named Sol Bloom realized that the Chicago fair would let him at last take advantage of an asset he had acquired in Paris two years earlier. Entranced by the Algerian Village at the Paris exposition, he had bought the rights to display the village and its inhabitants at future events. The Ways and Means Committee rejected him, too. He returned to San Francisco intent on trying a different, more oblique means of winning a concession—one that ultimately would get him a lot more than he had bargained for. Meanwhile young Lieutenant Schufeldt had reached Zanzibar. On July 20 he telegraphed Exposition President William Baker that he was confident he could acquire as many Pygmies from the Congo as he wished, provided the king of Belgium consented. “President Baker wants these pygmies,” the Tribune said, “and so does everybody else around headquarters.”

    On the drafting board the fair did look spectacular. The centerpiece was the Grand Court, which everyone had begun calling the Court of Honor. With its immense palaces by Hunt, Post, Peabody, and the rest, the court by itself would be a marvel, but now nearly every state in the nation was planning a building, as were some two hundred companies and foreign governments. The exposition promised to surpass the Paris exposition on every level—every level that is, except one, and that persistent deficit troubled Burnham: The fair still had nothing planned that would equal, let alone eclipse, the Eiffel Tower. At nearly one thousand feet in height, the tower remained the tallest structure in the world and an insufferable reminder of the triumph of the Paris exposition. “To out-Eiffel Eiffel” had become a battle cry among the directors.

    A competition held by the Tribune brought a wave of implausible proposals. C. F. Ritchel of Bridgeport, Connecticut, suggested a tower with a base one hundred feet high by five hundred feet wide, within which Ritchel proposed to nest a second tower and, in this one, a third. At intervals a complicated system of hydraulic tubes and pumps would cause the towers to telescope slowly upward, a journey of several hours, then allow them to sink slowly back to their original configuration. The top of the tower would house a restaurant, although possibly a bordello would have been more apt.

    Another inventor, J. B. McComber, representing the Chicago-Tower Spiral-Spring Ascension and Toboggan Transportation Company, proposed a tower with a height of 8,947 feet, nearly nine times the height of the Eiffel Tower, with a base one thousand feet in diameter sunk two thousand feet into the earth. Elevated rails would lead from the top of the tower all the way to New York, Boston, Baltimore, and other cities. Visitors ready to conclude their visit to the fair and daring enough to ride elevators to the top would then toboggan all the way back home. “As the cost of the tower and its slides is of secondary importance,” McComber noted, “I do not mention it here, but will furnish figures upon application.”

    A third proposal demanded even more courage from visitors. This inventor, who gave his initials as R. T. E., envisioned a tower four thousand feet tall from which he proposed to hang a two-thousand-foot cable of “best rubber.” Attached at the bottom end of this cable would be a car seating two hundred people. The car and its passengers would be shoved off a platform and fall without restraint to the end of the cable, where the car would snap back upward and continue bouncing until it came to a stop. The engineer urged that as a precaution the ground “be covered with eight feet of feather bedding.”

    Everyone was thinking in terms of towers, but Burnham, for one, did not think a tower was the best approach. Eiffel had done it first and best. More than merely tall, his tower was grace frozen in iron, as much an evocation of the spirit of the age as Chartres had been in its time. To build a tower would be to follow Eiffel into territory he already had conquered for France.

    In August 1891 Eiffel himself telegraphed the directors to ask if he might submit a proposal for a tower. This was a surprise and at first a welcome one. Exposition President Baker immediately cabled Eiffel that the directors would be delighted to see whatever he proposed. If the fair was to have a tower, Baker said in an interview, “M. Eiffel is the man to build it. It would not be so much of an experiment if he should be in charge of its construction. He might be able to improve on his design for the Eiffel Tower in Paris, and I think it fair to assume that he would not construct one in any way inferior to that famous structure.” To the engineers of America, however, this embrace of Eiffel was a slap in the face. Over the next week and a half telegrams shot from city to city, engineer to engineer, until the story became somewhat distorted. Suddenly it seemed as if an Eiffel Tower in Chicago was a certainty—that Eiffel himself was to do the out-Eiffeling. The engineers were outraged. A long letter of protest arrived at Burnham’s office, signed by some of the nation’s leading engineers.

    Acceptance of “the distinguished gentleman’s offer,” they wrote, would be “equivalent to a statement that the great body of civil engineers in this country, whose noble works attest their skill abroad as well as throughout the length and breadth of the land, lack the ability to cope with such a problem, and such action could have a tendency to rob them of their just claim to professional excellence.”

    Burnham read this letter with approval. It pleased him to see America’s civil engineers at last expressing passion for the fair, although in fact the directors had promised nothing to Eiffel. His formal proposal arrived a week later, envisioning a tower that was essentially a taller version of what he had built in Paris. The directors sent his proposal out for translation, reviewed it, then graciously turned it down. If there was to be a tower at the fair, it would be an American tower.

    But the drafting boards of America’s engineers remained dishearteningly barren.

    Sol Bloom, back in California, took his quest for a concession for his Algerian Village to an influential San Franciscan, Mike De Young, publisher of the San Francisco Chronicle and one of the exposition’s national commissioners. Bloom told him about the rights he had acquired in Paris and how the exposition had rebuffed his petition.

    De Young knew Bloom. As a teenager Bloom had worked in De Young’s Alcazar Theater and worked his way up to become its treasurer at age nineteen. In his spare time Bloom had organized the ushers, checkers, and refreshment sellers into a more efficient, cohesive structure that greatly increased the theater’s profits and his own salary. Next he organized these functions at other theaters and received regular commissions from each. At the Alcazar he inserted into scripts the names of popular products, bars, and restaurants, including the Cliff House, and for this received another stream of income. He also organized a cadre of professional applauders, known as a “claque,” to provide enthusiastic ovations, demand encores, and cry “Brava!” for any performer willing to pay. Most performers did pay, even the most famous diva of the time, Adelina Patti. One day Bloom saw an item in a theatrical publication about a novel Mexican band that he believed Americans would adore, and he convinced the band’s manager to let him bring the musicians north for a tour. Bloom’s profit was $40,000. At the time he was only eighteen.

    De Young told Bloom he would investigate the situation. One week later he summoned Bloom back to his office.

    “How soon could you be ready to go to Chicago?” he asked.

    Bloom, startled, said, “In a couple of days, I guess.” He assumed De Young had arranged a second opportunity for him to petition the fair’s Ways and Means Committee. He was hesitant and told De Young he saw no value in making the journey until the exposition’s directors had a better idea of the kinds of attractions they wanted.

    “The situation has advanced since our talk,” De Young said. “All we need now is somebody to take charge.” He gave Bloom a cable from the Exposition Company that empowered De Young to hire someone to select the concessions for the Midway Plaisance and guide their construction and promotion. “You’ve been elected,” he said.

    “I can’t do it,” Bloom said. He did not want to leave San Francisco. “Even if I did, I’ve got too much at stake here to consider it.”

    De Young watched him. “I don’t want to hear another word from you till tomorrow,” he said.

    In the meantime De Young wanted Bloom to think about how much money he would have to be paid to overcome his reluctance. “When you come back you can name your salary,” he said. “I will either accept or reject it. There will be no argument. Is that agreeable?”

    Bloom did agree, but only because De Young’s request gave him a graceful way of refusing the job. All he had to do, he figured, was name such an outrageous sum that De Young could not possibly accept it, “and as I walked down the street I decided what it would be.”

    Burnham tried to anticipate every conceivable threat to the fair. Aware of Chicago’s reputation for vice and violence, Burnham insisted on the creation of a large police force, the Columbian Guard, and placed it under the command of Colonel Edmund Rice, a man of great valor who had faced Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg. Unlike conventional police departments, the Guard’s mandate explicitly emphasized the novel idea of preventing crime rather than merely arresting wrongdoers after the fact.

    Disease, too, posed dangers to the fair, Burnham knew. An outbreak of smallpox or cholera or any of the other lethal infections that roamed the city could irreparably taint the exposition and destroy any hopes the directors had of achieving the record attendance necessary to generate a profit.

    By now the new science of bacteriology, pioneered by Robert Koch and Louis Pasteur, had convinced most public health officials that contaminated drinking water caused the spread of cholera and other bacterial diseases. Chicago’s water teemed with bacteria, thanks mainly to the Chicago River. In a monumental spasm of civic engineering the city in 1871 reversed the river’s direction so that it no longer flowed into Lake Michigan, but ran instead into the Des Plaines River and ultimately into the Mississippi, the theory being that the immense flows of both rivers would dilute the sewage to harmless levels—a concept downriver towns like Joliet did not wholeheartedly embrace. To the engineers’ surprise, however, prolonged rains routinely caused the Chicago River to regress and again pour dead cats and fecal matter into the lake, and in such volume that tendrils of black water reached all the way to the intake cribs of the city water system.

    Most Chicago residents had no choice but to drink the water. Burnham, however, believed from the start that the fair’s workers and visitors needed a better, safer supply. In this too he was ahead of the age. On his orders his sanitary engineer, William S. MacHarg, built a water-sterilization plant on the fairgrounds that pumped lake water through a succession of large tanks in which the water was aerated and boiled. MacHarg’s men set big casks of this sterilized water throughout the park and replenished them every day.

    Burnham planned to close the purification plant by Opening Day and give visitors a choice between two other supplies of safe water: lake water purified with Pasteur filters and offered free of charge, or naturally pure water for a penny a cup, piped one hundred miles from the coveted springs of Waukesha, Wisconsin. In November 1891 Burnham ordered MacHarg to investigate five of Waukesha’s springs to gauge their capacity and purity, but to do so “quietly,” suggesting he was aware that running a pipeline through the village’s comely landscape might prove a sensitive issue. No one, however, could have imagined that in a few months MacHarg’s efforts to secure a supply of Waukesha’s best would lead to an armed encounter in the middle of a fine Wisconsin night.

    What most worried Burnham was fire. The loss of the Grannis Block, with his and Root’s headquarters, remained a vivid, humiliating memory. A catastrophic fire in Jackson Park could destroy the fair. Yet within the park fire was central to the construction process. Plasterers used small furnaces called salamanders to speed drying and curing. Tinners and electricians used fire pots for melting, bending, and fusing. Even the fire department used fire: Steam engines powered the pumps on the department’s horse-drawn fire trucks.

    Burnham established defenses that by prevailing standards seemed elaborate, even excessive. He formed an exposition fire department and ordered the installation of hundreds of fire hydrants and telegraphic alarm boxes. He commissioned the construction of a fire boat, the Fire Queen, built specifically to negotiate the park’s shallow canals and to pass under its many low bridges. Design specifications required that every building be surrounded by an underwater main and be plumbed with interior standpipes. He also banned all smoking on the grounds, although here he made at least two exceptions: one for a contractor who pleaded that his crew of European artisans would quit if denied their cigars, the other for the big hearth in his own shanty, around which he and his engineers, draftsmen, and visiting architects gathered each night for wine, talk, and cigars.

    With the onset of winter Burnham ordered all hydrants packed in horse manure to prevent freezing.

    On the coldest days the manure steamed, as if the hydrants themselves were on fire.

    When Sol Bloom returned to the office of Mike De Young, he was confident De Young could not possibly accept his salary request, for he had decided to ask for the same salary as the president of the United States: $50,000. “The more I thought about it,” Bloom recalled, “the more I enjoyed the prospect of telling Mike De Young that no less a sum could compensate me for my sacrifice in leaving San Francisco.”

    De Young offered Bloom a seat. His expression was sober and expectant.

    Bloom said: “Much as I appreciate the compliment, I find that my interests lie right here in this city. As I look ahead I can see myself—”

    De Young cut him off. Softly he said, “Now, Sol, I thought you were going to tell me how much you wanted us to pay you.”

    “I didn’t want you to think I didn’t appreciate—”

    “You said that a minute ago,” De Young said. “Now tell me how much money you want.”

    This was not going quite the way Bloom had expected. With some trepidation, Bloom told him the number: “A thousand dollars a week.”

    De Young smiled. “Well, that’s pretty good pay for a fellow of twenty-one, but I have no doubt you’ll earn it.”

    In August, Burnham’s chief structural engineer, Abraham Gottlieb, made a startling disclosure: He had failed to calculate wind loads for the fair’s main buildings. Burnham ordered his key contractors—including Agnew & Co., erecting the Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building—to stop work immediately. For months Burnham had been combating rumors that he had forced his men to work at too fast a pace and that as a result some buildings were unsafe; in Europe, press reports held that certain structures had been “condemned.” Now here was Gottlieb, conceding a potentially catastrophic error.

    Gottlieb protested that even without an explicit calculation of wind loads, the buildings were strong enough.

    “I could not, however, take this view,” Burnham wrote in a letter to James Dredge, editor of the influential British magazine Engineering. Burnham ordered all designs strengthened to withstand the highest winds recorded over the previous ten years. “This may be going to extremes,” he told Dredge, “but to me it seems wise and prudent, in view of the great interests involved.”

    Gottlieb resigned. Burnham replaced him with Edward Shankland, an engineer from his own firm who possessed a national reputation as a designer of bridges.

    On November 24, 1891, Burnham wrote to James Dredge to report that once again he was under fire over the issue of structural integrity. “The criticism now,” he wrote, “is that the structures are unnecessarily strong.”

    Bloom arrived in Chicago and quickly discovered why so little had been accomplished at the Midway Plaisance, known officially as DepartmentM. Until now it had been under the control of Frederick Putnam, a Harvard professor of ethnology. He was a distinguished anthropologist, but putting him in charge of the Midway, Bloom said years later, “was about as intelligent a decision as it would be today to make Albert Einstein manager of the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus.” Putnam would not have disagreed. He told a Harvard colleague he was “anxious to get this whole Indian circus off my hands.”

    Bloom took his concerns to Exposition President Baker, who turned him over to Burnham.

    “You are a very young man, a very young man indeed, to be in charge of the work entrusted to you,” Burnham said.

    But Burnham himself had been young when John B. Sherman walked into his office and changed his life.

    “I want you to know that you have my full confidence,” he said. “You are in complete charge of the Midway. Go ahead with the work. You are responsible only to me. I will write orders to that effect. Good luck.”

    By December 1891 the two buildings farthest along were the Mines Building and the Woman’s Building. Construction of the Mines Building had gone smoothly, thanks to a winter that by Chicago standards had been mercifully benign. Construction of the Woman’s Building, however, had become an ordeal, both for Burnham and its young architect, Sophia Hayden, mainly because of modifications demanded by Bertha Honore Palmer, head of the fair’s Board of Lady Managers, which governed all things at the fair having to do with women. As the wife of Potter Palmer, she was accustomed by wealth and absolute social dominance to having her own way, as she had made clear earlier in the year when she suppressed a revolt led by the board’s executive secretary that had caused open warfare between factions of elegantly coiffed and dressed women. In the thick of it one horrified lady manager had written to Mrs. Palmer, “I do hope that Congress will not become disgusted with our sex.”

    Hayden came to Chicago to produce final drawings, then returned home, leaving their execution to Burnham. Construction began July 9; workers began applying the final coat of staff in October. Hayden returned in December to direct the decoration of the building’s exterior, believing this to be her responsibility. She discovered that Bertha Palmer had other ideas.

    In September, without Hayden’s knowledge, Palmer had invited women everywhere to donate architectural ornaments for the building and in response had received a museum’s worth of columns, panels, sculpted figures, window grills, doors, and other objects. Palmer believed the building could accommodate all the contributions, especially those sent by prominent women. Hayden, on the other hand, knew that such a hodgepodge of materials would result in an aesthetic abomination. When an influential Wisconsin woman named Flora Ginty sent an elaborately carved wooden door, Hayden turned it down. Ginty was hurt and angry. “When I think of the days I worked and the miles I traveled to achieve these things for the Woman’s building, my ire rises a little yet.” Mrs. Palmer was in Europe at the time, but her private secretary, Laura Hayes, a gossip of virtuosic scope, made sure her employer learned all the details. Hayes also relayed to Palmer a few words of advice that she herself had given the architect: “‘I think it would be better to have the building look like a patchwork quilt, than to refuse these things which the Lady Managers have been to such pains in soliciting.’ ”

    A patchwork quilt was not what Hayden had in mind. Despite Mrs. Palmer’s blinding social glare, Hayden continued to decline donations. A battle followed, fought in true Gilded Age fashion with oblique snubs and poisonous courtesy. Mrs. Palmer pecked and pestered and catapulted icy smiles into Hayden’s deepening gloom. Finally Palmer assigned the decoration of the Woman’s Building to someone else, a designer named Candace Wheeler.

    Hayden fought the arrangement in her quiet, stubborn way until she could take it no longer. She walked into Burnham’s office, began to tell him her story, and promptly, literally, went mad: tears, heaving sobs, cries of anguish, all of it. “A severe breakdown,” an acquaintance called it, “with a violent attack of high nervous excitement of the brain.”

    Burnham, stunned, summoned one of the exposition surgeons. Hayden was discreetly driven from the park in one of the fair’s innovative English ambulances with quiet rubber tires and placed in a sanitarium for a period of enforced rest. She lapsed into “melancholia,” a sweet name for depression.

    At Jackson Park aggravation was endemic. Simple matters, Burnham found, often became imbroglios. Even Olmsted had become an irritant. He was brilliant and charming, but once fixed on a thing, he was as unyielding as a slab of Joliet limestone. By the end of 1891 the question of what kind of boats to allow on the fair’s waterways had come to obsess him, as if boats alone would determine the success of his quest for “poetic mystery.”

    In December 1891 Burnham received a proposal from a tugboat manufacturer arguing the case for steam launches at the exposition. Olmsted got wind of it from Harry Codman, who in addition to being his chief operating man in Chicago served as a kind of spy, keeping Olmsted abreast of all threats to Olmsted’s vision. Codman sent Olmsted a copy of the letter, adding his own note that the tugboat maker seemed to enjoy Burnham’s confidence.

    On December 23 Olmsted wrote to Burnham: “I suspect that even Codman is inclined to think that I make too much of a hobby of this boat question and give an amount of worry, if not thought, to it that would be better expended on other and more critical matters, and I fear that you may think me a crank upon it.”

    He proceeded, however, to vent his obsession yet again. The tugmaker’s letter, he complained, framed the boat question solely in terms of moving the greatest number of passengers between different points at the exposition as cheaply and quickly as possible. “You perfectly well know that the main object to be accomplished was nothing of this sort. I need not try to make a statement of what it was. You are as alive to it as I am. You know that it was a poetic object, and you know that if boats are to be introduced on these waters, it would be perfect nonsense to have them of a kind that would antagonize this poetic object.”

    Mere transportation was never the goal, he fumed. The whole point of having boats was to enhance the landscape. “Put in the waters unbecoming boats and the effect would be utterly disgusting, destroying the value of what would otherwise be the most valuable original feature of this Exposition. I say destroy deliberately. A thousand times better [to] have no boats.”

    Despite increasing committee interference and intensified conflict between Burnham and Director-General Davis, and with the threat of labor strikes ever present, the main buildings rose. Workers laid foundations of immense timbers in crisscrossed layers in accord with Root’s grillage principle, then used steam-powered derricks to raise the tall posts of iron and steel that formed each building’s frame. They cocooned the frames in scaffolds of wood and faced each frame with hundreds of thousands of wooden planks to create walls capable of accepting two thick layers of staff. As workers piled mountains of fresh lumber beside each building, jagged foothills of sawdust and scrap rose nearby. The air smelled of cut wood and Christmas.

    In December the exposition experienced its first death: a man named Mueller at the Mines Building, dead of a fractured skull. Three other deaths followed in short order:

    Jansen, fractured skull, Electricity Building;

    Allard, fractured skull, Electricity Building;

    Algeer, stunned to oblivion by a new phenomenon, electric shock, at the Mines Building.

    Dozens of lesser accidents occurred as well. Publicly Burnham struck a pose of confidence and optimism. In a December 28, 1891, letter to the editor of the Chicago Herald, he wrote, “A few questions of design and plan are still undetermined, but there is nothing which is not well in hand, and I see no reason why we will not be able to complete our work in time for the ceremonies in October, 1892”—Dedication Day—“and for the opening of the Exposition, May 1st, 1893.”

    In reality, the fair was far behind schedule, with worse delay forestalled only by the winter’s mildness. The October dedication was to take place inside the Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building, yet as of January only the foundation of the building had been laid. For the fair to be even barely presentable in time for the ceremony, everything would have to go perfectly. The weather especially would have to cooperate.

    Meanwhile, banks and companies were failing across America, strikes threatened everywhere, and cholera had begun a slow white trek across Europe, raising fears that the first plague ships would soon arrive in New York Harbor.

    As if anyone needed extra pressure, the New York Times warned: “the failure of the fair or anything short of a positive and pronounced success would be a discredit to the whole country, and not to Chicago alone.”

Remains of the Day

    IN NOVEMBER 1891 JULIA CONNER announced to Holmes she was pregnant; now, she told him, he had no choice but to marry her. Holmes reacted to her news with calm and warmth. He held her, stroked her hair, and with moist eyes assured her that she had nothing to worry about, certainly he would marry her, as he long had promised. There was, however, a condition that he now felt obligated to impose. A child was out of the question. He would marry her only if she agreed to allow him to execute a simple abortion. He was a physician, he had done it before. He would use chloroform, and she would feel nothing and awaken to the prospect of a new life as Mrs. H. H. Holmes. Children would come later. Right now there was far too much to do, especially given all the work that lay ahead to complete the hotel and furnish each of its rooms in time for the world’s fair.

    Holmes knew he possessed great power over Julia. First there was the power that accrued to him naturally through his ability to bewitch men and women alike with false candor and warmth; second, the power of social approbation that he now focused upon her. Though sexual liaisons were common, society tolerated them only as long as their details remained secret. Packinghouse princes ran off with parlormaids and bank presidents seduced typewriters; when necessary, their attorneys arranged quiet solo voyages to Europe to the surgical suites of discreet but capable doctors. A public pregnancy without marriage meant disgrace and destitution. Holmes possessed Julia now as fully as if she were an antebellum slave, and he reveled in his possession. The operation, he told Julia, would take place on Christmas Eve.

    Snow fell. Carolers moved among the mansions on Prairie Avenue, pausing now and then to enter the fine houses for hot mulled cider and cocoa. The air was scented with woodsmoke and roasting duck. In Graceland Cemetery, to the north, young couples raced their sleighs over the snow-heaped undulations, pulling their blankets especially tight as they passed the tall, gloomy guardian at the tomb of Dexter Graves, Eternal Silence, a hooded figure that from a distance seems to have only darkness where the face should have been. To look into this emptiness, legend held, was to receive a glimpse into the underworld.

    At 701 Sixty-third Street in Englewood Julia Conner put her daughter to bed and did her best to smile and indulge the child’s delighted anticipation of Christmas. Yes, Saint Nicholas would come, and he would bring wonderful things. Holmes had promised a bounty of toys and sweets for Pearl, and for Julia something truly grand, beyond anything she could have received from her poor bland Ned.

    Outside the snow muffled the concussion of passing horses. Trains bearing fangs of ice tore through the crossing at Wallace.

    Julia walked down the hall to an apartment occupied by Mr. and Mrs. John Crowe. Julia and Mrs. Crowe had become friends, and now Julia helped Mrs. Crowe decorate a Christmas tree in the Crowes’ apartment, meant for Pearl as a Christmas-morning surprise. Julia talked of all that she and Pearl would do the next day, and told Mrs. Crowe that soon she would be going to Davenport, Iowa, to attend the wedding of an older sister, “an old maid,” Mrs. Crowe said, who to everyone’s surprise was about to marry a railroad man. Julia was awaiting the rail pass that the groom was supposed to have put in the mail.

    Julia left the apartment late that night, in good spirits, Mrs. Crowe later recalled: “there was nothing about her conversation that would lead any of us to think she intended going away that night.”

    Holmes offered Julia a cheerful “Merry Christmas” and gave her a hug, then took her hand and led her to a room on the second floor that he had readied for the operation. A table lay draped in white linen. His surgical kits stood open and gleaming, his instruments laid out in a sunflower of polished steel. Fearful things: bonesaws, abdomen retractor, trocar and trepan. More instruments, certainly, than he really needed and all positioned so that Julia could not help but see them and be sickened by their hard, eager gleam.

    He wore a white apron and had rolled back his cuffs. Possibly he wore his hat, a bowler. He had not washed his hands, nor did he wear a mask. There was no need.

    She reached for his hand. There would be no pain, he assured her. She would awaken as healthy as she was now but without the encumbrance she bore within. He pulled the stopper from a dark amber bottle of liquid and immediately felt its silvery exhalation in his own nostrils. He poured the chloroform into a bunched cloth. She gripped his hand more tightly, which he found singularly arousing. He held the cloth over her nose and mouth. Her eyes fluttered and rolled upward. Then came the inevitable, reflexive disturbance of muscles, like a dream of running. She released his hand and cast it away with splayed fingers. Her feet trembled as if tapping to a wildly beating drum. His own excitement rose. She tried to pull his hand away, but he was prepared for this sudden surge of muscle stimulation that always preceded stupor, and with great force clamped the cloth to her face. She beat at his arms. Slowly the energy left her, and her hands began to move in slow arcs, soothing and sensuous, the wild drums silent. Ballet now, a pastoral exit.

    He kept one hand on the cloth and with the other dribbled more of the liquid between his fingers into its folds, delighting in the sensation of frost where the chloroform coated his fingers. One of her wrists sagged to the table, followed shortly by the other. Her eyelids stuttered, then closed. Holmes did not think her so clever as to feign coma, but he held tight just the same. After a few moments he reached for her wrist and felt her pulse fade to nothing, like the rumble of a receding train.

    He removed the apron and rolled down his sleeves. The chloroform and his own intense arousal made him feel light-headed. The sensation, as always, was pleasant and induced in him a warm languor, like the feeling he got after sitting too long in front of a hot stove. He stoppered the chloroform, found a fresh cloth, and walked down the hall to Pearl’s room.

    It took only a moment to bunch the fresh cloth and douse it with chloroform. In the hall, afterward, he examined his watch and saw that it was Christmas.

    The day meant nothing to Holmes. The Christmas mornings of his youth had been suffocated under an excess of piety, prayer, and silence, as if a giant wool blanket had settled over the house.

    On Christmas morning the Crowes waited for Julia and Pearl in glad anticipation of watching the girl’s eyes ignite upon spotting the lovely tree and the presents arrayed under its boughs. The apartment was warm, the air rouged with cinnamon and fir. An hour passed. The Crowes waited as long as they could, but at ten o’clock they set out to catch a train for central Chicago, where they planned to visit friends. They left the apartment unlocked, with a cheerful note of welcome.

    The Crowes returned at eleven o’clock that night and found everything as they had left it, with no evidence that Julia and her daughter had come. The next morning they tried Julia’s apartment, but no one answered. They asked neighbors inside and outside the building if any had seen Julia or Pearl, but none had.

    When Holmes next appeared, Mrs. Crowe asked him where Julia might be. He explained that she and Pearl had gone to Davenport earlier than expected.

    Mrs. Crowe heard nothing more from Julia. She and her neighbors thought the whole thing very odd. They all agreed that the last time anyone had seen Julia or Pearl was Christmas Eve.

    This was not precisely accurate. Others did see Julia again, although by then no one, not even her own family back in Davenport, Iowa, could have been expected to recognize her.

    Just after Christmas Holmes asked one of his associates, Charles Chappell, to come to his building. Holmes had learned that Chappell was an “articulator,” meaning he had mastered the art of stripping the flesh from human bodies and reassembling, or articulating, the bones to form complete skeletons for display in doctors’ offices and laboratories. He had acquired the necessary techniques while articulating cadavers for medical students at Cook County Hospital.

    During his own medical education Holmes had seen firsthand how desperate schools were to acquire corpses, whether freshly dead or skeletonized. The serious, systematic study of medicine was intensifying, and to scientists the human body was like the polar icecap, something to be studied and explored. Skeletons hung in doctors’ offices where they served as visual encyclopedias. With demand outpacing supply, doctors established a custom of graciously and discreetly accepting any offered cadaver. They frowned on murder as a means of harvest; on the other hand, they made little effort to explore the provenance of any one body. Grave-robbing became an industry, albeit a small one requiring an exceptional degree of sang-froid. In periods of acute shortage doctors themselves helped mine the newly departed.

    It was obvious to Holmes that even now, in the 1890s, demand remained high. Chicago’s newspapers reported ghoulish tales of doctors raiding graveyards. After a foiled raid on a graveyard in New Albany, Indiana, on February 24, 1890, Dr. W. H. Wathen, head of the Kentucky Medical College, told a Tribune reporter, “The gentlemen were acting not for the Kentucky School of Medicine nor for themselves individually, but for the medical schools of Louisville to which the human subject is as necessary as breath to life.” Just three weeks later the physicians of Louisville were at it again. They attempted to rob a grave at the State Asylum for the Insane in Anchorage, Kentucky, this time on behalf of the University of Louisville. “Yes, the party was sent out by us,” a senior school official said. “We must have bodies, and if the State won’t give them to us we must steal them. The winter classes were large and used up so many subjects that there are none for the spring classes.” He saw no need to apologize. “The Asylum Cemetery has been robbed for years,” he said, “and I doubt if there is a corpse in it. I tell you we must have bodies. You cannot make doctors without them, and the public must understand it. If we can’t get them any other way we will arm the students with Winchester rifles and send them to protect the body-snatchers on their raids.”

    Holmes had an eye for opportunity, and with demand for corpses so robust, opportunity now beckoned.

    He showed Charles Chappell into a second-floor room that contained a table, medical instruments, and bottles of solvents. These did not trouble Chappell, nor did the corpse on the table, for Chappell knew that Holmes was a physician. The body was clearly that of a woman, although of unusual height. He saw nothing to indicate her identity. “The body,” he said, “looked like that of a jack rabbit which had been skinned by splitting the skin down the face and rolling it back off the entire body. In some places considerable of the flesh had been taken off with it.”

    Holmes explained that he had been doing some dissection but now had completed his research. He offered Chappell thirty-six dollars to cleanse the bones and skull and return to him a fully articulated skeleton. Chappell agreed. Holmes and Chappell placed the body in a trunk lined with duckcloth. An express company delivered it to Chappell’s house.

    Soon afterward Chappell returned with the skeleton. Holmes thanked him, paid him, and promptly sold the skeleton to Hahneman Medical College—the Chicago school, not the Philadelphia school of the same name—for many times the amount he had paid Chappell.

    In the second week of January 1892 new tenants, the Doyle family, moved into Julia’s quarters in Holmes’s building. They found dishes on the table and Pearl’s clothes hung over a chair. The place looked and felt as if the former occupants planned to return within minutes.

    The Doyles asked Holmes what had happened.

    With his voice striking the perfect sober note, Holmes apologized for the disarray and explained that Julia’s sister had fallen gravely ill and Julia and her daughter had left at once for the train station. There was no need to pack up their belongings, as Julia and Pearl were well provided for and would not be coming back.

    Later Holmes offered a different story about Julia: “I last saw her about January 1, 1892, when a settlement of her rent was made. At this time she had announced not only to me, but to her neighbors and friends, that she was going away.” Although she had told everyone her destination was Iowa, in fact, Holmes said, “she was going elsewhere to avoid the chance of her daughter being taken from her, giving the Iowa destination to mislead her husband.” Holmes denied that he and Julia had ever engaged each other physically, or that she had undergone “a criminal operation,” a then-current euphemism for abortion. “That she is a woman of quick temper and perhaps not always of a good disposition may be true, but that any of her friends and relatives will believe her to be an amoral woman, or one who would be a party to a criminal act I do not think.”

A Gauntlet Dropped

    EIGHTEEN NINETY-TWO BROKE COLD, with six inches of snow on the ground and temperatures falling to ten degrees below zero, certainly not the coldest weather Chicago had ever experienced but cold enough to clot the valves of all three of the city water system’s intake valves and temporarily halt the flow of Chicago’s drinking water. Despite the weather, work at Jackson Park progressed. Workers erected a heated movable shelter that allowed them to apply staff to the exterior of the Mines Building no matter what the temperature. The Woman’s Building was nearly finished, all its scaffolding gone; the giant Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building had begun rising above its foundation. In all, the workforce in the park numbered four thousand. The ranks included a carpenter and furniture-maker named Elias Disney, who in coming years would tell many stories about the construction of this magical realm beside the lake. His son Walt would take note.

    Beyond the exposition’s eight-foot fence and its two tiers of barbed wire, there was tumult. Wage reductions and layoffs stoked unrest among workers nationwide. Unions gained strength; the Pinkerton National Detective Agency gained revenue. A rising union man named Samuel Gompers stopped by Burnham’s office to discuss allegations that the exposition discriminated against union workers. Burnham ordered his construction superintendent, Dion Geraldine, to investigate. As labor strife increased and the economy faltered, the general level of violence rose. In taking stock of 1891, theChicago Tribune reported that 5,906 people had been murdered in America, nearly 40 percent more than in 1890. The increase included Mr. and Mrs. Borden of Fall River, Massachusetts.

    The constant threat of strike and the onset of deep cold shaded the new year for Burnham, but what most concerned him was the fast-shrinking treasury of the Exposition Company. In advancing the work so quickly and on such a grand scale, Burnham’s department had consumed far more money than anyone had anticipated. There was talk now among the directors of seeking a $10 million appropriation from Congress, but the only immediate solution was to reduce expenditures. On January 6 Burnham commanded his department chiefs to take immediate, in some cases draconian, measures to cut costs. He ordered his chief draftsman, in charge of exposition work under way in the attic of the Rookery, to fire at once any man who did “inaccurate or ‘slouchy’ work” or who failed to do more than his full duty. He wrote to Olmsted’s landscape superintendent, Rudolf Ulrich, “it seems to me you can now cut your force down one-half, and at the same time let very many expensive men go.” Henceforth, Burnham ordered, all carpentry work was to be done only by men employed by the fair’s contractors. To Dion Geraldine, he wrote, “You will please dismiss every carpenter on your force…”

    Until this point Burnham had shown a level of compassion for his workers that was extraordinary for the time. He had paid them even when illness or injury kept them out of work and established an exposition hospital that provided free medical care. He built quarters within the park where they received three large meals a day and slept in clean beds and well-heated rooms. A Princeton professor of political economy named Walter Wyckoff disguised himself as an unskilled laborer and spent a year traveling and working among the nation’s growing army of unemployed men, including a stint at Jackson Park. “Guarded by sentries and high barriers from unsought contact with all beyond, great gangs of us, healthy, robust men, live and labor in a marvelous artificial world,” he wrote. “No sight of misery disturbs us, nor of despairing poverty out in vain search for employment… We work our eight hours a day in peaceful security and in absolute confidence of our pay.”

    But now even the fair was laying off men, and the timing was awful. With the advent of winter the traditional building season had come to an end. Competition for the few jobs available had intensified as thousands of unemployed men from around the country—unhappily bearing the label “hobo,” derived possibly from the railroad cry “ho, boy”—converged on Chicago in hopes of getting exposition work. The dismissed men, Burnham knew, faced homelessness and poverty; their families confronted the real prospect of starvation.

    But the fair came first.

    The absence of an Eiffel challenger continued to frustrate Burnham. Proposals got more and more bizarre. One visionary put forth a tower five hundred feet taller than the Eiffel Tower but made entirely of logs, with a cabin at the top for shelter and refreshment. The cabin was to be a log cabin.

    If an engineer capable of besting Eiffel did not step forward soon, Burnham knew, there simply would not be enough time left to build anything worthy of the fair. Somehow he needed to rouse the engineers of America. The opportunity came with an invitation to give a talk to the Saturday Afternoon Club, a group of engineers who had begun meeting on Saturdays at a downtown restaurant to discuss the construction challenges of the fair.

    There was the usual meal in multiple courses, with wine, cigars, coffee, and cognac. At one table sat a thirty-three-year-old engineer from Pittsburgh who ran a steel-inspection company that had branch offices in New York and Chicago and that already possessed the exposition contract to inspect the steel used in the fair’s buildings. He had an angular face, black hair, a black mustache, and dark eyes, the kind of looks soon to be coveted by an industry that Thomas Edison was just then bringing to life. He “was eminently engaging and social and he had a keen sense of humor,” his partners wrote. “In all gatherings he at once became the center of attraction, having a ready command of language and a constant fund of amusing anecdotes and experiences.”

    Like the other members of the Saturday Afternoon Club, he expected to hear Burnham discuss the challenges of building an entire city on such a short schedule, but Burnham surprised him. After asserting that “the architects of America had covered themselves with glory” through their exposition designs, Burnham rebuked the nation’s civil engineers for failing to rise to the same level of brilliance. The engineers, Burnham charged, “had contributed little or nothing either in the way of originating novel features or of showing the possibilities of modern engineering practice in America.”

    A tremor of displeasure rolled through the room.

    “Some distinctive feature is needed,” Burnham continued, “something to take the relative position in the World’s Columbian Exposition that was filled by the Eiffel Tower at the Paris Exposition.”

    But not a tower, he said. Towers were not original. Eiffel had built a tower already. “Mere bigness” wasn’t enough either. “Something novel, original, daring and unique must be designed and built if American engineers are to retain their prestige and standing.”

    Some of the engineers took offense; others acknowledged that Burnham had a point. The engineer from Pittsburgh felt himself “cut to the quick by the truth of these remarks.”

    As he sat there among his peers, an idea came to him “like an inspiration.” It arrived not as some half-formed impulse, he said, but rich in detail. He could see it and touch it, hear it as it moved through the sky.

    There was not much time left, but if he acted quickly to produce drawings and managed to convince the fair’s Ways and Means Committee of the idea’s feasibility, he believed the exposition could indeed out-Eiffel Eiffel. And if what happened to Eiffel happened to him, his fortune would be assured.

    It must have been refreshing for Burnham to stand before the Saturday Afternoon Club and openly chide its members for their failure, because most of his other encounters over exposition business invariably became exercises in self-restraint, especially when he went before the fair’s many and still-multiplying committees. This constant Victorian minuet of false grace consumed time. He needed more power—not for his own ego but for the sake of the exposition. Unless the pace of decision-making accelerated, he knew, the fair would fall irreparably behind schedule, yet if anything the barriers to efficiency were increasing in size and number. The Exposition Company’s shrinking war chest had driven its relationship with the National Commission to a new low, with Director-General Davis arguing that any new federal money should be controlled by his commission. The commission seemed to form new departments every day, each with a paid chief—Davis named a superintendent of sheep, for a salary that today would total about $60,000 a year—and each claiming some piece of jurisdiction that Burnham thought belonged to him.

    Soon the struggle for control distilled to a personal conflict between Burnham and Davis, its primary battlefield a disagreement over who should control the artistic design of exhibits and interiors. Burnham thought it obvious that the territory belonged to him. Davis believed otherwise.

    At first Burnham tried the oblique approach. “We are now organizing a special interior decorative and architectural force to handle this part,” he wrote to Davis, “and I have the honor to offer the services of my department to yours in such matters. I feel a delicacy in having my men suggest to yours artistic arrangements, forms and decorations of exhibits, without your full approval, which I hereby respectfully ask.”

    But Davis told a reporter, “I think it is pretty well understood by this time that no one but the Director-General and his agents have anything to do with exhibits.”

    The conflict simmered. On March 14 Burnham joined Davis for dinner with Japan’s delegate to the fair, at the Chicago Club. Afterward Davis and Burnham remained at the club arguing quietly until five o’clock the next morning. “The time was well spent,” he wrote to Margaret, who was then out of town, “and we have come to a better feeling so that the path will be much smoother from this time forward.”

    An uncharacteristic weariness crept into his letter. He told Margaret he planned to end work early that night and go to Evanston, “and sleep in your dear bed, my love, and I shall dream of you. What a rush this life is! Where do the years go to?”

    There were moments of grace. Burnham looked forward to evenings on the grounds when his lieutenants and visiting architects would gather for dinner at the shanty and converse into the night in front of Burnham’s immense fireplace. Burnham treasured the camaraderie and the stories. Olmsted recounted the endless trials of protecting Central Park from ill-thought modifications. Colonel Edmund Rice, chief of the exposition’s Columbian Guard, described what it was like to stand in a shaded wood at Gettysburg as Pickett launched his men across the intervening field.

    Late in March 1892 Burnham invited his sons to join him at the shanty for one of their periodic overnight stays. They failed to arrive at the scheduled time. At first everyone attributed their absence to a routine railroad delay, but as the hours passed, Burnham’s anxiety grew. He knew as well as anyone that train wrecks in Chicago were nearly a daily occurrence.

    Darkness began to fall, but at last the boys arrived. Their train had been held up by a broken bridge on the Milwaukee & St. Paul line. They reached the shanty, Burnham wrote to Margaret, “just in time to hear Col. Rice tell some yarns about the war and life in the plains among the scouts and Indians.”

    As Burnham wrote this letter, his sons were near at hand. “They are very happy to be here and are now looking at the large photographic album with Mr. Geraldine.” The album was a collection of construction photographs taken by Charles Dudley Arnold, a photographer from Buffalo, New York, whom Burnham had hired as the fair’s official photographer. Arnold also was present, and soon the children were to join him in a sketching session.

    Burnham closed, “We are all well and satisfied with the amount and variety of work our good fortune has given us to do.”

    Such peaceful intervals never lasted long.

    The conflict between Burnham and Davis again flared to life. The directors of the Exposition Company did decide to seek a direct appropriation from Congress, but their request triggered a congressional investigation of the fair’s expenditures. Burnham and President Baker expected a general review but instead found themselves grilled about the most mundane expenses. For example, when Baker listed the total spent on carriage rental, the subcommittee demanded the names of the people who rode in the carriages. At one session in Chicago the committee asked Davis to estimate the final cost of the exposition. Without consulting Burnham, Davis gave an estimate ten percent below the amount Burnham had calculated for President Baker, which Baker had then included in his own statement to investigators. Davis’s testimony carried with it the unstated accusation that Burnham and Baker had inflated the amount of money needed to complete the fair.

    Burnham leaped to his feet. The subcommittee chairman ordered him to sit. Burnham remained standing. He was angry, barely able to keep himself composed. “Mr. Davis has not been to see me or any of my people,” he said, “and any figures he has given he has jumped at. He knows nothing about the matter.”

    His outburst offended the subcommittee chairman. “I object to any such remarks addressed to a witness before this committee,” the chairman said, “and I will ask that Mr. Burnham withdraw his remark.”

    At first Burnham refused. Then, reluctantly, he agreed to withdraw the part about Davis knowing nothing. But only that part. He did not apologize.

    The committee left for Washington to study the evidence and report on whether an appropriation was warranted. The congressmen, Burnham wrote, “are dazed with the size and scope of this enterprise. We gave them each a huge pile of data to digest, and I think their report will be funny, because I know that months would not be enough time for me to work out a report, even with my knowledge.”

    On paper at least, the fair’s Midway Plaisance began to take shape. Professor Putnam had believed the Midway ought first and foremost to provide an education about alien cultures. Sol Bloom felt no such duty. The Midway was to be fun, a great pleasure garden stretching for more than a mile from Jackson Park all the way to the border of Washington Park. It would thrill, titillate, and if all went well perhaps even shock. He considered his great strength to be “spectacular advertising.” He placed notices in publications around the world to make it known that the Midway was to be an exotic realm of unusual sights, sounds, and scents. There would be authentic villages from far-off lands inhabited by authentic villagers—even Pygmies, if Lieutenant Schufeldt succeeded. Bloom recognized also that as czar of the Midway he no longer had to worry about seeking a concession for his Algerian Village. He could approve the village himself. He produced a contract and sent it off to Paris.

    Bloom’s knack for promotion caught the attention of other fair officials, who came to him for help in raising the exposition’s overall profile. At one point he was called upon to help make reporters understand how truly immense the Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building would be. So far the exposition’s publicity office had given the press a detailed list of monumental but dreary statistics. “I could tell they weren’t in the least interested in the number of acres or tons of steel,” Bloom wrote, “so I said, ‘Look at it this way—it’s going to be big enough to hold the entire standing army of Russia.’ ”

    Bloom had no idea whether Russia even had a standing army, let alone how many soldiers it might include and how many square feet they would cover. Nonetheless, the fact became gospel throughout America. Readers of Rand, McNally’s exposition guidebooks eventually found themselves thrilling to the vision of millions of fur-hatted men squeezed onto the building’s thirty-two-acre floor.

    Bloom felt no remorse.

The Angel from Dwight

    IN THE SPRING OF 1892 Holmes’s assistant Benjamin Pitezel found himself in the city of Dwight, Illinois, about seventy-five miles southwest of Chicago, taking the famous Keeley cure for alcoholism. Patients stayed in the three-story Livingston Hotel, a red-brick building of simple appealing design, with arched windows and a veranda along the full length of its façade, a fine place to rest between injections of Dr. Leslie Enraught Keeley’s “gold cure.” Gold was the most famous ingredient in a red, white, and blue solution nicknamed the “barber pole” that employees of the Keeley Institute injected into patients’ arms three times a day. The needle, one of large nineteenth-century bore—like having a garden hose shoved into a bicep—invariably deposited a yellow aureole on the skin surrounding the injection site, a badge for some, an unsightly blemish for others. The rest of the formula was kept secret, but as best doctors and chemists could tell, the solution included substances that imparted a pleasant state of euphoria and sedation trimmed with amnesia—an effect the Chicago post office found problematic, for each year it wound up holding hundreds of letters sent from Dwight that lacked important elements of their destination addresses. The senders simply forgot that things like names and street numbers were necessary for the successful delivery of mail.

    Pitezel had long been a heavy drinker, but his drinking must have become debilitating, for it was Holmes who sent him to Keeley and paid for his treatment. He explained it to Pitezel as a gesture born of kindness, a return for Pitezel’s loyalty. As always, he had other motives. He recognized that Pitezel’s drinking impaired his usefulness and threatened to disrupt schemes already in play. Holmes later said of Pitezel, “he was too valuable a man, even with his failings taken into consideration, for me to dispense with.” It’s likely Holmes also wanted Pitezel to gather whatever intelligence he could about the cure and its labeling, so that he could mimic the product and sell it through his own mail-order drug company. Later, indeed, Holmes would establish his own curative spa on the second floor of his Englewood building and call it the Silver Ash Institute. The Keeley cure was amazingly popular. Thousands of people came to Dwight to shed their intemperate ways; many thousands more bought Dr. Keeley’s oral version of the cure, which he marketed in bottles so distinctive that he urged purchasers to destroy the empties, to keep unscrupulous companies from filling them with their own concoctions.

    Every day Pitezel joined three dozen other men in the daily ritual of “passing through the line” to receive his injections. Women received theirs in their own rooms and were kept separated from the men to protect their reputations. In Chicago hostesses always knew when guests had taken the cure, because upon being offered a drink, those guests invariably answered, “No, thank you. I’ve been to Dwight.”

    Pitezel returned to Englewood in April. The psychotropic powers of Keeley’s injections may account for the story Pitezel now told Holmes, of how at Keeley he had met a young woman of great beauty—to hear him tell it, preternatural beauty—named Emeline Cigrand. She was blond, twenty-four years old, and since 1891 had worked as a stenographer in Dr. Keeley’s office. Pitezel’s almost hallucinatory description must have tantalized Holmes, for he wrote to Cigrand and offered her a job as his personal secretary, at twice the salary she was making in Keeley. “A flattering offer,” as a member of the Cigrand family later described it.

    Emeline accepted without hesitation. The institute had a certain cachet, but the village of Dwight was no Chicago. To be able to earn twice her salary and live in that city of legendary glamour and excitement, with the world’s fair set to open in a year, made the offer irresistible. She left Keeley in May, bringing along her $800 in savings. Upon arriving in Englewood, she rented rooms in a boardinghouse near Holmes’s building.

    Pitezel had exaggerated Emeline’s beauty, Holmes saw, but not by much. She was indeed lovely, with luminous blond hair. Immediately Holmes deployed his tools of seduction, his soothing voice and touch and frank blue gaze.

    He bought her flowers and took her to the Timmerman Opera House down the block. He gave her a bicycle. They spent evenings riding together on the smooth macadam of Yale and Harvard streets, the picture of a happy young couple blessed with looks and money. (“White pique hats with black watered-ribbon bands and a couple of knife feathers set at the side are the latest novelty for women cyclists,” the Tribune’s society column observed.) As Emeline became more accustomed to her “wheel,” a term everyone still used even though the old and deadly huge-wheeled bicycles of the past had become thoroughly obsolete, she and Holmes took longer and longer rides and often rode along the willowed Midway to Jackson Park to watch the construction of the world’s fair, where inevitably they found themselves among thousands of other people, many of them also bicyclists.

    On a few Sundays Emeline and Holmes rode into the park itself, where they saw that construction was still in its early phase—a surprise, given the rapid onset of the fair’s two most important deadlines, Dedication Day and Opening Day. Much of the park was still barren land, and the biggest building, Manufactures and Liberal Arts, was barely under way. A few buildings had advanced at a far greater pace and appeared to be more or less complete, in particular the Mines Building and the Woman’s Building. There were so many distinguished-looking men in the park these days—statesmen, princes, architects, and the city’s industrial barons. Society matrons came as well, to attend meetings of the Board of Lady Managers. Mrs. Palmer’s great black carriage often came roaring through the fair’s gate, as did the carriage of her social opposite, Carrie Watson, the madam, her coach distinctive for its gleaming white enamel body and yellow wheels and its black driver in scarlet silk.

    Emeline found that riding her bicycle was best in the days after a good downpour. Otherwise the dust billowed like sand over Khartoum and sifted deep into her scalp, where even a good brushing failed to dislodge it.

    One afternoon as Emeline sat before her typewriter in Holmes’s office, a man entered looking for Holmes. He was tall, with a clean jaw and modest mustache, and wore a cheap suit; in his thirties; good looking, in a way, but at the same time self-effacing and plain—though at the moment he appeared to be angry. He introduced himself as Ned Conner and said he had once run the jewelry counter in the pharmacy downstairs. He had come to discuss a problem with a mortgage.

    She knew the name—had heard it somewhere, or seen it in Holmes’s papers. She smiled and told Ned that Holmes was out of the building. She had no idea when he would return. Could she help?

    Ned’s anger cooled. He and Emeline “got to talking about Holmes,” as Ned later recalled.

    Ned watched her. She was young and pretty—a “handsome blonde,” as he later described her. She wore a white shirtwaist and black skirt that accentuated her trim figure, and she was seated beside a window, her hair candescent with sunlight. She sat before a black Remington, new and doubtless never paid for. From his own hard experience and from the look of adoration that entered Emeline’s eyes when she spoke of Holmes, Ned guessed her relationship involved a good deal more than typewriting. Later he recalled, “I told her I thought he was a bad lot and that she had better have little to do with him and get away from him as soon as possible.”

    For the time being, at least, she ignored his advice.

    On May 1, 1892, a doctor namedM. B. Lawrence and his wife moved into a five-room apartment in Holmes’s building, where they often encountered Emeline, although Emeline herself did not yet live in the building. She still occupied rooms in a nearby boardinghouse.

    “She was one of the prettiest and most pleasant young women I ever met,” said Dr. Lawrence, “and my wife and I learned to think a great deal of her. We saw her every day and she often came in for a few minutes’ chat with Mrs. Lawrence.” The Lawrences often saw Emeline in Holmes’s company. “It was not long,” Dr. Lawrence said, “before I became aware that the relations between Miss Cigrand and Mr. Holmes were not strictly those of an employer and employee, but we felt that she was to be more pitied than blamed.”

    Emeline was infatuated with Holmes. She loved him for his warmth, his caresses, his imperturbable calm, and his glamour. Never had she met a man quite like him. He was even the son of an English lord, a fact he had confided in strictest secrecy. She was to tell no one, which dampened the fun quite a bit but added to the mystery. She did reveal the secret to friends, of course, but only after first securing their oaths that they absolutely would tell no one else. To Emeline, Holmes’s claim of lordly heritage had credibility. The name Holmes clearly was English—to know that, all one had to do was read the immensely popular stories of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. And an English heritage would explain his extraordinary charm and smooth manner, so unusual in brutish, clangorous Chicago.

    Emeline was a warm and outgoing woman. She wrote often to her family in Lafayette, Indiana, and to the friends she had made in Dwight. She acquired friends easily. She still dined at regular intervals with the woman who ran the first boardinghouse in which she had stayed after her arrival in Chicago and considered the woman an intimate friend.

    In October two of her second cousins, Dr. and Mrs. B. J. Cigrand, paid her a visit. Dr. Cigrand, a dentist with an office at North and Milwaukee Avenues on Chicago’s North Side, had contacted Emeline because he was working on a history of the Cigrand family. They had not previously met. “I was charmed by her pleasing manners and keen wit,” Dr. Cigrand said. “She was a splendid woman physically, being tall, well formed, and with a wealth of flaxen hair.” Dr. Cigrand and his wife did not encounter Holmes on this visit and in fact never did meet him face to face, but they heard glowing stories from Emeline about his charm, generosity, and business prowess. Emeline took her cousins on a tour of Holmes’s building and told them of his effort to transform it into a hotel for exposition guests. She explained, too, how the elevated railroad being erected over Sixty-third Street would carry guests directly to Jackson Park. No one doubted that by the summer of 1893 armies of visitors would be advancing on Englewood. To Emeline, success seemed inevitable.

    Emeline’s enthusiasm was part of her charm. She was headlong in love with her young physician and thus in love with all that he did. But Dr. Cigrand did not share her glowing assessment of the building and its prospects. To him, the building was gloomy and imposing, out of spirit with its surrounding structures. Every other building of substance in Englewood seemed to be charged with the energy of anticipation, not just of the world’s fair but of a grand future expanding far beyond the fair’s end. Within just a couple of blocks of Sixty-third rose huge, elaborate houses of many colors and textures, and down the street stood the Timmerman Opera House and the adjacent New Julien Hotel, whose owners had spent heavily on fine materials and expert craftsmen. In contrast, Holmes’s building was dead space, like the corner of a room where the gaslight could not reach. Clearly Holmes had not consulted an architect, at least not a competent one. The building’s corridors were dark and pocked with too many doors. The lumber was low grade, the carpentry slipshod. Passages veered at odd angles.

    Still, Emeline seemed entranced. Dr. Cigrand would have been a cold man indeed to have dashed that sweet, naďve adoration. Later, no doubt, he wished he had been more candid and had listened more closely to the whisper in his head about the wrongness of that building and the discontinuity between its true appearance and Emeline’s perception of it. But again, Emeline was in love. It was not his place to wound her. She was young and enraptured, her joy infectious, especially to Dr. Cigrand, the dentist, who saw so little joy from day to day as he reduced grown men of proven courage to tears.

    Soon after the Cigrands’ visit, Holmes asked Emeline to marry him, and she accepted. He promised her a honeymoon in Europe during which, of course, they would pay a visit to his father, the lord.

Dedication Day

    OLMSTED’S TEETH HURT, HIS EARS roared, and he could not sleep, yet throughout the first months of 1892 he kept up a pace that would have been punishing for a man one-third his age. He traveled to Chicago, Asheville, Knoxville, Louisville, and Rochester, each overnight leg compounding his distress. In Chicago, despite the tireless efforts of his young lieutenant Harry Codman, the work was far behind schedule, the task ahead growing more enormous by the day. The first major deadline, the dedication set for October 21, 1892, seemed impossibly near—and would have seemed even more so had not fair officials changed the original date, October 12, to allow New York City to hold its own Columbus celebration. Given the calumny New York previously had shoveled on Chicago, the postponement was an act of surprising grace.

    Construction delays elsewhere on the grounds were especially frustrating for Olmsted. When contractors fell behind, his own work fell behind. His completed work also suffered. Workmen trampled his plantings and destroyed his roads. The U.S. Government Building was a case in point. “All over its surroundings,” reported Rudolf Ulrich, his landscape superintendent, “material of any kind and all descriptions was piled up and scattered in such profusion that only repeated and persistent pressure brought to bear upon the officials in charge could gain any headway in beginning the work; and, even then, improvements being well under way, no regard was paid to them. What had been accomplished one day would be spoiled the next.”

    The delays and damage angered Olmsted, but other matters distressed him even more. Unbelievably, despite Olmsted’s hectoring, Burnham still seemed to consider steam-powered launches an acceptable choice for the exposition’s boat service. And no one seemed to share his conviction that the Wooded Island must remain free of all structures.

    The island had come under repeated assault, prompting a resurfacing of Olmsted’s old anger about the compulsion of clients to tinker with his landscapes. Everyone wanted space on the island. First it was Theodore Thomas, conductor of Chicago’s symphony, who saw the island as the ideal site, the only site, for a music hall worthy of the fair. Olmsted would not allow it. Next came Theodore Roosevelt, head of the U.S. Civil Service Commission and a human gunboat. The island, he insisted, was perfect for the hunting camp exhibit of his Boone and Crockett Club. Not surprisingly, given Roosevelt’s power in Washington, the politicians of the fair’s National Commission strongly endorsed his plan. Burnham, partly to keep the peace, also urged Olmsted to accept it. “Would you object to its being placed on the north end of the Island, snuggled in among the trees, purely as an exhibit, provided it shall be so concealed as to only be noticed casually by those on the Island and not at all from the shore?”

    Olmsted did object. He agreed to let Roosevelt place his camp on a lesser island but would not allow any buildings, only “a few tents, some horses, camp-fire, etc.” Later he permitted the installation of a small hunter’s cabin.

    Next came the U.S. government, seeking to place an Indian exhibit on the island, and then Professor Putnam, the fair’s chief of ethnology, who saw the island as the ideal site for several exotic villages. The government of Japan also wanted the island. “They propose an outdoor exhibit of their temples and, as has been usual, they desire space on the wooded island,” Burnham wrote in February 1892. To Burnham it now seemed inevitable that something would occupy the island. The setting was just too appealing. Burnham urged Olmsted to accept Japan’s proposal. “It seems beyond any question to be the thing fitting to the locality and I cannot see that it will in any manner detract essentially from the features which you care for. They propose to do the most exquisitely beautiful things and desire to leave the buildings as a gift to the City of Chicago after the close of the Fair.”

    Fearing much worse, Olmsted agreed.

    It did not help his mood any that as he battled to protect the island, he learned of another attack on his beloved Central Park. At the instigation of a small group of wealthy New Yorkers, the state legislature had quietly passed a law authorizing the construction of a “speedway” on the west side of the park so that the rich could race their carriages. The public responded with outrage. Olmsted weighed in with a letter describing the proposed road as “unreasonable, unjust and immoral.” The legislature backed off.

    His insomnia and pain, the crushing workload, and his mounting frustration all tore at his spirit until by the end of March he felt himself on the verge of physical and emotional collapse. The intermittent depression that had shadowed him throughout his adult life was about to envelop him once again. “When Olmsted is blue,” a friend once wrote, “the logic of his despondency is crushing and terrible.”

    Olmsted, however, believed that all he needed was a good rest. In keeping with the therapeutic mores of the age, he decided to do his convalescing in Europe, where the scenery also would provide an opportunity for him to enrich his visual vocabulary. He planned forays to public gardens and parks and the grounds of the old Paris exposition.

    He put his eldest son, John, in charge of the Brookline office and left Harry Codman in Chicago to guide the work on the world’s fair. At the last minute he decided to bring along two of his children, Marion and Rick, and another young man, Phil Codman, who was Harry’s younger brother. For Marion and the boys, it promised to be a dream journey; for Olmsted it became something rather more dark.

    They sailed on Saturday, April 2, 1892, and arrived in Liverpool under a barrage of hail and snow.

    In Chicago Sol Bloom received a cable from France that startled him. He read it a couple of times to make sure it said what he thought it said. His Algerians, scores of them along with all their animals and material possessions, were already at sea, sailing for America and the fair—one year early.

    “They had picked the right month,” Bloom said, “but the wrong year.”

    Olmsted found the English countryside charming, the weather bleak and morbid. After a brief stay at the home of relatives in Chislehurt, he and the boys left for Paris. Daughter Marion stayed behind.

    In Paris Olmsted went to the old exposition grounds. The gardens were sparse, suppressed by a long winter, and the buildings had not weathered well, but enough of the fair remained to give him “a tolerable idea” of what the exposition once had been. Clearly the site was still popular. During one Sunday visit Olmsted and the boys found four bands playing, refreshment stands open, and a few thousand people roaming the paths. A long line had formed at the base of the Eiffel Tower.

    With the Chicago fair always in mind, Olmsted examined every detail. The lawns were “rather poor,” the gravel walks “not pleasant to the eye nor to the foot.” He found the Paris fair’s extensive use of formal flower beds objectionable. “It seemed to me,” he wrote, in a letter to John in Brookline, “that at the least it must have been extremely disquieting, gaudy & childish, if not savage and an injury to the Exposition, through its disturbance of dignity, and injury to breadth, unity & composure.” He reiterated his insistence that in Chicago “simplicity and reserve will be practiced and petty effects and frippery avoided.”

    The visit rekindled his concern that in the quest to surpass the Paris exposition Burnham and his architects had lost sight of what a world’s fair ought to be. The Paris buildings, Olmsted wrote, “have much more color and much more ornament in color, but much less in moulding and sculpture than I had supposed. They show I think more fitness for their purposes, seem more designed for the occasion and to be less like grand permanent architectural monuments than ours are to be. I question if ours are not at fault in this respect and if they are not going to look too assuming of architectural stateliness and to be overbonded with sculptural and other efforts for grandeur and grandiloquent pomp.”

    Olmsted liked traveling with his youthful entourage. In a letter to his wife in Brookline he wrote, “I am having a great deal of enjoyment, and I hope laying in a good stock of better health.” Soon after the party returned to Chislehurst, however, Olmsted’s health degraded and insomnia again shattered his nights. He wrote to Harry Codman, who was himself ill with a strange abdominal illness, “I can only conclude now that I am older and more used up than I had supposed.”

    A doctor, Henry Rayner, paid a social visit to Chislehurst to meet Olmsted. He happened to be a specialist in treating nervous disorders and was so appalled by Olmsted’s appearance that he offered to take him to his own house in Hampstead Heath, outside London, and care for him personally. Olmsted accepted.

    Despite Rayner’s close attention, Olmsted’s condition did not improve; his stay at Hampstead Heath became wearisome. “You know that I am practically in prison here,” he wrote to Harry Codman on June 16, 1892. “Every day I look for decided improvement and thus far everyday, I am disappointed.” Dr. Rayner too was perplexed, according to Olmsted. “He says, with confidence, after repeated examinations, of all my anatomy, that I have no organic trouble and that I may reasonably expect under favorable circumstances to keep at work for several years to come. He regards my present trouble as a variation in form of the troubles which led me to come abroad.”

    Most days Olmsted was driven by carriage through the countryside, “every day more or less on a different road,” to view gardens, churchyards, private parks, and the natural landscape. Nearly every ornamental flowerbed offended him. He dismissed them as “childish, vulgar, flaunting, or impertinent, out of place and discordant.” The countryside itself, however, charmed him: “there is nothing in America to be compared with the pastoral or with the picturesque beauty that is common property in England. I cannot go out without being delighted. The view before me as I write, veiled by the rain, is just enchanting.” The loveliest scenes, he found, were comprised of the simplest, most natural juxtapositions of native plants. “The finest combination is one of gorse, sweet briar, brambles, hawthorn, and ivy. Even when there is no bloom this is charming. And these things can be had by the hundred thousand at very low prices.”

    At times the scenes he saw challenged his vision of Jackson Park, at other times they affirmed it. “Everywhere the best ornamental grounds that we see are those in which vines and creepers are outwitting the gardener. We can’t have little vines and weeds enough.” He knew there was too little time to let nature alone produce such effects. “Let us as much as possible, train out creepers, and branches of trees, upon bridges, pulling down and nailing the branches, aiming to obtain shade and reflection of foliage and broken obscuration of water.”

    Above all, his sorties reinforced his belief that the Wooded Island, despite the Japanese temple, should be made as wild as possible. “I think more than ever of the value of the island,” he wrote to Harry Codman, “and of the importance of using all possible, original means of securing impervious screening, dense massive piles of foliage on its borders; with abundant variety of small detail in abject subordination to general effect… There cannot be enough of bulrush, adlumia, Madeira vine, catbriar, virgin’s bower, brambles, sweet peas, Jimson weed, milkweed, the smaller western sunflowers and morning glories.”

    But he also recognized that the wildness he sought would have to be tempered with excellent groundskeeping. He worried that Chicago would not be up to the task. “The standard of an English laborer, hack driver or cad in respect to neatness, smugness and elegance of gardens and grounds and paths and ways is infinitely higher than that of a Chicago merchant prince or virtuoso,” he wrote to Codman, “and we shall be disgraced if we fail to work up to a far higher level than our masters will be prepared to think suitable.”

    Overall Olmsted remained confident that his exposition landscape would succeed. A new worry troubled him, however. “The only cloud I see over the Exposition now is the Cholera,” he wrote in a letter to his Brookline office. “The accounts from Russia and from Paris this morning are alarming.”

    As Sol Bloom’s Algerians neared New York Harbor, workers assigned to the Midway erected temporary buildings to house them. Bloom went to New York to meet the ship and reserved two traincars to bring the villagers and their cargo back to Chicago.

    As the Algerians left the ship, they began moving in all directions at once. “I could see them getting lost, being run over, and landing in jail,” Bloom said. No one seemed to be in charge. Bloom raced up to them, shouting commands in French and English. A giant black-complected man walked up to Bloom and in perfect House of Lords English said, “I suggest you be more civil. Otherwise I may lose my temper and throw you into the water.”

    The man identified himself as Archie, and as the two settled into a more peaceful conversation, he revealed to Bloom that he had spent a decade in London serving as a rich man’s bodyguard. “At present,” he said, “I am responsible for conveying my associates to a place called Chicago. I understand it is somewhere in the hinterland.”

    Bloom handed him a cigar and proposed that he become his bodyguard and assistant.

    “Your offer,” Archie said, “is quite satisfactory.”

    Both men lit up and puffed smoke into the fragrant murk above New York Harbor.

    Burnham fought to boost the rate of construction, especially of the Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building, which had to be completed by Dedication Day. In March, with just half a year remaining until the dedication, he invoked the “czar” clause of his construction contracts. He ordered the builder of the Electricity Building to double his workforce and to put the men to work at night under electric lights. He threatened the Manufactures contractor with the same fate if he did not increase the pace of his work.

    Burnham had all but given up hope of surpassing the Eiffel Tower. Most recently he had turned down another outlandish idea, this from an earnest young Pittsburgh engineer who had attended his lecture to the Saturday Afternoon Club. The man was credible enough—his company held the contract for inspecting all the steel used in the fair’s structures—but the thing he proposed to build just did not seem feasible. “Too fragile,” Burnham told him. The public, he said, would be afraid.

    A hostile spring further hampered the fair’s progress. On Tuesday, April 5, 1892, at 6:50A.M., a sudden windstorm demolished the fair’s just-finished pumping station and tore down sixty-five feet of the Illinois State Building. Three weeks later another storm destroyed eight hundred feet of the south wall of the Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building. “The wind,” the Tribune observed, “seems to have a grudge against the World’s Fair grounds.”

    To find ways to accelerate the work, Burnham called the eastern architects to Chicago. One looming problem was how to color the exteriors of the main buildings, especially the staff-coated palisades of the Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building. During the meeting an idea arose that in the short run promised a dramatic acceleration of the work, but that eventually served to fix the fair in the world’s imagination as a thing of otherworldly beauty.

    By all rights, the arena of exterior decoration belonged to William Pretyman, the fair’s official director of color. Burnham admitted later that he had hired Pretyman for the job “largely on account of his great friendship for John Root.” Pretyman was ill suited to the job. Harriet Monroe, who knew him and his wife, wrote, “His genius was betrayed by lofty and indomitable traits of character which could not yield or compromise. And so his life was a tragedy of inconsequence.”

    The day of the meeting Pretyman was on the East Coast. The architects proceeded without him. “I was urging everyone on, knowing I had an awful fight against time,” Burnham said. “We talked about the colors, and finally the thought came, ‘let us make it all perfectly white.’ I do not remember who made that suggestion. It might have been one of those things that reached all minds at once. At any rate, I decided it.”

    The Mines Building, designed by Chicago’s Solon S. Beman, was nearly finished. It became the test building. Burnham ordered it painted a creamy white. Pretyman returned and “was outraged,” Burnham recalled.

    Pretyman insisted that any decision on color was his alone.

    “I don’t see it that way,” Burnham told him. “The decision is mine.”

    “All right,” Pretyman said. “I will get out.”

    Burnham did not miss him. “He was a brooding sort of man and very cranky,” Burnham said. “I let him go, then told Charles McKim that I would have to have a man who could actually take charge of it, and that I would not decide from the point of friendship.”

    McKim recommended the New York painter Francis Millet, who had sat in on the color meeting. Burnham hired him.

    Millet quickly proved his worth. After some experimentation he settled on “ordinary white lead and oil” as the best paint for staff, then developed a means of applying the paint not by brush but through a hose with a special nozzle fashioned from a length of gas pipe—the first spray paint. Burnham nicknamed Millet and his paint crews “the Whitewash Gang.”

    In the first week of May a powerful storm dropped an ocean of rain on Chicago and again caused the Chicago River to reverse flow. Again the sewage threatened the city’s water supply. The decaying carcass of a horse was spotted bobbing near one of the intake cribs.

    This new surge underscored for Burnham the urgency of completing his plan to pipe Waukesha spring water to the fair by Opening Day. Earlier, in July 1891, the exposition had granted a contract for the work to the Hygeia Mineral Springs Company, headed by an entrepreneur named J. E. McElroy, but the company had accomplished little. In March Burnham ordered Dion Geraldine, his chief construction superintendent, to press the matter “with the utmost vigor and see that no delay occurs.”

    Hygeia secured rights to lay its pipe from its springhouse in Waukesha through the village itself but failed to anticipate the intensity of opposition from citizens who feared the pipeline would disfigure their landscape and drain their famous springs. Hygeia’s McElroy, under mounting pressure from Burnham, turned to desperate measures.

    On Saturday evening, May 7, 1892, McElroy loaded a special train with pipes, picks, shovels, and three hundred men and set off for Waukesha to dig his pipeline under cover of darkness.

    Word of the expedition beat the train to Waukesha. As it pulled into the station, someone rang the village firebell, and soon a large force of men armed with clubs, pistols, and shotguns converged on the train. Two fire engines arrived hissing steam, their crews ready to blast the pipelayers with water. One village leader told McElroy that if he went ahead with his plan, he would not leave town alive.

    Soon another thousand or so townspeople joined the small army at the station. One group of men dragged a cannon from the town hall and trained it on Hygeia’s bottling plant.

    After a brief standoff, McElroy and the pipelayers went back to Chicago.

    Burnham still wanted that water. Workers had already laid pipes in Jackson Park for two hundred springwater booths.

    McElroy gave up trying to run pipes directly into the village of Waukesha. Instead he bought a spring in the town of Big Bend, twelve miles south of Waukesha, just inside the Waukesha County line. Fair visitors would be able to drink Waukesha springwater after all.

    That the water came from the county and not the famous village was a subtlety upon which Burnham and McElroy did not dwell.

    In Jackson Park everyone became caught up in the accelerating pace of construction. As the buildings rose, the architects spotted flaws in their designs but found the forward crush of work so overwhelming, it threatened to leave the flaws locked in stone, or at least staff. Frank Millet unofficially kept watch over the buildings of the eastern architects during their lengthy absences from the park, lest some ad hoc decision cause irreparable aesthetic damage. On June 6, 1892, he wrote to Charles McKim, designer of the Agriculture Building, “You had better write a letter embodying all the ideas of changes you have, because before you know it they’ll have you by the umbilicus. I staved them off from a cement floor in the Rotunda to-day and insisted that you must have brick… It takes no end of time and worry to get a thing settled right but only a second to have orders given out for a wrong thing to be done. All these remarks are in strict confidence, and I write in this way to urge you to be explicit and flat-footed in your wishes.”

    At the Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building workers employed by contractor Francis Agnew began the dangerous process of raising the giant iron trusses that would support the building’s roof and create the widest span of unobstructed interior space ever attempted.

    The workers installed three sets of parallel railroad tracks along the length of the building. Atop these, on railcar wheels or “trucks,” they erected a “traveler,” a giant derrick consisting of three tall towers spanned at the top by a platform. Workers using the traveler could lift and position two trusses at a time. George Post’s design called for twenty-two trusses, each weighing two hundred tons. Just getting the components to the park had required six hundred railcars.

    On Wednesday, June 1, exposition photographer Charles Arnold took a photograph of the building to record its progress. Anyone looking at that photograph would have had to conclude that the building could not possibly be finished in the four and a half months that remained until Dedication Day. The trusses were in place but no roof. The walls were just beginning to rise. When Arnold took the photograph, hundreds of men were at work on the building, but its scale was so great that none of the men was immediately visible. The ladders that rose from one level of scaffold to the next had all the substance of matchsticks and imparted to the structure an aura of fragility. In the foreground stood mountains of debris.

    Two weeks later Arnold returned for another photograph and captured a very different scene—one of devastation.

    On the night of June 13, just after nine o’clock, another abrupt storm had struck the fairgrounds, and this one also seemed to single out the Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building. A large portion of the building’s north end collapsed, which in turn caused the failure of an elevated gallery designed to ring the interior of the building. One hundred thousand feet of lumber crashed to the floor. Arnold’s photograph of the aftermath showed a Lilliputian man, possibly Burnham, standing before a great mound of shattered wood and tangled steel.

    This, of all buildings.

    The contractor, Francis Agnew, acknowledged the wall had been inadequately braced but blamed this condition on Burnham for pushing the men to build too quickly.

    Now Burnham pushed them even harder. He made good on his threat and doubled the number of men working on the building. They worked at night, in rain, in stifling heat. In August alone the building took three lives. Elsewhere on the grounds four other men died and dozens more suffered all manner of fractures, burns, and lacerations. The fair, according to one later appraisal, was a more dangerous place to work than a coal mine.

    Burnham intensified his drive for more power. The constant clash between the Exposition Company and the National Commission had become nearly unbearable. Even the congressional investigators had recognized that the overlapping jurisdiction was a source of discord and needless expense. Their report recommended that Davis’s salary be cut in half, a clear sign that the balance of power had shifted. The company and commission worked out a truce. On August 24 the executive committee named Burnham director of works. Chief of everything.

    Soon afterward Burnham dispatched letters to all his department heads, including Olmsted. “I have assumed personal control of the active work within the grounds of the World’s Columbian Exposition,” he wrote. “Henceforward, and until further notice, you will report to and receive orders from me exclusively.”

    In Pittsburgh the young steel engineer became more convinced than ever that his challenge to the Eiffel Tower could succeed. He asked a partner in his inspection firm, W. F. Gronau, to calculate the novel forces that would play among the components of his structure. In engineering parlance, it embodied little “dead load,” the static weight of immobile masses of brick and steel. Nearly all of it was “live load,” meaning weight that changes over time, as when a train passes over a bridge. “I had no precedent,” Gronau said. After three weeks of intense work, however, he came up with detailed specifications. The numbers were persuasive, even to Burnham. In June the Ways and Means Committee agreed that the thing should be built. They granted a concession.

    The next day the committee revoked it—second thoughts, after a night spent dreaming of freak winds and shrieking steel and two thousand lives gone in a wink. One member of the committee now called it a “monstrosity.” A chorus of engineers chanted that the thing could not be built, at least not with any margin of safety.

    Its young designer still did not concede defeat, however. He spent $25,000 on drawings and additional specifications and used them to recruit a cadre of investors that included two prominent engineers, Robert Hunt, head of a major Chicago firm, and Andrew Onderdonk, famous for helping construct the Canadian Pacific Railway.

    Soon he sensed a change. The new man in charge of the Midway, Sol Bloom, had struck like a bolt of lightning and seemed amenable to just about anything—the more novel and startling the better. And Burnham had gained almost limitless power over the construction and operation of the fair.

    The engineer readied himself for a third try.

    In the first week of September 1892 Olmsted and his young party left England for home, departing Liverpool aboard the City of New York. The seas were high, the crossing difficult. Seasickness felled Marion and left Rick perpetually queasy. Olmsted’s own health again declined. His insomnia came back. He wrote, “I was more disabled when I returned than when I left.” Now, however, he had no time to recuperate. Dedication Day was only a month away, and Harry Codman was again ill, incapacitated by the same stomach problem that had struck him during the summer. Olmsted left for Chicago to take over direct supervision of the work while Codman recovered. “I am still tortured a good deal with neuralgia and toothache,” Olmsted wrote, “and I am tired and have a growing dread of worry & anxiety.”

    In Chicago he found a changed park. The Mines Building was finished, as was the Fisheries Building. Most of the other buildings were well under way, including, incredibly, the giant Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building, where hundreds of workers swarmed its scaffolds and roof. The building’s floor alone had consumed five traincar loads of nails.

    Amid all this work, however, the landscape had suffered. Temporary tracks latticed the grounds. Wagons had gouged chasms across paths, roads, and would-be lawns. Litter lay everywhere. A first-time visitor might wonder if Olmsted’s men had done any work at all.

    Olmsted, of course, knew that tremendous progress had been made, but it was the sort that escaped casual notice. Lagoons existed now where once there had been barren land. The elevated sites upon which the buildings stood had not existed until his grading teams created them. The previous spring his men had planted nearly everything raised in the exposition’s nurseries, plus an additional 200,000 trees, aquatic plants, and ferns, and 30,000 more willow cuttings, all this under the direction of his aptly named head gardener, E. Dehn.

    In the time left before Dedication Day Burnham wanted Olmsted’s men to concentrate on cleaning the grounds and dressing them with flowers and temporary lawns of sod, actions that Olmsted understood were necessary but that clashed with his career-long emphasis on designing for scenic effects that might not be achieved for decades. “Of course the main work suffers,” he wrote.

    One indisputably positive development had occurred during his absence, however. Burnham had awarded the boat concession to a company called the Electric Launch and Navigation Company, which had produced a lovely electric vessel of exactly the character Olmsted wanted.

    On Dedication Day even the press was polite enough to overlook the stark appearance of the grounds and the unfinished feel of the Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building. To have done otherwise would have been an act of disloyalty to Chicago and the nation.

    The dedication had been anticipated nationwide. Francis J. Bellamy, an editor of Youth’s Companion, thought it would be a fine thing if on that day all the schoolchildren of America, in unison, offered something to their nation. He composed a pledge that the Bureau of Education mailed to virtually every school. As originally worded, it began, “I pledge allegiance to my Flag and to the Republic for which it stands…”

    A great parade brought Burnham and other dignitaries to the Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building, where a standing army of 140,000 Chicagoans filled the thirty-two-acre floor. Shafts of sunlight struck through the rising mist of human breath. Five thousand yellow chairs stood on the red-carpeted speaker’s platform, and in these chairs sat businessmen dressed in black, and foreign commissioners and clerics in scarlet, purple, green, and gold. Ex-mayor Carter Harrison, again running for a fifth term, strode about shaking hands, his black slouch hat raising cheers from supporters in the crowd. At the opposite end of the building a five-thousand-voice choir sang Handel’s “Hallelujah” chorus to the accompaniment of five hundred musicians. At one point a spectator recalled, “Ninety thousand people suddenly rose and stood upon their feet and simultaneously waved and fluttered ninety thousand snowy pocket-handkerchiefs; the air was cut into dusty spirals, which vibrated to the great iron-ribbed ceiling… One had a sense of dizziness, as if the entire building rocked.”

    The chamber was so immense that visual signals had to be used to let the chorus know when a speaker had stopped talking and a new song could begin. Microphones did not yet exist, so only a small portion of the audience actually heard any speeches. The rest, with faces contorted from the strain of trying to listen, saw distant men gesturing wildly into the sound-killing miasma of whispers, coughs and creaking shoe leather. Harriet Monroe, the poet who had been John Root’s sister-in-law, was there and watched as two of the nation’s greatest speakers, Colonel Henry Watterson of Kentucky and ChaunceyM. Depew of New York, took turns at the podium, “both orators waving their windy words toward a vast, whispering, rustling audience which could not hear.”

    This was a big day for Miss Monroe. She had composed a lengthy poem for the event, her “Columbian Ode,” and pestered her many powerful friends into having it placed on the day’s program. She watched with pride as an actress read it to the few thousand people close enough to hear it. Unlike the majority of the audience, Monroe believed the poem to be rather a brilliant work, so much so that she had hired a printer to produce five thousand copies for sale to the public. She sold few and attributed the debacle to America’s fading love of poetry.

    That winter she burned the excess copies for fuel.

Prendergast

    ON NOVEMBER 28, 1892, Patrick Eugene Joseph Prendergast, the mad Irish immigrant and Harrison supporter, selected one of his postal cards. He was twenty-four years old now and despite his accelerating mental decline was still employed by the Inter Ocean as a delivery contractor. The card, like all the others, was four inches wide by five inches long, blank on one face, with postal insignia and a printed one-cent stamp on the other. In this time when writing long letters was everyday practice, men of normal sensibility saw these cards as the most crabbed of media, little better than telegrams, but to Prendergast this square of stiff paper was a vehicle that gave him a voice in the skyscrapers and mansions of the city.

    He addressed this particular card to “A. S. Trude, Lawyer.” He sketched the letters of the name in large floral script, as if seeking to dispatch the cumbersome duty of addressing the card as quickly as possible, before advancing to the message itself.

    That Prendergast had selected Trude to be one of his correspondents was not surprising. Prendergast read widely and possessed a good grasp of the grip-car wrecks, murders, and City Hall machinations covered so fervently by the city’s newspapers. He knew that Alfred S. Trude was one of Chicago’s best criminal defense attorneys and that from time to time he was hired by the state to serve as prosecutor, a practice customary in particularly important cases.

    Prendergast filled the postcard from top margin to bottom, from edge to edge, with little regard for whether the sentences formed level lines or not. He gripped the pen so tightly it impressed channels into the tips of his thumb and forefinger. “My Dear Mr. Trude,” he began. “Were you much hurt?” An accident, reported in the press, had caused Trude minor injuries. “Your humble servant hereby begs leave to tender you his sincere sympathy and trusts that while he does not appear before you in person, you nonetheless will not have any doubts as to his real sympathy for you in your misfortunes—you are wished by him a speedy recovery from the results of the accident which you had the misfortune to meet with.”

    He wrote with a tone of familiarity that presumed Trude would consider him a peer. As the note progressed, his handwriting shrank, until it seemed like something extruded rather than written. “I suppose Mr. Trude that you do understand that the greatest authority on the subject of law is Jesus Christ—and that you also know that the fulfillment of the whole law depends upon the observance of these two commands thou shalt Love God most of all & your neighbor as your self—these are the greatest commands if you please sir.”

    The note clicked from theme to theme like the wheels of a train crossing a freightyard. “Have you ever saw the picture of the fat man who looked for his dog while his dog was at his feet and still did not have the wit to see what was the matter—have you observed the cat?”

    He did not add a closing and did not sign the note. He simply ran out of room, then posted the card.

    Trude read the note and at first dismissed it as the work of a crank. The number of troubled men and women seemed to be increasing with each passing year. The jails were full of them, a warden later would testify. Inevitably some became dangerous, like Charles Guiteau, the man who had assassinated President Garfield in Washington.

    For no clear reason, Trude kept the card.

“I Want You at Once”

    IN LATE NOVEMBER THE young Pittsburgh engineer once again put his proposal for out-Eiffeling Eiffel before the Ways and Means Committee. This time in addition to drawings and specifications he included a list of investors, the names of the prominent men on his board, and proof that he had raised enough money to finance the project to completion. On December 16, 1892, the committee granted him a concession to build his structure in the Midway Plaisance. This time the decision held.

    He needed an engineer willing to go to Chicago and supervise the construction effort and thought he knew just the man: Luther V. Rice, assistant engineer of the Union Depot & Tunnel Company, St. Louis. His letter to Rice began, “I have on hand a great project for the World’s Fair in Chicago. I am going to build a vertically revolving wheel 250' in dia.”

    Nowhere in this letter, however, did he reveal the true dimension of his vision: that this wheel would carry thirty-six cars, each about the size of a Pullman, each holding sixty people and equipped with its own lunch counter, and how when filled to capacity the wheel would propel 2,160 people at a time three hundred feet into the sky over Jackson Park, a bit higher than the crown of the now six-year-old Statue of Liberty.

    He told Rice, “I want you at once if you can come.” He signed the letter: George Washington Gale Ferris.

Chappell Redux

    ONE DAY IN THE FIRST week of December 1892 Emeline Cigrand set out for Holmes’s building in Englewood bearing a small neatly wrapped parcel. Initially her mood was bright, for the parcel contained an early Christmas present she planned to give to her friends the Lawrences, but as she neared the corner of Sixty-third and Wallace, her spirits dimmed. Where once the building had seemed almost a palace—not for its architectural nobility but for what it promised—now it looked drab and worn. She climbed the stairs to the second floor and went directly to the Lawrences’ apartment. The warmth and welcome resurrected her good spirits. She handed the parcel to Mrs. Lawrence, who opened it immediately and pulled from the wrapping a tin plate upon which Emeline had painted a lovely forest.

    The gift delighted Mrs. Lawrence but also perplexed her. Christmas was only three weeks off, she said kindly: Why hadn’t Emeline simply waited and given the plate then, when Mrs. Lawrence could have offered a gift in return?

    Her face brightening, Emeline explained that she was going home to Indiana to spend Christmas with her family.

    “She seemed delighted with the anticipation of a visit to them,” Mrs. Lawrence said. “She spoke in most affectionate terms of them and seemed as happy as a child.” But Mrs. Lawrence also sensed a note of finality in Emeline’s voice that suggested Emeline’s journey might have another purpose. She said, “You are not going away from us?”

    “Well,” Emeline said. “I don’t know. Maybe.”

    Mrs. Lawrence laughed. “Why, Mr. Holmes could never get along without you.”

    Emeline’s expression changed. “He could if he had to.”

    The remark confirmed something for the Lawrences. “It had seemed to me for some time that Miss Cigrand was changing in her feelings toward Holmes,” said Dr. Lawrence. “In the light of what has happened since, I believe now that she had found out to a certain extent the real character of Holmes and determined to leave him.”

    She may have begun to believe the stories she heard in the neighborhood of Holmes’s penchant for acquiring things on credit and then not paying for them—stories she had heard all along, for they were rife, but that she at first had dismissed as the gossip of envious hearts. Later there was speculation that Emeline herself had trusted Holmes with her $800 savings, only to have it disappear in a fog of promises of lavish future returns. Ned Conner’s warning echoed in her mind. Lately she had begun talking of returning one day to Dwight to resume her work for Dr. Keeley.

    Emeline never told the Lawrences good-bye. Her visits simply stopped. That she would leave without a parting word struck Mrs. Lawrence as being very much out of character. She wasn’t sure whether to feel wounded or worried. She asked Holmes what he knew about Emeline’s absence.

    Ordinarily Holmes looked at Mrs. Lawrence with a directness that was unsettling, but now he avoided her gaze. “Oh, she’s gone away to get married,” Holmes said, as if nothing could have interested him less.

    The news shocked Mrs. Lawrence. “I don’t see why she didn’t mention something to me about getting married.”

    It was a secret, Holmes explained: Emeline and her betrothed had revealed their wedding plans only to him.

    But for Mrs. Lawrence this explanation only raised more questions. Why would the couple want such privacy? Why had Emeline said nothing to Mrs. Lawrence, when together they had shared so many other confidences?

    Mrs. Lawrence missed Emeline and the way her effervescence and physical brightness—her prettiness and sunflower hair—lit the sullen halls of Holmes’s building. She remained perplexed and a few days later again asked Holmes about Emeline.

    He pulled a square envelope from his pocket. “This will tell you,” he said.

    The envelope contained a wedding announcement. Not engraved, as was customary, merely typeset. This too surprised Mrs. Lawrence. Emeline never would have accepted so mundane a means of communicating news of such magnitude.

    The announcement read:

    Mr. Robert E. Phelps.    

    Miss Emeline G. Cigrand.    

    Married    

    Wednesday, December 7th

    1892    

    CHICAGO

    Holmes told Mrs. Lawrence he had received his copy from Emeline herself. “Some days after going away she returned for her mail,” he explained in his memoir, “and at this time gave me one of her wedding cards, and also two or three others for tenants in the building who were not then in their rooms; and in response to inquiries lately made I have learned that at least five persons in and about Lafayette, Ind., received such cards, the post mark and her handwriting upon the envelope in which they were enclosed showing that she must have sent them herself after leaving my employ.”

    Emeline’s family and friends did receive copies of the announcement through the mail, and indeed these appeared to have been addressed by Emeline herself. Most likely Holmes forged the envelopes or else duped Emeline into preparing them by persuading her they would be used for a legitimate purpose, perhaps for Christmas cards.

    For Mrs. Lawrence the announcement explained nothing. Emeline had never mentioned a Robert Phelps. And if Emeline had come to the building bearing marriage announcements, she surely would have presented one in person.

    The next day Mrs. Lawrence stopped Holmes yet again, and this time asked what he knew about Phelps. In the same dismissive manner Holmes said, “Oh, he is a fellow Miss Cigrand met somewhere. I do not know anything about him except that he is a traveling man.”

    News of Emeline’s marriage reached her hometown newspaper, which reported it on December 8, 1892, in a small chatty bulletin. The item called Emeline a “lady of refinement” who “possesses a character that is strong and pure. Her many friends feel that she has exercised good judgment in selecting a husband and will heartily congratulate her.” The item offered a few biographical details, among them the fact that Emeline once had been employed as a stenographer in the county recorder’s office. “From there,” the item continued, “she went to Dwight, and from there to Chicago, where she met her fate.”

    “Fate” being the writer’s coy allusion to marriage.

    In the days that followed Mrs. Lawrence asked Holmes additional questions about Emeline, but he responded only in monosyllables. She began to think of Emeline’s departure as a disappearance and recalled that soon after Emeline’s last visit a curious change in routine had occurred within Holmes’s building.

    “The day after Miss Cigrand disappeared, or the day we last saw her, the door of Holmes’ office was kept locked and nobody went into it except Holmes and Patrick Quinlan,” Mrs. Lawrence said. “About 7 o’clock in the evening Holmes came out of his office and asked two men who were living in the building if they would not help him carry a trunk downstairs.” The trunk was new and large, about four feet long. Its contents clearly were heavy and made the big trunk difficult to manage. Holmes repeatedly cautioned his helpers to be careful with it. An express wagon arrived and took it away.

    Mrs. Lawrence later claimed that at this point she became convinced Holmes had killed Emeline. Yet she and her husband made no effort to move from the building, nor did they go to the police. No one did. Not Mrs. Lawrence, not Mr. and Mrs. Peter Cigrand, not Ned Conner, and not Julia’s parents, Mr. and Mrs. Andrew Smythe. It was as if no one expected the police would be interested in yet another disappearance or, if they were, that they would be competent enough to conduct an effective investigation.

    Soon afterward Emeline’s own trunk, filled with her belongings and all the clothing she had brought with her when she left home in 1891 to work for Keeley, arrived at a freight depot near her hometown. Her parents at first believed—hoped—she had sent the trunk home because now that she was marrying a wealthy man, she no longer needed such old and worn things. The Cigrands received no further mail from Emeline, not even at Christmas. “This,” said Dr. B. J. Cigrand, Emeline’s second cousin, the North Side dentist, “in spite of the fact that she was in the habit of writing to her parents two or three times a week.”

    Emeline’s parents still did not imagine murder, however. Peter Cigrand said, “I had at last come to the belief she must have died in Europe and her husband either did not know our address or neglected to notify us.”

    The Cigrands and Lawrences would have found their anxiety intensified manyfold had they known a few other facts:

    That the name Phelps was an alias that Holmes’s assistant, Benjamin Pitezel, had used when he first met Emeline at the Keeley Institute;

    That on January 2, 1893, Holmes again had enlisted the help of Charles Chappell, the articulator, and sent him a trunk containing the corpse of a woman, her upper body stripped nearly bare of flesh;

    That a few weeks later the LaSalle Medical College of Chicago had taken delivery of a nicely articulated skeleton;

    And that something peculiar had occurred in the room-sized vault in Holmes’s building, a phenomenon that when finally discovered by police three years later would defy scientific explanation.

    Somehow a footprint had become etched into the smooth enameled finish on the inside of the vault door at a point roughly two feet above the floor. The toes, the ball, and the heel were so clearly outlined as to leave no doubt that a woman had left the print. The degree of detail mystified the police, as did the print’s resilience. They tried rubbing it off by hand, then with a cloth and soap and water, but it remained as clear as ever.

    No one could explain it with any certainty. The best guess posited that Holmes had lured a woman into the vault; that the woman was shoeless at the time, perhaps nude; and that Holmes then had closed the airtight door to lock her inside. She had left the print in a last hopeless effort to force the door open. To explain the print’s permanence, detectives theorized that Holmes, known to have an avid interest in chemistry, had first poured a sheen of acid onto the floor to hasten by chemical reaction the consumption of oxygen in the vault. The theory held that Emeline had stepped in the acid, then placed her feet against the door, thus literally etching the print into the enamel.

    But again, this revelation came much later. As of the start of 1893, the year of the fair, no one, including Holmes, had noticed the footprint on the door.

“The Cold-Blooded Fact”

    AT THE START OF JANUARY 1893 the weather turned cold and stayed cold, the temperature falling to twenty degrees below zero. In his dawn tours, Burnham faced a hard pale world. Cairns of frozen horse manure punctuated the landscape. Along the banks of the Wooded Island ice two feet thick locked Olmsted’s bulrush and sedge in cruel contortions. Burnham saw that Olmsted’s work was far behind. And now Olmsted’s man in Chicago, Harry Codman, upon whom everyone had come to depend, was in the hospital recovering from surgery. His recurring illness had turned out to be appendicitis. The operation, under ether, had gone well and Codman was recuperating, but his recovery would be slow. Only four months remained until Opening Day.

    The extreme cold increased the threat of fire. The necessary fires alone—the salamanders and tinner’s pots—had caused dozens of small blazes, easily put out, but the cold increased the likelihood of far worse. It froze water lines and hydrants and drove workers to break Burnham’s ban on smoking and open flame. The men of the Columbian Guard stepped up their vigilance. It was they who suffered most from the cold, standing watch around the clock in far-flung reaches of the park where no shelter existed. “The winter of 1892—3 will always be remembered by those who served on the guard during that period,” wrote Colonel Rice, their commander. Its members most dreaded being assigned to an especially bleak sector at the extreme south end of the park below the Agriculture Building. They called it Siberia. Colonel Rice used their dread to his advantage: “any Guard ordered to the post along the South fence would realize that he had been guilty of some minor breach of discipline, or that his personal appearance rendered him too unsightly for the more public parts of the grounds.”

    George Ferris fought the cold with dynamite, the only efficient way to penetrate the three-foot crust of frozen earth that now covered Jackson Park. Once opened, the ground still posed problems. Just beneath the crust lay a twenty-foot stratum of the same quicksand Chicago builders always confronted, only now it was ice cold and a torment to workers. The men used jets of live steam to thaw dirt and prevent newly poured cement from freezing. They drove timber piles to hard-pan thirty-two feet underground. On top of these they laid a grillage of steel, then filled it with cement. To keep the excavated chambers as dry as possible, they ran pumps twenty-four hours a day. They repeated the process for each of the eight 140-foot towers that would support the Ferris Wheel’s giant axle.

    At first, Ferris’s main worry was whether he could acquire enough steel to build his machine. He realized, however, that he had an advantage over anyone else trying to place a new order. Through his steel-inspection company he knew most of the nation’s steel executives and the products they made. He was able to pull in favors and spread his orders among many different companies. “No one shop could begin to do all the work, therefore contracts were let to a dozen different firms, each being chosen because of some peculiar fitness for the work entrusted to it,” according to an account by Ferris’s company. Ferris also commanded a legion of inspectors who evaluated the quality of each component as it emerged from each mill. This proved to be a vital benefit since the wheel was a complex assemblage of 100,000 parts that ranged in size from small bolts to the giant axle, which at the time of its manufacture by Bethlehem Steel was the largest one-piece casting ever made. “Absolute precision was necessary, as few of the parts could be put together until they were upon the ground and an error of the smallest fraction of an inch might be fatal.”

    The wheel Ferris envisioned actually consisted of two wheels spaced thirty feet apart on the axle. What had frightened Burnham, at first, was the apparent insubstantiality of the design. Each wheel was essentially a gigantic bicycle wheel. Slender iron rods just two and a half inches thick and eighty feet long linked the rim, or felloe, of each wheel to a “spider” affixed to the axle. Struts and diagonal rods ran between the two wheels to stiffen the assembly and give it the strength of a railroad bridge. A chain weighing twenty thousand pounds connected a sprocket on the axle to sprockets driven by twin thousand-horsepower steam engines. For aesthetic reasons the boilers were to be located seven hundred feet outside the Midway, the steam shunted to the engines through ten-inch underground pipes.

    This, at least, is how it looked on paper. Just digging and installing the foundation, however, had proven more difficult than Ferris and Rice had expected, and they knew that far greater hurdles lay ahead, foremost among them the challenge of raising that huge axle to its mount atop the eight towers. Together with its fittings, the axle weighed 142,031 pounds. Nothing that heavy had ever been lifted before, let alone to such a height.

    Olmsted, in Brookline, got the news by telegram: Harry Codman was dead. Codman, his protégé, whom he loved like a son. He was twenty-nine. “You will have heard of our great calamity,” Olmsted wrote to his friend Gifford Pinchot. “As yet, I am as one standing on a wreck and can hardly see when we shall be afloat again.”

    Olmsted recognized that now he himself would have to take over direct supervision of the exposition work, but he felt less up to the duty than ever. He and Phil, Harry’s brother, arrived in Chicago at the beginning of February to find the city locked in brutal cold, the temperature eight degrees below zero. On February 4 he sat down at Codman’s desk for the first time and found it awash with stacks of invoices and memoranda. Olmsted’s head raged with noise and pain. He had a sore throat. He was deeply sad. The task of sorting through Codman’s accumulated papers and of taking over the exposition work now seemed beyond him. He asked a former assistant, Charles Eliot, now one of Boston’s best landscape architects, if he would come to help. After some hesitation Eliot agreed. On arrival Eliot saw immediately that Olmsted was ill. By the evening of February 17, 1893, as a blizzard bore down on Chicago, Olmsted was under a doctor’s care, confined to his hotel.

    The same night Olmsted wrote to John in Brookline. Weariness and sorrow freighted each page of his letter. “It looks as if the time has come when it is necessary for you to count me out,” he wrote. The work in Chicago had begun to look hopeless. “It is very plain that as things are, we are not going to be able to do our duty here.”

    By early March Olmsted and Eliot were back in Brookline, Eliot now a full-fledged partner, the firm newly renamed Olmsted, Olmsted & Eliot. The exposition work was still far behind schedule and a major source of worry, but Olmsted’s health and the pressure of other work had forced him from Chicago. With deep misgivings Olmsted had left the work in the care of his superintendent, Rudolf Ulrich, whom he had come to distrust. On March 11 Olmsted dispatched a long letter to Ulrich full of instructions.

    “I have never before, in all the numerous works for which I have been broadly responsible, trusted as much to the discretion of an assistant or co-operator,” Olmsted wrote. “And the results have been such that in the straights in which we are placed by the death of Mr. Codman and my ill health, and the consequent excessive pressure of other duties, I am more than ever disposed to pursue this policy, and to carry it further. But I must confess that I can not do so without much anxiety.”

    He made it clear that this anxiety was due to Ulrich, specifically, Ulrich’s “constitutional propensity” to lose sight of the broad scheme and throw himself into minute tasks better handled by subordinates, a trait that Olmsted feared had left Ulrich vulnerable to demands by other officials, in particular Burnham. “Never lose sight of the fact that our special responsibility as landscape artists applies primarily to the broad, comprehensive scenery of the Exposition,” Olmsted wrote. (The emphases were his.) “This duty is not to make a garden, or to produce garden effects, but relates to the scenery of the Exposition as a whole; first of all and most essentially the scenery, in a broad and comprehensive way… If, for lack of time and means, or of good weather, we come short in matters of detailed decoration, our failure will be excusable. If we fall short in matters affecting broad landscape effects we shall fail in our primary and essential duty.”

    He went on to identify for Ulrich the things that most worried him about the fair, among them the color scheme chosen by Burnham and the architects. “Let me remind you that the whole field of the Exposition has already come to be popularly called ‘THE WHITE CITY’… I fear that against the clear blue sky and the blue lake, great towering masses of white, glistening in the clear, hot, Summer sunlight of Chicago, with the glare of the water that we are to have both within and without the Exposition grounds, will be overpowering.” This, he wrote, made it more important than ever to provide a counterbalance of “dense, broad, luxuriant green bodies of foliage.”

    Clearly the possibility of failure at the exposition had occurred to Olmsted and troubled him. Time was short, the weather terrible. The spring planting season would be brief. Olmsted had begun to think in terms of fallback arrangements. He warned Ulrich, “Do not lay out to do anything in the way of decorative planting that you shall not be quite certain that you will have ample time and means to perfect of its kind. There can be little fault found with simple, neat turf. Do not be afraid of plain, undecorated, smooth surfaces.”

    It was far better, Olmsted lectured, to underdecorate than to overdecorate. “Let us be thought over-much plain and simple, even bare, rather than gaudy, flashy, cheap and meretricious. Let us manifest the taste of gentlemen.”

    Snow fell, bales of it. It fell day after day until hundreds of tons of it lay upon the rooftops at Jackson Park. The exposition was to be a warm-weather affair, set to run from May through October. No one had thought to design the roofs to resist such extreme loading from snow.

    Men working at the Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building heard the shriek of failed steel and ran for cover. In a great blur of snow and silvery glass the building’s roof—that marvel of late nineteenth-century hubris, enclosing the greatest volume of unobstructed space in history—collapsed to the floor below.

    Soon afterward, a reporter from San Francisco made his way to Jackson Park. He had come prepared to admire the grand achievement of Burnham’s army of workers but instead found himself troubled by what he saw in the stark frozen landscape.

    “This seems to be an impossibility,” he wrote. “To be sure, those in charge claim that they will be ready on time. Still the cold-blooded fact stares one in the face that only the Woman’s Building is anywhere near completion inside and out.”

    Yet the fair was to open in little more than two months.

Acquiring Minnie

    FOR HOLMES, DESPITE THE PERSISTENT deep cold of the first two months of 1893, things never looked better. With Emeline gone and neatly disposed of, he now was able to concentrate on his growing web of enterprises. He savored its scope: He owned a portion of a legitimate company that produced a machine for duplicating documents; he sold mail-order ointments and elixirs and by now had established his own alcohol-treatment company, the Silver Ash Institute, his answer to Keeley’s gold cure; he collected rents from the Lawrences and his other tenants and owned two houses, one on Honoré Street, the other the new house in Wilmette now occupied by his wife Myrta and daughter Lucy, which he himself had designed and then built with the help of as many as seventy-five largely unpaid workers. And soon he would begin receiving his first world’s fair guests.

    He spent much of his time outfitting his hotel. He acquired high-grade furnishings from the Tobey Furniture Company, and crystal and ceramics from the French, Potter Crockery Company, and did so without paying a dime, though he recognized that soon the companies would attempt to collect on the promissory notes he had given them. This did not worry him. He had learned through experience that delay and heartfelt remorse were powerful tools with which he could fend off creditors for months and years, sometimes forever. Such prolonged standoffs would not be necessary, however, for he sensed that his time in Chicago was nearing an end. Mrs. Lawrence’s questioning had become more pointed, almost accusing. And lately some of his creditors had begun exhibiting an extraordinary hardening of resolve. One firm, Merchant & Co., which had supplied the iron for his kiln and vault, had gone so far as to secure a writ of replevin to take the iron back. In an inspection of the building, however, its agents had been unable to find anything they could identify conclusively as a Merchant product.

    Far more annoying were the letters from parents of missing daughters and the private detectives who had begun showing up at his door. Independently of each other, the Cigrand and Conner families had hired “eyes” to search for their missing daughters. Although at first these inquiries troubled Holmes, he realized quickly that neither family believed he had anything to do with the disappearances. The detectives made no mention of suspecting foul play. They wanted information—the names of friends, forwarding addresses, suggestions on where to look next.

    He was, of course, happy to oblige. Holmes told his visitors how much it grieved him, truly deeply grieved him, that he was unable to provide any new information to ease the worry of the parents. If he heard from the women, he of course would notify the detectives at once. Upon parting, he shook each detective’s hand and told him that if his work should happen to bring him back to Englewood anytime in the future, by all means stop in. Holmes and the detectives parted as cheerily as if they had known each other all their lives.

    At the moment—March 1893—the greatest inconvenience confronting Holmes was his lack of help. He needed a new secretary. There was no shortage of women seeking work, for the fair had drawn legions of them to Chicago. At the nearby Normal School, for example, the number of women applying to become teacher trainees was said to be many times the usual. Rather, the trick lay in choosing a woman of the correct sensibility. Candidates would need a degree of stenographic and typewriting skill, but what he most looked for and was so very adept at sensing was that alluring amalgam of isolation, weakness, and need. Jack the Ripper had found it in the impoverished whores of Whitechapel; Holmes saw it in transitional women, fresh clean young things free for the first time in history but unsure of what that freedom meant and of the risks it entailed. What he craved was possession and the power it gave him; what he adored was anticipation—the slow acquisition of love, then life, and finally the secrets within. The ultimate disposition of the material was irrelevant, a recreation. That he happened to have found a way to make disposal both efficient and profitable was simply a testament to his power.

    In March fortune brought him the perfect acquisition. Her name was Minnie R. Williams. He had met her several years earlier during a stay in Boston and had considered acquiring her even then, but the distance was too great, the timing awkward. Now she had moved to Chicago. Holmes guessed that he himself might be part of the reason.

    She would be twenty-five years old by now. Unlike his usual selections, she was plain, short, and plump, her weight somewhere between 140 and 150. She had a masculine nose, thick dark eyebrows, and virtually no neck. Her expression was bland, her cheeks full—“a baby face,” as one witness put it. “She didn’t seem to know a great deal.”

    In Boston, however, Holmes had discovered that she possessed other winning attributes.

    Born in Mississippi, Minnie Williams and her younger sister, Anna, were orphaned at an early age and sent to live with different uncles. Anna’s new guardian was the Reverend Dr. W. C. Black, of Jackson, Mississippi, editor of the Methodist Christian Advocate.Minnie went to Texas, where her guardian-uncle was a successful businessman. He treated her well and in 1886 enrolled her at the Boston Academy of Elocution. He died in the midst of her three-year program and bequeathed to her an estate valued at between $50,000 and $100,000, (about $1.5 to $3 million in twenty-first-century dollars).

    Anna, meanwhile, became a schoolteacher. She taught in Midlothian, Texas, at the Midlothian Academy.

    When Holmes met Minnie, he was traveling on business under the alias Henry Gordon and found himself invited to a gathering at the home of one of Boston’s leading families. Through various inquiries Holmes learned of Minnie’s inheritance and of the fact that it consisted largely of a parcel of property in the heart of Fort Worth, Texas.

    Holmes extended his Boston stay. Minnie called him Harry. He took her to plays and concerts and bought her flowers and books and sweets. Wooing her was pathetically easy. Each time he told her he had to return to Chicago, she seemed crushed, delightfully so. Throughout 1889 he traveled regularly to Boston and always swept Minnie into a whirl of shows and dinners, although what he looked forward to most were the days before his departure when her need flared like fire in a dry forest.

    After a time, however, he tired of the game. The distance was too great, Minnie’s reticence too profound. His visits to Boston became fewer, though he still responded to her letters with the ardor of a lover.

    Holmes’s absence broke Minnie’s heart. She had fallen in love. His visits had thrilled her, his departures destroyed her. She was perplexed—he had seemed to be conducting a courtship and even urged her to abandon her studies and run with him to Chicago, but now he was gone and his letters came only rarely. She gladly would have left Boston under the flag of marriage, but not under the reckless terms he proposed. He would have made an excellent husband. He was affectionate in ways she rarely encountered in men, and he was adept at business. She missed his warmth and touch.

    Soon there were no letters at all.

    Upon graduation from the Academy of Elocution, Minnie moved to Denver, where she tried to establish her own theatrical company, and in the process lost $15,000. She still dreamed about Harry Gordon. As her theater company collapsed, she thought of him more and more. She dreamed also of Chicago, a city everyone seemed to be talking about and to which everyone seemed to be moving. Between Harry and the soon-to-begin World’s Columbian Exposition, the city became irresistible to her.

    She moved to Chicago in February 1893 and took a job as a stenographer for a law firm. She wrote to Harry to tell him of her arrival.

    Harry Gordon called on her almost immediately and greeted her with tears in his eyes. He was so warm and affectionate. It was as if they had never parted. He suggested she come work for him as his personal stenographer. They could see each other every day, without having to worry about the interventions of Minnie’s landlady, who watched them as if she were Minnie’s own mother.

    The prospect thrilled her. He still said nothing about marriage, but she could tell he loved her. And this was Chicago. Things were different here, less rigid and formal. Everywhere she went she found women her own age, unescorted, holding jobs, living their own lives. She accepted Harry’s offer. He seemed delighted.

    But he imposed a curious stipulation. Minnie was to refer to him in public as Henry Howard Holmes, an alias, he explained, that he had adopted for business reasons. She was never to call him Gordon, nor act surprised when people referred to him as Dr. Holmes. She could call him “Harry” at any time, however.

    She managed his correspondence and kept his books, while he concentrated on getting his building ready for the world’s fair. They dined together in his office, on meals brought in from the restaurant below. Minnie showed “a remarkable aptitude for the work,” Holmes wrote in his memoir. “During the first weeks she boarded at a distance, but later, from about the 1st of March until the 15th of May, 1893, she occupied rooms in the same building and adjoining my offices.”

    Harry touched her and caressed her and let his eyes fill with tears of adoration. At last he asked her to marry him. She felt very lucky. Her Harry was so handsome and dynamic, she knew that once married they would share a wonderful life full of travel and fine possessions. She wrote of her hopes to her sister Anna.

    In recent years the sisters had become very close, overcoming an earlier estrangement. They wrote to each other often. Minnie filled her letters with news of her fast-intensifying romance and expressed wonder that such a handsome man had chosen her to be his wife.

    Anna was skeptical. The romance was advancing too quickly and with a degree of intimacy that violated all the intricate rules of courtship. Minnie was sweet, Anna knew, but certainly no beauty.

    If Harry Gordon was such a paragon of looks and enterprise, why had he selected her?

    In mid-March Holmes received a letter from Peter Cigrand, Emeline’s father, asking yet again for help in finding his daughter. The letter was dated March 16. Holmes responded promptly, on March 18, with a typed letter in which he told Cigrand that Emeline had left his employ on December 1, 1892. It is possible that Minnie in her role as Holmes’s personal secretary did the typing.

    “I received her wedding cards about Dec. 10,” he wrote. She had come to see him twice since her marriage, the last time being January 1, 1893, “at which point she was disappointed at not finding any mail here for her, and my impression is that she spoke of having written to you previous to that time. Before going away in December she told me personally that the intention was that she and her husband should go to England on business with which he was connected, but when she called here the last time she spoke as though the trip had been given up. Please let me know within a few days if you did not hear from her and give me her uncle’s address here in the city and I will see him personally and ask if she has been there, as I know she was in the habit of calling upon him quite often.”

    He added a postscript in ink: “Have you written her Lafayette friends asking them if they have heard from her? If not I should think it well to do so. Let me hear from you at all events.”

    Holmes promised Minnie a voyage to Europe, art lessons, a fine home, and of course children—he adored children—but first there were certain financial matters that required their mutual attention. Assuring her that he had come up with a plan from which only great profit would result, Holmes persuaded her to transfer the deed to her Fort Worth land to a man named Alexander Bond. She did so on April 18, 1893, with Holmes himself serving as notary. Bond in turn signed the deed over to another man, Benton T. Lyman. Holmes notarized this transfer as well.

    Minnie loved her husband-to-be and trusted him, but she did not know that Alexander Bond was an alias for Holmes himself, or that Benton Lyman actually was Holmes’s assistant Benjamin Pitezel—and that with a few strokes of his pen her beloved Harry had taken possession of the bulk of her dead uncle’s bequest. Nor did she know that on paper Harry was still married to two other women, Clara Lovering and Myrta Belknap, and that in each marriage he had fathered a child.

    As Minnie’s adoration deepened, Holmes executed a second financial maneuver. He established the Campbell-Yates Manufacturing Company, which he billed as a firm that bought and sold everything. When he filed its papers of incorporation, he listed five officers: H. H. Holmes,M. R. Williams, A. S. Yates, Hiram S. Campbell, and Henry Owens. Owens was a porter employed by Holmes. Hiram S. Campbell was the fictive owner of Holmes’s Englewood building. Yates was supposed to be a businessman living in New York City but in reality was as much a fiction as Campbell. AndM. R. Williams was Minnie. The company made nothing and sold nothing: It existed to hold assets and provide a reference for anyone who became skeptical of Holmes’s promissory notes.

    Later, when questions arose as to the accuracy of the corporation papers, Holmes persuaded Henry Owens, the porter, to sign an affidavit swearing not only that he was secretary of the company but that he had met both Yates and Campbell and that Yates personally had handed him the stock certificates representing his share of the company. Owens later said of Holmes: “He induced me to make these statements by promising me my back wages and by his hypnotizing ways, and I candidly believe that he had a certain amount of influence over me. While I was with him I was always under his control.”

    He added, “I never received my back wages.”

    Holmes—Harry—wanted the wedding done quickly and quietly, just him, Minnie, and a preacher. He arranged everything. To Minnie the little ceremony appeared to be legal and in its quiet way very romantic, but in fact no record of their union was entered into the marriage registry of Cook County, Illinois.

Dreadful Things Done by Girls

    THROUGHOUT THE SPRING OF1893 the streets of Chicago filled with unemployed men from elsewhere, but otherwise the city seemed immune to the nation’s financial troubles. Preparations for the fair kept its economy robust, if artificially so. Construction of the Alley L extension to Jackson Park still provided work for hundreds of men. In the company town of Pullman, just south of Chicago, workers labored around the clock to fill backlogged orders for more cars to carry visitors to the fair, though the rate of new orders had fallen off sharply. The Union Stock Yards commissioned Burnham’s firm to build a new passenger depot at its entrance, to manage the expected crush of fairgoers seeking a crimson break from the White City. Downtown, Montgomery Ward installed a new Customer’s Parlor, where excursive fair visitors could loiter on soft couches while browsing the company’s five-hundred-page catalog. New hotels rose everywhere. One entrepreneur, Charles Kiler, believed that once his hotel opened, “money would be so plentiful it would come a runnin’ up hill to get into our coffers.”

    At Jackson Park exhibits arrived daily, in ever-mounting volume. There was smoke, clatter, mud, and confusion, as if an army were massing for an assault on Chicago. Caravans of Wells-Fargo and Adams Express wagons moved slowly through the park, drawn by gigantic horses. Throughout the night freight trains huffed into the park. Switching locomotives nudged individual boxcars over the skein of temporary tracks to their destinations. Lake freighters disgorged pale wooden crates emblazoned with phrases in strange alphabets. George Ferris’s steel arrived, on five trains of thirty cars each. The Inman steamship line delivered a full-sized section of one of its ocean liners. Bethlehem Steel brought giant ingots and great slabs of military armor, including a curved plate seventeen inches thick meant for the gun turret of the dreadnought Indiana. Great Britain delivered locomotives and ship models, including an exquisite thirty-foot replica of Britain’s latest warship, Victoria, so detailed that even the links of chain in its handrails were to scale.

    From Baltimore came a long dark train that chilled the hearts of the men and women who monitored its passage across the prairie but delighted the innumerable small boys who raced open-jawed to the railbed. The train carried weapons made by the Essen Works of Fritz Krupp, the German arms baron, including the largest artillery piece until then constructed, capable of firing a one-ton shell with enough force to penetrate three feet of wrought-iron plate. The barrel had to be carried on a specially made car consisting of a steel cradle straddling two extra-long flatcars. An ordinary car had eight wheels; this combination had thirty-two. To ensure that the Pennsylvania Railroad’s bridges could support the gun’s 250,000-pound weight, two Krupp engineers had traveled to America the previous July to inspect the entire route. The gun quickly acquired the nickname “Krupp’s Baby,” although one writer preferred to think of it as Krupp’s “pet monster.”

    A train with a more lighthearted cargo also headed for Chicago, this one leased by Buffalo Bill for his Wild West show. It carried a small army: one hundred former U.S. Cavalry soldiers, ninety-seven Cheyenne, Kiowa, Pawnee, and Sioux Indians, another fifty Cossacks and Hussars, 180 horses, eighteen buffalo, ten elk, ten mules, and a dozen other animals. It also carried Phoebe Anne Moses of Tiffin, Ohio, a young woman with a penchant for guns and an excellent sense of distance. Bill called her Annie, the press called her Miss Oakley.

    At night the Indians and soldiers played cards.

    Ships began converging on U.S. ports from all over the world bearing exposition cargoes of the most exotic kind. Sphinxes. Mummies. Coffee trees and ostriches. By far the most exotic cargo, however, was human. Alleged cannibals from Dahomey. Lapps from Lapland. Syrian horsemen. On March 9 a steamer named Guildhall set sail for New York from Alexandria, Egypt, carrying 175 bona-fide residents of Cairo recruited by an entrepreneur named George Pangalos to inhabit his Street in Cairo in the Midway Plaisance. In the Guildhall’s holds he stashed twenty donkeys, seven camels, and an assortment of monkeys and deadly snakes. His passenger list included one of Egypt’s foremost practitioners of the danse du ventre, the young and lushly feminine Farida Mazhar, destined to become a legend in America. Pangalos had secured choice ground at the middle of the Midway, adjacent to the Ferris Wheel, in a Muslim diaspora that included a Persian concession, a Moorish palace, and Sol Bloom’s Algerian Village, where Bloom had converted the Algerians’ premature arrival into a financial windfall.

    Bloom had been able to open his village as early as August 1892, well before Dedication Day, and within a month had covered his costs and begun reaping a generous profit. The Algerian version of the danse du ventre had proven a particularly powerful draw, once people realized the phrase meant “belly dance.” Rumors spread of half-clad women jiggling away, when in fact the dance was elegant, stylized, and rather chaste. “The crowds poured in,” Bloom said. “I had a gold mine.”

    With his usual flare for improvisation, Bloom contributed something else that would forever color America’s perception of the Middle East. The Press Club of Chicago invited him to present a preview of the danse du ventre to its members. Never one to shun free publicity, Bloom accepted instantly and traveled to the club with a dozen of his dancers. On arrival, however, he learned that all the club had provided for music was a lone pianist who had no idea what kind of piece might accompany such an exotic dance.

    Bloom thought a moment, hummed a tune, then plinked it out on the keyboard one note at a time:

    Over the next century this tune and its variations would be deployed in a succession of mostly cheesy movies, typically as an accompaniment to the sinuous emergence of a cobra from a basket. It would also drive the schoolyard lyric, “And they wear no pants in the southern part of France.”

    Bloom regretted his failure to copyright the tune. The royalties would have run into the millions.

    Sad news arrived from Zanzibar: There would be no Pygmies. Lieutenant Schufeldt was dead, of unclear causes.

    There was advice, much of it of course from New York. The advice that rankled most came from Ward McAllister, factotum and chief slipperlick to Mrs. William Astor, empress of New York society. Appalled by the vision conjured by Chicago’s Dedication Day, of crčme and rabble mixing in such volume and with such indecorous propinquity, McCallister in a column in the New York World advised “it is not quantity but quality that the society people here want. Hospitality which includes the whole human race is not desirable.”

    He urged Chicago hostesses to hire some French chefs to improve their culinary diction. “In these modern days, society cannot get along without French chefs,” he wrote. “The man who has been accustomed to delicate fillets of beef, terrapin pâté de foie gras, truffled turkey and things of that sort would not care to sit down to a boiled leg of mutton dinner with turnips.” The thing is, McAllister was serious.

    And there was more. “I should also advise that they do not frappé their wine too much. Let them put the bottle in the tub and be careful to keep the neck free from ice. For, the quantity of wine in the neck of the bottle being small, it will be acted upon by the ice first. In twenty-five minutes from the time of being placed in the tub it will be in a perfect condition to be served immediately. What I mean by a perfect condition is that when the wine is poured from the bottle it should contain little flakes of ice. That is a real frappé.”

    To which the Chicago Journal replied, “The mayor will not frappé his wine too much. He will frappé it just enough so the guests can blow the foam off the tops of the glasses without a vulgar exhibition of lung and lip power. His ham sandwiches, sinkers and Irish quail, better known in the Bridgeport vernacular as pigs’ feet, will be triumphs of the gastronomic art.” One Chicago newspaper called McAllister “A Mouse Colored Ass.”

    Chicago delighted in such repartee—for the most part. On some level, however, McAllister’s remarks stung. McAllister was one particularly snooty voice, but it was clear to everyone that he spoke with the sanction of New York’s blue bloods. Among Chicago’s leading citizens there was always a deep fear of being second class. No one topped Chicago in terms of business drive and acumen, but within the city’s upper echelons there was a veiled anxiety that the city in its commercial advance may indeed have failed to cultivate the finer traits of man and woman. The exposition was to be a giant white banner waved in Mrs. Astor’s face. With its gorgeous classical buildings packed with art, its clean water and electric lights, and its overstaffed police department, the exposition was Chicago’s conscience, the city it wanted to become.

    Burnham in particular embodied this insecurity. Denied admission to Harvard and Yale and the “right” beginning, he had become a self-conscious connoisseur of fine things. He arranged recitals at his home and office and joined the best clubs and collected the best wines and was now leading the greatest nonmilitary campaign in the nation’s history. Even so, the social columnists still did not write about his wife’s dresses when he and she attended the opera, the way they described the nightly couture of mesdamesPalmer, Pullman, and Armour. The fair was to be Burnham’s redemption, and Chicago’s. “Outside peoples already concede our material greatness and that we are well nigh supreme in manufactures and commerce,” he wrote. “They do, however, claim that we are not cultivated and refined to the same extent. To remove this impression, the thought and work of this bureau has been mostly bent from the start.”

    Advice arrived also by the bookful. An author named Adelaide Hollingsworth chose to honor the fair with more than seven hundred pages of it, which she published early in the year under the title The Columbia Cook Book. Although her book did include compelling recipes for scrapple, ox cheek, and baked calf’s head and tips for the preparation of raccoon, possum, snipe, plovers, and blackbirds (for blackbird pie) and “how to broil, fricassee, stew or fry a squirrel,” it was much more than just a cookbook. Hollingsworth billed it as an overall guide to helping modern young housewives create a peaceful, optimistic, and sanitary household. The wife was to set the tenor of the day. “The breakfast table should not be a bulletin-board for the curing of horrible dreams and depressing symptoms, but the place where a bright key-note of the day is struck.” In places Hollingsworth’s advice revealed, by refraction, a certain Victorian raciness. In a segment on how best to wash silk underwear, she advised, “If the article is black, add a little ammonia, instead of acid to the rinsing water.”

    One of the most persistent problems of the day was “offensive feet,” caused by the prevailing habit of washing feet only once a week. To combat this, Hollingsworth wrote, “Take one part muriatic acid to ten parts of water; rub the feet every night with this mixture before retiring to bed.” To rid your mouth of the odor of onions, drink strong coffee. Oysters made the best rat-bait. To induce cream to whip, add a grain of salt. To keep milk sweet longer, add horseradish.

    Hollingsworth offered sage medical advice—“Don’t sit between a fever patient and a fire”—and provided various techniques for dealing with medical emergencies, such as accidental poisoning. Among a list of measures effective for inducing vomiting, she included: “Injections of tobacco into the anus through a pipe stem.”

    Jacob Riis, the New York journalist who had devoted himself to revealing the squalid housing of America’s poor, came to Chicago bearing counsel of a graver sort. In March he gave a talk at Hull House, a reform settlement founded by Jane Addams, “Saint Jane.” Hull House had become a bastion of progressive thought inhabited by strong-willed young women, “interspersed,” as one visitor put it, “with earnest-faced, self-subordinating and mild-mannered men who slide from room to room apologetically.” Clarence Darrow regularly walked the short distance from his office in the Rookery to Hull House, where he was admired for his intellect and social empathy but disparaged, privately, for his slovenly dress and less-than-exemplary hygiene.

    At the time of Riis’s talk, Riis and Addams were two of the best known people in America. Riis had toured Chicago’s foulest districts and pronounced them worse than anything he had seen in New York. In his talk he noted the fast approach of the exposition and warned his audience, “You ought to begin house cleaning, so to speak, and get your alleys and streets in better condition; never in our worst season have we had so much filth in New York City.”

    In fact, Chicago had been trying to tidy itself for some time and had found the challenge monumental. The city stepped up its efforts to remove garbage and began repaving alleys and streets. It deployed smoke inspectors to enforce a new antismoke ordinance. Newspapers launched crusades against pestilent alleys and excess smoke and identified the worst offenders in print—among them Burnham’s newly opened Masonic Temple, which the Chicago Tribune likened to Mount Vesuvius.

    Carrie Watson, Chicago’s foremost madam, decided her own operation merited a little sprucing up. Her place already was luxurious, with a bowling alley where the pins were bottles of chilled champagne, but now she resolved to increase the number of bedrooms and double her staff. She and other brothel owners anticipated a big spike in demand. They would not be disappointed. Nor, apparently, would their clients. Later, a madam named Chicago May recalled the boisterous year of the fair with a cringe: “What dreadful things were done by some of the girls! It always made me sick even to think of them. The mere mention of the details of some of the ‘circuses’ is unprintable. I think Rome at its worst had nothing on Chicago during those lurid days.”

    The man who helped make Chicago so hospitable to Carrie Watson and Chicago May, as well as to Mickey Finn and Bathhouse John Coughlin and a few thousand other operators of saloons and gambling dens, was Carter Henry Harrison, whose four terms as mayor had gone a long way to establish Chicago as a place that tolerated human frailty even as it nurtured grand ambition. After his failed run for the office in 1891, Harrison had acquired a newspaper, the Chicago Times, and settled into the job of editor. By the end of 1892, however, he had made it clear that he would love to be the “Fair Mayor” and lead the city through its most glorious time, but insisted that only a clear signal of popular demand could make him actually enter the campaign. He got it. Carter H. Harrison Associations sprang up all over town, and now, at the start of 1893, Carter was one of two candidates for the Democratic nomination, the other being Washington Hesing, editor of the powerful German daily Staats-Zeitung.

    Every newspaper in the city, other than his own Times, opposed Harrison, as did Burnham and most of Chicago’s leading citizens. To Burnham and the others the new Chicago, as symbolized by the White City rising in Jackson Park, required new leadership—certainly not Harrison.

    The city’s legions of working men disagreed. They always had counted Harrison as one of their own, “Our Carter,” even though he was a plantation-reared Kentucky man who had gone to Yale, spoke fluent French and German, and recited lengthy passages from Shakespeare. He had served four terms; that he should serve a fifth in the year of the fair seemed fitting, and a wave of nostalgia swept the city’s wards.

    Even his opponents recognized that Harrison, despite his privileged roots, made an intensely appealing candidate for the city’s lesser tier. He was magnetic. He was able and willing to talk to anyone about anything and had a way of making himself the center of any conversation. “His friends all noticed it,” said Joseph Medill, once an ally but later Harrison’s most ardent opponent, “they would laugh or smile about it, and called it ‘Carter Harrisonia.’ ” Even at sixty-eight Harrison exuded strength and energy, and women generally agreed that he was more handsome now than he had been in his fifties. Widowed twice, he was rumored to be involved with a much younger woman. He had deep blue eyes with large pupils and an unwrinkled face. He attributed his youthful aspect to a heavy dose of morning coffee. His quirks made him endearing. He loved watermelon; when it was in season, he ate it at all three meals. He had a passion for shoes—a different pair each day of the week—and for silk underwear. Almost everyone had seen Harrison riding the streets on his white Kentucky mare, in his black slouch hat, trailing a plume of cigar smoke. At his campaign talks he often addressed his remarks to a stuffed eagle that he carried with him as a prop. Medill accused him of nurturing the city’s basest instincts but also called him “the most remarkable man that our city has ever produced.”

    To the astonishment of the city’s ruling class, 78 percent of the 681 delegates to the Democratic convention voted for Harrison on the first ballot. The Democratic elite implored the Republicans to come up with a candidate whom they too could support, anything to keep Harrison from returning to office. The Republicans chose Samuel W. Allerton, a rich packer from Prairie Avenue. The biggest and most powerful newspapers formed an explicit combine to back Allerton and undermine Harrison.

    The ex-mayor countered their attacks with humor. During a talk before a large group of supporters at the Auditorium, Harrison called Allerton “a most admirable pig sticker and pig slaughterer. I admit it, and I don’t arraign him because he slaughters the queen’s English; he can’t help it.”

    Harrison rapidly gained ground.

    Patrick Prendergast, the young mad Irish immigrant, took pride in Harrison’s renewed popularity and believed his own efforts at promoting the ex-mayor for reelection had had a lot do with the campaign’s new momentum. An idea came to Prendergast. Just when it entered his brain he could not say, but it was there, and it gave him satisfaction. He had read extensively into law and politics and understood that political machines operated on a first principle of power: If you worked to advance the interests of the machine, the machine paid you back. Harrison was in his debt.

    This notion came to Prendergast initially as a glimmer, like the first sunlight to strike the Masonic tower each morning, but now he thought of it a thousand times a day. It was his treasure and made him square his shoulders and raise his chin. When Harrison won, things would change. And Harrison would win. The great upwelling of enthusiasm in the wards seemed to assure Harrison’s victory. Once elected, Prendergast believed, Harrison would offer him an appointment. He would have to. It was the law of the machine, as immutable as the forces that propelled the Chicago Limited across the prairie. Prendergast wanted to be corporation counsel. No more dealing with newsboys who did not know their place; no more walking in the yellow stew that bubbled between pavers; no more having to breathe the awful perfume of mortified horses left in the middle of the street. When Harrison took office, salvation would come to Patrick Prendergast.

    The idea caused moments of exultation. Prendergast bought more postcards and sent exuberant notes to the men who soon would be his associates and clubmates—the judges, lawyers, and merchant princes of Chicago. He of course sent another card to his good friend Alfred S. Trude, the defense attorney.

    “My Dear Mr. Trude,” he began. He intended the next word to be “Hallelujah!” but certain words gave him trouble. In his fever to write, he plunged ahead.

    “Allielliuia!” he wrote. “The attempt of the Herald gang to prevent the manifestation of the popular will has been checked—& Carter H. Harrison the popular choice will be our next mayor. The newspaper trust has been ingloriously sat down upon. What do I know about the candidacy of a Washington Hesing poor fellow—he has the ‘tail end’ of my sympathy. In his present trouble I hope it will not overcome him—& the noble newspaper trust. Glory to The Father Son & Holy Ghost!” He rambled on for a few more lines, then closed, “Friendship is the true test of character after all Sincerely,

    “P. E. J. Prendergast.”

    Again something in the card drew Trude’s attention. Many other recipients of Prendergast’s cards also took note, despite the crush of mail each received from his true peers, this being a time when everyone who knew how to write did so and at length. In that glacier of words grinding toward the twentieth century, Prendergast’s card was a single fragment of mica glinting with lunacy, pleading to be picked up and pocketed.

    Once again Trude kept the letter.

    In April 1893 the citizens of Chicago elected Carter Henry Harrison to his fifth term. In preparation for the fair, he ordered two hundred barrels of whiskey, to be used by his office in the entertainment of dignitaries.

    He gave no thought whatsoever to Patrick Eugene Joseph Prendergast.

The Invitation

    FOR THE MOMENT HOLMES held off on doing anything more with Minnie’s property. Minnie had told her sister, Anna, of the transfer of the Fort Worth land, and now Holmes sensed that Anna was becoming suspicious of his true intentions. This did not trouble him, however. The solution was really quite simple.

    One bright and fragrant spring day—as if on a wild equinoctial whim—Holmes suggested that Minnie invite her sister to Chicago to see the world’s fair, at his expense.

    Minnie was delighted and sent the good news to Anna, who immediately accepted. Holmes knew she would, for how could she have done otherwise? The chance to see Minnie was compelling in itself. Add Chicago and the great fair, and the combination became too alluring to turn down, no matter what Anna suspected about his and Minnie’s relationship.

    Minnie could hardly wait for the end of the school year, when her sister at last would be able to extricate herself from her duties at the Midlothian Academy. Minnie planned to show Anna all the wonders of Chicago—the skyscrapers, Marshall Field’s store, the Auditorium, and of course the world’s fair—but above all she looked forward to introducing Anna to her own personal wonder, Mr. Henry Gordon. Her Harry.

    At last Anna would see that she could put her suspicions to rest.

Final Preparations

    IN THE FIRST TWO WEEKS of April 1893 the weather was gorgeous, but other cruelties abounded. Four exposition workers lost their lives, two from fractured skulls, two electrocuted. The deaths brought the year’s total to seven. The exposition’s union carpenters, aware of their great value in this final phase of construction, seized the moment and walked off the job, demanding a minimum union wage and other long-sought concessions. Only one of the eight towers of the Ferris Wheel was in place and workers had not yet completed repairs to the Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building. Each morning hundreds of men climbed to its roof; each evening they picked their way gingerly back down in a long dense line that from a distance resembled a column of ants. Frank Millet’s “Whitewash Gang” worked furiously to paint the buildings of the Court of Honor. In places the staff coating already had begun to crack and chip. Patch crews patrolled the grounds. The air of “anxious effort” that suffused the park reminded Candace Wheeler, the designer hired to decorate the Woman’s Building, “of an insufficiently equipped household preparing for visitors.”

    Despite the carpenters’ strike and all the work yet to be done, Burnham felt optimistic, his mood bolstered by the fine weather. The winter had been deep and long, but now the air was scented with first blossoms and thawed earth. And he felt loved. In late March he had been feted at a grand banquet arranged largely by Charles McKim and held in New York at Madison Square Garden—the old Garden, an elegant Moorish structure designed by McKim’s partner, Stanford White. McKim assigned Frank Millet to secure the attendance of the nation’s finest painters, and these took their seats beside the most prominent writers and architects and the patrons who supported them all, men like Marshall Field and Henry Villard, and together they spent the night lauding Burnham—prematurely—for achieving the impossible. Of course, they ate like gods.

    The menu:

Blue Points ŕ l’Alaska.    

Sauternes.

POTAGES.    

Consommé printanier. Crčme de Celeri.    

Amontillado.    

HORS D’OEUVRES.

Rissoles Chateaubriand. Amandes salées. Olives, etc.    

POISSON.    

Bass rayée, sauce hollandaise. Pommes parisiennes.    

Miersfeiner. Moet et Chandon. Perrier Jouet, Extra Dry Special.    

REFEVE.    

Filet de Boeuf aux champignons. Haricots verts. Pommes duchesse.    

ENTRÉE.   

Ris de Veau en cotelette. Petits Pois.    

SORBET.    

Romaine fantaisie. Cigarettes.    

ROTI.    

Canard de Tęte Rouge. Salade de Laitue.    

Pontet Canet.    

DESSERT.    

Petits Moules fantaisies. Gateaux assortis. Bonbons. Petits-fours. Fruits assortis.    

FROMAGES.    

Roquefort et Camembert.    

Café.

Apollinaris.    

Cognac. Cordials. Cigars.

    Newspapers reported that Olmsted also was present, but in fact he was in Asheville, North Carolina, continuing his work on Vanderbilt’s estate. His absence prompted speculation that he had stayed away out of pique at not being invited to share the podium and because the invitation had identified the major arts only as painting, architecture, and sculpture, with no reference to landscape architecture. While it is true that Olmsted had struggled throughout his career to build respect for landscape architecture as a distinct branch of the fine arts, for him to shun the banquet because of hurt feelings would have been out of character. The simplest explanation seems best: Olmsted was ill, his work everywhere was behind schedule, he disliked ceremonies, and above all he loathed long-distance train travel, especially in transitional months when railcars, even the finest Pullman Palaces, were likely to be too hot or too cold. Had he attended, he would have heard Burnham tell the guests, “Each of you knows the name and genius of him who stands first in the heart and confidence of American artists, the creator of your own and many other city parks. He it is who has been our best advisor and our constant mentor. In the highest sense he is the planner of the Exposition, Frederick Law Olmsted… An artist, he paints with lakes and wooded slopes; with lawns and banks and forest-covered hills; with mountain sides and ocean views. He should stand where I do tonight…”

    Which is not to say that Burnham wanted to sit down. He reveled in the attention and adored the engraved silver “loving cup” that was filled with wine and held to the lips of every man at the table—despite the prevalence in the city outside of typhoid, diphtheria, tuberculosis, and pneumonia. He knew the praise was premature, but the banquet hinted at the greater glory that would accrue to him at fair’s end, provided of course the exposition met the world’s elaborate expectations.

    Without doubt huge progress had been made. The six grandest buildings of the exposition towered over the central court with an effect more dramatic and imposing than even he had imagined. Daniel Chester French’s “Statue of the Republic”—nicknamed “Big Mary”—stood in the basin complete and gleaming, its entire surface gilded. Including plinth, the Republic was 111 feet tall. More than two hundred other buildings erected by states, corporations, and foreign governments stippled the surrounding acreage. The White Star Line had built a charming little temple at the northwest bank of the lagoon opposite the Wooded Island, with steps to the water. The monstrous guns of Krupp were in place in their pavilion on the lake south of the Court of Honor.

    “The scale of the whole thing is more and more tremendous as the work proceeds,” McKim wrote to Richard Hunt. A bit too tremendous, he noted cattily, at least in the case of the Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building. His own Agriculture Building, he wrote, “must suffer by comparison with its huge neighbor opposite, whose volume—215 feet high—off the main axis, is bound to swamp us and everything else around it.” He told Hunt he had just spent two days with Burnham, including two nights at the shanty. “He is keeping up under his responsibilities and looking well, and we all owe him a great debt for his constant watchfulness and attention to our slightest wishes.”

    Even the carpenters’ strike did not trouble Burnham. There seemed to be plenty of unemployed nonunion carpenters willing to step in for the absent strikers. “I fear nothing at all from this source,” he wrote on April 6 in a letter to Margaret. The day was cold “but clear, bright and beautiful, a splendid day to live and work in.” Workers were putting in “the embellishments,” he wrote. “A lot of ducks were put in the lagoons yesterday, and they are floating around contentedly and quite like life this morning.” Olmsted had ordered more than eight hundred ducks and geese, seven thousand pigeons, and for the sake of accent a number of exotic birds, including four snowy egrets, four storks, two brown pelicans, and two flamingoes. So far only the common white ducks had been introduced into the waters. “In two or three days,” Burnham wrote, “all the birds will be in the water, which already commences to be still more beautiful than last year.” The weather remained lovely: crisp, clear, and dry. On Monday, April 10, he told Margaret, “I am very happy.”

    Over the next few days his mood changed. There was talk that other unions might join the carpenters’ strike and bring all work in Jackson Park to a halt. Suddenly the exposition seemed dangerously far from ready. Construction of the sheds for the stock exhibits at the south end of the grounds had yet to begin. Everywhere Burnham looked he saw rail tracks and temporary roads, empty boxcars and packing crates. Tumbleweeds of excelsior roved the grounds. He was disappointed with the unfinished appearance of the park, and he was peeved at his wife.

    “Why do you not write me every day?” he asked on Thursday. “I look in vain for your letters.”

    He kept a photograph of Margaret in his office. Every time he walked by it, he picked it up and stared at it with longing. So far that day, he told her, he had looked at it ten times. He had counted on a rest after May 1 but realized now that the intensity would persist until long afterward. “The public will regard the work as entirely done, and I wish it were, so far as I am concerned. I presume anyone running a race has moments of half despair, along toward the end; but they must never be yielded to.”

    Margaret sent him a four-leafed clover.

    There was disarray in the fairgrounds, but not next door on the fifteen acres of ground leased by Buffalo Bill for his show, which now bore the official title “Buffalo Bill’s Wild West and Congress of Rough Riders of the World.” He was able to open his show on April 3 and immediately filled his eighteen-thousand-seat arena. Visitors entered through a gate that featured Columbus on one side, under the banner “PILOT OF THE OCEAN, THE FIRST PIONEER,” and Buffalo Bill on the other, identified as “PILOT OF THE PRAIRIE, THE LAST PIONEER.”

    His show and camp covered fifteen acres. Its hundreds of Indians, soldiers, and workers slept in tents. Annie Oakley always made hers very homey, with a garden outside of primrose, geranium, and hollyhock. Inside she placed her couch, cougar skins, an Axminister carpet, rocking chairs, and assorted other artifacts of domestic life. And of course a diverse collection of guns.

    Buffalo Bill always began his show with his Cowboy Band playing “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Next came the “Grand Review,” during which soldiers from America, England, France, Germany, and Russia paraded on horseback around his arena. Annie Oakley came next, blasting away at an array of impossible targets. She hit them. Another of the show’s staples was an Indian attack on an old stagecoach, the Deadwood Mail Coach, with Buffalo Bill and his men coming to the rescue. (During the show’s earlier engagement in London, the Indians attacked the coach as it raced across the grounds of Windsor Castle carrying four kings and the prince of Wales. Buffalo Bill drove.) Late in the program Cody himself demonstrated some fancy marksmanship, dashing around the arena on horseback while firing his Winchester at glass balls hurled into the air by his assistants. The climax of the show was the “Attack on a Settler’s Cabin,” during which Indians who once had slaughtered soldiers and civilians alike staged a mock attack on a cabin full of white settlers, only to be vanquished yet again by Buffalo Bill and a company of cowboys firing blanks. As the season advanced, Cody replaced the attack with the even more dramatic “Battle of the Little Big Horn… showing with historical accuracy the scene of Custer’s Last Charge.”

    The fair was hard on Colonel Cody’s marriage. The show always kept him away from his home in North Platte, Nebraska, but his absence wasn’t the main problem. Bill liked women, and women liked Bill. One day his wife, Louisa—“Lulu”—traveled to Chicago for a surprise conjugal visit. She found that Bill’s wife already had arrived. At the hotel’s front desk a clerk told her she would now be escorted up to “Mr. and Mrs. Cody’s suite.”

    Fearful that a wider strike could hobble the fair, even destroy it, Burnham began negotiations with the carpenters and ironworkers and agreed at last to establish a minimum wage and to pay time and a half for extra hours and double time for Sundays and key holidays, including, significantly, Labor Day. The union men, in turn, signed a contract to work until the end of the fair. Burnham’s clear relief suggests that his earlier bravado might have been just for show. “You can imagine though tired I go to bed happy,” he wrote to his wife. One measure of his exhaustion was the fact that the contorted syntax he usually worked so hard to suppress had now resurfaced. “We sat from early in the afternoon to nine o’clock. Till the fair is over this trial will not recur I believe, so your picture before me is unusually lovely as it looks up from the desk.”

    Burnham claimed the agreement was a victory for the exposition, but in fact the fair’s concessions were a breakthrough for organized labor, and the resulting contracts became models for other unions to emulate. The fair’s capitulation pumped steam into America’s—and Chicago’s—already-boiling labor movement.

    Olmsted returned to Chicago accompanied by his usual troika of affliction and found the place galvanized, Burnham everywhere at once. On Thursday, April 13, Olmsted wrote to his son John, “Every body here in a keen rush, the greatest in imaginable outward confusion.” Winds raced over the park’s barren stretches and raised blizzards of dust. Train after train arrived bearing exhibits that should have been installed long before. The delayed installations meant that temporary tracks and roads had to remain in place. Two days later Olmsted wrote: “We shall have to bear the blame of everyone else’s tardiness, as their operations are now everywhere in our way. At best the most important part of all our work will have to be done at night after the opening of the Exposition. I cannot see any way through the confusion but there are thousands of men at work under various chiefs & I suppose by & by the great labor will begin to tell together.”

    He assigned some of the blame for the incomplete landscape to himself, for failing to install a trustworthy overseer in Chicago after the death of Harry Codman. On April 15, 1893, he wrote to John, “I am afraid that we were wrong in leaving the business so much to Ulrich & Phil. Ulrich is not I hope intentionally dishonest but he is perverse to the point of deceiving & misleading us & cannot be depended on. His energy is largely exhausted on matters that he sh’d not be concerned with… I cannot trust him from day to day.”

    His frustration with Ulrich grew, his distrust deepened. Later, in another note to John, he said, “Ulrich is unwittingly faithless to us. The difficulty is that he is ambitious of honors out of his proper line; cares more to be more extraordinarily active, industrious, zealous & generally useful, than to achieve fine results in L.A. [Landscape Architecture].” Olmsted grew especially leery of Ulrich’s slavish attentiveness to Burnham. “He is all over the grounds, about all sorts of business, and Mr. Burnham & every head of Department is constantly calling for ‘Ulrich!’ In going over the works with Burnham I find him constantly repeating to his Secretary: ‘Tell Ulrich to’—do this & that. I remonstrate, but it does little good. I can never find him at the work except by special appointment and then he is impatient to get away.”

    At heart what Olmsted feared was that Burnham had transferred his loyalty to Ulrich. “I suppose that our time is out—our engagement ended, and I fear that Burnham is disposed to let us go and depend on Ulrich—for Burnham is not competent to see the incompetency of Ulrich & the need of deliberate thought. I have to be cautious not to bore Burnham, who is, of course, enormously overloaded.”

    Other obstacles quickly appeared. An important shipment of plants from California failed to arrive, worsening an already critical shortage of all plants. Even the fine weather that prevailed in the first couple of weeks of April caused delays. The lack of rain and the fact that the park’s waterworks were not yet completed meant Olmsted could not plant exposed portions of the grounds. The wind-blown dust—“frightful dust,” he said, “regular sandstorms of the desert”—continued and stung his eyes and propelled grit into his inflamed mouth. “I am trying to suggest why I seem to be accomplishing so little…” he wrote. “I think the public for a time will be awfully disappointed with our work—dissatisfied & a strong hand will be required here for weeks to come to prevent Ulrich’s energies from being wrongly directed.”

    By April 21 Olmsted was again confined to bed “with sore throat, an ulcerating tooth, and much pain preventing sleep.”

    Despite all this his spirits began slowly to improve. When he looked past the immediate delays and Ulrich’s duplicity, he saw progress. The shore of the Wooded Island was just now beginning to burst forth in a dense profusion of new leaves and blossoms, and the Japanese temple, the Hoo-den, crafted in Japan and assembled by Japanese artisans, detracted little from the sylvan effect. The electric boats had arrived and were lovely, exactly what Olmsted had hoped for, and the waterfowl on the lagoons provided enchanting sparks of energy in counterpoint to the static white immensity of the Court of Honor. Olmsted recognized that Burnham’s forces could not possibly finish patching and painting by May 1 and that his own work would be far from complete, but he saw clear improvement. “A larger force is employed,” he wrote, “and every day’s work tells.”

    Even this flicker of optimism was about to disappear, however, for a powerful weather front was moving across the prairie, toward Chicago.

    During this period, the exact date unclear, a milk peddler named Joseph McCarthy stopped his cart near Chicago’s Humboldt Park. It was morning, about eleven o’clock. A man in the park had caught his attention. He realized he knew the man: Patrick Prendergast, a newspaper distributor employed by the Inter Ocean.

    The odd thing was, Prendergast was walking in circles. Odder still, he walked with his head tipped back and his hat pulled so low it covered his eyes.

    As McCarthy watched, Prendergast walked face-first into a tree.

    Rain began to fall. At first it did not trouble Burnham. It suppressed the dust that rose from the unplanted portions of the grounds—of which, he was disappointed to see, there were far too many—and by now all the roofs were finished, even the roof of the Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building.

    “It rains,” Burnham wrote to Margaret, on Tuesday, April 18, “and for the first time I say, let it. My roofs are in such good order at last, as to leaks we care little.”

    But the rain continued and grew heavier. At night it fell past the electric lights in sheets so thick they were nearly opaque. It turned the dust to mud, which caused horses to stagger and wagons to stall. And it found leaks. On Wednesday night a particularly heavy rain came pounding through Jackson Park, and soon a series of two-hundred-foot cataracts began tumbling from the glass ceiling of the Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building onto the exhibits below. Burnham and an army of workers and guards converged on the building and together spent the night fighting the leaks.

    “Last night turned out the most terrible storm we have had in Jackson Park,” Burnham wrote Margaret on Thursday. “No damage was done to the buildings on grounds except that the roofs of the Manufactures Building leaked on the east side, and we stayed there until midnight covering up goods. One of the papers says that Genl Davis was on hand and attending to things & that he never left the building till all was safe. Of course Mr. D had nothing whatever to do with it.”

    The rain seemed to bring into focus just how much work remained. That same Thursday Burnham wrote another letter to Margaret. “The weather is very bad here and has so continued since last Tuesday, but I keep right along although the most gigantic work lies before us… The intensity of this last month is very great indeed. You can little imagine it. I am surprised at my own calmness under it all.” But the challenge, he said, had tested his lieutenants. “The strain on them shows who is made of good metal and who is not. I can tell you that very few come right up to the mark under these conditions, but there are some who can be depended on. The rest have to be pounded every hour of the day, and they are the ones who make me tired.”

    As always, he longed for Margaret. She was out of the city but due back for the opening. “I will be on the look out for you, my dear girl,” he wrote. “You must expect to give yourself up when you come.”

    For this buttoned-up age, for Burnham, it was a letter that could have steamed itself open.

    Day after day the same thing: fogged windows, paper curled from ambient moisture, the demonic applause of rain on rooftops, and everywhere the stench of sweat and moist wool, especially in the workers’ mess at lunch hour. Rain filled electrical conduits and shorted circuits. At the Ferris Wheel the pumps meant to drain the tower excavations ran twenty-four hours but could not conquer the volume of water. Rain poured through the ceiling of the Woman’s Building and halted the installation of exhibits. In the Midway the Egyptians and Algerians and half-clothed Dahomans suffered. Only the Irish, in Mrs. Hart’s Irish Village, seemed to take it in stride.

    For Olmsted the rain was particularly disheartening. It fell on ground already saturated, and it filled every dip in every path. Puddles became lakes. The wheels of heavily loaded wagons sank deep into the mud and left gaping lacerations, adding to the list of wounds to be filled, smoothed, and sodded.

    Despite the rain the pace of work increased. Olmsted was awed by the sheer numbers of workers involved. On April 27, three days before the opening, he reported to his firm, “I wrote you that there were 2,000 men employed—foolishly. There have been 2,000 men employed directly by Mr. Burnham. This week there are more than twice that number, exclusive of contractors forces. Including contractors and concessionaires’ forces, there are now 10,000 men at work on the ground, and would be more if more of certain classes could be obtained. Our work is badly delayed because teams cannot be hired in sufficient numbers.” (His estimate was low: In these closing weeks the total number of workers in the park was almost twenty thousand.) He was still desperately short of plants, he complained. “All resources for these seem to have failed and the want of them will be serious in its result.”

    His ulcerated tooth, at least, had improved, and he was no longer confined to bed. “My ulcer has shrunk,” he wrote. “I still have to live on bread & milk but am going about in the rain today and getting better.”

    That same day, however, he wrote John a private and far bleaker letter. “We are having bad luck. Heavy rain again today.” Burnham was pressuring him to take all manner of shortcuts to get the Court of Honor into presentable shape, such as having his men fill pots with rhododendrons and palms to decorate terraces, precisely the kind of showy transient measures that Olmsted disdained. “I don’t like it at all,” he wrote. He resented having “to resort to temporary expedients merely to make a poor show for the opening.” He knew that immediately after the opening all such work would have to be redone. His ailments, his frustration, and the mounting intensity of the work taxed his spirits and caused him to feel older than his age. “The diet of the provisional mess table, the noise & scurry and the puddles and rain do not leave a dilapidated old man much comfort & my throat & mouth are still in such condition that I have to keep slopping victuals.”

    He did not give up, however. Despite the rain he jolted around the grounds to direct planting and sodding and every morning at dawn attended Burnham’s mandatory muster of key men. The exertion and weather reversed the improvement in his health. “I took cold & was up all night with bone trouble and am living on toast & tea,” he wrote on Friday, April 28. “Nearly constant heavy rain all the day, checking our work sadly.” Yet the frenzy of preparations for Monday’s opening continued unabated. “It is queer to see the painters at work on ladders & scaffolds in this heavy rain,” Olmsted wrote. “Many are completely drenched and I should think their painting must be streaky.” He noticed that the big Columbia Fountain at the western end of the central basin still was not finished, even though it was to be a key feature of the opening ceremony. A test was scheduled for the following day, Saturday. “It does not look ready by any means,” Olmsted wrote, “but it is expected that it will play before the President next Monday.”

    As for the work under his own department, Olmsted was disappointed. He had hoped to accomplish far more by now. He knew, also, that others shared his disappointment. “I get wind of much misplaced criticism, by men as clever even as Burnham, because of impressions from incomplete work and undeveloped compositions,” he wrote. He knew that in many places the grounds did look sparse and unkempt and that much work remained—anyone could see the gaps—but to hear about it from others, especially from a man whom he admired and respected, was profoundly depressing.

    The deadline was immutable. Too much had been set in motion for anyone even to consider postponement. The opening ceremony was scheduled to begin, would begin, on Monday morning with a parade from the Loop to Jackson Park, led by the new president of the United States, Grover Cleveland. Train after train now entered Chicago bringing statesmen, princes, and tycoons from all over the world. President Cleveland arrived with his vice president and a retinue of cabinet officials, senators, and military leaders and their wives, children, and friends. The rain steamed off black locomotives. Porters hauled great trunks from the baggage cars. Caravans of water-slicked black carriages lined the streets outside the city’s train stations, their red waiting lights haloed by the rain. The hours slipped past.

    On the evening of April 30, the night before Opening Day, a British reporter named F. Herbert Stead visited the fairgrounds. The name Stead was well known in America because of Herbert’s more famous brother, William, the former editor of London’s Pall Mall Gazette and recent founder of The Review of Reviews. Assigned to cover the opening ceremony, Herbert decided to scout the grounds ahead of time to get a more detailed sense of the fair’s topography.

    It was raining hard when he exited his carriage and entered Jackson Park. Lights blazed everywhere as shawls of rain unfurled around them. The ponds that had replaced Olmsted’s elegant paths shuddered under the impact of a billion falling droplets. Hundreds of empty freight cars stood black against the lights. Lumber and empty crates and the remains of workers’ lunches lay everywhere.

    The whole scene was heartbreaking but also perplexing: The fair’s Opening Day celebration was set to begin the next morning, yet the grounds were clotted with litter and debris—in a state, Stead wrote, of “gross incompleteness.”

    The rain continued through the night.

    Later that Sunday night, as rain thumped their windowsills, editors of Chicago’s morning dailies laid out bold and elaborate headlines for Monday’s historic editions. Not since the Chicago Fire of 1871 had the city’s newspapers been so galvanized by a single event. But there was more quotidian work to be done as well. The more junior typesetters leaded and shimmed the classifieds and personals and all the other advertisements that filled the inside pages. Some that night worked on a small notice announcing the opening of a new hotel, clearly another hastily built affair meant to capitalize on the expected crush of exposition visitors. This hotel at least seemed to be well located—at Sixty-third and Wallace in Englewood, a short ride on the new Alley L from the fair’s Sixty-third Street gate.

    The owner called it the World’s Fair Hotel.