ABSTRACT
The phenomenon of Chicago had risen with incredible speed in the stinking wild onion swamp at the foot of Lake Michigan. In 1833, when it was incorporated as a town, a census showed 180 persons who lived in forty-three shanties and cabins. The population was made up almost wholly of real estate operators and the keepers of saloons and dives. Michigan City, Indiana, was then the incomparable metropolis of the region. It contained almost twenty times the population of Chicago. The one great commodity of Illinois of the 1830s was real estate, and it was immediately apparent there were enough suckers in the eastern states who would buy, sight unseen, all the cheap land put up for sale in almost any part of the Midwest. A decade later hundreds of big wagons rumbled over plank roads into Chicago daily; and fleets of ships docked to load or unload produce and merchandise.
