by H. W. Brands
Technically, the girls brought to America were contract workers, bound for a term of service in exchange for their passage east. The contracts could be quite explicit. “An agreement to assist a young girl named Loi Yau” declared:
Because she became indebted to her mistress for passage, food, &c., and has nothing to pay, she makes her body over to the woman Sep Sam to serve as a prostitute to make out the sum of $503. The money shall draw no interest, and Loi Yau shall receive no wages. Loi Yau shall serve four and a half years.… When the time is out, Loi Yau may be her own master, and no man shall trouble her.
The contracts were rather less than they seemed, starting from the fact that the girls who were made to sign them typically couldn’t read. Moreover, the pimps and mistresses devised various means to extend the contracts. The girls were docked for sickness; in Loi Yau’s case, she had to repay one month for every fifteen days she was sick. Given their line of work, sickness was common, with the result that the girls found themselves falling farther and farther behind. (Some pimps and madams defined menstruation as a sickness, in that it kept the girls from working; these unfortunate souls were guaranteed an extended sentence.)25
Chun Ho learned the business the hard way. She received customers nearly every day, earning her masters almost three hundred dollars a month. She hoped that some of this might be credited to her account, but after two years they told her she was deeper in debt than when she started. For her—or anyone else—to purchase her freedom would now cost $2,100. Needless to say, she didn’t have any money, and so she was sold to another tong man, who kept her working as hard as ever.
During this period she heard about groups devoted to rescuing sex slaves like herself, but her new owner warned her that if she tried to escape he’d kill her. The rescue societies staked out the brothels, to gather evidence against them and to encourage girls like Chun Ho to break for freedom, but the pimps took the girls to other houses, outside the city, to administer exemplary beatings where no one could hear their screams. “The instruments used were wooden clubs and sometimes anything they could lay their hands on,” Chun Ho said. “One time I was threatened with a pistol held at me.”
She survived and, by a stroke of fortune, eventually escaped, but she knew of many other girls who weren’t so lucky. One was murdered by her pimp for not turning over money he said she owed him. “I saw her after she had been shot,” Chun Ho said. At least three others Chun Ho knew met a similar fate. “Two of these were shot and one stabbed to death.” The murderers were never brought to justice. “No one would dare to testify.”26
Chapter 10
CITIES OF THE PLAIN
Nearly all the immigrants landed in cities of the American seaboard, especially New York, which during the last decades of the nineteenth century served as port of entry for four newcomers out of every five. Indeed, Ellis Island in New York harbor, where a federal immigration facility opened in 1892, became a symbol of all the immigration (approached in significance only, and then not closely, by Angel Island in San Francisco Bay and Galveston on the Texas Gulf Coast).
Many immigrants remained in the cities of their landing; many others proceeded to different cities. Some found their way to the frontier, but these grew comparatively less numerous as time passed. In 1890 immigrants and their children were three times as likely as the native born to live in cities. Industry was the engine of American growth, the eye of the capitalist storm, and industry centered on the cities. Immigrants might dream of homesteads, and some actually attained them. But the vortex was strong and hard to escape.1
BY THE EARLY 1870s capitalism needed Chicago as much as Chicago needed capitalism. This hadn’t always been so. A military outpost, Fort Dearborn, had been established in the early nineteenth century where the Chicago River enters Lake Michigan, but the post was evacuated during the War of 1812, most of the evacuees were massacred by Indians friendly to Britain, and the stockade was destroyed. It was rebuilt after the war but never amounted to much and was abandoned for good in 1837.
The city, as distinct from the fort, got its start in 1830, after Illinois lawmakers decided to improve on nature and force the Illinois River to run uphill, or at least empty into the Mississippi River and the Gulf of Mexico rather than Lake Michigan and the Atlantic. The projected canal prompted the platting of a city at what amounted to the canal’s lake entrance. The name, Chicago, derived from an Indian term for the wild garlic that grew there. (Town boosters long denied the link to an unpleasant odor, contending that the word simply meant “powerful.”)
By the time the canal was completed, in 1848, the fat days of canalling had passed and railroads were stealing the waterways’ traffic. This development actually benefited Chicago, for while the canal merely facilitated access to neighborhoods already served by boats and barges, railroads—the first of which reached Chicago almost coincident with the completion of the canal—opened entire new districts to efficient transport. Chicago became the queen city of the prairies, the gateway to the West.2
In the process it served as the model for a new generation of American cities. For a quarter millennium in America (and for longer in Europe, Asia, and Africa) cities had been sited on water, which afforded the only economic means of moving heavy cargoes. Boston, Newport, New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston were seaports; New Orleans, St. Louis, Cincinnati, and Pittsburgh were river towns. By putting bulk cargoes on wheels, railroads liberated cities from their transport dependence on water. The cities of the railroad age required water for drinking and bathing and industry, but large wells or small streams sufficed for these purposes. Navigation no longer mattered nearly so much. Chicago blossomed far beyond what the Illinois canal would have supported; Denver transcended the South Platte River, Dallas the Trinity, Minneapolis the upper Mississippi, Kansas City the Missouri, Atlanta the Chattahoochee.
Older cities felt the railroads’ influence too. The center of city life had historically been the waterfront: the Long Wharf in Boston, the Battery and the East River in New York, the foot of Market Street in Philadelphia. The railroads pulled commerce away from the water to warehouses in cheaper districts. Dry land often became more valuable than harbor frontage. Boston filled in much of the surrounding waterways; New York did so to a lesser degree. Philadelphia had grown up looking east to the Delaware and the Atlantic; it settled into middle age looking west along the Main Line of the Pennsylvania Railroad. Newport disappeared as a commercial presence; the Rhode Island inlets that had made it a splendid port now made it a nightmare for railroad construction. New Orleans was similarly problematic, and if it didn’t become as anachronistic as Newport, it surrendered much pride of Southern place to Atlanta, which simultaneously transformed Charleston nearly into a museum.
THE NEW CITIES faced new problems and some old ones. The latter included fire, which visited every city sooner or later. Philadelphia’s eighteenth-century fires had prompted Benjamin Franklin to organize his famous fire department. New York burned during the American Revolution and recurrently thereafter. San Francisco went up half a dozen times during the first half decade of the Gold Rush, from bad luck, high winds, and the discovery by arsonists that gold mining was easier in the ashes of banks and hotels than in the streams of the Sierra.
Arson aside, the underlying cause of the fires was that Americans built for the moment rather than for the ages, and hence of wood more often than of brick or stone. Beyond this, American civic culture resisted the curbs on construction that might have restricted the use of wood in the most densely populated neighborhoods or guaranteed minimal separation between buildings. Americans begrudged spending money on fire departments (Franklin’s firemen were volunteers). And until the late nineteenth century the most common source of light and heat was open flame. Candles tipped; kerosene spilled; creosote clogged chimneys till they burst into flame. Most such accidents had minor consequences, but when the stars were evilly aligned, devastation could result.
Chicago’s star-crossed moment occu
rred in October 1871. That summer and early autumn had been dry; between July 3 and October 9 only two and a half inches of rain fell, one-fourth the average. A hot wind began blowing from the southwest in early October, drying the city still more and putting everyone on edge. A fire broke out on Saturday, October 7, in the western division of the city and destroyed nearly a million dollars’ worth of property before the wind blew it into an undeveloped strip of land devoid of fuel and it died. Chicagoans sighed relief at the disaster escaped.3
But the wind kept blowing, and that night another fire began, in a West Side barn owned by Irish immigrants Patrick and Catherine O’Leary. Because cows were known to kick over lanterns, many Chicagoans assumed that one of the O’Leary cows started the fire. This theory was never proved, and Mrs. O’Leary denied it. The official report of the fire declined to specify a cause, although it did pinpoint the location as the O’Leary barn. However the flames originated, they were fanned by the wind and spread rapidly.4
“About two o’clock we were awakened by a very bright light and a great noise of carts and wagons,” Mary Fales, a resident of the city’s North Side, recalled. Because the Faleses’ window faced north and the light seemed to be coming from that direction, Mary and her husband, David, concluded that a fire was burning to the north of them. He went outside to assess the situation. “David found that the fire was not at all on the North Side,” Mary explained, “but was burning so furiously on the South Side that the whole sky was bright.” Mary and David took comfort from the fact that the Chicago River separated their house from the South Side. “But it proved no obstacle, and the North Side was soon on fire, and Wells and La Salle streets were crowded with carts and people going north.”
David told Mary to pack what she valued most and prepare to flee. Mary looked out her window at the clogged, smoky streets and decided packing would be a waste of time. If she loaded a trunk there would be no wagon to haul it. “Every vehicle demanded an enormous price and was engaged. Several livery stables were already burned.” But David somehow found a loose horse and an abandoned buggy, and he and Mary threw their irreplaceables in a trunk and heaved the trunk in the buggy. They climbed aboard and set off.
“I cannot convey to you how the streets looked,” Mary related to her mother the next day. “Everybody was out of their houses, without exception, and the sidewalks were covered with furniture and bundles of every description. The middle of the street was a jam of carts, carriages, wheelbarrows, and every sort of vehicle—many horses being led along, all excited and prancing, some running away. I scarcely looked right or left, as I kept my seat by holding tightly to the trunk. The horse would not be restrained, and I had to use all my powers to keep on. I was glad to go fast, for the fire behind us raged, and the whole earth, or all we saw of it, was a lurid yellowish red.”
David dropped Mary and the trunk at the house of her aunt and returned for another load. “I saw him no more for seven hours,” she said of the harrowing night. Her aunt’s house became a refuge for many in similar straits. “One young lady, who was to have had a fine wedding tomorrow, came dragging along some of her wedding presents. One lady came with four servants, and one with six blankets of clothing. One lady came with nurse and baby, and, missing her little boy, went off to look for him; this was about daylight, and she did not come back at all.” Most of the husbands, like David, were trying to salvage personal property ahead of the blaze; one and then another stopped by the house. “They only stayed long enough to say how far the fire advanced, and assured us of safety.”
David eventually reappeared. He explained that he had buried his and Mary’s china, some books, and even the piano on the grounds of a neighbor family. This family, the Hubbards, thought they were safe, as their lot was large and open and their house was brick. Mr. Hubbard followed the example of many others in hauling the carpets from his house, soaking them in water, and covering such wooden surfaces as the structure possessed. His efforts merely delayed the destruction. The heat grew so intense that it boiled the water from the carpets before bursting them into flame. Superheated air blasted through the windows and doors, and the house caught fire from inside as well as out.
Mary Fales learned from David that their house had been destroyed at the same time, but what she saw for herself was terrifying enough. “In the afternoon the wind blew more furiously”—by now the fire had become a storm itself and was creating its own weather—“the dust was blinding, the sky gray and leaden, and the atmosphere dense with smoke. We watched the swarms of wagons and people pass. All the men, and many of the women, were dragging trunks by cords tied in the handles; the children were carrying and pulling big bundles.”
Mary’s refuge—her aunt’s house—had become a trap. Had she and the others left sooner, the streets would have been clearer and passage more ready. Most had come in by cart or buggy and could have continued rolling. But acquiring a vehicle now was nearly impossible. “Such confusion as there was! Everybody trying to get a cart, and not one to be had at any price.” The husbands who had returned were frantically burying what they and their wives had brought. “Many of the ladies fairly lost their wits.” The buggy David had acquired earlier had been lost, but he managed to locate a soot-blackened man with a run-down cart pulled by a jaded nag. David and Mary loaded their trunk and one of her aunt’s in the cart and set off again.
“The West Side was safe, but to get there was the question,” Mary recorded. Some of the bridges had burned; others were packed solid with refugees and their vehicles. Yet the cart driver thought he knew a way: a bridge more distant but still passable. “Our ride was an anxious one. The horse had been over-used, and when urged on would kick till the old cart bid fair to break in pieces.… Many times we were blocked, and it seemed as if the fire must reach the bridge before we did.” Disabled carts and wagons littered the streets; people carried what the vehicles no longer could. Others dragged boxes and trunks; exhaustion and fear streaked the refugees’ faces almost as grotesquely as the dust, smoke, and their sweat. As their strength failed and their fear continued to rise, they abandoned their possessions and staggered away, leaving these last of their belongings in the road.5
The story was the same across much of the city. Tens of thousands of men, women, and children fled for their lives as the wall of flame advanced. Lambert Tree was a Cook County judge; his first thought was to save his court records. He hurried to his South Side office, stuffed the most important papers into the pockets of his coat, and made his way back to the street. The buildings in this downtown district were built of masonry almost from bottom to top, which was why their owners hadn’t worried much about previous fires. But this time the sparks and embers discovered each structure’s most vulnerable spots. “When I got out of doors I found it literally raining fire,” Tree recalled afterward. “Along Randolph and Clark streets canvas awnings in front of many of the stores, and in several instances the large wooden signs, also, were burning. Here and there where the sparks had found a lodgment small jets of flames were darting out from the wooden cornices on the tops of buildings, while the sparks and cinders which were constantly falling upon the streets were being whirled around in little eddies and scattered down the basement stairways.” Not even the sidewalk beneath his feet was safe. “Along North State and Ohio streets, the dead leaves which the wind had from time to time caught up and deposited against and under the wooden sidewalks had been ignited in many places by the flying sparks, which had in turn set fire to the sidewalks, so that every few yards tongues of fire were starting up between the cracks in the boards.”
Judge Tree’s home lay north of the river, and, like the Faleses and many others, he thought the river would serve as a firebreak. He started to realize he might be wrong just as he was crossing the river and the bridge burst into flames, its wooden planks igniting from the sparks. Still he hoped to save his house. He climbed to the roof and with the help of his servants poured bucket after bucket of water upon the shingles, to cool them an
d douse any sparks that landed. He found himself under incendiary assault. “A burning mass, which was fully as large as an ordinary bed-pillow, passed over my head.” He realized it was the remains of a hay bale sucked aloft and ignited by the raging updraft on the South Side. “There were also pieces of burning felt, some of which I should say were fully a foot square, flying through the air and dropping upon the roofs of the houses and barns.” Tree himself might yet have stayed, but his servants valued their lives over his property and fled. He finally decided that if he and his family waited any longer they might be surrounded by the inferno. He and his wife buried their silver in a neighbor’s yard, put their jewelry in a tin box small enough to carry, and, with the rest of the household, ventured into the street.
“We had scarcely got out of the door before we were assailed by a hurricane of smoke, sparks, and cinders, which nearly blinded and suffocated us. Fearing separation, I grasped my wife by one hand and my son by the other, and moved around to the west side of the house, intending to pass through one of the gates on Ohio Street. But we had no sooner got from under the protection which the north wall of the house afforded us, than we met the full force of this hurricane of smoke and fire. My wife’s and sister’s bonnets and my father’s and son’s hats were immediately blown from their heads, while the cinders were falling upon heads, hands, and faces and burning them.” The shrubs in the yard burst into flames before their eyes. Judge Tree feared they would be trapped and either suffocated or burned alive. Salvation came, ironically, on the wings of the fire itself. As the heat and smoke drove them toward a corner of the yard from which Tree knew there was no escape, a large section of the fence suddenly collapsed, burned at the base by the flames and toppled by a sudden gust of the inferno. They ran through the gap to freedom.
