The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic and Madness at the Fair That Changed America

by Erik Larson

  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 à l’Alaska.

  Sauternes.

  POTAGES.

  Consommé printanier. Crème de Celeri.

  Amontillado.

  HORS D’OEUVRES.

  Rissoles Chateaubriand. Amandes salées. Olives, etc.

  POISSON.

  Bass rayée, sauce hollandaise. Pommes parisiennes.

  Miersfeiner. Moet et Cbandon. 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 Tête 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 “t
he 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. Tumble-weeds 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.”