Quill Ink

In 1832, old fear returned to the river.

The Black Hawk War did not make Chicago its great battlefield, but dread travels faster than armies. Word moved over prairie and water, through cabins and taverns, along muddy paths and river bends. Settlers looked again to Fort Dearborn for shelter. The fort, rebuilt after fire and spilled blood, became once more what forts become when men are afraid: a wall against the unknown.

That same year, the road out of Chicago began to stretch farther.

John Frink and Charles K. Bingham were among the men who saw profit in distance. They opened the first stage line, sending coaches from the settlement into the wider country. The old footpaths and canoe routes were no longer enough. Men wanted roads now. Schedules. Movement.

The first stagecoach ventured west from Chicago to Fullersburg, the place we know today as Oak Brook, about fifteen miles from the river settlement. It followed the old Indian Boundary Line, the same boundary remembered today in the name of Indian Boundary Park on Chicago’s North Side. The fare for that fifteen-mile ride was ten cents.

But stagecoach travel was not romance. This was not a polished carriage ride through pleasant countryside. Coaches left the Chicago depot before the sun had done much more than think about rising, usually between four and six in the morning. Daylight was precious, and the roads were treacherous.

The route toward Galena stretched west through towns and stopping places that would become familiar names: Eleroy, Freeport, Rockford, Belvidere, Bloomingdale, and others along the way. Depending on the route taken, the trip was 150 to 160 miles. In ordinary conditions, it took five days. When the line began running around the clock, changing horses every twelve to fifteen miles at relay stations, the journey could be cut to two days.

That speed came at a price.

The fare was $12.50. But money was not the only cost. Passengers were often forced to climb down and help push the coach out of mud. They helped with broken wheels and rough repairs. Accidents were common. Horses were injured. Stages became stuck or disabled, and a traveler who began the journey in a coach might finish it in the first farm wagon willing to carry him farther down the road.

Even a meal had to be survived.

At the inns, there was no comfort waiting. The kitchens often stayed cold until the coach arrived. Only then did the fire rise, the pans blacken, and the meal begin. Nearly an hour could pass before food reached the table, and then travelers were given only a few hurried minutes to eat before the driver called them back to the road.

A person learned quickly in those days.

Swallow fast.

Keep one ear turned toward the door.

Because the stage did not wait for hunger, weariness, or anyone’s unfinished plate.

And while the coaches dragged people west through mud, darkness, and broken roads, news came to Chicago by a slower rhythm.

Even the mail arrived like a faint heartbeat.

The first post office stood in a log cabin near South Water Street, close to where Lake Street would later meet the business of the bridge and river crossing. David McKee served as Chicago’s first postmaster, and in those days, the mail arrived only once a month. A whole month of waiting for a letter. A whole month for news to crawl across the country and find this small, wet place by the river.

But Chicago was changing.

Slowly at first. Then all at once.

By 1833, the settlement had become a town.

Barely.

Only about 350 people lived there, gathered near the river and the fort, standing on ground that still felt half-wild and half-promised. The town covered roughly one square mile, bordered by what are now Kinzie, Madison, State, and Des Plaines Streets. A small square of ambition pressed against mud, marsh, timber, prairie, and water.

And still, the old world had not entirely left.

Black bears were still being hunted in what is now the Loop. No glass towers. No traffic lights. No theaters, office doors, or people hurrying with coffee in their hands. Bears. Timber. Smoke. Mud. Men with rifles. A young town with one foot in the wilderness and the other already reaching for empire.

The first jail was built of logs near the public square, in the early heart of town. It was not much to look at, but it told its own truth. Once men gather, rules follow. And when rules are broken, then come locks.

The first fire company came too, the Washington Volunteer Fire Company, because where men build in wood, fire waits nearby with its teeth showing.

A lighthouse rose near the lake, a small, steady eye watching the water. It did not make Chicago grand. Not yet. But it announced something. Ships could look toward this shore and know there was a place here now. A mark. A warning. A welcome.

And the town began to make things.

Tyler Blodgett opened a brickyard on the north side near the river. David Carver, a lumber merchant, opened the first lumber yard. Out beyond the town, at Hickory Creek in the country that belongs today to Will County and the New Lenox-Joliet area, a sawmill cut timber for a growing region.

Wood. Brick. Boards. Barrels.

These were not pretty things, but they were the bones of a town.

Near present-day Kinzie Street, Elson and Woodruff began making soap and candles in a barn. Small things, maybe. But a town does not become a city by speeches, treaties, and maps alone. It becomes a city when someone makes the soap, cuts the boards, burns the brick, hauls the barrels, lights the room, and sweeps the floor after the men with big plans have gone home.

Those were the quiet trades.

But Chicago was not only learning how to survive. It was learning how to sell itself.

And George W. Dole understood that before many others did.

He opened the first grocery store in town, competing with R.A.A. Kinzie near Dearborn and Water Streets, where the business of the young settlement gathered close to the river.

A grocery store meant supplies. Flour. Salt. Coffee. Pork. Whiskey. The ordinary goods that kept a rough settlement from falling back into wilderness.

But Dole was not only selling to the town.

He was beginning to send Chicago outward.

That year, he made the first shipment of beef to the East: 287 barrels of beef, 14 barrels of tallow, 2 barrels of beeswax, and 152 dried animal hides. Before the great stockyards, before the iron rails and the slaughterhouse smoke, there were barrels. Hides. Tallow. Beeswax. The first hard proof that this muddy town could turn animal, labor, and river access into commerce.

It was a small shipment compared with what would come later.

But small beginnings are how great appetites announce themselves.

And then came the newspaper.

John Calhoun, a publisher from New York, founded the Chicago Weekly Democrat, and with it, the town began speaking in ink. A place with a newspaper is no longer content to be a rumor. It wants witnesses. It wants arguments. It wants announcements. It wants to tell the world what it is becoming before the world has agreed to believe it.

But the heaviest gathering of 1833 was not in a barn, or a brickyard, or a newspaper office.

It was the treaty council.