Grafters and Goo Goos: Corruption and Reform in Chicago

1. Frontier, Finances, and Fire: 1833–71

10 Frontier, Finances, and Fire 10 1 Frontier, Finances, and Fire 1833–71 If the Angel Gabriel came to Chicago, he would surely lose his character within a week. —Chicago evangelist Dwight L. Moody Chicago’s first reformer appeared three months before the place was even incorporated as a town. A boat carrying the Reverend Jeremiah Porter moored at the mouth of the Chicago River on  May . He saw “a wide, wet prairie, as far as the eye could reach, on a muddy river winding south over a sand-bar to the Lake with a few scattered dwellings.”1 The settlement had forty-seven houses and about three hundred people. Porter (–) was a Yankee Presbyterian evangelist whose venture into the frontier must have been as daring for its time as an astronaut’s launch into space. Born in Hadley, Massachusetts, to an old New England family, Porter was ordained a pastor at Princeton Theological Seminary in New Jersey. There he answered a call to preach at Sault Ste. Marie in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. So he took a stage to Albany, New York, a flatboat on the Erie Canal to Buffalo, a steamer to Cleveland and Detroit , and then a schooner to Mackinac, Michigan. On deck during his voyage, Porter “found a man on his way to Chicago , and heard from him that the Unated States Government was about to build a light-house there, and he was going to open a boarding-house, and believed it—Chicago—would become a fine place for business.”2 That unidentified shipmate of Porter was a prophet. Frontier, Finances, and Fire 11 Fur agents at Sault Ste. Marie sent a canoe paddled by Native Americans to fetch Porter from Mackinac, but it had to return in a snowstorm. Soon came three French voyageurs and a black man in a small bark canoe . After three days and nights of paddling across Lake Huron and up the St. Mary’s River, Porter had to break ice on shore to land the boat at Sault Ste. Marie. Upon taking his first pulpit, the clergyman persuaded town residents and Fort Brady soldiers to forgo the sins of dancing and drinking. Emboldened by this success, he accompanied the Fort Brady garrison when it was dispatched to relieve troops at Fort Dearborn in Chicago. At the time, the entire south bank of the main branch of the Chicago River was reserved for the U.S. military as a redoubt for Indian wars. On their journey to Chicago along the western shore of Lake Michigan , Porter’s party saw no human habitation except for a fur post at Milwaukee .Thus he was disappointed in fulfilling an assignment from church superiors in New England to find settlements of whites or Native Americans ripe for missionary visits. After rough winds and seasickness kept Porter on board for a day at Chicago, he rowed upriver to meet local businessmen at a tavern on shore at Goose Island. The village had not been shepherded by clergy except for a few itinerant Baptist and French Jesuit missionaries and Methodist country circuit riders. Even at that early date, the cultures of Jesuits and Protestants clashed. The first Catholic priest permanently assigned to Chicago, John M. I. St. Cyr, arrived just ten days before Porter. Later, Porter openly spoke about kneeling outside St. Cyr’s church late at night to pray that it not prosper. An old woodcut shows Porter looking as smug as any anticlerical cartoonist might wish. Behind round frameless spectacles, his eyes had the hint of a twinkle. Thin lips curved at the corners in a wraith of a smile, an expression conveying the benevolence of a Christian pastor. It also suggested the self-satisfaction of bourgeois respectability that many others found annoying. A fashionable beard in the shape of a shovel blade adorned his chin, while the upper lip was clean-shaven. Porter was fully a man of his times, as were his enemies. 12 Frontier, Finances, and Fire He organized the first permanent Protestant church and, for his premiere sermon, took a text from John :–: “One of his disciples, Andrew , Simon Peter’s brother, saith unto him, ‘There is a lad here, which hath five barley loaves, and two small fishes: but what are they among so many?’” Porter was frustrated, for he inscribed in his journal that evening, “The first dreadful spectacle that met my eyes on going...