Quill Ink

By 1838, Chicago had been a city for one year.

That was long enough for its leaders to stand a little straighter, fill official papers with ambitious promises, and speak as though giving Chicago a new title had erased the mud, debt, and disorder beneath it.

But the land remembered what stood there before the ink dried.

The river still carried sand into its own mouth. The streets still swallowed wagon wheels. Debts remained unpaid, and laborers still bent beneath their shovels. Beyond the settlement, the last Native families were being driven from lands their people had known longer than any surveyor’s chain could measure.

Chicago wore its new title like a fine coat.

Underneath, its hands were still dirty.

The fever that had seized the town during the great land rush had broken, but Chicago was still dealing with what it had left behind. Only a few years earlier, men had bought muddy lots as though each one concealed a chest of gold. They borrowed money, traded promises, and sold the future to one another at ever-rising prices.

Then the Panic of 1837 came through like a hard wind.

By 1838, the boasting had quieted.

Men who had walked the streets speaking loudly of their fortunes began speaking softly with their creditors. Property that had seemed priceless when everyone was buying became difficult to sell when everyone needed money. Some discovered that the wealth they possessed had never been wealth at all.

It had all been on paper.

A signature.

A handshake.

A debt wearing a gentleman’s hat.

There was no single thief standing in the street with Chicago’s money stuffed beneath his coat. The trick was larger than one man. Respectable businessmen had convinced one another that tomorrow’s riches could pay today’s bills.

When tomorrow arrived empty-handed, they called it misfortune.

Southwest of Chicago, men were carving the Illinois and Michigan Canal through prairie, stone, and wet earth. Many were Irish immigrants who had crossed an ocean only to find themselves standing at the bottom of a ditch.

They worked from sunrise until the light was gone. Their shovels lifted earth into wheelbarrows that had to be pushed up narrow planks. Where stone blocked the path, men drilled and blasted with crude equipment and little protection. Injuries were common. Disease moved easily through the camps, and malaria waited in the marshes. The workers slept crowded together in rough shanties with dirt beneath their feet and insects in the walls.

For this, an ordinary laborer might earn sixteen to twenty dollars a month.

Even that money did not always reach him whole.

Food and shelter could be deducted from his wages. Then, during the winter of 1838, some workers were paid with banknotes worth less than the number printed upon them, if they were even paid at all.

A man cannot feed his family with the promise that his money may become money later.

On February 19 and 20, anger broke loose along the canal works near the settlement then called Juliet, renamed later as Joliet.

The official records called the men rioters.

James Brooks, a contractor overseeing part of the canal work near Juliet, employed many of the Irish laborers digging that section of the waterway.

He wrote to the canal commissioners three days later to tell them that Irish workers had committed outrages at his worksite. He said he had been injured, that his property stood exposed and that neither he nor his men felt safe enough to return.

The arrested laborers, he complained, had already been released.

Brooks asked the canal commissioners to restore order and protect his men and property.

His letter tells the contractor’s side of the riot, but the laborers left behind no written account of their own. They had been working long days in dangerous conditions, and some had been paid with banknotes worth less than the amount printed on them, if they were even paid at all.

 They endured long days of digging through mud and stone, dangerous blasting work, crowded shanties, sickness, insects, poor food. Their anger did not rise from nowhere. Still, because their voices were silenced, it is difficult to know which grievance finally pushed the men into violence.

What is certain is that the canal mattered far more to Chicago’s leaders than the men digging it. The city’s future depended upon that canal. Merchants imagined goods moving between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River, with Chicago seated between them like a tollkeeper at the door of a wealthy house.

Yet the city could not even persuade its own river to remain open.